15
votes
Democrats need to reimagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.
Link information
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- Title
- Opinion | Democrats, Repeat After Me: Help People Fast
- Published
- Jan 21 2021
- Word count
- 3588 words
Money is just a stand-in for power. The power to feed yourself and your loved ones, the power to choose where you live, the power to leave a job you don't like. Perhaps other people in other countries have other stand-ins for those things, but it's not money's fault. It's the fault of a system that require that money be held for power to be had.
If you want a different system that has some other way of distributing power, cool, but as long as we're in this one, complaining that wealth is the sorting mechanism seems pretty pointless. Especially when we're talking about the current motivations of people living within that system.
No, I mean: All else being unchanged, until such time as some other metric is used for distributing power, of course everything must be centered around money. If some other locus of control emerges, unless everyone's basic needs are truly met everyone will be focused on that instead. It's not about the money, but the existence of inequality. As such, complaining about the yardstick through which we measure inequality is a distraction. I do agree that the degree of inequality needs to be resolved, but I don't think that the fact that we have a measure of value has much to do with that.
I'm sorry, I took your initial statement as an expression of dissatisfaction regarding the fact that people in the USA want money. Did I misunderstand? It sounded to me like a complaint regarding capitalism that was really tangential to a statement that people need to see a quick return from Democrats to reward them for their votes and faith in the recent election.
Anyway, things having variable value and entities recognizing that is not a human-centric concept, nor was it invented by humans. My dog likes food more than he likes rocks. Amoeba will move from areas of low resource density to those of high resource density. I like soft smooth bedding more than I like laying on gravel. None of that is exclusive to humans or capitalism.
Chose a quote from the 2nd paragraph for the title because I think it's less inflammatory and more representative of the author's argument than the actual headline.
This is from Ezra Klein, formerly one of the cofounders of Vox, who just recently left and started writing for the NYT.