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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • That’s because the Chinese experience was very peculiar. When American and European investors and industry giants went abroad to outsource manufacturing, they brought in the capital and left with the profits. But the capital, and technology or knowledge, never spread in the colonies or neo-colonies. When China “opened up”, they were real clever about it. They said: “sure, you can open your factories here where there is an abundance of cheap labor. But in exchange, we want the knowledge and technology”. And since opening up China to foreign capital has been the wet dream of capitalists and proto-capitalists for the past several hundreds of years, they accepted the deal. So China was left with the know-how to be able to set-up their own national industries. And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.



  • That is a simplification to make a point, but I think it’s important to know that this never happened.

    Barter economies didn’t exist as a historical process. They only existed in very specific situations. Such as when a market based economy collapses (for example after the Roman Empire collapsed, in some more distant places, until a new power could establish a market) and when two groups that had different economic models encountered each other.

    What existed before monetary market systems were debt systems, maybe with organised ledgers. And before that what existed were gift (like the Hawaiians) and palatial economies (like the Incas and Mycenaeans).

    This is already very well established within anthropology and archeology. David Graeber’s “Debt the first 5,000 years” was a bestseller man…

    TL,DR: Hunter gatherers didn’t barter. They did things for each other and then “owed” each other. This bond, of being indebted to your fellow men and them being indebted to you, is what was the basis of most societies.


  • Definitely should be mixed income, and the planning for it is better handled more locally (neighbourhood/borough, city, town etc.). But it should be funded federally, cause cities can’t print money. All development they make has to be funded by taxes. The federal government doesn’t have to earn a dime, they can just print a couple hundred billion and distribute it to all the major population centers to develop public housing and infrastructure however they see best. That would work best imo


  • Public housing doesn’t need to be uniform or boring… that was mostly a result of the ideology of urban planners of the mid 20th century when most public housing projects happened. The government can contract a private developer to make a nice building, that is well located, and is not just for poor people. That seems so obvious, but it seems people are stuck by their own ideology and can’t even think a bit outside of what is, or has been.

    And I’m not talking about subsidised, I mean PUBLIC. Owned by the government or by coops, councils etc. Built using federal money. Just having this around would decrease overall housing costs so much… the market would have to compete with the no-profit, cost only, rents of public housing.

    And Amazon has done a lot of research and found you only need to control 8% of a market to control the pricing. The government just has to build enough public housing in major population centers facing rent crisis to own 8% of total housing there. And that’s it. Rent cost crisis averted. And thousands of jobs and GDP generated because of all the construction (add in extra infrastructure for better access to the public housing, and you got a real economic boom cooking — hint hint, it’s literally what China did lmao).



  • A very easy solution is for the government to build public housing? Isn’t it rather obvious? It completely fix all things you talked about.

    Buildings get built, rents are cheaper, and it doesn’t matter if the “returns” are lower than the stock market. The government doesn’t give a fuck about returns, they print the money.

    Edit: and I also think it’s pretty fucking obvious why this easy simple and direct solution is not applied. Landowners and capitalists are in complete collusion. The classes are mixing in ways that they are indistinguishable now. And the government is completely controlled by capitalists. They will never cut their profits and means of control. They won’t allow it.