CeffTheCeph

On both your and daychilde’s comments here…

The system gets rigged when there are fewer people invested in the democratic process, when there are fewer people actually pursuing and participating in a democratic system. The more we outsource our democratic agency to others, the more likely those others are going to be corrupt. One of the main points of the article is that democratic backsliding is a global trend. This doesn’t mean that particular countries are democratically electing dictators, democratic backsliding means that across the world, incrementally, small policy changes are adding up to a less democratic world. These policies may have nothing to do with democracy in their discourse, but act to weaken the democratic process.

As an example, where I am from every school district has a set of trustees who are democratically elected in municipal elections and are tasked with ensuring that the local school board is following the Ministry of Education guidelines as they relate to the needs of the local community. Currently the state government is in the process of eliminating all trustees and appointing a single state ‘administrator’ to take on the role of the trustees for all districts in the state. Literally dozens of locally elected representatives are being replaced with a single state appointed administrator.

The discourse around this issue is troubling, essentially revolving around the notion that trustees are inefficient, don’t know how to properly use public education dollars and are costing taxpayers more while adding no value to the education system itself. While there most certainly is an argument to be made about efficient use of tax dollars with respect to trustees, the point that a functioning democratic institution is being replaced with a centralized authoritarian ruler is completely ignored.

The point of this story is that it is significantly easier to corrupt the democratic process, whether through a rigged election, or through manipulation, or gerrymandering, or whatever, when there are fewer people engaged in the voting process. In my state the average voter turnout for municipal elections is well below 40%. The reason people aren’t interested in the democratic backsliding that is caused by getting rid of trustees is because it is only a minority of people in the state who even bother to elect trustees in the first place.

Another important point that is being made in the article is that one way to effectively fight against threats to democracy is to call out those threats as they are. Getting rid of trustees may actually produce better outcomes in terms of efficiency, but we all have to acknowledge that getting rid of trustees is a direct threat to our democracy. An autocratic state is always going to be way worse for everyone than having some inefficiencies in the school board trustee system.

If there are more people engaged in the democratic process than there are more people who are able to critically scrutinize the democratic process. It is only when we are engaged in the democratic process that we can actually hold it accountable to us. The more people who believe in democracy, the deeper and stronger that democracy becomes.

The voting system may very well be rigged, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on democracy entirely. In reality, it is only when a majority of people give up on democracy that any voting system can be rigged. When the majority of people believe centralized efficiency is better than local representation, for example, democracy dies. In any case, the more people participate in the democratic process the stronger that process becomes. Just always vote. That is by far the most important and effective action you can take to prevent democratic elections from becoming rigged.

How this can be achieved is the question

Just fucking vote. Engage in all local, state, and federal elections. Be invested in the results. Everyone, all the time, vote on everything. Believe in democracy.

I genuinely appreciate your concern. I’m really glad that you are here in Canada, as open minded people make our world a better place.

Engaging with racism is always helpful, in any context. Here in TBay there used to be a city committee directly committed to addressing racism in the city. They had a campaign headlined: “If you witness racism, say something”, with a link to report observations. The headline was on billboards, city buses and everything around the city.

I suppose enough local tax payers complained about inefficient use of tax dollars and that committee has since been retired. But the international headlines about TBay continue.

I am from Thunder Bay and have lived here my whole life. These are not new stories, and the highest 10 year average in Canada in this case is not a surprise. TBay is a bottleneck between eastern and western Canada. It is a hub for dozens of Northern Ontario remote First Nations communities. In all of the small communities outside of TBay, there are billboards on the highway that are directed specifically at reminding people that “Human Trafficking is a Crime”. I don’t intend to be directly confrontational, but the comment:

maybe there should be some awareness campaign and/or educational programs to get the public more knowledgeable and work to recognize and report these instances or avoid them.

is incredibly ignorant. Located on the north shore of Lake Superior, TBay is visited by dozens of Great Lake and International cargo ships daily during the shipping season; it isn’t an issue of the public not recognizing that trafficking is taking place, it is a crime of opportunity. TBay is also regularly considered to be the ‘murder capital of Canada’. We have some of the highest drug overdose rates in the country as well. Some people might be oppositional to my point of view here, but the problem is systemic racism.

The only access to most of the remote First Nations in Northwestern Ontario is through TBay. Drug trafficking as well as human trafficking up North can only happen through the city. A lot of these remote communities are also struggling with increasing populations and limited access to resources. Several of these communities are under boil water advisories due to lack of resources and infrastructure, some of which have been so for over 15 years. This issue is incredibly complex, but realistically it comes down to the fact that anti-Indigenous racism is rampant and very well off still within our country, despite Harper’s apology and all of the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ that has been happening lately.

Some media resources, in case anyone is interested in looking further into the issue: Brief Podcast series on the topic Award winning narrative outlining the overt racism in TBay

Your circumstances are different, but consider the lyrics to the song “Almost Summer” by Jason Collett for a typical experience… https://youtu.be/xVnF0GsiwoY

That is just how rotating things work. This is why vehicles need a differential, so that when you turn a corner the inside wheel can rotate at a different speed as the outside wheel.

I have questions about the macroeconomic implications of AI replacing jobs. Does this mean that those workers will shift to other non-AI jobs? Or does this mean that unemployment goes up and there just aren’t any jobs for people any more?

The way I am thinking about this, if corporations are able to hoard more wealth and increase profits substantially by getting rid of the need to pay people, how does the economy function if the money that would be paid to those workers is no longer circulating back into the economy?

If people then will get money from a UBI instead of labor income, who pays the government taxes? Corporations? Consumption taxes on people?

If corporations manage to get labor costs to near zero, profits go to near infinity, which is the goal of profit maximizers. But then there is no money in the hands of individuals to be able to pay to consume the goods or services these corporations provide? Is this desire to replace human labor with AI not just a living example of the myth of Icarus?

Any economists out there interested in breaking these issues down into more of a layman language for me? Thanks!

That does help. Thanks.

Donate it to the library or a local food bank. Simple community building.