The Upper class is crushing the Middle and Working classes with skyrocketing housing prices, fuel prices and outsourcing (and insourcing).
How much more of this shit should we take before an armed revolt??
Well, let's see, housing is part of the housing boom that occurred a while back and really not so much an issue of rich people as a lot of people wanting houses. A way to get past that is to choose an apartment or even just trying to cut back in house size as I think that house size has gotten bigger. Fuel prices? I would try to push for better bus transportation and carpooling or some such as gas prices are not likely to get incredibly lower, in fact, if you believe in global warming it would be better that they get higher anyway in order to push for less consumption. Outsourcing? Well, outsourcing is bad for the poor in this nation but generally considered a boon for the poor in other nations and an improvement in efficiency as well as increase in competition. The possible issue with that is that it takes good factory jobs, but it must be recognized that other trends are pushing wages down on that issue such as the growth of technology that can do many tasks.
I would have to go with "a lot more" in this case. Civil wars are incredibly costly and most of the possible gains would be erased by the possible losses. Not only that but a lot of the trends are somewhat impersonal and although they benefit the rich they are not purely a matter of class warfare as the outsourcing issue is actually credited with decreasing world inequality. Finally, what happens when we revolt? What basis do we use for power, for order, for economic distribution? A working class revolution is somewhat likely to end in some form of communo-fascist system full of corruption, the reason being that the classes brought in tend to value most freedom less highly and do not share the more libertarian ideas of the upper classes(I mean, it is not the elites that hate the gays GW is doing it to suck up to his less wealthy constituents as the man himself has in the past stated a belief in Civil Unions), not only that but most revolutions end up being hi-jacked, or screwing up really badly: the largest reason the American revolution worked is because it wasn't revolutionary and even it had shit. I would say that the real issue ends up being what we do in order to deal with these changes: gas issues need to be dealt with through transportation improvements, housing probably needs to go its own course somewhat unless monopoly power is an issue, really though, if you want a house just go to Detroit, they have houses there cheaper than cars! But seriously, another way to deal with things is to live the college way and get roommates as I think our much poorer ancestors in the Industrial Revolution had to, and for outsourcing issues I would see the real problem at stake to be trying to adapt our worker population in order to deal with the complex changes, after all educated labor is being paid at a relatively high premium.
I started this thread, because like McJ, I have a passion for the well-being of the working class. I believe that we are Western Civilizations Miners Canary. If we fall into poverty, then the middle class will be right behind us.
The weakness of Capitalism is that it soonser or later devolves into Feudalism. I don't want to live to see that day happen.
The issue with that is that people of the past probably said that about the farmer. Strangely enough I don't see our society being purely agricultural and rather see us just shelling out money to pay for these folks to not grow crops. What is the real issue is that we are going through a revolutionary age in many ways. The computer is hitting us sort of like the factory did in changing how we deal with the world, the rise of trade is causing more competition for jobs, which as I stated is actually decreasing the inequality of the much larger system that is now being created but increasing the inequality within nations. The world is changing in a fundamental way I think, even if we did not have outsourcing the rise of computer technology is also going to hurt some of the jobs.
Possibly it does become feudalism, possibly it doesn't. I know that Marx argued that it would, however, the issue is that even though there is a recent slide in wealth at the bottom, the net effects of capitalism over the ages tends to be positive. To fully fall into feudalism, I think that a lot more work would have to be done to deal with labor mobility, which has almost undoubtedly increased since past ages, and to increase poverty significantly as it is also notable that our concept of what we need has gone up rather than down with time.
I'm thinking that's why the ruling elites in America want to import all these poor uneducated Mexicans ino our country. The locals are wising up and demanding higher wages and this is how they counter-punch.
I think that the real issue with Mexican labor is one of difficulty in keeping them out, and the idea that people should be free to deal with whomever they want. Mexican labor really cannot do much of the labor that we need or commonly find as many jobs today require English speakers.
