richlind33: Right, but that's very different from the economy that ordinary people interact with, where market forces ruthlessly punish people for tiny mistakes, while the privileged few at the top are lavishly rewarded when they fail spectacularly.
"Oops, we did it again. Sorry about that."
Did you know that the FED allowed the commercial banking sector to dump trillions of dollars worth of derivatives into the public banking system, which will totally wipe out the FDIC? I think it's safe to say that nothing is sacred anymore and it's only a matter of time before Social Security and Medicare are eliminated, which will quickly be followed by a dramatic decline in life expectancy. But hey, if we look at this from a bean counter's perspective, eliminating 7/8 of the global population will "reset" the economy and initiate a brand new "golden age" of prosperity and opportunity, and who can say no to that? : (
I agree that the day to day interactions of regular people with the economy don't bear out the idea that something like 2% inflation could be considered a benign amount of inflation, but that has less to do with the amount of inflation than it does with the stagnation or decrease in real wages people have experienced for the past 25 or 30 years, despite strong increases in general productivity. That stagnation in wages is a direct result of the neo-liberal agenda to concentrate wealth into the hands of the investor class via tax breaks, under the guise of trickle down economics and the gutting of labour unions.
It's not just the commercial banking sector that enjoys ridiculous wealth transfers from the middle class to the moneyed class via corporate welfare. What is perhaps more egregious is the fact that post recession the Federal Reserve was handing billions and billions of dollars to the European Central Bank taken on as junk bonds by the Fed with zero input from the US electorate or government. That was debt accumulated by US taxpayers, given to foreign entities with no input from elected officials.
I'm not sure how bean counters could view a massive decline in population as a net positive. Speculative markets are based almost solely on the illusion of growth, it's hard to maintain that illusion when you cut the pool of potential consumers by large margins. I suppose some people could argue that there is less of a drain on public goods and services, but it would also reduce the tax base, limiting the governments revenues to pay for said public goods.
rtcvb32: Censorship seems to be a popular thing right now...
Is censorship popular though? That kind of assumes that the companies banning people from platforms or not selling certain goods relish the opportunity to do so. Based on how slowly these companies tend to react I'd be more apt to assume they do so begrudgingly.
And if you're not talking about the actions of the company and more about the people who express outrage over benign things, or at least things that some people view to be benign. And you're assuming that it's just a small group of loud people expressing misplaced outrage, as many people profess to believe about these things.... wouldn't that make it decidedly unpopular, since it's only a small group expressing outrage and not a majority or even strong minority?