• whofearsthenight
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    8 months ago

    This whole comment is a straw man that feels like it was written by a walking Fox News segment.

    They’ve descended into sloganeering identity politics and away from policy largely.

    Completely nonsense. Just because there are some slogans like ACAB or BLM doesn’t mean that there aren’t policy proposals, it just means that “modern policing is a corrupt institution with bad systems that lead to bad outcomes and we should end qualified immunity and force police unions to pay when cops drastically abuse their power” doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

    Lots of leftists genuinely believe society could just remove property, the police, money and all sorts of crazy shit

    More complete nonsense. This is lemmy.ml, so they over represent here, but the vast majority of American leftists are mostly along the lines of “we should improve society somewhat.”

    They think problems are easily solved with just taxes on the rich and everybody just acting like them as though that’s a realistic proposal.

    This one I won’t disagree with. Quite a lot of things could be solved simply by taxing the rich, who are currently experiencing some of the lowest taxes in the history of the US, and during the US’s real heyday from 40-70 or so, were taxed at a significantly higher rate. They were also paid significantly less, with CEO to worker pay usually being around a 10-20x multiplier, instead of a 100s of times. This is simply empirically true, like the fact that other countries exist that do tax the wealthy more, have more social programs, and generally have better outcomes (lower crime, lower rates of poverty, lower rates of maternal mortality, lower overall average mortality, etc.) Even still, the calls for taxing the rich aren’t really even pushing for tax rates of the 50’s, they’re pushing for tax rates of like 2003, or even 2015 before they were given yet another tax break with no plan for paying for it. So yeah, pretty realistic given that we’ve done it in this country, and many countries are still doing it even more than we did.

    Don’t even get me started on the modern Monetary theorists who think there is no downside to endlessly printing money.

    Please don’t. This would be another argument against a straw man, unless you’re arguing for a gold standard or something which would just highlight a lack of knowledge about modern economic theory.