Yeah? well I don't see any corporations getting hot puss puss. Later nerds.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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You think we're gonna fight corporations as individuals if we strangle government?
No. Government is our protection from those who would want to consolidate power, especially corporations. I understand that the government often fails at that protection, but it's still a hell of a lot better than being completely defenseless.
The whole point of the founding fathers was to spread power and attempt to keep it spread. They wanted to avoid both the abuses of monarchy and the eventual decapitation of leadership (seeing as how that'd be their heads).
Yes. The point of government is to fight things too big for us to fight ourselves. That is the only reason government has to exist. All the other things are nice to have features, but a government is a fighting force.
That doesn’t mean we give up our own weapons though. We need an army to fight the other armies, law to fight the power of money, and government for those. But we also need weapons of our own to prevent the government from physically fighting us.
Our weapons keep the government polite. The government keeps other governments and other large organizations polite.
It’s the minimum structure necessary for a society where respectful interaction is the norm.
All these weapons and power structuring aren’t about dominating. They’re about maintaining a power balance to prevent domination … and make space for respect and trade.
Government therefore exists in order to:
- Prevent any individual from dominating any other individual, creating guaranteed space for respectful trade
- Ensure the first item by having enough physical power (army) to control any individual including removing them
- Also configure that army to oppose other armies so that they can’t come dominate the local individuals
- Be unable to dominate the whole polity if it fights together (government carries a sword but each individual carries a small knife; only large groups of individuals can oppose the sword)
It all starts from needing a way to enforce nobody is dominating anyone else.
But we also need weapons of our own to prevent the government from physically fighting us.
And the most important and effective weapon is collective action. The reason people look weird at Americans about gun culture is because alone, you can have as many guns as you want, the police will bash your head in either way. Together, you don't even need guns, you can cripple the government in a week by just not going to work.
And that ability is incredibly heavily regulated in the US. From our perspective, the US is the country where people don't have the ability to fight the government.
That said, guns can be good against nazis at your door, but at that point, the government has long failed at taking out the trash.
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Government is our megazord. Got it.
Edit: added wiki link for the curious. In short, episodes of the Power Rangers often end with the rangers battling a monster that inevitably revives as a much larger, Godzilla-scale version.
As the rangers are suddenly too small to fight the larger foe that towers above them, they must instead organize their individual vehicles into one giant “megazord” — a large mech, like a gundam crossed with a transformer — in order to defeat the enemy.
One might argue that the government is there to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. James Madison certainly did
Thus the beheading part. Spreading power was good for everyone.
I'd rather have a billion USD as an American citizen than have 10 billion USD as a Russian oligarch. For some reason the GOP doesn't seem to understand why.
It ain't going well for the little guy lately - the thread in my Lemmy right below this one is "Amazon, SpaceX and other companies are arguing the government agency that has protected labor rights since 1935 is actually unconstitutional".
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the working man that labor unions were gasp COMMUNIST
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90% was self employed in 1900.
That can't be right can it?
Yeah, it's correct if by "self employed" you mean "subsistence farmer". The US was basically a third world country in 1900. We only won the Spanish American War in 1898 because Spain was a dying empire.
50% according to this article. They mention 80% in 1860.
I'm not 100% sure of the source there but I have heard similar numbers around 50%. Think of all the self-employed people doing jobs that just don't exist today in the US - delivering milk, fruit, fish, newspapers, door-to-door salesmen, and that's on top of jobs that still exist today with a lot of self-employed people like AC repair, plumbing, etc...
From 1860 to 1900 the average size of American farms had declined from 199 acres to 147 acres and the percentage of farmers in the labor force declined from 58 to 38 percent.
No, doesn't seem right.
Yo I wanna hang with you at the parties.