Sunday, September 25, 2016

The Alt Left Generation!

We can see them right here, but they just haven’t found the Alt Left / Realist Left yet:


We can also see them here in the statistics on European youth unemployment for 2015 (i.e., the number of unemployed people from 15 to 24 years old as a percentage of the youth labour force):
Greece | 49.8%
Italy | 40.3%
Spain | 48.4%
Portugal | 31.9%
Slovak Republic | 26.4%
France | 24.7%
Belgium | 22.1%
Finland | 22.0%
Ireland | 20.9%
Poland | 20.8%
Sweden | 20.3%
Hungary | 17.3%
Luxembourg | 17.3%
Slovenia | 16.4%
Latvia | 16.3%
Austria | 10.6%
United Kingdom | 14.6%
United States | 11.6%
Czech Republic | 12.6%
Netherlands | 11.3%
Denmark | 10.8%
Germany | 7.3%
https://data.oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm
They just need to hear a different message, and wake up to the disaster of neoliberalism, the regressive left and SJW insanity, and see a different kind of left, because many of them might be lost to the populist right or Alt Right.

Add to this the angry Baby Boomers and Generation Xers sick and tired of neoliberalism, the demented cultural left, and left-wing McCarthyite political correctness, and we have a movement.

In short, they need this kind of left, the *Alt Left*:

Realist Left
Realist Left on Facebook
Realist Left on Twitter @realistleft
Realist Left on Reddit
Realist Left Blog
Realist Left on YouTube
Lord Keynes on Facebook
Social Democracy for the 21st Century: A Realist Alternative to the Modern Left

Alt Left on the Internet:
Alternative Left on Facebook
Alt-Left on Google+
Samizdat Broadcasts YouTube Channel
Samizdat: For the Freedom Loving Leftist

I’m on Twitter:
Lord Keynes @Lord_Keynes2
https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2

12 comments:

  1. indeed LK full support btw can you again give me the link to gdp growth in different regions of the world i need this badly for the arguements i do have.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Growth rates in the neoliberal era as compared to the 1945-1973 era?:

      http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/06/average-per-capita-gdp-growth-rates.html

      Delete
    2. Also, here are the scholarly studies:

      Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Egor Kraev, and Judy Chen. 2001. Scorecard on Globalization 1980–2000: 20 Years of Diminished Progress, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
      http://cepr.net/publications/reports/the-scorecard-on-globalization-1980-2000-20-years-of-diminished-progress

      Chang, Ha-Joon. 2015. “The Failure of Neoliberalism and the Future of Capitalism,” in Satoshi Fujii, Beyond Global Capitalism. Springer, Tokyo. 19–34, at pp. 25-26.

      Delete
  2. LK, saw this & thought you'd enjoy it:

    https://youtu.be/zCdbxFgJa-Y

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shocked to see some economically stable and advanced countries with such high youth unemployment.

    Sweden, Finland, and Belgium? What the hell?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Huh? Did you misread the legend? 4.1% is low.

      Delete
    2. That's % living with parents.

      Delete
    3. Ah, he meant the list. I got confused.

      Never mind!

      Delete
  4. In Spain -and many other countries-, the phenomenon of young people living with parents is partially unrelated to the economic crisis: back before the crisis, during the credit-fueled boom, when youth employment was much better, the numbers were not different.

    In fact, the rising trend of youth that lives with their parents was created along with the housing bubbles; it was not a consequence of the crisis. Simply put, keynesian fiscal stimulus, no matter how intense, will not fix this problem because if wages are raised, rents will raise too.

    And if rent is too expensive, living with your parents even if you have a job is not uncommon. It makes sense to not move when the rent for the shittiest house available is more than half of your income.

    The Left urgently needs to have a very serious talk about housing.

    Many people forgets how much rent prices are responsible of creating the housing bubble. The rationale that many people followed during the bubble was: "Well, a mortgage payment of 900€/month is too much for us. But we are already paying 800€/month for the rent, so what gives? At least, after paying the mortgage we will own the house". It's excessive rent prices what make housing bubbles possible.

    Post Modern Left has adopted the neoliberal fallacy that housing can be understand by simplistic demand-supply analysis - "if buying/renting a house is expensive, it's because of supply issues". Yet, when you look at the stats, countries such as Spain or Greece have a MASSIVE oversupply of housing and declining population (population decline that, in some part at least, it is influenced by not being able to move early and consolidate a traditional relationship).

    Having too many houses, declining population and expensive renting doesn't mix. What is happening? If you have a neoliberal mindset, you will obviously put a your focus in supply issues. There are not enough houses being rented; there must be too much regulation, too many taxes. How can we encourage home owners to rent their second houses? Remove all regulation that benefits tenants, make things easier for landlords, make them easy to punish tenants who misbehave. In other words, make renting a house as easy as possible. And that's certainly the kind of policies we have seen in Spain in the last decades. It was a left wing party who passed in 2010 a law called "express eviction". Their purpose was to make renting attractive so that supply would increase and prices would fall.

    But rent prices are still high (right now, they are even increasing, due to the "recovery"!).

    Why? For the neoliberal and the decadent left, the problem will still be too many taxes and too many regulations (of course!). A more sensible analysis (that the decadent, postmodern left refuses to do) is that the housing market is a VERY imperfect market. In countries such as Spain, a lot of people buys a second house as a sort of "investment asset". A lot of people don't want to rent their second houses, they want to see house prices raise. Even after the explosion of the housing bubble, they can wait until the market "recovers", because taxes are low and waiting for a recovery is not too expensive.

    The reality about the housing market is that if you want to make it work, you have to encourage a supply increase...by (almost) forcing home owners to rent their houses! And how you do that? By making very expensive to keep a house void: that is, heavily increase all kind of taxes related to property. When owning a second home is very expensive, that's when homeowners will rent their houses or sell them. That's when the supply problems disappear and the prices decrease. At that point, you can heavily tax home sales or even rental incomes. The kind of policies we have seen in the latest decades are about removing all kind of taxes for selling and renting houses, under the belief that "inefficiencies" were the cause of malfunctioning markets.

    ReplyDelete
  5. LK,

    I support 90%+ of "21st Century" Social Democracy policy set of Bernie Sanders & Jill Stein. They put economic rights/security a primary priority, yet also mention important REAL noneconomic injustice occurring in the US, such as police violence in general, & disproportionate extreme level of police violence against Black USians (per capita rate of police killing of civilians in Germany is G, the rate of White USians is 20G, & Black USians is 80G).

    Stein is even better than Sanders, in that she is clearly anti-US Empire, non-interventionist, & wants to cut the US MIC by 50%.

    LK, which if any policies Sanders or Stein has that you do not support?

    Is your "Alt Left" something noticeably distinct from Sanders/Stein-ish Social Democracy?

    ProNewerDeal

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Her emphasize on balanced budgets no real opinion about trade and she is pretty ok with ilegal immigration,with a huge dosege of SJWism (look at her VP he is 100 percent conspiracy nut that blame us for literaly anything).

      Stein is part of the establishment just even nuttier on PC and SJWism.

      Thats why there is no big point to support her.

      Delete