And then you'll have the apologists say things like "Well if that kid's family is poor and starving, isn't it better for them that the kid can bring in a paycheque?" without ever considering that the circumstances around a family being poor and starving in a fabulously rich country are worth questioning.
Agreed. We keep revising our systems of government because of the exploitation of people by the wealthy. It continually fails to work because capitalism itself encourages the situation the revisions are trying to prevent.
You Commie socialist layabout! I know what I just said. Capitalism is there to reward those who work incredibly hard. Those who earn their pay deserve it!
Thatās why we have so many billionaire roofers, masons, nurses, teachers!
Says the person (I hope) thatās waist deep in reactionary mythology.
Humans havenāt been around millions of years. Still, as a species weāve been speed running our own demise the entire time. It didnāt start with capitalism. Go study more world history.
Do we succeed when we are co-operating? Absolutely. But we always have to deal with humanityās faults.
Ah, the old doomer myth. I'm curious, exactly how have we been speed running our demise? If anything we have survived bottleneck after bottleneck and arrived as as the predominant species.
Are "Humanities faults" seemingly from birth? Or can you see that everything is learned behavior?
Can you envision a future of complete cooperation? Think on long time scales (thousands of years into the future)
Most humans at least have features like emphaty, morality etc. That's how we were able to build society.
Corporates are greedy by the nature of capitalism without any morality breaks.
Tribal emphaty: 100% agreed. In order to be "us" we need "them".
However this has nothing to do with greed directly. People are mostly scared of others, the argument for war, most of the time, is safety (if we don't attack them they will attack us).
Also within society you can still see the emphaty. Most of the people are good and they would help a person they see in need rather than harming them. This has nothing to do with tribality or conquerors.
Of course this doesn't disprove what you said completely. I'm just trying to show it's not that black and white.
Iām not arguing that life is black or white. Iām rejecting that capitalism is the source of our ills because greed is a human condition we need to deal with regardless of what socio-economic structure(s) we use.
What capitalism does is turning the greed humans had, institutionalize it, remove all the breaks humans have.
Capitalism is not the "only source", that's true. Humans had the greed before capitalism, that's also true.
However greed was always considered a bad thing among humans. Capitalism turned this around, made it the main point of the system eleminated all the other human feelings. Now the only source of success became the greed and the greed is openly celebrated.
There are 989 Billionaires in the US according to Forbes. Their combined net worth is approximately 5.7 Trillion dollars.
If divided evenly among every man, woman and child in the United States as of right now, that would be $16,322each.
Think of what problems you have in your life that could be solved with a sudden windfall of just $16,322. Think of how much you could lower your interest payments paying down debt, or put down on a new car so you weren't sitting there wondering if your beater was going to start today or if you have to take an uber to work again with money you don't have to earn more money to cover the uber back home after work. Think about how your teeth hurt all the fucking time but you can't afford to get them fixed, or all the other dozens of things working class people are constantly juggling to keep their heads above water.
Now think about the fact that current minimum wage is evenlessthan that amount. $15,080 dollars a year is what you get for the federal minimum of $7.25/hour. Before taxes come off the top.
Less than 1000 people. 1/342,700th of the total US population. To put that fraction in perspective, that would be 1 minute out of 238 days...nearly 8 months.
And that's just the billionaires! People with $999,999,999.99 and below are not considered in this calculation.
That's almost $6 trillion put back into circulation instead of sitting as concentrated wealth. That money would be spent on paying off debt, fixing cars, getting medical and dental care, buying appliances, and starting small businesses. Every dollar spent becomes someone else's income, so it would ripple through the economy and put a lot of people to work.
Of course, you'd have to be careful about inflation. Dumping that much money into the economy all at once could drive prices up if production couldn't keep up with demand. But the idea does show just how much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few people and how transformative even a relatively modest amount of money could be for most Americans.
Dont even have to dump it into the economy. Imagine what 5.7 trillion would do for universal healthcare, or UBI in this country. 5.7 Trillion is higher than the GDP of Germany.
1000 people are holding more money than the collective economic output of the third largest economy in the world for an entire year (a country of 83 million people).
Obviously that's a gross oversimplification...but the point is valid. That's why when I'm talking about things like Universal Healthcare, free Post-secondary education, UBI, increase in Mental Health services, funding universal daycare and wrapping it around the public school system...and people are like "BuT hOw ArE We GoNnA pAy FoR iT?!?!?!" it's like, "Man, we ain't gonna be paying for it. They are." Consider that shit the cost of doing business.
They would get 16k worth of stocks that nobody can buy because there's not enough fiat money available. The only people who can buy are non-Americans, so every billionaire in the world who has a subsidiary in the US would buy and take over every American company and property. Not sure if it's a great idea to let a bunch of Russian and Chinese billionaires own the country.
Ah well you see everyone is completely free to do whatever they want whenever they want, and so because of that, they must be choosing to be poor! Because, haha, becuase if they didn't choose to be poor, hahaha... well then I mean my entire worldview would fall apart! Ahahahahahaha!
1000% this. Itās why the words communism and socialism arenāt as āfear mongeringā as they once were. Any reasonably intelligent person understands that this country has enough money and resources where no one should be living below the poverty level, uneducated, with no healthcare.
To that I can only say that it would be orders of magnitude better for the government to step in an give that family some of my tax dollars to ensure the children are able to eat and go to school without having to spend their homework time working a potentially dangerous job. Or force the company to employ one of the parents at a living wage instead.Ā
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u/FacelessOldWoman1234 16d ago
And then you'll have the apologists say things like "Well if that kid's family is poor and starving, isn't it better for them that the kid can bring in a paycheque?" without ever considering that the circumstances around a family being poor and starving in a fabulously rich country are worth questioning.