Doom Report (Week 26: It's the Economy, Stupid)

I’ve often said that there’s nothing wrong with the concept of Communism; it’s just the implementations that tend to go badly.  It turns out that implementing communism in a pure form is basically an impossibility, because people are gonna people, and they will always pervert the system.

We, as good old capitalist Americans, can easily see this.  We even get to point to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the conversion of China to an at least partially capitalist system, and say “look! they failed—we were right all along.”  But you also have to consider that it’s difficult to get a clear picture of a system that you’re currently submersed in, just like Stephen Hawking’s goldfish trying to formulate scientific laws about objects moving outside their bowls.  The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that implementations of capitalism can also never be pure, and they too may inevitably fail.  If you hear people talking about “late-stage capitalism,” this is what they mean.  Critics of the term say it’s impossible to know whether capitalism is actually on its last legs, but it seems pretty clear to me that the American implementation of it, at least, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

This was the topic of The Weekly Show this week, where Jon Stewart interviews two economists, Clara Mattei and James Robinson.  Throughout the interview, it becomes clear that Mattei is quite liberal, and Robinson is a secret conservative.  But the initial discussion about the capital class vs the working class—or, as some call them, makers and takers—is what really drew me in.  Because we don’t live in a pure expression of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations any more than the Soviets lived in a pure expression of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  There is no “free market” in America, as Jon is quite fond of pointing out (and does so again quite articulately here).  There are earners and owners (which feels a bit more charitable than “makers and takers” to me), and the government intervenes on behalf of the owners constantly, while intervention on behalf of the earners is decried as socialism and moral hazard.

And this, it seems to me, is where the system must inevitably fall apart.  Because the owners have already been so successful at extracting all the wealth from the earners—as Mattei reminds us at one point, “three people own more than 150 million Americans”—that soon there will be no more wealth to extract, and no more earners to extract it from.  If the workers can’t make a living and can’t get sufficient healthcare, it sure does seem like we’re headed for a future shortage of workers.

Another thing they talk about is economic growth, and they point out that “capital accumulation, which is economic growth—we tend to call it economic growth because it sounds less political; it sounds more kind of neutral.”  And this dovetails nicely with my own thoughts from a year and a half ago when I wrote about vibecession.  All the economic indicators show that our economy is booming, because it is ... for the ultra-wealthy.  See, the problem with our traditional economic indicators is, they measure dollars.  If they were somehow measuring people, then the very tiny minority of billionaires would be statistically insignificant next to the rest of us.  But in terms of raw dollars, the growing inequality in our society means that the ultra-wealthy overwhelm the lower and middle classes (put together, even).  So the economic growth indicators can seem positive even while the majority of the people are starving.  In my vibecession post, I posited that we should probably start using different economic indicators.  So far, no luck on that.

Another topic essayed by Stewart and his guests is austerity.  And, as they point out, “austerity” always means austerity for the workers: no one ever seems to propose that the billionaires suffer any austerity.  Worse, austerity often means helping the capital class, because that supposedly stimulates the economy.  Forget the fact that nearly fifty years of trying trickle-down/supply-side economics has never worked.  Seriously: not once, in fifty years.  What other philosophy has failed so blatantly for so long and yet people still keep doing it?  And it doesn’t help that the capital class has managed to cloak its deeds in increasingly complex terms.  So when government passes all these laws and rules about “depreciations” and “capital gains” and “derivatives” (etc etc ad nauseum), it’s often difficult for the working class to figure out how badly they’re getting screwed.  This has nothing to do with the owners being smarter than the earners, of course; it’s just that the owners have nothing better to do than sit around and invent more and more byzantine financial instruments.  Meanwhile, the earners have actual work to do: they don’t have time to try and understand all this investment bullshit.

The contrast between the two economists is extreme, and in many ways Jon is balanced between them.  While he agrees with Clara on most points, he thinks her alternatives to capitalism (such as those practiced by native peoples) are far too idealistic, and that her ideas can’t scale to an economy of our size.  And he’s probably right.  But James goes too far in the other direction.  I called him a “secret conservative” because he starts out agreeing with Jon—and even Clara, to a certain extent—and waits about half an hour (almost exactly halfway through the interview) to drop this gem:

And I think, like—I’m not denying anything that Clara says—but I think if you think about the big picture, you know, the United States has actually been better at solving those sort of problems than Nigeria, or Colombia, or any poor country in the world has been.  Any country in the world has elites that want to rig the game in their favor.  And boy, have they been more successful in Colombia, you know, than they have in the United States.  I think that’s the big picture.  You know, and, in fact, you know, there are all these problems.  I agree.  But if you look at the last 100, 150 years, yeah, you have to fight.  You have to fight for your rights.  You have to fight for wages.  You have to fight to get the government to pay attention to you.  But that fight has been much more successful for ordinary people in the United States than it has in Colombia.  And I guess that’s what I said here.

In other words, James is starting out from the perspective that “America’s not doing so bad” ...  which is just demonstrably untrue.  And his “proof” is logically unsound—in fact, in the clip, you can hear (and see) Clara snort and say “of course.”  Because “other places suck worse” is not proof that it doesn’t suck here.  “Sucks less” is a far cry from “doesn’t suck,” and the inability of people to distinguish between those two never ceases to amaze me.

But James really proves his perspective is suspect when he tries to sell us this line about Elon Musk:

What was it that drove him to take over this whole DOGE?  He was not trying to make money.  He actually lost enormous amounts of money.  He was doing it because he’s a libertarian, because he’s ideologically driven to oppose anything the government does, I think.

And, stunningly, neither Jon nor Clara calls him on this bullshit.  He wasn’t trying to make money?  I suppose it was just coincidence, then, that he just happened to quash 65 federal investigations into his companies, potentially saving him $2 billion in fines and liabilities? or that he used his time in the government to try to steal a $2 billion contract from Verizon and to award himself over $13 billion in Space Force contracts?  Somehow I think he’s coming out okay in the long run ...  Not to mention, “he lost money doing it”—even if that were true (which I doubt: see previous points)—is only relevant if Musk understood that he was going to lose money before he started DOGE.  Now, given everything that we all now know about President Musk (and we know way more than we ever wanted to, I’m sure we can all agree), do we honestly think that he said to himself “this is going to cost me a bunch of money, but I’m going to do it anyway, because of my principles!”?  Or do we think it more likely that, because he is a complete narcissist, it never even occurred to him that anyone would come to hate him so much that it might cost him money?  I refer you to the interview where Musk was pissed at Tim Walz for saying he had started watching the Tesla stock price drop to add a little pick-me-up to his day.  Listen to what he says there: the only explanation he can come up with as to why someone might be pleased to see his company’s stock in the toilet is that they must be “evil.”  He literally can’t think of any other reason.  But that guy predicted that cutting over three-quarters of a million jobs would get people upset at him?  Yeah, right.

So, it was a great show about our economy, and that was after Stewart interviewed Kyla Scanlon on Monday’s Daily Show; her new book In This Economy? is apparently a great resource for understanding economics at a very accessible level.  And you know what the one thing is that gets pointed out in both interviews?  The reason the working class is always the one that gets screwed is because they don’t have lobbyists.  Which is depressing enough.  But the real bombshell Scanlon dropped was this one, when Jon asked her why we can’t choose demand-side solutions vs supply-side ones:

Scanlon: It’s a tough sell, politically.  Like, it’s a tough narrative.
Stewart: So this is a political problem, not an economic problem?
Scanlon: Most economic problems are political problems, at the end of the day, yeah.
Stewart: That’s—but they never say that.
Scanlon: Why would they?

I can’t think of a more succinct summary of our system (both economic and otherwise).

Other things you need to know this week:

• On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Nick Offerman does his first “In My Opinion” segment, and he talks about our National Parks.  In regards to Trump’s plan to charge foreigners more to visit the parks, which is estimated to bring in about $90 million, Nick had this response: “So let me get this straight, Mr. President: you cut 267 million to get back 90 million?  Now, I’m no mathematician, but I believe that’s called ‘shitting the bed’.”  Definitely worth the watch.

• In this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich tries out the line that Trump is the Deep State.  Despite bringing a few receipts, I’m not sure that message is going to break through.  Still, I gotta respect the hustle.
• It’s a longer video, but if you want a really articulate—and also hilarious—summary of the Trump-Epstein debacle, Josh Johnson has you covered.

I wish I had a note of hope to end on, but in reality the item I must leave you with is one of defeat.  Stephen Colbert announced this week that The Late Show has been cancelled by Paramount.  He’ll finish out his contract through May of next year, then the entire show will be dismantled.  Now, Paramount is claiming that their reasons are strictly financial, but it sure does seem related to Paramount’s decision to pay (at least) $16 million to settle a meritless lawsuit, a move that many (including Colbert himself) called a bribe.  Certainly Adam Kinzinger thinks the two are related.  We may never know, and I certainly hope Colbert finds a new outlet, but this is not particularly encouraging for an informed populace.  The Daily Show is also owned by Paramount, so they could be next on the chopping block, and honestly, no one is safe.  Brian Tyler Cohen has started pointing out that YouTube could shut off access to his videos at any time, and Google is certainly pro-Trump these days.  Jimmy Kimmel’s bosses at Disney have already showed a predilection to doing as Trump asks, and the jury is still out on Warner Bros (owners of HBO Max and consequently Last Week Tonight).  Once upon a time, you could only trust the big corporations when it came to accurate news; now we’re entering a time when you can only trust anyone else.  And, since Joe-Blow-with-a-blog could be a MAGA nutjob just as easily as a crusader for truth, you can’t really trust them either.

They used to say “democracy dies in darkness,” but then the Washington Post got bought by Jeff Bezos.  Now it seems we’ve passed democracy’s twilight and are moving into dusk.  I don’t think we’ll miss these things until they’re gone—isn’t that always the way?—but I feel pretty confident we will miss them.  So let’s make the most of Colbert while we still have him.  The future is looking kind of dim.