Comment by monkeyfun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeyfun | Hacker News Reader

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You're overall correct, but made me notice that there is actually an unusually coherent argument (by their standards) being presented by the reactionaries pushing for the things you mention. It goes roughly like:

>The reason these jobs are terrible is because immigrants are doing it for wages that would be intolerably low to anyone else.

>This is also why it's hard to find a decent job in general, our competition is basically cheating!

>But if we remove the immigrants, the employers will surely have to increase wages like they were supposed to

>Now americans will have high paying factory jobs, and if some goods increase in price that's ok, their wages will let them afford it.

>we got to have our cake and eat it too!

Obviously they're missing some key steps and consciousness here in the reasoning, but I feel it's interesting to reflect on in context of how it's almost right -- and surprisingly close to a marxist view of things until it starts assuming things like that individuals have more bargaining power than their employers or that economic agents will always try to set the lowest price they can afford for goods rather than the highest.

So for example they'd believe prices would only go up a little and manufacturing companies would just live with stagnant or reduced profits since they'd have no other choice.

Notice how they have a habit of assuming totally Good behavior from Companies but totally Bad behavior from Immigrants!

I think in context of all that, it becomes more visible both how we could actually resolve this problem other than by just accepting the loss of domestic industry, and what in specific the people falling for this narrative are being hooked on.

Well it's not just that but also the expectation that their wages will increase. The current government is only trying to drop the minimum wage (under the guise of minimum wage earners being losers/leeches which is a strange reasoning)

And very few Americans are actually unemployed. The disappearance of manufacturing is a process that started decades ago and most people have moved on to bigger and better things. So why would they be making more in a minimum wage factory job? They will be making less and without access to cheap Asian manufacturing they can do even less with it. I totally agree the idea of companies doing the right thing is wrong.

But yes the reasons we're doing better in Europe is that we're not giving free reign to companies and have good welfare systems. When people have less worries about their survival they spend more. Of course to Trump backers this is unthinkable because of 'socialism'. Yes it is socialist which is different from communism.

We do of course have similar problems (housing is a problem too and there is resentment of immigrants)

I think the problems here are less bad though because:

1) We don't have a two party system (except for the UK which is in a similar situation to the US). That means it's not a zero sum game. A loss for one isn't an automatic win for the other. So politics are more focused on the positive than kicking the other down. Also we don't have this powerful singular leader with the kind of power the US president has.

2) Right wing politics is more a religion than anything. Not in a god per se but in the narrative and leader. Its followers like being told what to believe. This works best on the poorly educated. We see the same here but because our education system is better (less difference in quality between poor and affluent areas), less people fall into that trap.

> We don't have a two party system (except for the UK which is in a similar situation to the US).

The UK does not have a two party system to anything like the same extent the US does. There are 13 parties with at least one seat in the House of Commons and 15 independents.

Smaller parties look likely to gain a lot more seats in the next election.

> But yes the reasons we're doing better in Europe is that we're not giving free reign to companies and have good welfare systems

Historically true, but it seems to be less so.

> Its followers like being told what to believe. This works best on the poorly educated.

I think it is not that simple. The poorly educated correlate strongly with the poor, who have done badly in recent decades.

> We do of course have similar problems (housing is a problem too and there is resentment of immigrants)

To a great extent in some countries. There are multiple European countries that have parties more extreme than the US right that are growing: AfD, PVV, Fidesz, Rassemblement national etc.

> Smaller parties look likely to gain a lot more seats in the next election.

That's true but that's more because the "two party system" became a one party system with labour doing the same as the tories. They started to become more different again under corbyn after the disaster of "tory-lite" but now they're right back to their old ways.

> I think it is not that simple. The poorly educated correlate strongly with the poor, who have done badly in recent decades.

Yes but voting right-wing is making them even more poor because the right only think of the poor as a natural resource. Yet they manage to convince them they care. Why would a billionaire care about the poor?? The only reason they became a billionaire was exploiting the poor. The only reason billionaires exist is the huge gap between rich and poor and those are always going to draw the short end of the stick.

If they voted left they would fare way better. Yet the right manages to convince them that the left only wants to take what's theirs. This image is very apt I think: https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...

> There are multiple European countries that have parties more extreme than the US right that are growing: AfD, PVV, Fidesz, Rassemblement national etc.

I don't think those are more extreme than the Republicans are now. They are the exact same. I'm from Holland myself and the reason the PVV (and also similar parties like FVD and BBB) is not getting anything done despite being the biggest party now, is that the coalition government waters everything down. The current government is constantly trying to grin to one another while trying to shoot each other in the back. Which is good, because it undermines their ability to do anything. I doubt they will make their full term.

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