5mo ago

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The US is Politically to the Right of [Other] Democracies

231 comments

Because even the people who are the most negatively affected by wealth centralization will defend the billionaires that provide them with stuff they like, we'll never escape that system until people realize that there are no good billionaires and that they all exist at the expense of the majority of the population.
- Mainly because the wealthy are the ones who co tell the flow of (dis)information and have been making full on attacks against the quality of education we as citizens receive.
  When you don’t know any better, and you’re being told the sky is green and the grass is blue long enough, you start to believe it. Them in comes some know-it-all telling you you’re wrong and your belief system has been lying to you, and yeah you’re going to get mad at the know-it-all and cling tighter to your belief system.
  Big Scary Man Bad.
- It's not the billionaires doing the providing, it's just that the economic engine is locked behind a paywall and so instead of laborers getting the value and credit it's the owning class.
  The laborers should be the owning class. This is the core idea of socialism. I don't get why "small government" types are so big on "own me harder daddy" when it comes to the economy. We spend most of our waking hours in dictatorships.
  
  I don't get why "small government" types are so big on "own me harder daddy" when it comes to the economy.
  Lots of these people are Petite Bourgeoisie, ie small business owners and the like. Their class interests align with larger Bourgeoisie, but the growth of larger Bourgeoisie pushes the Petite Bourgeoisie into proletarianization.
  This is where fascism comes in, actually. The Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie unite against the Proletariat and Lumpenproletariat, along Nationalist lines, as a response to this proletarianization.
  
  The Alt-Right Playbook does a good job of explaining it in this video, but basically what it comes down to is they believe in a rigid pyramidal structure, with everyone in their ‘proper place’. They also believe that, if we don’t have that rigid structure, our society will crumble.
  That’s also why they’re against UBIs, DEI, and other things that ‘promote people beyond their means’.
- They are literally parasites.
  
  But they took the risk. The risk of spending loaned money at minuscule interest rates and offsetting any real losses by petitioning the state for handouts. They took the risk of making guaranteed profits on political donations leading to regulatory capture.
  The capitalism that people imagine (which I still wholeheartedly reject) isn't even the capitalism that's real in practice.
  Even putting aside the inherent inequality of risk having a significant coefficient applied to it that diminishes when you come from generational wealth and a family with the right connections.
  The myth of capitalist meritocracy is the most blatantly false myth that's ever been peddled but it works on so many people. It's mind boggling.
  Ironically things like UBI might level the playing field a bit in terms of entrepreneurship becoming more accessible, but for some reason capitalism advocates don't actually want more people to be able to participate in capitalism.
- your system is working as intended, every true democracy knows that lettings your politians get bought by corporation is a stupid idea, working exactky as written

The older I get the more I agree with this.
Like, we won. We did it. We have enough food, we can build enough homes, we can build enough clean energy to fulfill our requirements if we're halfway smart about it. What the fuck are we doing?
- What the fuck are we doing?
  Making the shareholders rich.
- This is what kills me about modern day living. What the fuck are we doing? Innovations (AI) dont fucking help people anymore. All we're doing is chasing profits and letting everything else rot. I feel like I'm living in some FromSoft game before the player comes in to clear out all the ancients holding onto the decay.
  
  That might just be because conservatives and liberals, have always been those ancients holding back society.
  In 1776 the conservatives were Loyalists, the progressives were Patriots.
  In 1789 the conservatives were Right Wing, the progressives were Left Wing.
  In 1860 the conservatives were Confederates, the progressives were The Union.
  In 1940 the conservatives were The Axis, the progressives were The Allies.
  
  Innovations still help people loads, that's a crazy pessimistic generalization.
  Yes of course the trashy tech bro nonsense isn't helping you, but what about RNA vaccines during covid? What about all of the medical work and innovation going into cancer treatment? What about all of the work and innovation going into reducing carbon emissions so we don't ruin our planet? I could go on for a long time.
  Real innovation in mainstream tech may be mostly stagnant and lame, but there will always be useful and helpful innovation.
- We've made farming a capitalist system. It only functions if there's scarcity. A farmer can't feed their family or farm their fields without paying bribes to machine companies.
  And politicians vilify "subsidies" to farmers. Our society should be "funding" food production as a basic human right. It would take about 1% of the US military budget to completely socialize food production and feed everyone. It's disgusting.
  I don't think capitalism is inherently evil. Just the people in control of the wealth.
  
  The Nature of Capitalism https://youtu.be/WseyrYuD8ao
  
  Once anyone understands this , nothing else politically matters. There is no left or right. There is no tankie or liberal.
  There is only rich.. and poor.
  
  Even worse, we have been producing, and throwing away, so much food that the US by itself could feed the entire world a couple times over. We don't need to spend more money to fix food production and healthcare, we need to spend less.
- Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
  We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We've de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
  That's before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
  Idk if we've won. I get the feeling that we're all living on borrowed time, and we've actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
  
  We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting.
  Only USA does. The only country that did similar things was USSR. It was. Now USA the only is.
  Even EU has better standards of living AND not use slave labour of prisoners.
  Our semiconductor industry is failing.
  Assuming you are from USA, your semiconductor industry is just fine.
- It's the problem of "political deactivation" it's in part a cultural issue, in part a byproduct of capitalism.
  9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by "the little people"... These are the ingredients for "political deactivation".
  People want to stay an alert and informed member of society, but that doesn't necessarily result in activism or change. In fact sometimes it makes people less likely to try to change things.
  
  9-5 jobs kill a lot of political activism. Inculcation into cultural traumas that make the system seem unchangeable by "the little people"... These are the ingredients for "political deactivation".
  Welcome to 1916 Russia, when all non-Imperialists(not only Bolsheviks) were saying, that 6-day work week prevents prevents people from becoming citizens. Next step would be mandatory education.
- What made us successful as a species, required us to be ruthless by design.
  
  I feel like it was more learning to work together that's made us so successful compared to other animals. Not having to spend our lives solely dedicated to hunting/growing food for ourselves and our families has allowed people to specialize in other fields. The advancement of science wouldn't have been possible without people collaborating and working together, though conflict has also played a role as well. Ruthlessness only works for a small number of individuals who exploit the good will of others, but the whole thing falls apart if everybody was always ruthless.
  
  That's patently false. Before agriculture, societies were just tribes of at most a hundred individuals, with not much in the way of hierarchy due to the lack of division of labor, essentially a very primitive form of anarcho-communism. Humans are extremely empathetic and there's plenty of evidence that prehistoric humans took care of people with disabilities or with serious injuries despite them possibly (not necessarily) being a liability for the tribe in terms of food-to-labor ratio.
  
  Psychopathy
  
  Somebody read and agreed with Might is Right…
  What made us successful as a species is our societies and those came as a direct rejection of ‘ruthlessness’. Society is built on cooperation.
  Sure, we’re still bloodthirsty monsters. But that will be our downfall.
  
  Nonsense.
- What the fuck are we doing?
  A mortgage (not rent!) for a 3 bedroom house is $1,400. Live somewhere cheaper, you don't need to live in/near a city.
  If you do, that's fine, just recognize that is something you are choosing to pay for.
  
  Damn dude. Why didn’t I think about that? All I have to do is work 80 hours a week at the gas station, send my kids to substandard schools, not buy decent food, not have access to public transit, not have access to decent medical care, not have any cultural options, be white since rural areas are not kind to people of color, drive 40+ minutes to anything worth driving to, not have municipal water or sewage or possibly trash pickup, etc.
  Why do I keep wanting to live in places with services and good quality of life in a capitalist country where I make 3x the median wage and still can’t buy a house? Silly me.
  In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’ve lived in rural areas previously, and I’d rather rent for the rest of my life than ever do that again.
  
  I don’t really understand how you don’t understand that buying a house requires cash on hand.
  
  This mofo saying that living in a city (56% of humans, 4.4bn people, live in cities) should be a luxury.

US Democrats are the equivalent to our countries conservatives, and US Republicans are basically our rightwing/neo-nazi party pedant. It is noteworthy here that this Republican-equivalent rightwing party here is under active surveillance by the national security agencies for being a threat to our democracy.
And people still wonder why the US f-ups their people up and down.
- I keep trying to tell people this but they don't want to hear it.

Because it’s actually a corporate oligarchy
- Capitalism in decay.

I think the most damning thing is that the US is regressing where others are progressing.
DeSantis Signs Anti-Worker Bill Against Heat Regulation in Florida
UAE's midday break for outdoor workers begins on June 15
- As a European, I wish you were right. Europe hasn't recovered from the austerity policy imposed in the post-2008 crisis. I'm Spanish so I can tell you about my country. Job termination payment was halved and hasn't recovered, firing people became easier and cheaper, stricter laws against protesting were created ("ley mordaza" or gag law) which enabled more police violence and increasingly violent mall-cops, and we're right now suffering the rise of the far right in Europe with Meloni winning in Italy, Marine LePen close to doing so in France, and rising AFD in Germany (many other countries as well).
  We're all fucked, buddy.

Work is punishment for original sin.
- You mean breaking away from the UK?
  
  No, we meant throwing away good tea.

I do not think that the US is a democracy. The electoral college is not in any way democratic.
- It is an indirect democracy, rather than a direct one. Its less democratic, but not completely undemocratic.
  That being said, I do think the system is broken in another fundamental way.
  
  Its less democratic, but not completely undemocratic.
  It's completely undemocratic. Public opinion has no influence on policy whatsoever. Most Americans are in favour of Medicare for all, of legal abortions, of rising taxes on corporations and the most rich people, and much much more. But study after study shows that public opinion has no influence on policy, as in, they're not even correlated.
  
  It is an indirect democracy, rather than a direct one.
  Ahem. Indirect democracy AKA representative democracy AKA republic is political system, where laws are voted by representatives who are elected by citizens. USA is indirect indirectracy. Or idiocracy. Like Putin's Russia, but with bells and whistles.
  Direct democracy is rare beast. In it laws are directly voted by citizens on referendums.
  
  FPTP?
- Gerrymandering, vote caging, mass disenfranchisement, consolidated power in appointed positions...
  A very curious was to run a republic.

Can't have a view that matters when you are hungry, stressed, are left with like 1 hour a day to yourself, and with constant other random threats to your existence you get to manage.
The system is working as designed, ppl forget how much work such a system needs to sustain itself actually.
- The system is working as designed, ppl forget how much work such a system needs to sustain itself actually.
  The problem is that Capitalism, and by extension Imperialism, is unsustainable and constantly decaying.
  
  Yes.
  And one of the constant maintenance being performed to sustain it is convincing us how sustainable and overall the best thing ever possible it is - how at the same time it has by default only one single goal, a goal of which by default the only end-game of a properly working system is a single complete concentration of power, yet it is widely "believed" how much that is in everyones best interest.
  
  The Nature of Capitalism https://youtu.be/WseyrYuD8ao

*60 hours a week
Laughs in European
- Right. I work 37.5 hours a week in a job I love and I hate working. I can’t imagine doing almost double.
  
  My partner used to do 60 hour weeks. She was working outdoors, in the desert (41°c on average), and only worked 4 days a week. The work culture in this country sucks...
- I know its just a meme and I think you're right to point it out but I feel bad for laughing.
  In the UK, as one example, its default unlawful to work more than 45 hours a week. You have to choose to sign this away. Refusal to agree can't be used as a reason to fire you or choose not to hire you, unless its like the police or army or something.
  The UK is worse in different places and has this too. So, its not about being superior or any of that BS. But the US is full on, mask-off, you are cattle and the mega rich are your ranchers. You can't even just simply move to a different country to escape paying for gargantuan corporate benefits. They own you and they don't care if you know it.
  
  There's functionally no enforcement of what was formerly the EU working time directive being voluntary to opt out of. If a company wants you to sign (and in some fields, they will, even if they've got no reason to) they can always pretend to have found some other reason not to hire you.
  
  In the UK, as one example, its default unlawful to work more than 45 hours a week.
  It's 5 hours more than in Russia. Please fix.
- I worked 12h shifts for 7 days a week, as a european. Hoping to gather enough money to buy a house...guess what, my 40h job barely covers the cost of living nowadays and i'm not fit to work more hours. Plus i ended up running short with every passing year, when i needed a 200€ wage increase to afford a mortgage by the time i got that i needed another €150 wage increase.
  A single family home used to be 150k, now those go for 500k and my wage ended up in the exact same spot where i started at the age of 21. (Before that it was a youth wage and surprise surprise i could rent a bigger house back then than i currently am on my adult wage)
  Somedays i just want to stop showing up for work and stop paying rent, weaponize myself and keep the house by force.
  Fuck this shitshow we are in.
  
  What does your union think of that?

Propaganda is one hell of a drug

It's not the standard view because, in America, consumption is inherently tied to your identity.
You are seen as more attractive if you have trendy clothing compared to "outdated" clothing. You are seen as more financially successful if you overpay for "luxury" handbags. You are seen as having "made it" based on how much stuff you have.
Corporations know they can exploit this. They play up the value of purchases to your identity in advertising, then use that to distract you from the fact that your labor is being allocated solely to fuel this seemingly endless (solely monetary) growth, while they continue to siphon off more and more of your wages because, well, they "deserve" it for being the founder of the company, or being the shareholders that are "invested in its success."
The only solution to this problem is degrowth. If we show corporations we don't care about all this excess junk that nobody really needs, the available labor pool remains the same while demand craters. If everyone is working x hours a week, but demand drops to only necessities and minor luxuries, without the products advertised as "needs" holding any demand, suddenly, each individual has to work only, say, half of x hours a week to accomplish the same requirements to sustain society and individual wellbeing.
That, and we need to give the means of production back to the workers too, of course.
- Except people are getting squeezed on housing and the basic necessities now, people are having to work long hours just to live. I can't even imagine how my young adult life would play out if I were experiencing it now, paying ridiculous rents and making the shitty wages. Sharing an apartment and affording anything else was hard enough back then, I can't even imagine how people are making it out there nowadays. I got lucky and got into a home when prices were semi-decent, it'd be a severe strain on finances if I had to pay current rates.
  
  Yeah, housing's a huge issue right now. It's almost entirely the fault of the artificial scarcity produced by landlords, and their influence on what kind of housing gets built.
  I'm not sure if this was meant to be your point by the way, but I do want to clarify that my original post was not meant to make it seem like the only reason people are struggling with work and finances is because they buy goods they don't actually need. That's certainly part of the equation for some people, but definitely not entirely.
  In my opinion, we can see the same effects I mentioned before happening to our necessities as well, but on the corporate decision making side of things, rather than the consumer decision making side. For instance, food is more expensive because companies throw out any produce that looks "weird," even if it's perfectly edible. Housing is more expensive because developers prioritize the highest paying customer class over the average working person when deciding the quality, pricing, and size of housing to build. I hope you get the idea.
  The only real solution to these issues is unions and co-ops, anti-monopoly action, the elimination of landlording as a practice, and a higher minimum wage. Basically all of this has to be advocated for at a federal level, unfortunately, since we can't exactly implement these as independent, personal practices.

Because mEriTocRacY, those wealth ~~thieves~~ ~~hoarders~~ aggregators worked sooooooooooo hard for their money, they totally deserve every penny. If only people would work as hard as them, they wouldn't be hungry or cold!

I have no idea how this isn't the standard view. Technology is often used as a carrot on a stick.

Ah yes, propaganda superspreader, my favorite account to follow on twitter.

My understanding is that issues like universal healthcare and paid leave for parents poll at around 80 percent. The reason the US doesn't have those things is not because the people don't want it. So the representation we elect are center right and don't actually support the will of the people. They represent the will of their donors.
- I agree with what you say, but we should also be very careful of expressions like "center right".
  If we have issues where the vast majority of the people agree, that should by definition be the center. However, quite clearly that's not how the words are used. Instead, mass media and politicians always refer to everything in reference to the two-party system, when representatives of both parties are actually way off in the fringes, at least some of the time, on issues like these.

I’m sure the invisible hand will figure it out.
- They've been telling us the so-called "invisible hand" will deliver something worthwile for almost 250 years now... so the time must be almost here! I cannot contain my excitement!
  
  And when it doesn't deliver, it's clearly the big bad gubmint's fault. Who needs laws and regulations, amirite?
- Invisible hand that masturbate shareholders

I keep telling you, people.
Edit: the answer here is that some jobs are still necessary and the ruling class hasn't found yet a way to motivate people to carry out those necessary jobs, if not by keeping everyone on the edge of starvation. If food and habitation were to become free, people would just stop being the useful tools they are supposed to be. That's why ubi is never going to take off.
Edit 2: Am i been downvoted by the ruling class? Actually, maybe it's because i said i don't think the ubi is going to stick. If that's the reason, I want to clarify that i believe ubi is going to be necessary in the long term, though I also believe it's just a piece of the puzzle. Another piece would be limiting resource usage by accounting for externalities through a system like carbon credits, but with more types of resources (not just co2) and for individuals. It should be a system that lets the normal person live almost normally, but stops the rich from doing the fuck they want just because they have money. At least they would have to buy credits from other people and pay them if they can get them.
- I'd like to see someone try a UBI system that was genuinely universal. Literally everyone gets it, employed or not, regardless of income level, but at the same time minimum wage is removed because your living expenses are already ostensibly covered. So if a business can get someone to come in for $1/hour, or even for free, great. All wages just become "gravy" if someone wants luxuries above and beyond basic living expenses.
  Under such a system I'd be interested to see how much what are currently minimum wage jobs would need to offer on top of UBI to get people in the door. I could absolutely see things like hobby shops employing people for pennies who'd be happy to be there just due to interest/passion in the subject of their work. Conversely I could see the wages for dreary or abuse prone jobs like gas station attendant or fast food cashier going up because no one in their right mind would want to do it for a pittance if their basic needs are already covered.
  
  This is A very interesting thought. I think you might be not to wrong with your assumptions about jobs. I also would really like to see this in practice.
  
  Suddenly every bodies rent goes up about as much as their ubi check
  
  It is really simple if you eliminate social welfare and make UBI part of taxes, you free up a lot of money. Everyone gets $35 000 a year or does not pay any tax on their first $35k. This creates a system that is already less expensive to operate than the current mess and injects a lot of money into an economy. The ruling class hate this idea because if people are not jammed into a corner living paycheck to paycheck or worse, they tend to quit their jobs where their employer was abusing them and get a better education. Or say fuck you to your employer and live poor until you get a new job.
  
  but at the same time minimum wage is removed because your living expenses are already ostensibly covered.
  Except a UBI doesn't necessarily cover all living expensives. It's just a little boost to help people out.
- It's paradoxical, though, because anti-labour tactics make those jobs paid so badly that it is not worth automating e.g. trash collection, packet delivery, cleaning staff.

Billionaires are doing their part to fix this problem! In the next 50 years you wont be able freeze to death with rising global temps. Problem solved!

Some people have become so ingrained into the system, that they will even fight to defend it.

Think about all the power we generate to mine bitcoin. That could power HVAC for a small country. So, bitcoin exists to create a decentralized currency to prevent government from regulating the currency so the advent of a financial clapse bit coin holders will be able to keep the power on. The very power being spent to generate bitcoin. Add on the extra carbon emissions from running the power plants and you have an equation for certain clapse.
- Wait till you hear about traditional banking using 50x more energy.
  
  Well..... Yeah. 70% of the global population utilizes some sort of traditional banking system compared to the 2.74% of the global population that utilizes crypto.
  It's not a brag to consume 4 times less power than traditional banks when you only serve a tiny fraction of the population.
  
  What is the comparison of how many people it's serving? Either way you don't have to convince me that Banks are a drain on society.
  Edit:
  Did some looking into this. Claims that traditional markets use 50x more electricity than bitcoin are coming from bitcoin analysts. Did not find any university funded studies. The figure they are giving is annual and looking at a global perspective.
  Honestly, this would be a really hard thing to know because financial industries don't track this data. Either way the estimates are superfluous and do not account for scale.
  If you estimate current wallets with bitcoin the number might be 60-100 million. As we all know, the number of people participating in some form of traditional currency around the globe is everyone (8 billion). If you are thinking of ignoring the people who don't have any money to speak that would be a disservice because those people are the most effected by the banking industry.
  
  Wait until you hear about other cryptocurrencies that use a ton less power then Bitcoin. I seriously don't understand why Bitcoin isn't obsolete now

Work is not completely obsolete, since there's plenty of stuff that can't be automated, but imagine if we paid living wages for growing food and build infrastructure. We could afford to eliminate all the useless shit jobs, like middle managers and marketing executives.
- Seriously, I can't be the only one who thinks there's a better possible society than 1/3rd of workers doing excel sheets

Way, way to the right.

In fact, I've heard people most likely worked less back in the olden days pf pre-industrial scarcity, or at least took entire seasons off when the crops they grew weren't expected to yield anything.
- Yeah, I've thought similar.
  Probably, the only real intensive labour times were sowing and harvest. Apart from that, I can't fathom what would possibly justify 40 hrs/week work times the rest of the year.
- I'm guessing farmers didn't waste their time not working when in low season, but rather did other stuff like making furniture, clothing, building, ropemaking, these sorts of manual labor. It's just a guess though, I'm no historian
- That's a dangerously naive view of history.
  
  It's true, though. As industrialization occured, people began to work more, as more profit could be made.

We don't need to, we're forced to because a minority of ultra rich hold all the power.
- That's why we need to work together
  
  Correct.
- Now wait for raid from twitter canceling you for hurting feelings of rich minority.

This is the standard view of the majority under 50

I'm not really sure about that - I'd say in the US reactionary politics is just far more overt than it is in other places that self-describes (optimistically) as "democracies."
- Not really -- MAGA-esque neofascism is just as overt in many European countries.
  What makes the Overton window shifted towards the right in the US, IMO, is that (unlike Europe) the socialist Left never got a foothold in politics at the national level. This, plus years of Cold War, propaganda, allowed collectivist ideas like nationalized industries and universal healthcare to be branded as "Soviet" and somehow Un-American.
  To this day, there are people on the Right in the US who believe that advancing any tax-paid public services is tantamount to communism, whereas in Europe there is broad support for the public sector on both sides of the political spectrum.
  
  Nationalized industry (or healthcare) is neither a leftist idea nor a collectivist one. It's merely bog-standard nationalism and perfectly compatible with concepts of "social democracy," which, if you know your history, you already understand isn't leftist at all - it was literally invented by Otto von Bismarck as a way to protect against socialist revolution.
  A leftist accepts that state-control of services is still a lot better than privatized control... but it is still a very, very distant second-best to socialized control.
  
  collectivist ideas like nationalized industries and universal healthcare to be branded as "Soviet" and somehow Un-American.
  If they are so soviet, then why ~~Supreme Soviet~~ Congress doesn't legislate them into existance? Or if Soviet is so Un-American, then why America has parlaments in the first place?

Your basic removed Walmart laptop is now a few times more powerful than IBM's deep blue.

You guys should be railing against the central banks, but instead you say how stupid the libertarians are. If you want to change join the correct fight not just yell about how rich people are bad.
- Not entirely certain why you're being downvoted. This is the most sane take I have seen from you. I guess it's because of the second sentence. We can fight multiple battles at the same time. FSM knows, I do.
  
  I get the hate of rich people, but I am rather rich and I did nothing wrong. They just dont understand they are being taxed the most its just via inflation and wage devaluing.

They say this like EVERYONE is working 60 hours, like some kind of… reverse strawman? Weird statement to make.
- They say this like EVERYONE is working 60 hours, like some kind of… reverse strawman? Weird statement to make.
  NO ONE should have to work 60 hours to meet those goals.
  
  Is it pretty common for people to work 60 hours to pay the bills? I’m not disagreeing with you — no one should have to work that much — i’m just saying the way they worded it as if “we all work 60 hours” seems strange, but maybe i’m just ignorant and the odd one out.

Don’t forget that scarcity is literally the goal of many people trying to make sure we avoid climate change.
It’s not my view, but many many people are talking about “reducing consumption” for humanity. They never come out and acknowledge that their economy-shrinking tactics are making life miserable for poor people, but they’d have to be blind not to understand it.
- There are many, many different ways in which the economy could be shrunk. Many have the downside which you mention; making life miserable. But also many, other ways avoid this problem. A few examples how this could look like:
  reduce consumption of the super rich
  reduce production of trash products like plastic toys or single use vapes
  remove laws which enforce waste, such as minimum parking spots
  in urban design: prioritize mass transit, biking and walking over motorized individual transportation
  When discussing these things, we should never forget that too little, too late action will certainly lead to what you wanted to avoid; making life miserable for poor people.
  
  reduce consumption of the super rich - interesting idea. sci fi at this point. all the consumption-reduction is hitting the poor so far
  reduce production of trash products like plastic toys or single use vapes - eliminating those jobs, removing choice from people over what they use
  remove laws which enforce waste, such as minimum parking spots - agree, zoning in general means enormous deviation from market equilibrium, meaning tons of economic value wasted
  in urban design: prioritize mass transit, biking and walking over motorized individual transportation - as usual, ignores the time cost to people. Time is people’s most limited resource. Taking away people’s time makes them poorer
- You're talking about a completely different kind of scarcity.
  The artificial scarcity we're talking about is things like monopolistic industry restricting the theoretical max output of a good solely for profit (i.e. throwing out perfectly good food/product to make way for new, but not necessarily better stock, making farmers re-buy seeds every year through utility patents, making defective-by-design products to require the purchasing of new goods over repairing old ones, intellectual property rights restricting who can manufacture and build upon technologies and ideas, etc)
  The "scarcity," or rather, reduced material use and consumption being promoted by environmentalists is completely different. We should sell and use the stock we already have before we create entirely new products, while claiming the old ones are now irrelevant. We should still sell fruits and vegetables that aren't as aesthetically pleasing, instead of throwing them away. We shouldn't buy products solely designed to temporarily relieve us of the effects of the Hedonic Treadmill, instead focusing on building a society where consumption is not the primary means of self-worth and growth.
  None of this means you don't eat, don't have clothes to wear, don't have a roof over your head, don't have transportation to get around, or don't have luxuries. It just means that those same actions are done using less, and getting more, not for the sole sake of profit, but for the sake of the planet, and the individual themselves.
  Artificial scarcity is production that goes straight to landfills, ideas that are restricted from free use, artificially expensive goods, and an inefficient allocation of goods and services in an economy.
  Reduced consumption is a reduction of waste, fair pricing, and longer-lasting goods that don't just serve to provide recurring revenue to a corporation's shareholders.
  
  The artificial scarcity we're talking about is things like monopolistic industry restricting the theoretical max output of a good solely for profit
  Yeah monopolies are really bad. Which industries do you believe are monopolized right now?
- Ideally what we'd do is shift from polluting to non-polluting forms of consumption - such as by switching from coal and natural gas to renewables. Some would claim this is "economy shrinking" because we'd be pushing people away from one and towards the other by artificial means like taxes and subsidies.
  But what these arguments fail to recognize is that we're already doing that. We can't pretend that the government has nothing to do with setting incentives when it lets coal plants pollute for free, and also gives them free police and military protection to stop any citizens or foreign countries that may be on the less beneficial end of that pollution from doing anything about it. So in essence discouraging and eventually ending the burning of fossil fuels is putting an end to the tax we all already pay in the form of bad health outcomes and lost current and future land value from pollution.

what an antisemitic question
- What?
  
  I'm reasonably certain they were being sarcastic in an edgy way, that said, I'm not checking their post history for fear that they may have meant the other potential meaning.

No shit, the most left-wing politician in the US would be considered a far-right fascist dictator in Europe.
In the US there’s no left, because left would imply socialism that eventually lead to communism and that goes against the ideia of America, the American dream, the constitution etc. The entire country was built and maintained on the ideia of being against any form of communism.
- the most left-wing politician in the US would be considered a far-right fascist dictator in Europe
  I live in Europe. Someone like Bernie would be a labor leftie in every European country. Europe isn't the leftist walhala you think it is. Or do you really think fascists like Wilders or Meloni would be considered left wing in the US?
- The entire country was built and maintained on the ideia of being against any form of communism.
  No, it wasn't built that way, the US as a country predates strong communist movements
  
  You can build after you founded.
- I doubt Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be considered far right.
  
  They aren’t, Bernie is centre right

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