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Originally Posted by rousseau
True. The problem is more cultural than anything else, though. While the left has shifted its focus to "social justice" and identity politics, it's mostly left behind your average guy or gal trying to make a living at a blue-collar or service job who likely doesn't spend much mind time thinking about pronouns and "systemic racism against people of colour." Meanwhile, the brave activists working to dismantle the white male cis-hetero patriarchy tend to blanch at the possibility of getting misgendered cooties from the unwoke masses.
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Race and gender based politics work pretty well for elites. In particular it is a way to construct distracting forms of privilege other than privilege through heredity (of wealth and connections, and even of economically desirable traits), which explains the lion's share of the difference in people's life outcomes.
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Interesting how the sands of time have shifted things for us Canadian centre-leftists who came of age in the second half of the 20th century. We haven't changed; we want things like our healthcare untainted by the vagaries of the free market, but we also want the free market to be governed with just the right regulatory touch to allow for enough economic opportunity while guarding against rapacious damage to the social, economic and ecological environment.
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The scary thing is that this approach is working less and less even when it is applied.
Fundamentally we have an economy based on trading labour for the goods and services that people need to live. The market price of labour is dropping because of a combination of globalization and automation. I doubt the trend is going to reverse. The idea that we will retrain all the old truck drivers to become software engineers in the brave new world is fantasy.
We also have bad cost disease in a few sectors. Free trade has dropped the price of manufactured goods but instead of people here living dramatically better lives, certain sectors like health care, housing, and education have eaten up the gains (this problem seems to be even worse in the US).
We need to come up with ways for people to live well without working, while still encouraging people with higher value labour to continue to work. Part of this will probably involve distributing money to more people, even if they don't work, and part of it will have to involve keeping costs down by fixing industries.
Our government in Canada is moving at about 1/10 the speed of the global economy. Hopefully something will change but I'm not optimistic.