U.S Presidential Election 2016 Not Otherwise Specified

Blackchubby thanks for your response. It seems institutional or structural reform is difficult to make be it the US electoral system or the British, the UN or the EU. In most cases this is because reform needs the agreement of too many parties with their own interests unwilling to allow any change that might weaken their position, just as change when it happens often comes after a disaster, like war. There is also apathy - in 2011 UK voters were asked in a referendum if we wanted to change the way we choose our representatives by moving from a Single Member Simple Plurality ('first past the post') system or opt for a form of proportional representation. Change was rejected, but voter turnout was 42.2%. If Trump behaves in an outrageous way this might force minds, and he himself wants to reform the terms that govern the House so we shall see if he is a revolutionary or not.

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Originally Posted by bluesoul

so, was at a bar last night in the prague when the results came in. and today i read that trump is "considering" ben carson as education secretary (ha- that's a laugh).

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congrats to ben carson on his new position as secretary of urban housing and development

is it just me or does anyone read that as a joke?

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Originally Posted by bluesoul

congrats to ben carson on his new position as secretary of urban housing and development

is it just me or does anyone read that as a joke?

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I guess Trump figures since he looks like most of the people that live in urban housing, Carson would be the perfect fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VggFao85vTs

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VggFao85vTs

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Brought to you by the same people who gave you regime change in Iraq and permanent war in Afghanistan -cost: choose a number and add $Trillion after it; the same people who gave you the collapse of Savings and Loans banks in the 1980s and the financial crisis of 2008; the same people who use State law to limit a woman's right to an abortion; the same people who want to ban same-sex marriage and criminalise homosexuality and what they deem 'deviant' sexual behaviour; the same people who want you to pay every time you click on a link on the internet which they also want monitored and censored in line with their political views. And from the same people who created the Moral Majority and other fanatical Christian groups -rather than 'Marxists'- who sit in Congress allegedly as 'Republicans' but who refuse to recognise that the Constitution they are sworn to maintain is a secular, not a religious document.
It is not 'cultural Marxism' that these people are opposed to, it is the fact that Americans vote for someone else, not them. And if 'cultural Marxism' has been so effective in schools and universities and the media, why do people vote Republican or vote for Trump? This rubbish has been doing the rounds of the internet and YouTube for years, it is the American version of Salafist Islam and should be treated in the same way.

I cannot say that I agree with all of what the movie preaches but it surely makes more sense than your pro-communist bullshit which just does not make any sense. There is no reasoning with you guys. You seem to acknowledge information given to you and simply take it for granted without question. Most of you do not even bother watching movies like this one because you already lost your ability to reason. All I can say that maybe election of Trump is going to open up your eyes a bit, as he makes quite a lot of sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

I cannot say that I agree with all of what the movie preaches but it surely makes more sense than your pro-communist bullshit which just does not make any sense. There is no reasoning with you guys. You seem to acknowledge information given to you and simply take it for granted without question. Most of you do not even bother watching movies like this one because you already lost your ability to reason. All I can say that maybe election of Trump is going to open up your eyes a bit, as he makes quite a lot of sense.

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In my case I posted a severe critique of Castro just yesterday and far from just supping up 'information' without criticism I have been both active in left-wing politics and engaged with it and other forms of politics through intellectual scrutiny for many years so my conclusions are drawn from a reasoning that does involve questions, of the kind which many more do not ask of Donald Trump who has told so many blatant lies, and fooled so many people it is surely going to be his supporters who will feel 'Castroed' this time next year -?

On a more serious level, I do not accept that political correctness is a form of 'cultural Marxism', just as I would argue that free market capitalists, anti-EU and anti-trade deal billionaires like Rupert Murdoch have been more influential in swaying public opinion against the NHS, against same-sex relations and internet freedom, against political correctness through their media outlets like Fox News, and newspapers and websites in the UK. It is up to individuals to make their own choices, but I think it is patronising to assume posters here do so without much thought given the quality of argument in most of the posts in P&R.

While I have made my feelings known about how anti-political correctness sentiments played a role in this year's election (and will continue to a play role in future elections if the Democrats don't get their shit together), I would never refer to it as "cultural marxism". I also can't take that video seriously when one of the first people speaking is Pat Buchanan and the words "militant secularism" comes out of his mouth.

Have you even watched the movie or just read its title? You are accusing capitalists, who in contrast to communists actually get things done for others to use, of telling lies while your propaganda is nothing but lies.

Frankly, I cannot see why a capitalist would have anything against same sex relations or internet freedom. Moreover, as a businesswoman, I would like to promote whatever suited my business, on-line! However, you lefties, wanna have the media all controlled because you want to be the "more equal" class in your world of "equality". You are against free trading. You are against competition.

You want to induce fear in black, latino transgendered, homosexual people with your promotion of violent acts against them on the media you control. This causes some of us to do silly things like all sorts of parades, marches and other things that in turn make the "normal" part of the society feel uneasy. It increases racism, xenophobia and hate in general. All one needs to do is look around them to see all this and interpret it in the properly.

Luckily, your bullshit seems to have lost a bit of its momentum... Fingers crossed that you guys will be pushed back to your universities and the general public is going to get a break from all that crap.

It’s always been something of a mystery to me what Americans even mean by ‘political correctness.’ Language is always on the move. Usages go out of fashion and meanings change. Other usages come into fashion. I assume that to most Americans ‘political correctness’ refers to this ebb and flow in the context of political language, especially within identity politics. “Crippled” was displaced by “disadvantaged” was replaced by “challenged” etc. as each substitution acquires through abusive usage more and more negative freight. Once very common, words like “wop” and “kike” and others have fallen almost completely out of disuse. Why? You tell me.


How are these evolving usages enforced? Nobody is using clubs, knives or guns: “militant political correctness” is outright hyperbole. In most cases there are no laws involving language use. You can call me a “jungle bunny” if you like - there is no law against it. If you commit a violent crime against me while using such epithets the State may have a case that the crime was a “hate crime” which may carry harsher penalties. You might lose your job if you referred to a client using an epithet. Most managers realize such behavior is bad for business.


If on the other hand, a person uses “political correctness” to refer, not to language, but to rights; e.g. your right to use the rest room you deem appropriate for you gender, I would say they are conflating “political correctness” with “civil rights”. The fight for civil rights not unconnected to political correctness, but it is certainly a more substantial issue. There are laws protecting our civil rights. There weren’t always such laws. Most of them were hard won and some of them (our emancipation from slavery, for example) did indeed involve militancy. Still not everybody has full protection under the law. ALEC is constantly pushing laws in state legislatures that would abridge the civil rights of women, LGBTQ persons, Muslims and others.


But instead of facing up to these substantial issues, we are now entering the War-Against-Christmas season, where we listen to O’Reilly rant about the militant attack against Christian values and how Christianity is about to be displaced by Anti-Christian Secularism.

[QUOTE=Ts RedVeX;1733867]
Have you even watched the movie or just read its title? You are accusing capitalists, who in contrast to communists actually get things done for others to use, of telling lies while your propaganda is nothing but lies.
--I posted a critique of a film on YouTube some time ago, but I don't recall its title and cannot find the post. The film explores the same issue with regard to 'Cultural Marxism' and is just as riddled with factual errors and other distortions of the truth to be of no value in any serious debate on politics. I have criticised, not defended Communism, and as for getting things done, well, over a period of 600 years capitalism has achieved extraordinary things, but not always. Sometimes the truth really is just that, not propaganda.

Frankly, I cannot see why a capitalist would have anything against same sex relations or internet freedom. Moreover, as a businesswoman, I would like to promote whatever suited my business, on-line! However, you lefties, wanna have the media all controlled because you want to be the "more equal" class in your world of "equality". You are against free trading. You are against competition.
-If you read the post I started last week you will note that it is the Conservative government that has introduced in the Investigative Powers Act a law to limit your internet freedom, and it is nonsense to say that 'the left' is opposed to free trade when the evidence suggests that people like Donald Trump, who claims to be a successful capitalist, is opposed to free trade and in favour of tariffs. The left is now so lacking in influence in politics in the UK and the USA you probably need to accept that the current division of most importance is between 'traditional conservatives' and 'authoritarian populists' though that is a bit of a (tasteless) mouthful.
http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/sho...44#post1732144

You want to induce fear in black, latino transgendered, homosexual people with your promotion of violent acts against them on the media you control. This causes some of us to do silly things like all sorts of parades, marches and other things that in turn make the "normal" part of the society feel uneasy. It increases racism, xenophobia and hate in general. All one needs to do is look around them to see all this and interpret it in the properly.
-The sad fact is that if any media outlet has encouraged violence against minorities it is Breitbart, and we all know where they stand in relation to Donald Trump. The minorities you refer to have never been attacked by The Guardian, or Channel 4 News, or even the BBC in the UK, all allegedly part of the 'left-wing media'.

Luckily, your bullshit seems to have lost a bit of its momentum... Fingers crossed that you guys will be pushed back to your universities and the general public is going to get a break from all that crap.
--When it comes to 'bullshit', a man who claims elections are rigged but offering no supporting evidence qualifies for the brown stuff. I don't work in a university, for what that's worth.

The critical remarks you have made about 'the left' could as easily be made about Conservatives. I understand why you support Donald Trump, but he is not a 'conventional conservative' and I suspect much of what he claimed he would do on the campaign trail will be discarded. From what you have said I would expect you to identify with libertarians, but Trump is not one of them, and I therefore think you may be both disappointed and disillusioned with the reality of contemporary politics next year.

I strongly agree with Trish' post about political correctness. It is a phrase that has a legitimate domain so small it's difficult to think of an example of someone tangling themselves up in verbal gymnastics to avoid causing offense. The one example I can think of is a Jewish friend of mine who did not like the word "Jew" even when used in its ordinary manner as a noun, because he had heard people use it in a sinister way as a pejorative, or worse yet as an adjective. But the solution is not to make people acting in good faith say Jewish-American instead of Jew, which when used in good faith should offend no one. That's literally the only example I can think of.

Almost every other time I've heard people say they are tired of political correctness, they follow it up with epithets and stereotypes. Objecting to the attempt to disqualify a Judge because he's Hispanic is not political correctness. Objecting to the insinuation that Muslims are affiliated with terrorist organizations is not political correctness. Objecting to the use of racist caricatures of African-Americans and slurs against them is not political correctness. These are actual racist offenses and should be opposed by everyone.

The only way political correctness can get in the way of solving problems is if you are one of those people who believes there are actually innate differences between groups of humans, and such urgent issues as the Jewish question (as one example) need to be answered without self-censorship. Then you might actually deplore political correctness because it prevents us from having that candid conversation about how to deal with that group.

But political correctness for me is synonymous with decency and conscientiousness.

I should say political correctness as it is used by Republicans is synonymous with common decency and conscientiousness. Political correctness used properly to mean gratuitous offense-taking, has a domain so narrow very few actual examples exist.

For the most part, those who whine about political correctness just want rude to be considered politic because they're too stupid to converse any other way.

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

Have you even watched the movie or just read its title? You are accusing capitalists, who in contrast to communists actually get things done for others to use, of telling lies while your propaganda is nothing but lies.

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I have now watched this film and it is similar to the one I saw a year or two ago whose title and link I cannot find. The film has a simple message which is entirely American in orientation. This message is that America is the greatest country in the world, formed to give people liberty and freedom, provided through its Constitution which aims to give people a life free of taxes and government. The thrust of the film is provided by something called 'Cultural Marxism' which at times appears to be anything considered un-American that originated in Europe and which has infected the USA like a virus. The attack on America thus takes the form of an attack on the family, on private property, on the nation and on God. As Pat Buchanan argues at the beginning of the film and later (around 19.55) America is a Christian country but one where the Supreme Court has 'perverted the Constitution' by imposing secular views and values on States and communities, a comment he makes in spite of the fact that the Constitution is a secular document.
A core element of the argument is that everything changed in the 1960s and thus the film is an attack on youth culture which allegedly lapped up European Cultural Marxism to replace Dad as head of the family with Mom, indeed this entire section entitled 'Androgyny' beginning around 33.45 claims that tv, film, the media and academia have all conspired to destroy the American family as a union between a man and a woman who believe in a Christian God and love their Country. Crucially, throughout this film, Christianity is the core belief of the USA to the extent that no other religion is mentioned, presumably because such religions are either irrelevant or un-American.
The last half-hour of the film is a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson, FDR and John Maynard Keynes, with the various claims about the printing of money, debt and borrowing as being unconstitutional and of course, part of Cultural Marxism's attempt to smash capitalism and the USA with it. Keynes is described as an economist 'indoctrinated in the environment of our former enemy' (ie Britain), who with Roosevelt conspired in the New Deal to destroy a Republic founded on free trade.
Thus welfare creates poverty and above all, shifts responsibility from the Christian family (which is no longer Christian) to the State, and the State provides, creating a circle of dependency that boosts the power of the Federal government and its power to levy taxes and print money.
There are so many holes in these arguments one hardly knows where to start. There is no awareness of the role played by the Christian church in Europe (or Latin America) in crushing democracy, in acting against the interests of the people by forming alliances with corrupt and dictatorial monarchies of the very kind the American Constitution sought to prevent. Again, the Constitution is continuously lauded as the source of law and values, yet Buchanan, a writer called Giffin and others regularly impute to the Constitution Christian values that are not there.
At times the language is absurd, such as the claim that children sent to day care centres and public schools are 'handled like animals in captivity' (c35.44) and the conclusion by one Harvard economist that the 2nd Amendment in effect obliges every citizen to be armed. In the matter of capitalism, while it has in private property and free trade provided America with its greatness, the fascists known as multi-national corporations have Congress bought and sold for their benefit, and it was the Federal Reserve that caused the great depression.
As for Cultural Marxism, a loose collection of thoughts by philosophers from Marx through Gramsci to the Frankfurt School does not amount to the organized conspiracy the film tries to portray it as, in fact there is no evidence the film-maker even understands what it was that Marx argued for, given that he viewed Communism as a state-less society...rather like the United States of America the film-maker would like to live in.

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Originally Posted by Ts RedVeX

All I can say that maybe election of Trump is going to open up your eyes a bit, as he makes quite a lot of sense.

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Before I give you my rebuttal I want to say I appreciate that you're willing to stand up and state your views. On this forum when I state my views, they tend to be fairly mainstream but I know what it's like to state views that you know 10 or 12 people will vehemently disagree with. So thanks for that. I've read transcripts of Trump speaking, and all I see are tangents, non-sequiturs, bluster, and falsehoods.

On Twitter the other day, he said that MILLIONS of people voted illegally for Hillary. This false claim was rebutted by CNN and other networks, as it's noteworthy that the winning candidate in an election is making a baseless charge of voter fraud. He then took to twitter to insult CNN and say, "prove to me what I said isn't true." Anyone with an iota of common sense knows that the onus is on a person making an outrageous claim to provide evidence it's true, not on those saying it's unsupported to prove a negative.

The reason he finds allies in people like Alex Jones, who makes videos claiming secret agents are in the midst of following him, is that he needs to go to the paranoiac fringe to find people with as little respect for facts and reality. He won a big victory in the election, but it's not a victory for truth, it's a victory for nihilists and people who don't care very much about facts but are angry about the way things are.

I also imagine you were here to see Erika's little performance where she was posting racist images and memorializing Nazis to show her love for Trump. This movement, known as the alt-right, but little more than a collection of neo-nazis of varying degrees of commitment, has grown under Trump. People might ask what control does he have over those who follow him? He doesn't have ultimate control. But it is telling that he is more vitriolic in talking about Rosie O'Donnell than he is in talking about thousands of Neo-Nazis who feel empowered enough by his victory to yell things like "Heil Trump". Being too cowardly to chastise a group who calls other human beings subhuman with the vigor you do of someone who mocks your thin hair is not leadership quality.

Woody Allen mocks a woman in his movie Manhattan who talks about how biting satire is the best way to combat fascism. The joke is that in the face of violent people who do not care about facts or irony or ridicule but who only want to bash your skull in, the rebuttals amount to nothing. That's how I feel in writing about Donald Trump's recent tweet where he said that people who burn the American flag should be imprisoned or lose their citizenship. First of all, under our constitution, nobody can have their citizenship revoked, even for murder. Once you are a citizen, you can be imprisoned, you can even be executed for crimes, but there is no process for forfeiting citizenship. The imprisonment (or any punishment at all) of people for burning the U.S. flag is also unconstitutional as it violates the first amendment. This has been ruled upon and if it were before the court again, I imagine such a law would fail first amendment scrutiny unanimously. We are truly living in a post-fact world, where we have a president who treats literal neo-nazis with kid gloves and then recommends the imprisonment or deportation of citizens engaging in protected speech.

We are now in a time where people are derided for kneeling before the flag and not standing. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes."

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

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Originally Posted by flabbybody

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

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I didn't know that, though it's not surprising. This is going to sound like a partisan claim, but I think that any problems or inefficiences that exist with obamacare are the result of not having a comprehensive enough system. The entire reason the federal government has commerce clause power is to impose a uniform system for economic activity whose costs and benefits transcend state boundaries.

Healthcare is something that affects people regardless of geography, and it never made sense for the health insurance industry to be split up into fifty different regimes. It was only further complicated by the fact that ERISA peeled off those employer sponsored plans and did subject them to federal regulation, but removed some of the deterrents that used to provide protection against insurance companies acting in bad faith (summarily denying meritorious complaints or drowning busy people in paperwork).

Were both parties to recognize that healthcare is not an ordinary good or service, that it is one best dealt with using insurance (which involves the sharing of risks) because its costs are so unpredictable and potentially catastrophic to families, then maybe we can agree upon a system that retains few characteristics of a purely private system. My recommendation is that if we get rid of Obamacare, we try to replace it with a system that protects working class families against rising healthcare costs rather than leaving those unfortunate enough to become gravely ill vulnerable to a hodgepodge of laws that make them susceptible to financial ruin.

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Originally Posted by flabbybody

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

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I read an article the other day that said some Republican governors don't want the part of Affordable Care Act that expanded the Medicaid program in their respective states. The fear being that if you kick all those people off Medicaid, they will start using emergency rooms for their primary care providers. So between this and Trump already saying he wants to keep certain parts of the Affordable Care Act that works, I'm still optimistic that it won't be repealed.

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

The last half-hour of the film is a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson, FDR and John Maynard Keynes, with the various claims about the printing of money, debt and borrowing as being unconstitutional and of course, part of Cultural Marxism's attempt to smash capitalism and the USA with it. Keynes is described as an economist 'indoctrinated in the environment of our former enemy' (ie Britain), who with Roosevelt conspired in the New Deal to destroy a Republic founded on free trade.
Thus welfare creates poverty and above all, shifts responsibility from the Christian family (which is no longer Christian) to the State, and the State provides, creating a circle of dependency that boosts the power of the Federal government and its power to levy taxes and print money.

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As you indicate, nothing Keynes said, or Roosevelt did during the New Deal could be challenged as unconstitutional, nor is it unconstitutional to run deficits or increase the money supply or do all sorts of things fiscal conservatives think are harmful. There were a series of cases, called the Lochner cases during the early 20th century, where libertarians basically argued that states cannot pass laws that in any way impede the right of two individuals to enter into a contract. This is different from saying that a state cannot impair existing contracts, but would strike down any law that could prospectively interfere with a contract between an employer and an employee. If the Court had not shortly overturned this in an eloquent decision by Justice Holmes, all sorts of employment protections and wage floors and social programs might be held unconstitutional. But otherwise, as you rightly indicate, there's nothing in there that seems to identify any liberal policies that are actually unconstitutional.

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Originally Posted by blackchubby38

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

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If it didn't have a mandate attached to it, it's not a system at all. Risk pooling depends upon cross-subsidization between low and high risk individuals. If low risk individuals opt out, you have something called adverse selection, and a remaining pool for health insurance that is not affordable for people who really need it. Given that insurance companies are already not allowed to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions, without the low risk individuals as part of the pool, they probably can't be competitive.

Low risk individuals also tend to underestimate their risk, and given that we have programs like EMTALA which make emergency care mandatory, their failure to get insurance would increase costs. If you allow people to remain uninsured, you don't have good risk pooling and you also have huge back end costs.

Actually, the Holmes opinion I"m thinking of is in the dissent of Lochner, but a subsequent case overturned Lochner's endorsement of a fundamental right to contract.

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Originally Posted by blackchubby38

Although I do wonder if Republicans would have been more open to the ACA if it didn't have the individual mandate attached to it.

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And I realize you are trying to identify areas of compromise. Excuse me, I'm just being a spoiled baby. But I did feel that the mandate is what makes the system work.

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Originally Posted by broncofan

As you indicate, nothing Keynes said, or Roosevelt did during the New Deal could be challenged as unconstitutional, nor is it unconstitutional to run deficits or increase the money supply or do all sorts of things fiscal conservatives think are harmful. There were a series of cases, called the Lochner cases during the early 20th century, where libertarians basically argued that states cannot pass laws that in any way impede the right of two individuals to enter into a contract. This is different from saying that a state cannot impair existing contracts, but would strike down any law that could prospectively interfere with a contract between an employer and an employee. If the Court had not shortly overturned this in an eloquent decision by Justice Holmes, all sorts of employment protections and wage floors and social programs might be held unconstitutional. But otherwise, as you rightly indicate, there's nothing in there that seems to identify any liberal policies that are actually unconstitutional.

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Some years ago I briefly knew an American woman (resident in London) who insisted that Roosevelt was a Communist and would not accept an alternative argument. The people who made the film and promote these arguments take a severe, minimalist view of what the USA ought to be, based on their interpretation of the Constitution in the context they provide of the American revolution, which they see as a revolution against monarchy, taxation and servility, and for a Republic with little or no taxation and guaranteed liberty. One of the public speakers in the films makes a correlation between the Boston Tea Party protests about a few pence of taxes on tea compared to the lack of protest in the US today over taxes counted in dollars. The debate in the film over the 2nd Amendment revisits the problem Washington had with a standing army that could only be maintained through taxation, thus the interpretation offered is that the 'well armed militia' should be the armed forces of the USA and for this reason every citizen should be armed. The cardinal point being the reluctance of the government to impose taxes on the citizen. It is also part of the free market libertarian view that your money is your private property and should be yours to spend as you wish without any interference from the government. From this perspective, the Federal Reserve is a state-sponsored thief stealing money it does not earn from people who do.
There is no room here for any argument about banking regulation, or the historical evidence that the multiple banking failures in US history took place in an environment where precisely the lack of regulation Rand Paul supports led to their collapse. His view, I assume, would be that the market could not sustain those banks, with little or no sympathy for those people who though the bank was safe, put their money in it, only to be told once it evaporated markets succeed and sometimes they fail.
Crucially, there is no sensible argument about what to do when capitalism fails, and the deep trauma of the depression and the New Deal administration that it led to is not viewed in human terms, but in terms defined by a mis-trust of government and the state. One public speaker suggests that poverty used to be an unfortunate but temporary glitch that people got over, until the government moved in with welfare programmes that stole money from working people to give to unemployed people who thereby had no incentive to work at all so thereby welfare created a class of people permanently unemployed and permanently supported in their idleness by people working. Although the identity of this mass of unemployed dependents is not clearly stated you don't need to be a genius or be familiar with the works of either Charles Murray or Daniel Moynihan to know who is being discussed.

As for Keynes, there is a common mis-perception that his economic theories on state intervention in the economy offered an alternative to free market capitalism, where in fact Keynes offered a temporary solution to economies in recession seeing this as part of an economic cycle. The difference between him and, say Jeavons, is that Keynes argued the worst effects of a recession can be dealt with through the state sponsoring jobs to maintain an equilibrium of supply and demand; his famous remark that it would be better for the state to employ one group of men to dig holes and another to fill them in than leave both idle, was an illustration of the need for money to continue circulating in the economy through wages and consumption.
The difference between then and now, is that in Keynes's day, once the recession had bottomed out, productive capacity would return, bringing more jobs and prosperity with it, and the need for government intervention would recede, and markets would return as the primary form of economic activity. This worked until the de-industrialization and modernizations that began in the 1960s changed the way products are made, and where they are made.
The UK along with the USA has lost productive capacity with regard to what was once called 'heavy industry' and the service and techno industries that have grown since the 1970s just do not create as many jobs. The irony of Trump's insistence that Apple and IBM repatriate jobs from China to the USA is that with modern technology in the form of robotics, Apple may be able to re-locate the whole of its production of computers and phones to the USA but employ less than a thousand people to do it because robotics is now becoming even cheaper than labour in China, indeed, Foxconn is in the process of replacing 60,000 workers in China with robotic production-
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11...ng-smartphones

What do you do with an army of unemployed people? As modern production is increasingly automated, and as many people do not have the skills to be part of the 'knowledge economy', can markets rather than government provide the jobs needed to give people something to do? Most Americans are now employed by either the Federal or State and local government, but if Trump delivers on some of his promises, the ranks of the unemployed may be about to grow. And who knows where that leads?