[pdog]

> People don’t think they can really reach goals related to life stability unless they win some sort of lottery.

People think this because it's true. The median U.S. income is no longer enough to cover a year of basic expenses, or achieve reasonable goals, even if you work for the entire year[1].

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...

[ClumsyPilot]

"His concern about what he calls “market fundamentalism” derives from the way those markets are failing American families."

Free-market extremists provably ruined more lives than all terrorists combined

[fleacircus]

"Free-market extremists" are just neoliberals and they're everywhere.

They've infected both sides of politics, reducing most elections to 'red neoliberal' or 'blue neoliberal' that decide nothing except whose gross neoliberal friends get to gouge the taxpayers this term.

This is backed by major media companies who are also all run by neoliberals. They put on a bit of theatre to pretend there is actually more than trivial differences and they'll rake in billions.

They teach their kids neoliberalism in their exclusive schools, training them up to be the next generation of greedy sociopaths. They pay sleazy neoliberal P.R companies to undermine their critics online. They take over unions and turn them into yet another avenue for personal profit.

All to the thunderous applause of the neoliberals running incredibly exploitative, near-sighted businesses that are rapidly ruining the world in search of ever greater profits.

People need to start identifying this ideology and stripping the people who spout it from power.

Money doesn't trickle down, no matter how much of it you stuff into a billionaires pocket. The 'free market' doesn't give people the power to end things like foreign-slavery.

The powerful people that push these ideas know it. The rest of us need to know it too.

[chmod775]

> Free-market extremists provably ruined more lives than all terrorists combined

So did architects who designed unsafe staircases...

Or air pollution...

Or mosquitoes...

[me_me_me]

Not sure what the point of this post is?

[chmod775]

The point is that it isn't a high bar.

[ClumsyPilot]

well, air pollution and mosquitoes do kill like a million people a year, I am not sure about staircases...

[chmod775]

In the US staircases and mosquitoes are about equally deadly, with around 1500 deaths per year.

However most of the malaria deaths occur in people returning from countries where the toll is much higher.

[sershe]

Yes, because all of these expensive industries are paragons of free market economy.

The industries where the government stimulates demand (everything from mortgage rate deductions to section 8 and from creating and backing loans non-dischargable in bankruptcy to well, pretty much everything in healthcare) and restricts supply (everything from zoning and environmental regulation to excessive regulation, like in healthcare, to directly running things), are expensive, as summarized crudely in this famous chart [1].

In fact, we are now experiencing what happens when government restricts supply and stimulates demand on most things - lockdowns + stimulus (in some cases, also things like tariffs, canceling pipelines, etc.). It evidently "works" exactly the same way as e.g. healthcare "worked" for a long time; on a smaller scale due to relative size of the interference vs the interfered-with segment of the economy.

Oh and of course, price to income ratio in the USA still remains in line with OECD averages, and considerably lower than some far less "neoliberal" countries [2]

In general, size of the middle class in the free market hellscape is far larger, and the incomes are higher [3] Moreover, the "hollowing out" of the middle class is due to the migration primarily to higher income brackets in constant dollars [4]

What really is happening in the segments where things are not going as well as they could, is not neoliberalism.

The 1st part was described by Ortega Y Gasset almost a century ago; he describes one aspect of "mass men" as being similar to spoiled children (or aristocratic heirs), who are born into the world of prosperity built by someone else, and so take it for granted and assume they are entitled to it. It's hard for me to believe that about 1920ies, but I guess I haven't lived then and he has; it's easy for me to believe that about the West in the 2020ies.

The second part was described e.g. by Thomas Sowell a decade ago - politicians force corporations to give people things. Whatever benefit the people get from that is ascribed to politicians. The negative outcomes (at the very least, someone has to pay for the benefits) is blamed on the corporation. There's historically been a name for this model of governance [5], and it flourished in 1920ies, which might not be a coincidence.

[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019....

[2] https://data.oecd.org/chart/6xsL

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-...

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-ame...

[5] https://www.ocregister.com/2012/06/12/thomas-sowell-obamas-n...

[taurath]

Even tech workers are like wait, it’s still this hard to afford a home when I make *x the median income? It must be impossible for most people.