The main problem is that people who feel trapped don’t have the financial stability to go without income for any period of time, which greatly limits the ability to find a new job.
It’s also why voter turnout is so low, at least here in the US.
As intended, of course.
Yup, and why we’ll never see a meaningful increase of the minimum wage.
Pokemon make voting day a holiday
Not to mention healthcare.
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Maybe in an actual civilized country.
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Troll or bot. Fuck off.
It’s really not. Someone has to train the doctors. The doctors have to get the medication- to get the medication it has to be made somewhere. To be made Someone has to research how to make it and what needs to go in it. To get what needs to go in it Someone has to go grow/mix/etc etc etc.
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So you’re telling me you’ve never had to go through hoops to get healthcare? I can’t do sports I liked because I cannot afford getting injured and be in debt
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Why would finding a new job cause a lapse in income?
Because you never know what’s going to happen at the new job. You might be given circumstances you cannot adhere to or deal with people you simply can’t put up with.
Starting a new job is always a gamble and can fail easily
A lot of places will walk you out the moment you turn in notice.
If you planned a two week notice and the other job won’t be ready for you until then…you’re kind of SOL.
That’s why it’s important to pay close attention to how your job treats others who have left, and plan accordingly.
But beyond that, you’ve also got payroll conflicts. If you get paid every other week at your current job, and your new job is off cycle or does bimonthly, or pays on set days, that can result in some short term gaps in income. If those happen to hit when bills are due and you are paycheck to paycheck, you’ll either have to get a loan or hope there’s an adequate grace period.
If you quit because of bad conditions, like unsafe conditions.
If you get a new job and put in two weeks, your first job might immediately fire you. Teo weeks without pay is a crisis for a lot of people.
If you need to spend time applying and interviewing you might not be able to work your crappy job during that time.
These are US issues for low income earners who are afraid of getting a new job.
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This is such a narrow world view that it becomes really hilarious when you try to say other people aren’t using logic.
What if someone got fired just because of a horrible boss? What if someone quit because of shitty working conditions? What if someone had to go on medical leave for an extended period of time? What if someones house burned down and they have to move away from their job? What if a work place becomes hostile? What if the business just closes?
This could be a literally endless list.
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It’s literally not. We’re talking about losing your job and NOT working.
I don’t even know how you could be so wrong.
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Lmfao. K.
I’ve done (or had done to me) the first two and last two multiple times and his advice still holds. Not sure what you’re aiming at.
How do you have a job lined up in those situations?
You’re just lying.
I’m not lying. It’s how I went from making 36k to just over 100k in 6 years.
A job you had unexpectedly closed and you already had a job lined up?
You’re lying.
You have no time to find a new job when you’re already juggling two just to make ends meet. Let alone interview for it.
I don’t believe you work two jobs and have no time if you have the time to set up and play on private Valheim servers.
I never said I did. I’m lucky. I have a good job that pays well, at a decent company with a decent boss. I really like my job too! Lots of people aren’t that lucky though.
Tell me you are upper middle class without telling me you are upper middle class.
I did this while at my poorest. It’s literally how I climbed out. My ratchet-ass cousin just did this last month, and she is perpetually trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. My ex-teacher friend is currently doing it too. Anyone at any income level can just keep an eye out for opportunity.
You work one job while looking for better opportunities elsewhere, then quit and go elsewhere, rinse and repeat. Fastest way to increase your earnings, period, and way better in terms of QOL.
I hadn’t considered that your experience is the only valid one and nobody can have a different one than yours. Such a convincing argument you have there.
It’s not an argument, but an anecdote. I assure you that anything I can do, another person can do.
What I don’t understand is why you seem vested in being hopeless about your own future.
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Some assholes think that it’s very easy for every human being to just go out and find a new job. Just like that.
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That’s easy. According to most people “die” is good enough. Oh they won’t say it out loud but their actions speak loud as fuck.
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It’s always been hard for me to find a job
:( I know the feeling
I am a fucking janitor and it feels like the big time given the shit this town been given me.
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Maybe make a little more effort with your comments if you actually have something you want to add.
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That has nothing to do with what I’m talking to you about. You have a shit attitude, get it adjusted.
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If an economy’s working correctly, it certainly should be. The demand for goods/services and willingness to work for them is one of the few things that’s basically fundamental to human nature. Of course we have all kinds of problems that make that inaccessible in an economy, or that artificially skew the ratio of one to the other (for better or for worse, depending on the person). First and foremost, that across the public/private spheres, a few people at the top have the entire economy by the throat.
It’s definitely intentionally made difficult. It’s not to say you can’t just move around at jobs and stuff, but it definitely requires some tough measures and occasional high risks.
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I like “just start your own business!” I had a small business that did well enough that I was able to run it for 10 years and only stopped out of choice. I now have a relatively low-paying job with someone else and I am more financially secure now than I was during any of those 10 years.
Nobody said it’s easy to be independent. Stability is definitely not guaranteed when you have a small business
When “just start your own business” is presented as a real viable alternative to a job with someone else, they are saying it’s easy. There’s nothing easy about it. And they don’t tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don’t file quarterly.
I mean, it definitely is an alternative, but it’s not easy at all
Dude, stop. They don’t want to run a business, they want a guarantee of security, and by rights they are entitled to that. If you don’t agree, that’s your problem, but don’t come up on here thinking their complaints are a threat to your society thinking you have to change their way of thinking to quell it.
We’re abandoning you whether you like it or not :P
Jesse wtf are you talking about?
You’re defending a shitty evil economic system by defending the notion of small business as a meaningful alternative to work while ignoring the motivations of who you’re talking to. Doing that belies your motivations: you see him complaining as a threat to capitalism which you support, which is why you’re trying to convince him in the first place.
I am telling you we’re going to abandon capitalism whether you like it or not, shutting down your primary goal of convincing people not to complain. I’m telling you emphatically we’re going to do a lot more than complain.
It’s that simple
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No one is abandoning capitalism lol
Shit, formerly-communist countries embraced capitalism to have any sort of economy at all.
It sounds great, but I forget the part where I asked for your opinion
wym hes just trying to cook
Dude is high on groupthink.
Kind of ironic
There is no financial security. Anyone of you, even higher paid people, could go homeless any second and there is nothing you can do about it.
Life is not naturally easy- it is only because of the labor of others that life is anywhere near as comfortable as it is now.
We have the means to make a fair and equitable society with minimal crime and no hunger. We, as a society, choose not to. We choose the hard life for the sake of getting everything we worked for to ourselves at the risk of losing it all with one bad day. That’s not comfortable. The labour of all should benefit all so that everyone can have an easy and comfortable life.
What do you mean by “we chaosem the hard life”? What do you think should be done to achive easy life for everyone?
We choose to continue to live in a pro-capitalist society, therefore we choose the hard life. Pure and true socialism is the easy way out my friend. Comfort for all.
But how?
life can be easy for everyone if we all chip in a little, it’s the whole basis of society, we just can’t afford the hoarding aristocracy
Serious question: do you think the “aristocracy” has like, vaults full of money? Like you think Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars sitting in his bank account? Or a literal vault?
Because that is definitely not how rich people actually live. As a rule, they have very little liquidity as a percent of their net worth.
What does that have to do with anything? Just because the wealth is on paper doesn’t make it any less real.
It matters because people suggest that Bezos et al “hoard wealth” which is both untrue and impossible with the way their wealth is calculated.
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And they don’t tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don’t file quarterly.
Meh, you find out about that the first year and honestly in the US, it’s not that much.
depends on what bussiness, and what country, in developing countries the salary for white collar and blue collar jobs are insanely low that it is basically slavery and you will earn like triple or more income if you have even the smallest bussiness like selling street food or door dash kind of job
I don’t know where is that, but unless you don’t play by the rules usually being a business owner is worse. Usually developing countries have a myriad of taxes and labour laws that make having a business very difficult. So for you to have a business you either don’t go by the law (which is how successful “business owners” usually get there, by knowing someone or by cutting corners), you have to work an insane amount of hours (my dad used to work Monday to Monday, 10 hrs a day on a median), or you accept that you might need to declare bankruptcy in any given time.
I kind of feel like both are true.
The threat of starvation and homelessness is a pretty strong coercion to keep working at all…
…but nobody’s really stopping you from job-hunting if you really hate this particular job rather than the concept of having a job at all.
I’m not going to sit here and be like “just go back to school, get certifications, blah blah blah” because seriously fuck that. You and whose fuckin’ Time Turner?
That said, even looking for a less-awful workplace doing the same thing you’re already doing could be an improvement in your overall mental health and life situation. A small step, maybe, but I know from myself and people around me that it can be a step.
You need to be very certain though. What if the new job doesn’t work out and they decide 6 months later they don’t need you after all? Having a job, as shitty as it might be, is stability. Changing a system always comes with risks.
(Never mind that a different job needs to even be available without moving your whole life elsewhere)
Stagnation also comes with risks.
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True, it could also happen to my current job. But then I haven’t actively done anything to cause it. I haven’t gone out of my way to change the situation and thus made it worse. That’s a big factor in why people are afraid of change, the risk of actively and inadvertently making it worse, instead of passively enduring.
(Disclaimer: I’m on disability so I don’t have a “current job” and I also live in a place with decently sane labour laws)
But just enduring the current job also comes with a risk even in a country with strong labor laws. Not changing jobs comes with stagnation of skills and wages. I’ve heard plenty of stories of loyal employees who worked the same job for decades but who now earn less than the new hires and they are now at a point where switching jobs is hard since their skill set hasn’t improved for years. Risk averse people are also often too afraid to even renegotiate their wages. And bosses know that and exploit that.
This is just accepting the same amount of risk but denying yourself agency in improving your life.
Ask yourself if you would accept that in any other situation - same risk, but no agency. I’d hope the answer is no.
That feels like a musical chairs approach to this issue, where people who find a good job are lucky and sit in that and the rest shuffle between the shitty job leftovers. I recently found a decent job and it‘s only cause the guy retired after 30 years. Now I can only hope they will keep me on, or else I get to participate in that awful game again. Or maybe it will turn shitty for some other reason, like how there is no raises and my rent keeps going up anyway.
We even got unions in my country, and still we ended up like this where a lot of people switch jobs every few years to try and keep up with inflation. I’m not saying don’t take that step though. Sorry, I got no point I think? Just a rant your comment inspired in me.
Sometimes you need a good rant; no harm done.
but nobody’s really stopping you from job-hunting if you really hate this particular job
Yes and no. It might be extremely difficult to get an interview due to the hours you’re currently working.
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How is it a weak ass excuse? If you’re scheduled to work during the hours that interviews are available, what the hell are you supposed to do?
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Call your boss. Tell them you’re sick. Go to the interview.
You find other interviews that can fit your schedule.
Can you? Are you sure? You really think there aren’t people who have trouble scheduling interviews due to their current job’s schedule?
I think there are people that have trouble with a lot of things, but as far as practical advice for living in society, I think that’s a shit excuse.
For anyone that trapped, you have my sympathies.
I agree with you to an extent. From my personal experience, working at a string of shitty companies, some industries don’t provide better opportunities. In service jobs for example you usually can only choose between being treated like “a piece of shit” or “a human who is also a piece of shit”.
Additionally, working 8 hours as a punching bag, plus 1 hour unpaid overtime, plus 2 hour commute doesn’t leave much energy to write applications.
I also managed to get out of it eventually, but I’ve always been overqualified for the service industry and always had problems with authority, which made it easier for me to question the way I was treated. Still it was way harder than it had to be.
Nobodys stopping you but having a miserable job can take its toll and can affect your job hunt. At least it did for me. After years of failed job hunts and a difficult battle with MDD and alcoholism my Dr signed me off sick until I got a new job. In a short period I had 3 job offers.
3months off with full pay. Spent a couple days a week job hunting. Rest of the time went walking in the national parks with my dog. At the end I had a 60% better paying job, no more commute, no more being voluntold to drive around the country to tasks I had zero training for and much better colleagues. One of my best times of my life.
Yet when the writer’s guild and sag aftra went on strike they all decided to wait until people started losing their homes.
Ghouls. All of them
Except half the workers are scabbing pieces of shit who are undermining the strike.
Come live in France.
You get a little bit of welfare, enough for rent and food. Highly recommended.
I read that to the tune of Mambo No 5
You get a bit of welfare, 'nuf for rent 🎵 A little bit of food, I recommend 🎶 A little bit of health care, for your life 🎵 And a little bit of family time, for your wife 🎶
Go on…
And the bi-annual mass protest!
So make a self sustaining commune that lives up to your principles. I think you will find that to be more work than your average 9-5 however.
It’s illegal to homestead in the United States without first buying the land from whoever owns it already, even if the land is entirely unused. This means you need a massive injection of capital, the kind of capital that would mean you’re in the top 10% of Americans (at least) in terms of wealth, exactly the kinds of people who aren’t looking to escape society. This isn’t even mentioning the kinds of building permits and other stamps of approval from the government you’d need to do this, also requiring capital and often licensing by a trained professional.
Of course you can just find unused land and roll the dice on getting caught. A lot of communes have done this successfully, but not everyone is comfortable doing something that is technically illegal.
A lot of people in the top 10% are still working class, and would benefit from a dismantling of capitalism, but they’re not so poor that leaving society is favorable, just reforming society.
For the people who would benefit from leaving society, they’re coerced to stay via laws written by and for the powerful (enforcing private property rights for example, denying access to unused lands).
These are fair counterpoints, thanks for the reply. My point was more that work is necessary in any society given today’s technology, even in one designed to be as egalitarian and non-coercive as possible
You don’t need a lot of personal capital if you fundraise prior to starting your commune, and have everyone pitch in the equity from sold homes/cashed out 401(k)s etc
Also you don’t have a right to someone’s property simply because they aren’t using it at the moment
A lot of Americans have negative net worth, so everyone cashing out would likely mean you’re still in debt, which is one of the ways our society keeps people trapped.
There’s a difference between legal rights and moral rights. Legally you’re correct, but 150 years ago people legally had the right to buy slaves, but they didn’t have the moral right to.
Similarly, people have the legal right to buy hundreds of acres of land and hold onto it until it increases in value, and then sell it later. This is immoral though, it’s scalping. We all understand scalping is bad when it’s through the lens of GPUs or consoles because we weren’t raised hearing about how “smart investors” invested in GPUs, we just heard about “investing” in housing or land.
If you have a solid argument why scalping houses or land should be permissible and even praised, while scalping GPUs/consoles should be impressible or at least scolded, I’d love to hear why.
I’d assert that scalping necessities is actually worse than scalping luxury goods.
I think it’s unhelpful to frame structural economic problems as moral wrongs done by individuals, because these are all situations where more people accepting a moral consensus doesn’t actually resolve the problem. If there are 50 active GPU scalpers in the market, and a shaming campaign succeeds in reducing that number to 10, ultimately those 10 people are still going to be able to exploit the differential in retail price and actual market price to the same extent. Maybe it would take them a little while to scale up their operations, but they would do it. No amount of moralizing against scalpers can overcome supply and demand in this situation or actually make cheap graphics cards available to everyone.
Squatting isn’t immoral IMO, but enshrining legal protections for squatters would probably just result in a lot of effort being wasted on preventing trespassing lest property rights be forfeit. Instead it would be better to have high taxes on unused land and various forms of redistribution to keep everyone in a situation where they have genuine choice in their lives. The point shouldn’t be deciding who the wrongdoers are and punishing them.
Whether or not it’s helpful is orthogonal to whether it’s true, which is more what I’m concerned with. Maybe there’s a point to be had about effectively trying to convince people, but I don’t have an obligation to be the most effective conversationalist or converter.
However I’d happily support systemic approaches to reducing the effectiveness of housing scalpers. Calling them immoral is not mutually exclusive with supporting legislation against them. I’d even say those things are usually aligned.
legislation against them
This is why I don’t think it is aligned. There is a lot of possible legislation that would effectively punish “scalpers” or reduce their effectiveness in pursuing their goals, but would not actually help resolve the actual underlying problem or even make things worse. For instance trying to ban the practice directly, or trying to fix prices, those generally will backfire. If the focus is legislating “against” them, that’s looking it as a justice problem instead of an incentives problem, but even if it is immoral punishing immoral acts is much less important than solving the problems in peoples lives, and these goals can easily be at odds.
It’s not scalping to hold onto something for years. That’s the opposite of scalping, which is taking advantage of surges in demand for quick profit.
Owning land is not a necessity.
GPU scalping isn’t technically scalping either by some definitions, but the layman usage of the word is “buying up a product and selling it back at an inflated price”. Someone is still a GPU scalper even if it takes them 2 years to resell some stock.
By this definition, housing scalpers are scalpers too. I’m not in the business of prescribing how people should speak, so if you have some academic issue with the word “scalping” I can choose a different one. We’ll call it “yeegstrafing”, but my contention is still the same despite what you call it.
People correctly have an issue with GPU yeegstrafers, because they’re not providing any value, they’re just hoarding excess goods and reselling to make a profit. Housing/land yeegstrafers are doing the same thing with necessities.
You may claim that housing or land more generally (you need land for housing/shelter) is not a necessity, but larger society disagrees. People generally regard shelter+food+water as the basic necessities. If someone successfully hoarded all the land, nobody would have access to shelter.
The correct term for buying a thing at a lower value than you sell it for after a period of time is “investing”
What you need isn’t stealing from people, it’s changing zoning laws.
You can call it scalping, yeegstrafing, investing, whatever. I recognize that depending on what you call it, people will have different emotional responses to it. If you call it scalping, it’ll be negative. Investing it’ll be positive. Yeegstrafing, probably just confusion.
But playing with words isn’t the game I’m trying to play, I have a contention with the action, not the word choice. People shouldn’t be allowed to invest in certain things, you can agree. Like you shouldn’t be able to buy up humans at a low value and sell them at a higher value later. Even if you called it investing, it’d still be impermissible.
Similarly, restricting access to land/shelter, driving up prices by reducing supply, and then later selling your hoarded supply at an excess due to said price driving is problematic. It’s restricting cheap access to housing so some people can “make” money.
Using “scalping” as the word to describe this highlights its parasitic nature, they’re siphoning value out of the economy and restricting access to shelter/land while doing it.
Using “investing” instead ignores the negative societal ramifications, and only focuses on the positive personal outcomes (generating money for yourself).
No, that’s gouging. Scalping, at least as I’ve always understood it, is buying up a limited resource and then selling it at an inflated price.
I’m not taking a position on the morality of buying unused land, just trying to get the terms right.
The moral rights are more complicated when the property is in something that includes natural resources such as land. Land isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor, so everyone has an equal claim to it. There are a variety of ways this equal claim could be recognized, but one that has been proposed is requiring active occupancy and use to retain ownership of land. Another is a 100% land value tax whose revenue is distributed as a social dividend to citizens, which would give people some capital
I always have an ear open for Georgism.
Getting others as interested as I am is the challenge
To get other’s interest,
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always mention the LVT and other natural resource payments should be entirely used to sustain a guaranteed minimum income. This is justified on the basis of everyone’s equal claim to natural resources.
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Include it as part of a larger systemic critique that mentions how the current system denies employees the positive and negative fruits of their labor, which the employer solely legally appropriates.
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Very much a ‘you dislike society yet you participate in it. Curious!’ sort of a response. Additionally, OP problem was that they hated their work, not that there was too much of it. But I’d expect as much from my mortal foe.
Having to work isn’t a societal issue, it’s the physical reality. Without food, water, and shelter, you’ll die, and someone needs to work to provide those things.
I want a post-scarcity utopia as much as the next guy, but until then, work needs to be done.
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The difference is someone has to do the labor to stop you from being homeless and starving. So, either you will do labor that can compensate them- or you should do the labor to stop yourself from starving. Starvation is the natural state of humanity
Starvation is the natural state of the individual. Society separates us from that. You will find that other things are also fairly natural, such as death, disease, and exposure.
Unfortunately, for the support that manages to feed people, work must be done, and not every job can find enough people that want to do it sincerely to avoid some people hating their job.
That doesn’t mean employers should get away with being exploitative and abusive, or that reform isn’t needed. But the philosophy “no one should ever have to do something they don’t want to do” is unrealistic.
Agreed. Now imagine if the people doing the work they don’t enjoy, do it because the compensation outweighs the hardship. Rather than creating systems that both compensate disproportionately less for some roles in society AND ensure there is enough labour through coercive means.
Lets say everyone gets free college education, and there is no bias in the system for who gets to work where. No one wants to be lets say… a technician for utility lines, or work in maintaining sewage systems because there are easier jobs.
Should we a) increase compensation or b) make it difficult for people who work there transition to other work.
Universal healthcare, unemployment income, free education, universal child care, universal housing etc. all undermine the societal ability to keep people at work that is difficult but underfunded.
I’m on board with the reforms that properly recognize jobs people are inclined to hate as deserving of being some of the highest paid rather than lowest paid. I think health insurance should not be tied to employment (universal ideally, but at least decoupled from employment benefits). Free education to a point. I think universities need to be held more accountable for efficiency, rather than anything resembling a blank check (the well-intended student loan system has caused unintended badness without any accountability for actually managing expense). I’ll accept that universal ‘housing’ can be difficult when you get into the minutia (a fine line to walk between providing universal housing and appearance of just packing away undesirables out of sight, and auditing the living conditions)
You listed power line technician, but Linemen (as they are called) make crazy good money. I believe they deserve more, because the job is insane, but it’s a skilled, union job that pays very well.
Also they commonly only work 4 days per week.
Awesome. Firefighters are also paid quite well and have an on and off schedule. Thanks (sincerely) for the name - Linemen. Couldn’t remember it for the life of me.
All labour requires skill, some more, some less. Unfortunately pay doesn’t always scale with skill and danger/dislike/inconvenience etc.
I agree that there should be rewards for doing undesirable jobs. It would improve coordination.
We could have a society without employers. Everyone could be individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker coop. Such a society would give workers control rights over the fruits of their labor, which employer-employee relationships inherently deny. This denial makes being an employer by itself exploitative and abusive. We need to abolish the property relationships of work not reform
Starvation is the natural state of the individual. Society separates us from that.
How so? Isn’t the point of this meme that you have to work in society (in general) to not starve?
Some societies have figured out how to care for people better than other societies.
That’s awesome!
work in society (in general) to not starve
No. Capitalism requires that we ‘work’. I.e. provide output that is valuable to the capitalists. In a normal society, there are other forms of value that merit the person existing.
But also, we’re human. One of the reasons I want people to not starve is that I’m not a sociopath. So sometimes the value a person provides to society is that they’re not starving in the middle of the street. There’s value in that.
In a normal society
What’s a normal society? Is this a no true scottsman argument? It’d be my perspective that in the vast majority of societies people generally have to work to live.
normal society
Good point! Let’s start with a definition that’s something like… a society of humans that are treated like humans, and not treated like ‘human capital’, and go from there.
output that is valuable to capital (owners)
This is false. You need to provide output that is valuable to your consumers
No, the owner needs to do that to stay in business. You need to provide output valuable to the owners. The owner can decide whether you need to provide value to the customers or not.
Example: Nepotism.
example: nepotism
Because unethical acts that are bad business practice are such a great example.
Nepotism isn’t unethical. The owner of the company has every right to do what they want with their capital. There is nothing that says the owner must act in a rational or profit seeking way. A CEO must act in a profit seeking way, but that’s because he is accountable to the owner.
It’s also not necessarily bad business practice. You seem to be suffering under the misconception that the world is a meritocracy, and the ‘best’ person for a job should get it. That’s not how any of this works in the real world.
Regardless, you seem like a creative chap. You can come up with other examples of when a business owner might keep someone on payroll that wasn’t directly to extract value for the customer and instead to provide value for other reasons. I believe you can do it.
This is false. There are many types of work that the market fails to value accurately. An example of this would be economic public goods. A producer of these will not be rewarded anywhere near the social value of what they produce
I didn’t say you’re rewarded commensurate to value brought, but rather that workers produce output valuable to consumers.
In some cases, the valuation of work by the market due to it involving economic public goods can be insufficient, so people producing valuable public goods are forced to take on another job. In the case of public goods, there is nothing for the employer to appropriate and exclude others from to charge consumers for access, so employers don’t value it despite it being valuable to consumers. I don’t believe they were mis-attributing what work is under the current economic system
Morally, everyone has an equal claim to products of nature and the value they add to production. Today’s economic system denies people their equal claim. If society secured people’s equal right to natural resources and their value, the notion of coercion in the post would be reduced. Therefore, the economic system’s structure causes this coercion not just nature
Starvation is the natural state of the individual.
Thank you for articulating this very important distinction!
No sufficiently sophisticated political ideology is against labor (capitalist work is not synonymous with labor). On the contrary, most anti-capitalist ideologies are extremely pro-labor.
The question isn’t whether we need labor, that’s reductive and (currently) we obviously do. The question is how should labor be treated. Right now labor is a commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. If we instead setup a system that decommodified labor, outlawing renting of humans (just as we have with buying humans), then even in a market-based economy you have far better compensation for labor.
Market-value for labor in a capitalist society is done as a commodity as I’ve previously said, so the goal is to reduce the price of the commodity as far as allowable for the business owners. This means a viable path towards profitability is reducing the labor force, or cutting compensation. This is why layoffs happen when companies are doing incredibly well, to increase immediate profits.
If instead there was a democratic assembly of workers that held their interests in common, there’d be no reason to just layoff a bunch of great workers during times of good business.
In short, we don’t need two different classes with two different relationships to capital. Instead of allowing one class to rent the other, compensate them as little as possible, and pocket the surplus value, outlaw that commodification of humans and allow the market to properly compensate workers.
This isn’t an end all solution, but market socialism is a massive improvement over capitalism, and once we dismantle the parasitic owner class (capitalists, landleeches, cops, etc.) we can focus on more interesting discussions about the merits of markets in certain situations (e.g they’re good at reacting to consumer desires, they’re bad at accounting for externalized costs like climate change, etc.)
With respect to climate change, it has more to do with the property relationships of the current economic system than the market itself. If natural resources were commonly owned and people had a recognized right to their value, polluters and other people harming the environment during production would have to pay citizens collectively proportional to the social costs. Then, prices would accurately represent the social cost of pollution involved in the production of the product
“If the pickings are slim, they’ll appreciate what little they get.”
My stomach forces me. So does my pride. And my wife.
A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
Edit: this response was part of a chain, but I posted it when lemmy.world was having issues and I think my lemmy client couldn’t find the comment it was responding to, so it just posted it at the top level, here’s the chain for context: https://lemmy.world/comment/1973311
Capitalism is an ideology, you have a very weird relationship with definitions, first denying what scalping is and now denying what an ideology is. I don’t know why you choose to live in a world where you just make up your own definitions, but it makes it harder to communicate.
Demand outstrips supply absolutely, and yeah if we built an infinite number of houses we’d have a fine supply, but also if we didn’t have 16 million vacant homes we’d also have a fine supply. We currently have more vacant housing units than homeless people (by a factor of ~30), and capitalists are purposefully restricting supply to increase cost.
I don’t know why you choose to live in a world where there is only one possible solution to the housing crisis. I’ve already said building more would obviously help supply, I don’t know why you’re so ideologically motivated that you can’t admit that putting literally millions of housing units on the market would also help supply. You seem to have an inability to even consider that capitalism could have any problems. That’s the epitome of an ideologue.
There’s a surplus but they’re restricting supply?
Yup. GPU scalpers do the same thing, they buy up an entire stock, and then restrict supply by only letting a couple units go at a time, which inflates the price.
In housing, capitalists lovingly call this practice “investing”, when you buy up land or housing and don’t rent it out or sell it, you just let it sit and increase in value.
That’s an easy explanation to reach for, but the theory rapidly breaks down without a unified cartel controlling the entire thing, because it’s opportunity cost down the drain to sit on properties to try to drive up prices across the market - each individual participant would make more money breaking with the cartel and just selling/renting their stock. Hence, the sheer number of actual participants in the market disproves it.
There are a ton of reasons why individuals/corporations would scalp housing units and hold onto them without opening them up to use, from laws requiring fair treatment of renters like in NYC (where 90,000 rent controlled apartments remain vacant), to “unified cartels” actually have incredibly large influence over some areas (there are some companies that hold 10s of thousands of housing units, like blackrock, and these corporations purposefully keep some vacant to inflate the price of all units and control supply).
But even if you want to just close your eyes and ignore my last paragraph, you can try to rationalize away the data, but the data will still be there. There are 16 million vacant housing units in the U.S. Even if you can’t fathom any reason why these might exist, they still do, and they still impact supply even if you’d like to believe they don’t.
I’m not pretending they don’t exist. I’ve called the problem out myself. But simple “capitalists are hoarding them to price gouge” is not a plausible explanation as to why.
You didn’t respond to anything I said. You essentially said “I agree and you’re wrong” with some fluff, so uhm okay good talk buddy.
I really don’t know why convos go this way.
Consider more deeply the problem of how competing firms respond to prices. Consider that these firms don’t actually have monopolies over a single geographical area, and also that people would have the option to move somewhere else even if they did. When there is actual competition, the theory immediately breaks down, because sitting on stock without selling/renting it actually just wastes money, and any other competing provider will just slip in below the price you’re trying to sell it at.
I’m addicted to healthcare
This same logic could be used to argue that the government forced people to get the covid vaccine.
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I’m between billionaire CEO positions right now.
Well, the truth is that you could just go get a tent and live in a national park if you truly wanted to. You could build a houseboat and live on that. Or fuck off to the Alaskan wilderness. There are remote places you could live without having to pay any money.
You do realize that you still need to eat? Or going to a doctor or a dentist once in a while? Or at least buy some medication, or some shoes because the old ones are wasted? Living in the wilderness is possible, but very, very hard. Only very few people are actually able to live like that.
You can get all that stuff for free in nearby towns and nothing is stopping you from hiking into town once a week for supplies. It’s entirely possible to live for free if you wanted to. I’ve done it before, so I know the score.
I agree with you that living up in the Alaskan wilderness would be a whole different ball game. In most of the continental U.S., though, if you’re close to a national park, it is possible. People do it all the time
What towns are giving away free supplies?
Most towns give free food and clothing to the indigent, especially at churches. It’s a true fact. Living in a tent in a woods is essentially doing just that and there are people who live their whole lives off of charity like that. You could, in principle, do it.
That is not scalable. Other people have to put in work to run a charity and community effort like that. If everyone is living off of charities, who is funding them?
It doesn’t matter. We’re talking about one person choosing to up and leave a broken system. Actually there are over 1 million homeless in the U.S. right now, and this is essentially how they live albeit most of them don’t camp in national parks. Some do though
