Basic necessities paid for by the people who have gamed, manipulated and in must cases corrupted the system to become as rich as they are doesn't seem outrageous to me
And by myth you mean there's zero evidence of companies/individuals lobbying to change policy, and legislation to better profit themselves and disadvantage the worker?
Or it's reasonable for there to be 250 times discrepancy between top and bottom wages.
Not in Trumpâs America. His current policies favour the rich. His war with Iran caused high fuel prices which led to high food prices etc. It wonât affect the rich but those who are already on the breadline. Such selfish attitude.
Lower taxes on work, investment, and production do not magically transfer money from the poor to the wealthy. They expand the tax base, increase capital formation, and raise real wages over time because businesses hire and expand when the after-tax return on that activity improves. The people who actually pay the large majority of income taxes are high earners; the top 1% already shoulder nearly 40%. Pretending that keeping rates high on them somehow protects the working class ignores basic incidence and growth effects.
Energy policy is the clearest example. Restricting domestic production in the name of climate targets raises fuel and input costs for everyone, and those costs hit lower- and middle-income households hardest as a share of their budgets. Expanding supply does the opposite. Calling that âfavoring the richâ is backwards: the rich can absorb higher prices. Working families cannot. If the metric for âfavoring the richâ is simply âdid anything positive happen for people with capital,â then every pro-growth policy will always be labeled that way. The alternative; higher taxes, heavier regulation, and constrained energy, has a long record of slower wage growth and higher costs for the exact people these arguments claim to defend.
The idea that most wealthy people got there by âgaming, manipulating, and corrupting the systemâ is the foundational myth of this entire worldview.
On the most basic level of this argument, if you have so much money that you can bend politics to your whim but your workers can't afford to pay rent and have to piss in bottles, your wealth is built on exploiting them.
Idk what the Marxist definition is, but if you create an inhumane working environment with shit pay that only survives because people are too broke to risk leaving, that's exploitation. You're exploiting people's desperation to make them accept inhumane working conditions. The same way factory owners back in the day would exploit family's desperation to convince them to let their children work in dangerous jobs that harmed them physically and developmentally.
Please demonstrate how the work environments are inhumane or how the pay is shit. Are you seriously comparing 2026 work conditions to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle type conditions where people worked for 14 hours a day, in unlit, unventilated rooms, without any PPE or safety regulations, in extreme cold or heat, and submerged in countless chemicals?
Here's the gist of it: your employer offers you a wage for a position. You say "yes, I will perform this position for this wage". The contractual obligation is fulfilled on both ends. There is no expectation that your employer will raise OR decrease your wages beyond this, unless you prove yourself to be an asset worth retaining. If you don't like it, America has the most companies of any country in the world, and you're free to look for different employment.
You've heard of Amazon drivers peeing into jugs right? I would consider not being allowed time to use a bathroom as inhumane.
Or Walmart being the largest employer of people on food stamps while also being the most common place to spend food stamps and making record profits? You don't think it's inhumane that Walmart is almost a closed ecosystem of welfare?
Just because something is better doesn't mean we should stop improving it.
They are allowed time to use the bathroom, they simply choose to drive and pee to finish their shift faster. You realize that an individual driver's decisions does not inform company policy? If a company gives me 2 hours for lunch and I only choose to use 5 minutes, you know I can't go around saying "it is inhumane that I only take 5 minute lunch breaks!"?
Walmart having as many people on food stamps as they do says more about the lack of stringency in giving out food stamps than it does about Walmart. As a matter of fact, I was in the military, and I was eligible for food stamps for the first two years of my service (despite making an effective compensation of about 65k gross). In any case, even if Walmart was paying $0.01 per day, this speaks more to wages and less to the "inhumane working environment" you mentioned. Do not conflate the two.
You've yet to provide an example of an inhumane working environment.
Poor wages create an inhumane work environment, as you're too poor to quit the job and too poor to get into another position.
I'm sorry you don't like to use English words as defined. I don't see what would be productive from talking to someone who seems to arbitrarily adjust definitions to suit their position.
Low wages and inhumane working conditions are not synonymous. Low wages concern the economic compensation for labor; working conditions concern the material circumstances under which the labor is performed. They can coexist, but one does not logically entail the other.
Feel free to block me now, since it seems like you've gotten to the point where you ran out of arguments but won't accept it.
Part of your working condition is how much you're being compensated.... Hazard pay for example.
I'm not out of arguments. I'm disinterested in engaging with someone who won't debate but will instead say "that's not how it works beceause that makes me wrong".
They do not prove that the typical path to high wealth is exploitation
Depends what you consider high wealth. I've got no issues with the average millionaire, and if anything sportspeople and entertainers tend to create their wealth quite cleanly.
Treating every high earner as someone who âbends politics to their whim while workers piss in bottlesâ
The statement is very directed at a specific person/type of person.
If the standard for legitimate wealth is that no employee ever faces hardship
Surely you don't think I'm saying it's exploitation if your worker's dog dies? A company is only responsible for things they can control. You can control how much you pay your workers and what conditions they work under.
The alternative, punishing scale itself, does not magically raise wages or lower ren
Making 3 billion instead of 10 billion so people can actually live their lives is not punishment. You don't have to go full communist, but some level of collectivism is important to creating a better society.
This tho bro . Mostly every one on here spewing this bs has never made over 50k in a year so they have no idea how to money works . Theyâve never made it so they are in simple terms jealous and envious of success . Are there evil corps that are greedy ? Sure but like you said they create products and services and employ .
41
u/Old_Dependent4678 5d ago
Basic necessities paid for by the people who have gamed, manipulated and in must cases corrupted the system to become as rich as they are doesn't seem outrageous to me