Sunday, March 8, 2020

Palliative Liberalism Can't Cure Our Ailing Working Class

The assumption that contemporary North America and Europe already have near-classless societies, to be made perfectly classless by a few low-cost policy interventions, also compels neoliberals to attribute the problems of the native white Western working class not to the class system but rather to personal shortcomings, which a number of unfortunate individuals are alleged to share.

SBTC theory explained rising inequality by asserting that the "Left-behind" members of the working class had inferior and outmoded skills not needed by the "Creative class" or the "Digital elite" in the new "Global knowledge economy."

Somewhat bolder proposals to help the working class, which also avoid any heretical questioning of the labor market effects of deunionization, offshoring, and mass immigration, include more redistribution of income in the form of cash transfers or tax breaks and more opportunities for working-class citizens to start their own businesses.

Redistributionist proposals range from expanding tax subsidies to wage earners, like America's earned income tax credit, to the old but periodically revived idea of a universal basic income, which would allow all citizens to live at a minimally adequate level without working.

In the U.S., large firms with over five hundred workers in 2007 employed 44 percent of all workers but only 28 percent of low-wage workers.

These reformers propose the euthanasia of the working class.

They may ameliorate the symptoms, but they do not cure the disease-the imbalance of power, within Western nation-states, between the overclass and the working class as a whole, including many exploited immigrant workers who labor for the affluent in the metropolitan hubs.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/palliative-liberalism-wont-cure-whats-wrong-with-our-working-class/

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