CIO Fox guest: "Great blessing" that old Americans can't afford to retire

[parochial boy]

I learned over a decade ago that the types of people who populate the Business channels and business websites, the kind of day trader, financial industry types are some of the most horrible people ever.

I recall reading an article from 2009 that claimed the recession was a good thing because it meant he could finally get decent service at the coffee shop since it was an employers market.

As the type of conservative that seeks to understand and prevent the kind of conditions that lead to the rise of people like Lenin, I must say this attitude makes me sick and is part of the reason I have been railing against Investor's Business Daily and Wall Street Journal even back in the days when I was a Romney supporter.

Yeah, it's interesting (and/or concerning) that capitalism, or the business elite, or whatever, used to have the ability to adapt and constrain the most excessive edges of capitalism for the good of its own survival. I mean, the embedded liberal era is the most obvious example of this, where capitalism was able to reform itself, precisely to stave of the Communist thread.

Nowadays though, it seems to have lost its ability to do this, and desparately screams down even the most tepid attempts to reform or constrain it. This may be precisely because there isn't an equivalent of Soviet Russia looming in the background - but it doesn't seem too far fetched to feel that modern liberal capitalism's refusal to bend with the prevailing wind is going to contain the seeds of its own downfall.

[parochial boy]

Horrible. This is why I fully understand why some Americans are attracted to the ideas of AOC and Bernie. But their blind spot is multiculturalism. Their open borders fantasy will always enable capitalism to foster.

The combination of capitalism and multiculturalism really leads to the worst possible outcome for the general populace, especially those in worse socio-economic positions.

Are you legitimately trying to claim that multiculturalism has an actual tangible negative effect on national economics and the lower class?

I've seen arguments like this regarding illegal immigration, but multiculturalisn? This is a massive crock of sh__.

Multiculturalism causes social cohesion to decline and individualism to increase. The result: less willingness to pay into a system that upholds a welfare state. Moreover, mass immigration of working-class people drives down wages (and slows down automation and innovation). The main losers of such policies are the native working classes (of whichever color). Middle-class people lose too, as they benefit from a welfare state and good public facilities (also thinking of education here) too as well as being affected by the decrease of public safety. The only ones who benefit are the literal 1%.

Somewhat interestingly, off topic or not, but I have been reading a book ("l'archipel français" to be precise), by Jerôme Fourquet - which included a load of analyis about the experience of North African migrants in France. And what stood out is that they were following a broadly "normal" pattern of integration (increasingly likely to marry out of their community, increasingly likely to choose "french" rather than "muslim" names for their children, increasingly likely to benefit from social mobility and move out of the banlieues...) until this process actually started going backwards around about the year 2000. Ie, more or less the time that neo-liberal "there is no alternative" capitalism was becoming hegemonic across the globe.

In fact, in many societies, you actually have this ultra-liberalism coming into place before they became multicultural (eg Thatcher was elected at a time when the UK was still 98% white); which I think undermines the argument that Multiculturalism is something that undermines social cohesion.

So I would tend to think that the cause of social fracturing and individualism was not multiculturalism - but instead, it was purely down to neoliberalism, which drove both everything you described about social cohesion, but as a consequence, drove the failure of integration of recent migrants (and that includes the rise of the Islamist identatarian movement, which was also clearly fuelled by neoliberal globalisation as much as anything else). I mean, I wouldn't dispute that "neoliberlism" has been a driver of increased migration to Europe, but I think you have the causality the wrong way round.

[parochial boy]

Horrible. This is why I fully understand why some Americans are attracted to the ideas of AOC and Bernie. But their blind spot is multiculturalism. Their open borders fantasy will always enable capitalism to foster.

The combination of capitalism and multiculturalism really leads to the worst possible outcome for the general populace, especially those in worse socio-economic positions.

Are you legitimately trying to claim that multiculturalism has an actual tangible negative effect on national economics and the lower class?

I've seen arguments like this regarding illegal immigration, but multiculturalisn? This is a massive crock of sh__.

Multiculturalism causes social cohesion to decline and individualism to increase. The result: less willingness to pay into a system that upholds a welfare state. Moreover, mass immigration of working-class people drives down wages (and slows down automation and innovation). The main losers of such policies are the native working classes (of whichever color). Middle-class people lose too, as they benefit from a welfare state and good public facilities (also thinking of education here) too as well as being affected by the decrease of public safety. The only ones who benefit are the literal 1%.

Somewhat interestingly, off topic or not, but I have been reading a book ("l'archipel français" to be precise), by Jerôme Fourquet - which included a load of analyis about the experience of North African migrants in France. And what stood out is that they were following a broadly "normal" pattern of integration (increasingly likely to marry out of their community, increasingly likely to choose "french" rather than "muslim" names for their children, increasingly likely to benefit from social mobility and move out of the banlieues...) until this process actually started going backwards around about the year 2000. Ie, more or less the time that neo-liberal "there is no alternative" capitalism was becoming hegemonic across the globe.

In fact, in many societies, you actually have this ultra-liberalism coming into place before they became multicultural (eg Thatcher was elected at a time when the UK was still 98% white); which I think undermines the argument that Multiculturalism is something that undermines social cohesion.

So I would tend to think that the cause of social fracturing and individualism was not multiculturalism - but instead, it was purely down to neoliberalism, which drove both everything you described about social cohesion, but as a consequence, drove the failure of integration of recent migrants (and that includes the rise of the Islamist identatarian movement, which was also clearly fuelled by neoliberal globalisation as much as anything else). I mean, I wouldn't dispute that "neoliberlism" has been a driver of increased migration to Europe, but I think you have the causality the wrong way round.

According to the chart on this page, 2000 is also the year in which immigration to France started to steadily tick up, after remaining stagnant for a quarter of a century. So it seems just as likely to me that as long as the Maghrebi population in France was cut off from the Maghreb, assimilation occurred at a steady rate, but the constant flow of new arrivals to France since then has changed that equation.

Maybe, there are always going to be so many moving parts that you could never know for sure - but recent years have seen an increasing tendancy towards segregation amongst other groups (practising Catholics, Jews, the wealthy and upper middle classes...); whereas at the time of the original wave of North African immigration those trends weren't happening. So a big difference is neoliberalism in this case. (and anecdotally, it would be hard to deny the rise of things like satellite TV (ie al jazeera), or of Salafism as a globally present ideology, in particularly as spread through the internet, as things that would have been factors increased immigration levels or not).