betterbemeta:

betterbemeta:

it’s a sham how much the american right-wing talks up how ‘socialism’ would be bad for the US economy.  most of the ‘socialist’ policies that are on the table in the USA are only economic ones in the most general sense, that money is a measure of resources and to achieve all goals resources must be invested. By this logic, all policies for anything at any time are about the ‘economy.‘ 

Such a model frames the cost of reform as “an extra expense” and the cost of business as usual as “nothing.” But it’s not nothing. It’s not the cost of the norm, but the cost of decline– the upkeep of aging structures, current subsides, and current astronomical amounts of cash siphoned away from the system– as profit, much of which doesn’t go back into wages or investments accessible to the ordinary citizen. That stuff isn’t bad for the economy?

Conservatives insist the left wing lives in a fantasy world insulated from the fact that reform projects cost money, that it’s just ‘basic economics’ that you ‘can’t get stuff for free’ and ‘who is gonna pay for all this? people who didn’t ask for it?’… but often discard that extracting larger and larger profits on top of the cost of doing business drains that money from somewhere. You can’t ‘generate value’ entirely for free– it’s not ‘free money.’ And it’s likely the people who shouldered that cost didn’t get to choose.

Why is one form of ‘wanting things for ‘free’/at the expense of others’ prosperity’ considered naive, but another completely ignored as if it’s not even happening? Like it’s just a cost-neutral status quo upon which any further expense would be a burden?