The greatest crime a capitalist can imagine is an employee getting paid the amount they are promised, in excess of that they deserve. The greatest virtue a capitalist can imagine is an employer making profits in excess of their contribution.
Inflation punishes people who assets. Poor people only suffer when their nominal wages don't grow to match inflation -- but that's exactly the same as their employers lowering wages in an inflation-free environment. Inflation is only superficially related to the problem of real wage reductions.
"..in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."
In other words there is this aggregate value called "employment" that it's politically expedient to optimize, and the way to do that is to tweak the markets to screw the poor and transfer that wealth to the rich.
Well, yes, if you create a moving wage treadmill that forces people to work harder or fall off, you will get higher employment rates.
Arabs use "Sharia" like Americans use "Liberty". They just use the word because it sounds respectable, but they make it mean whatever suits their power.
Quite well except for a certain continent. In NL churches are being sold for peanuts because they're empty on Sundays. As the last generation that went to church regularly dies the church makes one last effort at value extraction: real estate price increases are being liquidated.
In the USA and Canada it is still very much a popular thing, no idea how long it will take to get to the point where people realize they're being had.
Religion can have positive effects in people's lives, but at the same time organized religion is used for vote marshalling and politics, it's just another power structure and a business to boot. This goes for most religions, not just for Christianity.
Personally I'd be fine with an englightened version of Islam, one that formally recognized the rights of women and that did away with the most antiquated and damaging aspects of the religion. Of course a push to effect that would result in even harsher pushback from the fanatics, for fear that such a strategy might succeed.
Speaking as an ardent secularist, I hope at least some of the older churches are being preserved for their historical value.
>Religion can have positive effects in people's lives, but at the same time organized religion is used for vote marshalling and politics, it's just another power structure and a business to boot. This goes for most religions, not just for Christianity.
The relationship between the House of Saud and the Wahabbist establishment in Saudi Arabia demonstrates this. It's absolutely chilling stuff that is woefully unexamined for its importance to the making of the modern world.
There is zero incentive for an enlightened version of Islam. They're winning the population game and losers (the rapidly secularizing West) don't get to dictate terms.
Catholic Africa is growing and will possibly step in to replace the West after it goes majority Islamic.
He wasn't communist, and that nonsense worldview is why they missed the problem. He was an opportunist, like many people in all governments. He sold info to russians while others just sold contracts to friends or embezzled directly. It's not us vs a foreign them, there are selfish and power-hungry monsters throughout all sides.
