Rock-Bottom

Are we there yet? Can we fall any lower? "Onwards and upwards" is the trajectory we humans like to think ourselves on, but lately regressive forces have had the upper hand and we're on a downward spiral of which the end is not yet in sight...

Editor's note: I posted another article with the same title in January 2020, which you can read here.

Not just in America, but all across the Western World we see a decline in the liberties and progression we've come accustomed to up until the Baby Boomer generation. Baby Boomers were the last generation able to look their children straight in the eye and say that the world is theirs to conquer, that they will have a better, more prosperous and more meaningful life. It was the way of the world, the American Dream of a middle class owning their own house with a white picket fence around the garden and lawn was still alive. Up until the 1970s wages went up, synchronous with GDP growth, and common folks had the idea that they got their fair share of a growing economy.

Little did they know that this "middle class" was a lie to begin with. It was a manufactured class, a direct response to the growing popularity of socialist and communist ideologies in The East. Although most communist and socialist experiments got stuck in a mode where the centralized governments regulated everything, it was the ideology of a system by and for workers, the real creators of wealth, that scared the pants off the capitalists in The West. So they decided it was prudent and wise to keep their workers happy and satisfied by paying them an honest wage. With the decline and fall of the only other superpower in the world, this threat is no more. Economies kept growing, but wages struggle to even keep up with inflation. So we now live in a modern version of the age of robber barons, a return to the way capitalism is supposed to operate.

Make no mistake; capitalism and capitalists have only one goal, and that is to see profits grow. It's sad and funny to me that the people who want more freedoms are so often the same people who claim that capitalism isn't pure enough, that everything would be so much better if only the government would mind their own business and let individuals and businesses free to do as they wish. When someone, like myself, points out how capitalism has failed us from its very inception, they claim that "this is not capitalism!" But it is. Corporatism, socialism for the rich, plutocracy, give it any label you wish; it's the end product of a system in which individuals are allowed to accumulate unlimited wealth just because they own a factory or invented some new trinket. With wealth comes power, and now we live in a world where freedoms are limited not by governments but by the wealthy who employ those governments; their astronomical wealth is the bullet that killed democracy.

The race to ever growing profits for the capitalists is also known as another race; "the race to the bottom" for everyone else:

Race to the bottom is a socio-economic phrase to describe either government deregulation of the business environment or reduction in corporate tax rates, in order to attract or retain usually foreign economic activity in their jurisdictions. While this phenomenon can happen between countries as a result of globalization and free trade, it also can occur within individual countries between their sub-jurisdictions (states, localities, cities). It may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production. The effect and intent of these actions is to lower labor rates, cost of business, or other factors (pensions, environmental protection and other externalities) over which governments can exert control.

This deregulation lowers the cost of production for businesses. Countries/localities with higher labor, environmental standards, or taxes can lose business to countries/localities with less regulation, which in turn makes them want to lower regulations in order to keep firms’ production in their jurisdiction, hence driving the race to the lowest regulatory standards.
_{source: Wikipedia}

To make profits, capitalists cut costs, evade taxation and seek the cheapest workers they can find. Think child labor is a thing of the past? Think again. Think the immigrants are here to steal your job? Blame the capitalists that invited them for their willingness to accept lower wages. Don't blame the individuals who just try to make a better life for themselves and their families. Speaking of walls (I'll let you make that connection yourself ;-)), know that this race to the bottom is the real cause of the loss of freedoms so many freedom-loving libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain about. Child labor needed to be regulated. Unsafe working conditions needed to be regulated. Producing unsafe products by cutting costs needed to be regulated. Keep the capitalist free to do as he wishes, and the whole world would be like Bangladesh.

It's never mentioned, but i'd like you to keep all of the above in mind when you watch the below linked video about clothing and the manufacturing of clothing. Bangladesh is mentioned, several times, and if we want to stop this race to the bottom, if we want to prevent becoming like Bangladesh, we need to recognize that capitalism is a crazy system that's never worked for the masses, that it produces a plutocracy by the rich for the rich. I hope we all wise up to this obvious truth before we really do hit rock-bottom...

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