I guess I’m flattered that you took the time to try to understand my offhand comment and took so much time to argue against points that you assume I was making.
The ‘power’ lies in the flow of consumptionist economics right now. There is no humanism because we’ve replaced human concepts of social interaction with competitive fanacisms and branding. As you have so aptly demonstrated, your argument is against a belief system that you have concocted for me, not one that I have espoused. As for big or small government, what we need is good government, and I think personally that it should come from random selection of representation (a system that assumes the citizens are competent, vs the election system which assumes citizens are mostly incompetent). I also think that demand for government comes from what people choose to purchase from outside their place or reach, and that is manipulated by price structures with externalized costs toward debt-based and exploitative practices outside the control of the citizen. Therefore, I advocate for a sales-tax-based system with a prebate (www.fairtax.org) that informs every purchaser the true cost of what they are demanding from corporations (and thus, government: you don’t think our government is controlled by the public, do you?), and pays a collective value to people that represents their basic value to the society as cannon fodder and job contestants.
If you read some of my other comments, you’ll see that I’m not exactly a Hillary fan. She was president already, fighting for the rights of WalMart and her dopey husband’s Republican-run Arkansas drug trade, and short-changing the full investigation into Iran Contra and all of the corruption that entailed.
When I say we missed an opportunity for “humanism”, I mean as opposed to blind faith systems (“religions” by any other name) of aristocratic power over individuals (along the lines of “The Verge” or “On the Nature of Things”, Lucretius et al). None of the candidates will ever talk about how to allow people to be useful to themselves. It’s always about “jobs” and “The Economy”, not whether what people do is practically useful to their own (and the planet’s) future. The Republicans talk a big game of cutting government, but they exponentially expanded the military industrial complex and have made the world less stable politically. As the Iowan farmers can tell you, Trump has not made America better off unless you measure everything by the stock market (one dollar=one vote, and it always votes for the other dollars), which is speculation based on people doing mostly useless things and an unfettered rapacity behavior that even the most liberal of scientists can’t keep up with.
Do we need big government to do anything at all about it? No. We need people to be better at being people, and they can’t do that with their noses buried in Faecesbook sucking on Crapft beer.
There are a lot of nuances to what one thinks “humanism” is. Our language and education systems don’t work for humans. They work for a power structure that most people have very little say over. The “liberal” media is not promoting liberal ideas: they are selling beer and cars just like the right wingnut media, by sensationalizing every celebrity turd and every bullet because when people are angry and uninformed, they buy stuff.
The human being is an amazing animal. Unfortunately, it has given up its ability to act with reason and logic and sensibility in exchange for entertainment, comfort, security and cheap calories.
Oh, and the “companies falling over themselves to pay and hire people” is because the Boomers are dying and retiring (see “Harley Davidson”), and because of all the planet moles that Obama and Bush got started up, not because of anything Trump has done. If anything, he has accelerated those projects through deregulation, but some things need to be regulated, and his bankrupt sense of business isn’t exactly looking out for our grandchildren. I don’t blame him for his position. We have a dysfunctional system of government that should be able to manage the processes and allow efficient economics no matter what idiot is sitting in the big chair. It is all of the so-called ‘leaders’ and ‘intellectuals’ that have been falling down on their jobs. The Left just sells the Left, and the Right just sells the Right, and our institutions and organizations take whatever they can get because every decision is made at the cash registers based on cheap, shiny noisy crap. Leadership and sensibility is basically unknown unless there’s a way to screw someone out of a buck (see “Boeing”).
Money and cars are now the dominant species on the planet. The Invisible Hand Job is always holding a weapon, pointed at someone’s kid.
