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There is an aforism, “a rising tide lifts all boats”, made popular by a speechwriter in the JFK administration who snarfed it from the regional New England Council in the early sixties.
It’s been used to promote pretty messed up economic policies that benefit the richest of the richest, and completely ignoring the ever-widening wealth gap, under the guise of “what are you complaining about? Even though the wealth gaps are the biggest they’ve ever been and the billionares can buy and sell forty thousand Versailles palaces per minute, you’re still better of than a Whitechapel streetrat in the 19th century, aren’t you?”
There’s also a really good music album by Mire Kay that’s named after that phrase. One of my favorite records, coincidentally. It doesn't seem like a political record as far as I can tell. It is a poetic and dangerously convincing phrase even though the underlying political sentiment is all kinds of messed up.
Often times left politics come across as saying “see how they live? You can have that too! Everyone can! We’ll all be super comfy and life’ll be awesome!”
But I can’t promise that.
The wealth of the industrial era—unfairly distributed as it is—is all illusory and hollow and borrowed from future generations. Mine and drill and frack and burn now, suffer tomorrow. (And "tomorrow" is rapidly becoming "today".)
I want sustainable economics. “Economics” means “the laws of householding”. I do want to fight the wealth gaps but that’s gonna mean taking away their private jets, not giving everyone private jets.
Elizabeth Warren once said that we won’t take away your cheeseburgers.
I can’t sign off on that promise.
Yes, the rich own many million times as much as we do. That’s gonna have to change. That’s step one. But even so, I’m such a pessimist and I see the world as so resource-constrained that I still believe and fear that everyday American and European working class lives are also going to get more constrained rather than more luxurious. That tide isn’t going up anymore.
This is why my politics will never be popular.
We’re seeing how leftist organizations like Sinn Féin in Ireland, Vänsterpartiet in Sweden, and TEV-DEM in the autonomic North-Eastern Syria are falling prey to gasoline populism.
Cheap oil puts food on the table and ballots in the boxes.
They’re heading towards the most risen boats on the cinder.