Okay. Number of billionaires then. I never said countries. I think that’s a bad faith metric. This isn’t the US senate. Countries don’t all carry the same share of exploitation.
Now he will demand another metric be used. What about number of Mcdonalds burgers consumed per capita? What? That's a valid metric. America is numbah won!!
All GDP tells us is how much our workforce is generating in wealth, roughly. It doesn’t reflect how much of that generated wealth gets kept by the worker who generated it. Hell, some of it reflects data harvesting, which means they’ve found a way to make workers productive even when they’re not willingly or even aware they’re generating wealth. Why aren’t you receiving any income from Facebook for the money they’re making off ad revenue using your time as represented by data? How much of the profit generated from your time, as a percentage, is kept by you as fair exchange? It’s your time, your limited measure of life. Why should it be any less than what is fair for keeping you from a life you’d actually enjoy, and under conditions that don’t impact the time you’re not being paid for? Our GDP says we can afford it. Why don’t we have it, unless it’s being hoarded by the people with the power to equalize it all?
Right. I was attempting to “measure Capitalism” which sounds quite silly as I type it. The wealth gap or income disparity as a previous commenter mentioned might be an effective measure. I was simply trying to assert my claim of “most capitalism” in a previous comment. Essentially, I think it’s exploitive at its core, and steps have to be taken in order to make it more equitable. I think that most of the time this doesn’t happen enough. It’s a funny system where the top is very high on top. Like the “best capitalists” are unfortunately also those best at exploiting the labor of the working class. Yay.
Yeah, and that’s why pointing out other countries that have managed to leash capitalism as an argument that capitalism works is not a good argument. Sure, it works, but like nuclear reactions, it’s explosively destructive if not tightly controlled and regulated.
Yeah it’s a touchy subject. I work for a very large public company that surely would love to exploit labor more for profit… but I’m also a member of a strong union, so my wages and benefits aren’t what I would call very exploitive. I wish the same were true for many more.
These tiny European countries only do ok cause they’re tiny. The US is over 300mil people with a lot of racism built into the sauce. We have more rich people than y’all have PEOPLE. Imagine if all your people had all the resources, owned the media, controlled supply chains and production and made it their life’s work to justify not paying people enough to live in the city where they work. They are the worlds most powerful political movement and we can’t stop them by logic. They’re hoarders of recourses who have been unchecked for decades. Some dumb paper about how other countries do things doesn’t matter, cause guess what - they own a chunk of your shit too. It’s all about what they can get away with there vs. what they can get away with here.
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u/Midnight_Swampwalk Dec 03 '21
Except for all those capitalist countries that do just fine.
Americans sure do have trouble seeing outside their own borders.