I am so so happy we live in a democracy. Because if your ilk managed to take power, it would only have been possible through violent authoritarian revolution
No you can definitely vote this stuff in, especially if you let capitalists extract money from vulnerable populations for long enough.
People have a misunderstand of protections or government spending. The New Deal isn't socialism, it's the perfect capitalist policy. If we never had the New Deal, there's a good chance we would be a socialist democracy today. We got really, really close.
When things get bad you have to throw people a bone in order to maintain the current systems. Our newest generations of the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful don't seem to understand that. Ultimately we, the working class, hold everything together. We're the majority and it's not even close.
If we wanted to change things for our own selfish benefit, we could.
Just think. If the capitalist soul sucking robber barons weren't hoarding every morsel of wealth they possibly could, policies like this wouldn't cross anyone's mind in the first place.
Part of the trick is to foist on us the economic priests that tell us of the fire and brimstone that will fall on us if governments ever use their currency issuing power for social improvements.
I'm not so sure. I can describe some of the paradoxes in our social systems in-depth, but it's often the poorest people saying we can't afford social improvements.
The USA has the global reserve currency and we have monetized our social welfare through advanced mechanisms of currency debasement. To say we aren’t printing currency to finance our lifestyle is absurd - we have been doing that through various mechanisms since WWI
A major goal of policy is to set incentives to which people optimize.
The "capitalist soul sucking robber barons" are doing exactly what the incentives we set up push for. If they didn't, boards of directors / shareholders would vote them out. And if those didn't, competing businesses would crush them. No one has any real choice; it's the free hand of the market.
There are nice books about this (Dictator's Handbook comes to mind).
Many would prefer to be less exploitative personally, but need legal frameworks to be able to do so. And indeed, in history, you often saw the "capitalist soul sucking robber barons" see the harms they were causing and push for that regulation. Most people would prefer to provide safe food, safe medicine, etc. than sell poison and snakeoil. But you can't really resist market forces.
So you need to work to set up socially-constructive market forces.
And it's all better than serfdom and 1500-era systems regardless.
