Am I the only one who gets tired of hearing the exact same token Austrian economics complaints about the Fed lowering interest rates every time a story that remotely deals with the economy come up?
No, you're not. But in this case, the parent has a point. Or at least half a point. And you get the other half.
In most countries, governments largely pander to the middle and lower classes, because that's where the votes are. As a result, the election cycles usually involve large government outlays leading up to elections. The media also tends to pander to the middle/lower class.
In the United States, governments largely pander to the top 1% of incomes because
a. the billionaire class has figured out how to craft a message to the middle/lower classes where they think they're being screwed by the government, and the proper response is to reduce the size of government.
b. the government keeps growing, but their focus is entirely on making the tax system more regressive.
c. the billionaire class has more control over the government, and ensures that more dollars go to them, and less to the middle lower class.
d. the media does the exact same thing as the government.
e. because the government is actually screwing the middle class, we can go back to (a) and repeat the cycle.
If you doubt what I'm saying, you really need to read the writings of the most important member of the Austrian school of economics... Grover Norquist:
If you doubt what I'm saying, you really need to read the writings of the most important member of the Austrian school of economics... Grover Norquist:
while remembering that Mr. Norquist is one of the more zealous servants of the billionaire class.
Fascinating theory about why the US is different from the rest of the western world. How does the UK relate, it seems to have some of the same differences?
The media doesn't have such a pro-corporate message in the UK. The Economist, widely considered a conservative paper, is wholly in support of government-run socialized health care. The BBC is also a great source of news that's not as tainted as most US agencies by corporate sponsorship dollars.
We have NPR, but they can't really espouse liberal views, because the Republicans are always at their throats for grant money (I think most elected Democrats are corporate whores too - they're just more subtle about it). Other than that, there's probably a dozen decent newspapers in America, all of which are slowly dying, and as such can't afford to upset their advertisers.
Financial newspapers are an exception to this, but you'll never see the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal suggesting that people like Lloyd Bankfein or Joe Cassano should tighten their belt buckles. In the US, the hand that feeds the media is biting everybody, but the media is afraid to bite back.
The independence of BBC is probably not perfect, but impressive. I might still trust NY Times and Washington Post more, as long as they don't write about big advertisers. There just seems to be less of organized political pressure on US media than when you have European parties.
For the European media I know enough of to have an opinion (Sweden), they are a sad joke. Let me give two examples.
1. Big advertisers never get bad stories.
2. After 1968, the left tried to take over the journalist occupation and seems to own it today. You can check this, by following one of the subjects where the left really care and compare with international press; Israel is good. (Pallywood has never been mentioned in Swedish mainstream media, neither torture between Hamas/PLO. There is a long, long, long list of examples like this.)
I've read bad things about e.g. Spanish press, but don't really know. There are, like USA, some incredibly good media in Europe -- and like in USA, most are garbage.
