this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I'm going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to "how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?" Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you'll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that's going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn't get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we're going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that'll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it's a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we're going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can ~~go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city's fine taxpayer funded services~~ nope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money's going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.
The economy objectively never did actually recover from 2008, in terms of returning to the previous growth pattern/trajectory.
Japan's economy had more or less been in the same situation since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.
They call this state of their economy 'the lost decades'. Growth never returned to the previous levels, and has been either stagnant or modest since, requiring massive active management from the government to keep everything from totally breaking.
... Sound familiar?
We have also been in our own lost decades, we just have about one less such lost decade than Japan.
In both cases, the only way to keep things going is to keep financializing more and more of the economy... but this results in an increasing wealth concentration gap and more volatility in financial markets.
The cure isn't really a cure, its a stopgap to prevent essentially a near total reset... but the stopgap itself is also harmful if you get addicted to it, and don't come up with a better solution.
The better solution is in fact to do that near total reset, and also set up something analogous to, or actually, a UBI.
But the only way you can do that is if you expropriate the capital owners.
So, the boom bust cycle of capitalism continues, until it breaks so hard that either everyone is basically dead (cough climate change cough)... or you have some kind of massive popular revolution.
There are some folks who want to accelerate the total reset and maybe create a UBI. Those are the Dark Enlightment folks (sometimes Dark MAGA), and they are called neoreactionary accelerationist. The intentional destruction of the US gov is the acceleration of the reset that you mention. These are a bit different from the Heritage Foundation and mostly tech bros. They are considered far right, but I'm far left and can't help but see a lot of truth in some of what they say. I've had the same opinion you have for 20 years now, that it would be better to just let this all fall so we can hurry up and rebuild our economy into something that is not a plane with locked engines falling straight out of the sky. I totally know what you mean.
Yep yep yep.
Except... for those folks, UBI is basically viewed the way a promised feature is in a highly scalable app.
That is to say, entirely optional, subject to terms and conditions, subject to market conditions... likely just a marketing gimmick that only a few naive truely believers think was ever really seriously on the table.
What they actually want is technofeudalism.
Ironically, I would basically describe myself politically as an Anarchist.
But... I am actually entirely terrified by the idea of just suddenly collapsing the entire economy without very, very solid plans in place for the transition, and the future.
If done poorly...literally billions could die, or be made into slaves.
I am all for detaching yourself from the capitalist death machine as much as possible, setting up alternate systems, mutual aid, co-ops, etc...
But if you just pull the legs out of the entire economy all at oncr and let it freefall... that'll be the layman's idea of anarchy: total fucking mad max / fallout style chaos.
20 years ago, we might have been able to do something like collapse neoliberalism entirely... you know, back around when Seattle rioted againt the WTO.
Its too late now, it would be way, way way too hard to just pivot suddenly back to much less global trade and more autarkic societies.
Farming alone is a nightmare to try to imagine that for.
On the other hand, climate change will basically cause that same economic near total collapse in most places within 20 years, by my reading of projected future impacts.
So uh yeah, we're just fucked, unless we somehow have a massive revolution and also a very competently executed plan to transition the economy off oil ... and that scenario is nearly impossibly unlikely.