Here’s a contrast between a neoliberal and a Marxist analysis of our current situation.
Neoliberal: “Inflation is caused by Joe Biden who’s an incompetent, bad person.”
Neoliberalism tells us that everything happens on the level of individuals. If something goes wrong, it’s the fault of some individual who mismanaged things.
Now, a Marxist analysis would be: “Inflation is caused by the massive transfer of capital to the oligarchy.”
Biden is still bad and incompetent. But the problem is a lot bigger than his personal qualities. As we all remember, it was Trump who started the stimulus payments, put Fauci in charge of COVID policy, and did absolutely nothing to stop the “free testing/ free vaccines” scam. Both Biden and Trump benefited their social class at the expense of mine and yours.
I’m still surprised that everyone is surprised to learn there was a price for lockdowns, border closure and money printing. Who would have thought that doing something unprecedented would have downstream effects.
I’ve been collecting information from my local government; they didn’t even bother to do a cost-benefit analysis. Modelling is good enough to tell you how many people will catch a virus, but they didn’t bother to do one to examine how many small business would collapse, how many cancers would go undetected or how many people would commit suicide.
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People got upset when I said that this is just the beginning of us paying for the COVID theater but unfortunately it’s true.
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I had political economics in high school. It remains one of the most useful social-science classes I’ve ever had. But most kids in the US never get to see any of it.
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