This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If tariffs make things more expensive for the other party, why is putting counter tariffs a good idea?”
Let’s first begin by dropping the notion that throwing counter-punches is a “good thing.”
A vast difference exists between a “good thing” and a “necessary thing.”
“Good things” result in mutual progress and shared benefit of growth.
A “necessary thing” is a strategy for mitigating loss and facilitating the reversal of destruction.
Punching someone back after they have punched you isn’t a “good thing,” but a “necessary thing” because they will continue to beat on you until you can do nothing but submit like a broken animal to their assaults until they decide to stop or until you’re dead.
Tariffs are often used in negotiations to achieve balanced results between two parties.
Tariffs can be a means of securing a stable trade relationship.
Tariffs can also be used punitively to attack a negotiating partner, precisely how bullies like Trump approach their negotiations. He championed this strategy of overwhelming negotiating partners with force in his “Art of the Deal” piece of provocative garbage. Bullying is his life pattern.
Trump has always been a bully and his behaviours have destroyed people’s lives.
The only way to deal with a bully that tries to overpower you is to debilitate them.
This approach is precisely how Putin has resolved his conflicts. He has never stopped at just pushing someone back. He has always taken his conflicts to an extreme resolution to eliminate any shred of threat as a message to anyone else who might threaten him. None of his political opponents were beaten to live their lives in a reclusive or marginalized state. They were all murdered to ensure they could no longer pose a threat against him.
Being assaulted by someone like Trump with a long history of behaving in a consistently bullying manner and whose commitments aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on — and who is backed by a psychopath like Putin whose goal is the total eradication of resistance means the necessary option of overpowering Trump and his strategy to such a degree that he is beaten to the ground like a rabid dog is a survival necessity.
Until he has been so broken and defanged that he can do nothing more than gum his way through future assaults, he will always be an existential threat to human civilization. Preventing him from throwing punches isn’t enough. He must have every single weapon of his broken beyond repair so that he lives in a state of total impotence like the swamp slug he is.
This is not a “good thing” by any stretch of the imagination. This is a horrifyingly “necessary thing,” if we want to see something resembling sanity return to society that can allow some form of stability to emerge.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What happens if all the wealth in the world got distributed evenly to every human being for 1 day? Would we return back to capitalism?”
People would do far better thinking about the system that creates income disparity rather than imagining pipe dreams that would accomplish nothing.
Firstly, redistributing all the wealth in the world equally would not magically create a world of millionaires. For example, if Elon Musk were to redistribute approximately 400 billion to America’s 350 million, they would end up with only $1140.00.
The entire world’s wealth is approximately $454 trillion; if you divide that by 8 billion people, each person ends up with $56,750.00. You can’t buy a house for that in most developed countries. It’s nowhere near enough to make fundamental changes in a person’s life.
The problem may seem that we have money hoarded by too few people — such that eight people own half of the world, but that’s a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The problem is caused by how money is distributed throughout our capitalist systems.
The problem is caused by centibillionaires and corporate executives earning thousands of times more per hour than the average employee.
When that ratio was only 23 times more than employees per hour (as it was in the 1970s), more people had disposable income. When most of a population has a lot of disposable income, they buy many more goods and take advantage of many more services, which creates many more jobs and opportunities for self-employed people to sustain themselves. In short, the velocity of money in an economy is much higher — which means cash changes hands much faster than it does today when it’s mostly tied up in significant investments and essentially hoarded by too few people.
This is called a force multiplier in the economy and why the middle class is called the economy’s engine. Everybody wins.
You should ask instead: Why don’t we cap an upper limit on personal net worth to ensure the economy works for everyone? This strategy not only supercharges an economy like a finely tuned vehicle, it also eliminates government corruption. With a global cap of one billion in personal net worth, we could forever eliminate the threat we face by a globalist oligarchy.
We could end a centuries-long class warfare overnight with the stroke of a pen.
We could end poverty almost overnight.
If we were united in solidarity on this point alone.
It may seem impossible, but it would happen if eight billion people decided they wanted this to happen.
Try to think about that.
It would also end wars around the globe.
The war in Ukraine would end overnight.
Vladimir Pukin’, his oligarchic buddies, and all the rich techbros thinking they could reinstall a modern monarchy would be disempowered overnight.
No more familial dynasties. No more Walton family treating their employees like dirt while forcing them to get government handouts because they’re not being paid enough.
No more arrogant stupidity by people thinking they’re better than the rest of humanity that they regard like pack animals instead of human beings.
We would reduce and eliminate many social problems because money would flow freely. People would not be dying from poverty. A child would not be dying every five seconds from hunger. Homelessness would disappear. Altruism and food banks would become moot.
Fight for a global cap of one billion because that’s more than enough to live in bloated luxury.
If we need one goal for eight billion people to rally around, we should make this our goal (along with UBI).
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will the next President be able to reverse the current destruction of the government?”
No.
The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of freefall, but the destruction will be permanent.
The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.
The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.
The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.
The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.
Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.
The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.
This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.
The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.
The numbers don’t lie.
The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.
No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.
We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.
We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.
We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.
Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.
More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.
The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.
The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.
There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.
If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.
The presumption in this question is an oversimplification. It’s like saying the flu is about the sniffles, the chills, the sneezing, and the perpetual flow of mucus when it’s inherently about a virus infestation.
The hatred is the symptom of an underlying cause, or set of causes, as it were. The first cause is always the same and has always been the same throughout history, driving every public conflagration: living insecurity. In today’s world, that translates into economic insecurity.
We’ve had an odd confluence of events occurring throughout this modern phase of the class war we’ve been undergoing for centuries now and since the dawn of human civilization, as the small group of the most powerful among us seek (and have always sought) to sublimate the majority in service to their will.
Quality of life for the middle class has been steadily tanking while the ownership class has been leveraging the benefits of technological progress to ameliorate and offset the increasing hardship they’ve been imposing upon the rest of us.
For example, poverty only one-half-century ago was evident in that the appearance of failing to meet essentials like clothing for appearance was a hallmark indicating poverty. That’s no longer the case, as many of the most impoverished among the working class avail themselves of systems that allow them to maintain an appearance of modest living while enduring severe degrees of economic insecurity.
The Fox network made a big deal about people not living in poverty because they had refrigerators and microwaves. It is that kind of difference between poverty today and the poverty of last century that allows the ownership to more easily shame the victims of their efforts at impoverishing the majority in service to their hoards.
The harsh reality, however, is that most essential components of psychological health and emotional stability have been steadily stripped from the middle class in a stream of primarily invisible and ignored cuts over time.
Compensation increases virtually halted for the middle class (and have even experienced shrinkages due to inflation), while income has skyrocketed for the ownership class.
The promise of capitalism raising people out of poverty from good ol’ fashioned elbow grease and modest living has vanished. The age of the Wealthy Barber lasted only a couple of decades before it was stripped from the people.
What we are left with now is a perpetual struggle for survival that has been steadily increasing year by year in the number of victims and the scope of theft perpetrated. The most privileged among us have had enough of an economic buffer to weather the storms that have destroyed the lives of millions victimized by the economic war waged by the ownership class against the working class. For many of those who would have qualified as being “upper middle class” fifty years ago and whose wealth would be more than double what it is today had the economy continued growing as it did during the heyday of Eisenhower tax rates, the economic war has remained largely invisible to them because they have not had to face the threat of food and housing insecurity that millions of working poor do today.
They may still face medical bankruptcies because those are huge bills that could and should be non-existent in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. However, the percentage of victims of that particular form of theft is relatively rare compared to the general population. We would otherwise have already had many Luigis acting out on their frustrations by now.
Instead, we have extremist right-wing groups on terrorist watch lists because they align themselves within their tribes and stoke their hatred toward those they blame for their woes. Occasionally, their outbursts gain public attention, but mostly, they’re made manifest in the ongoing and almost daily mass murders of innocent citizens and schoolchildren.
While the extreme right acts out their anger in unfocused ways, the left is targeted specifically on the causes of their anger. While the right victimizes anyone who doesn’t capitulate to their dogmatic adherence to the power wielded by those most responsible for victimizing them, like Stockholm Syndrome candidates, the mostly non-existent “extreme left” campaigns for economic justice through programs that restore equity.
Conflating the two as being identical is worse than oversimplifying a complex issue; it’s empowering the conditions that give rise to the hatred one seeks to demonize. It serves the narrative of a culture war perpetuated by the ownership class to divide the people further and distract them from the thefts perpetrated against them.
The irrational conflation made within this question merely functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy in which one declares a bullet wound fatal while stabbing the patient in the heart with a hunting knife to dig out the bullet.
This question is like accusing people of being jealous of Elon Musk’s money when the reality is that they hate white supremacists who install puppet rulers to destroy nations to attain their goal of empowering themselves at the expense of impoverishing the world. It’s a rather short-sighted attack on reality and the countless victims suffering needlessly in service to gluttonous powers.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Imagine that millions lose their jobs due to AI. Is there a way for those who have lost their jobs to effectively declare war on AI?”
Well, that’s pointless.
People will not lose their jobs because of AI but because corporations save money on labour costs.
AI is a tool, and the argument that ammosexuals love to barf up applies here: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
AI doesn’t kill jobs. Capitalists kill jobs because they can and are incentivized by it within a system that worships personal wealth above all.
We, as citizens, kill jobs through our apathy and through our empowerment of those who prioritize their material benefits at the expense of the many they can exploit.
We bring this upon ourselves by not having a coherent social development roadmap. We allow our societies to grow by chaos rather than responsible systems management strategies.
We empower our leaders through a reactionary process of social development rather than a strategically reasoned and proactive process.
Sadly, authoritarian regimes are far more successful along this vector than democracies because their decision-making is limited to small, centralized powers.
This is part of the reason that the public has been increasingly questioning the value of democracy while looking toward authoritarian models to solve our problems for us.
Sadly, the solution for democracies to be far more effective in mobilizing social development in a coherent and unified direction is entirely contingent upon the quality of the education the public receives.
For instance, the transition to a fully automated society is an inevitability. There is no point in resisting it. We would all be much better off by leaning into it and demanding we adapt our systems to manage the transition better so that we can mitigate collateral damage.
Instead, we are experiencing a chaotic transition led by random powers following personal visions motivated by personal benefit rather than social good.
If our education systems provided a more comprehensive insight into social development, much of the public would be engaged in the political process in strategic rather than reactionary ways.
We would be more unified as a people in identifying trends and developing coherent strategies for successfully managing the challenges we face.
Instead, we are burdened by a dearth of education that reduces a population into cheerleading camps driven by emotionality that can be characterized as juvenile reactions against authorities. Considering how democracy means each person is a governing authority member, this is beyond an asinine apprehension of how one’s government works or how it can be made effective.
Democracy demands engagement, yet our apprehension of engagement is limited to how many likes one gets on one’s post. That’s not even remotely resembling engagement.
That’s like claiming every celebrity walking a red carpet and waving at the throngs is socializing with friends.
Sadly, part of the problem has been deliberately cultivated by the capitalists who want us distracted enough from the sausage-making process to allow them to remake human society into their image.
They have been succeeding remarkably within the U.S. as it has become a dystopian corporatocracy that prioritizes gun sales over the lives of children and billionaire profits over the healthcare needs of citizens.
The public has been so conditioned to prioritize profit at all costs that they will fight to preserve a billionaire’s right to kill people for profit.
We can’t govern ourselves in a democracy if all of our time is focused on survival and profit-churning. Most of us don’t care to be involved in the decision-making process, which would be okay if we could trust our information systems to prioritize informing people over chasing profits.
Instead, we have media that has become a singular, massive entity of public influence predicated upon churning conflict to maintain attention justified by revenue increases.
Instead of informing the public on issues of criticality to the future of the people, we have this kind of incendiary rhetoric from an attention whore indulging in shock stupidity to justify their salary increases by ginning up the rubes to create conflict.
Less than one hundred years ago, this kind of crap would be shut down immediately because it would be considered a precursor to war.
Instead, the attention-seeking mentality justified by the profit (and power-seeking) motive does not care about the casualties created by irresponsible language.
The value of human life has been downgraded, if it ever mattered to society, to a level that’s no greater than the Roman arenas when people were killed for entertainment.
If we don’t start asserting some standards on coherent behaviour that cultivates the best of us as a species, we will continue careening headlong into chaos.
Humans can take only so much abuse before they break. Everyone can break, and people like Watters are playing with fire. There’s no way he will be safe again crossing the border into Canada because of his disgusting language. Some might argue that any aggressive response against him is unjustifiable, and that may be valid, but it doesn’t change how humans behave when aggrieved. I’m confident few Canadians will give him a warm reception for his remarks if he ever crosses the border. At best, at least from my perspective, he’s earned a bloody nose for his garbage.
This kind of bullying rhetoric is toxic to society and is a betrayal of the social contract.
The acceptability of this nonsense and its prevalence is why we have no coherent strategy for managing our transition into a fully automated society. The acceptability of this kind of incendiary distraction from critical information the public needs to make proper decisions to minimize casualties in our transition will create unnecessary casualties. This kind of thinking is what permits bigotry to determine outcomes that dramatically affect lives.
This kind of nonsense is why this question exists in so many forms everywhere and why I’ve already answered this question in several forms by now.
The issues are not complex, but they are made so because we’re not talking about them where we need to be talking about them. We’re allowing jackasses to troll for reactions in “respectable mainstream media” that we would mute and block online if they were individuals and not expensively dressed and cosmetically pampered media personalities.
We are being betrayed by the Fourth Estate each and every day — and to the degree that a majority of the world now believes the U.S. is a tragic case of end times for a nation that has become so corrupt, it can never be trusted for leadership in the world again. However, anyone may parse the 2024 election, and one cannot ignore the role of the media in installing a monster in the top job for the nation.
If you genuinely want to declare war against the loss of jobs, then you need to take it to those who benefit from displacing jobs. You need to start pressuring the billionaires and the corporations they benefit from while ripping off the public through tax avoidance schemes.
Instead of war, you should demand responsible management for an unavoidably dramatic and traumatic societal transition by insisting on the only sane solution to this period in human history, UBI, as a starting point toward sanity in our social development.
The worst thing about where the world is at in this transition is that the next four years are being defined by a parasitic presence seeking to empower further those who are disempowering the working class while replacing workers with automated solutions to toss millions out onto the streets to fend for themselves.
We must stop blaming AI for job losses because it’s just a gun in the hands of mercenaries.
An 11-year-old trying to generate $100 daily is a travesty of epically dysfunctional proportions for society.
That’s a friggin horror show straight out of a Dickens novel.
An 11-year-old should be playing dress-up and letting their imaginations soar, not concocting survival schemes.
As much as I can feel compassion towards whatever circumstances motivate you in this direction, I’m also highly disgusted by them.
This question makes me want to pull out guillotines and give billionaires free haircuts below the neck.
The problem you face is that you have no leverage to make that amount of money daily.
That means you will have to spend every waking moment focused on generating that amount of money by performing services for people who will treat you like dirt. Many won’t even pay you for a day’s work because you cannot force them to pay you.
You will become an embittered sociopath by the time you hit twenty. That will make you able to justify ripping off everyone you encounter as you learn to treat people like marks and evolve as a predator in society.
I don’t know what solutions might be available, but selling lemonade won’t work. Door-to-door sales of products might work, but that exposes you to predators.
I’m not even sure it’s legal for you to earn money in an employment capacity. Laws in your area may be different, and if you’re American, child labour is just around the corner with a Trump presidency.
Even worse is that making yourself available to generate revenue exposes you to the ugliest of predators who would choose to use you as a playtoy for inhumanly sick and twisted people.
Damn, but this question severely bothers me.
You’re a frigging child.
You should have a childhood with friends, playing ball outside in the sun at the park with other kids, not trying to make money.
Please try talking to a counsellor at your school because the way you’re thinking right now means you’re giving up your childhood and almost literally guaranteeing you’ll be chewed up and spit out by your early twenties. You’re nearly guaranteeing you won’t make it to your thirties.
Please talk to someone who cares and can help you because there’s nothing anyone online can do for you — and if anyone offers, you can’t be sure they’re not a wolf sizing you up as a tasty meal.
Within a capitalist system, one sells either one’s body or mind, which is called employment.
The only alternative to that is to pay people to use their minds and their bodies to create products that other people buy to generate revenue for them.
That’s right… either you’re a plutocrat with wealth galore and never have to sell yourself to anyone, or you’re a servant for someone else.
Women selling their bodies in today’s society is a very smart economic move because a great deal of money can be made in a very short time that can propel one from being a seller of their body to being a capitalist paying others to make money for them.
Women selling their bodies in today’s society are very pragmatic and have a clear advantage over men in generating revenue.
If you can earn upwards of six figures for a couple of hours per day of on-camera nudity, the problem isn’t women selling their bodies but your disconnect with the capitalist system you’re living within.
IOW, you may want to shame women for making that choice, but it is a choice because men have made it one. It’s not a bad choice because of women. Women choose to benefit financially in ways no longer available to most working-class people.
Perhaps if we paid school teachers more than hedge fund managers, we’d find people aligning their economic decisions more closely with moral values. In a society that steadily strips away economic choice, you can’t complain about the people who choose options you find uncomfortable. After all, they’re chosen as options because living wages no longer are.
What’s truly sad about all of this is how little people comprehend implications that stretch far past the ones that immediately impact them… and that’s not a phenomenon limited to the little people; the captains of industry we rely on for leadership in society are just as bad at failing to see past their navel… possibly even worse than the majority, although, from my biased perspective, they have a greater responsibility to rise to their status.
“To whom much is given, much is asked of in return.”
Stop crapping on the women getting rich from their birth lottery winning because benefitting from birth lotteries is the world we have created.
If you need to crap on something, crap on that.
The women getting rich by making horny incels happy are not the problem in society.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Could taxing Elon Musk and other people with massive fortunes 80% be the solution to paying down the national debt in the USA?”
The answer is quite simple and beyond evident to anyone with eyes and a mind that’s capable of connecting simple dots from a simple table of numbers:
Here are a few points to address regarding regurgitated soporifics routinely employed by the enablers in the crowd.
Taxing the billionaires won’t be enough money. — Well… DUHHH!!!! That’s not the point. The point is multifold, but let’s cover some leading characteristics. a. Force Multiplier and b. Speed of Money
A healthily functioning economy is highly contingent upon “the speed of money flowing” through the system — like arteries in a human body. The more plaque there is that obstructs the flow, the less healthy the system is and the more prone to systemic collapse it becomes. The low tax rates that we have now and that we had leading up to the Great Depression encourage hoarding and are a leading cause of numerous social issues guaranteed to result in a dramatic economic collapse — mainly as automation speeds up.
The more money the bottom end of the economy has, the more demand for goods and services, and the more businesses grow in a feedback loop. Even more beneficial to the economy is that when more people have more resources to invest in themselves and their futures, more innovation is introduced into a system that feeds on innovation to grow.
These two concepts alone, together, make up for what the useful idiots who defend the hoarding billionaires who lack imagination for humanity’s future beyond building space penises fail to account for. It is bloody disheartening that trickle-down stars can so thoroughly blind people and make them so addicted to the taste of billionaire orifices to understand how their misanthropic stupidity is the equivalent of suicidal ideation for humanity.
The graphic above screams the economic solution in our faces.
The lower the taxes =, the more unimaginative parasites and predators horde = the more sociopathically stupid they become =, and the more of a threat to our future as a species they become.
We create laws to mitigate the impact of excessive behaviours because we understand the destructive effects of unrestrained freedom on society. We know that if laws don’t exist to prohibit murder, many more murders would occur. The laws don’t end murder, but they function as a valve on society to mitigate and minimize the impact of widespread murder on society.
We create laws to restrain an entire host of issues resulting from the toxic extremes of human behaviour. Still, for some reason, the notion of building dynasties to rule humanity isn’t viewed as the threat that it is… even when the numbers add up to our extinction.
The main reason the billionaires should be taxed isn’t even economic, at least not quite directly the most important. The main reason they need to be restrained is that if they are not, they will destroy human civilization, and they don’t care because they have enough to build bunkers to ride out the apocalypse.
The people answering this question who are defending the atrocities of unrestrained wealth are as guilty of crimes against humanity as the MAGAts who are guilty of treason against the United States.
An astute argument was raised in response to this post that I’ve included here:
One point I would make is that taxing income and taxing wealth are two completely different things. Elon Musk may be worth $300 billion but that’s his wealth, not his income. If we start taxing wealth, be prepared to start paying taxes on the increased value of your house every time it appreciates in value. Politicians that tell you they would set a minimum of $100 million before taxing are telling half truths. They may set a limit initially but over time that can change. The original income tax was 0.5% of incomes over $1 million. How’s that working out for everyone ?
That argument sounds much like the fearmongering cynicism against raising the minimum wage — inflation will go up, or robots will replace jobs.
The reality is that property ownership is not the same thing as stock wealth, and there’s a fix for that — eliminate the corporate ownership of residential real estate.
Furthermore, the number of tax brackets that exist today is an unrealistic reflection of the historic levels of wealth disparity. For example, there are only seven tax brackets today. I checked to see how many existed during more realistic tax assessments. It was strange that learning how many tax brackets existed historically took more effort to identify than my bias believes it should.
This link below shows that in 1952, there were 28 tax brackets. Eliminating tax brackets benefits only the wealthiest in the land. The more tax brackets, the more granular the taxation rates and the less discriminatory tax rates are to the lower classes, and the more progressive taxes become — as they have always been intended to be. As it stands, the radical reduction of tax brackets has just been a means of waging a class war against the little people by allowing them to skip responsibilities that are inherently theirs while redistributing tax responsibility downward.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is it possible that the ability of the Western-style capitalistic system to create great individual wealth will eventually lead to its own eventual destruction?”
I clearly remember my only extended holiday trip out of the country to visit Mexico in the late 1980s — around 1988. It was a fantastic month-long experience I had hoped I would do again within a few years while I was eager to explore the world. I had been living at that point, under the illusion that stability in my income would continue indefinitely while growing year by year as I applied my efforts diligently to what I was doing for employment.
At that point, I worked as an “Educational Counsellor” (according to HR) on the SAIT campus in Calgary, Alberta — a more familiar title for those with experience in post-secondary residence life would be “Residence Life Co-ordinator” — of which I learned many things. In this case, I realized job titles might be universal, but the roles vary dramatically from environment to environment. For the uninitiated, my function was essentially “Community Development,” I wore several hats to succeed in that role while being informed that I had developed — on a green field — the most advanced program in Alberta. I was pretty proud of my accomplishments and still have many good memories from that time.
In my early to mid-twenties, I believed I had developed a firm professional grounding that I could build a successful career for my future. That was less the case than I had hoped because I didn’t follow a defined career prescription and chose to carve out a path unique to my specific interests. There are many reasons for divergence from choosing the road more travelled, but they constitute a divergence from the opening sentence of this answer.
Rather than emulate Grandpa Simpson, I’ll say capitalism isn’t a formula or a universally applicable prescription anyone can follow and achieve great results if they stick to their map. The world I grew up in was filled with people who applied themselves throughout a forty-to-fifty-year stint in a role many hated but stuck with because they had mortgage payments and a family to feed. They could maintain their commitments for so long because the carrot of retirement at the end of their trek meant mortgage-free home ownership.
The first winds of change to that dynamic began to blow around the time I managed to see a small part of the world that was foreign to me. Ronald Reagan was president then, and his betrayals of the working class hadn’t been felt or predicted because the heyday of tax cuts left a lot of cash on the table for people to party it up. It wasn’t until the spend-like-a-drunken-sailor party began winding down that the hangover of austerity began kicking in — then came the dramatic downward slide of uncertain futures.
Lifetime jobs began to disappear as fast as the unions started disappearing.
At any rate, this was all academic to me at a time when I was excited to go on a month-long excursion to an exotic tropical locale that I had been familiar with from books but was eager to experience first-hand. I spent a couple of months in preparation for my trip by learning Spanish as best I could — which was relatively easy for me, having been raised in a Portuguese-speaking household. In several cases, it was more challenging for me to separate the two languages while I spoke. I had to think about my word choices to realize I may have used an unfamiliar Portuguese word when greeted with a quizzical expression.
On the other hand, it was like music to my ears when I heard a Spanish word identical to the Portuguese version of the concept. “Bastante” was such a word that made my heart jump in realization of how much both cultures have in common. The locals seemed to appreciate my efforts at communicating with them in their language and, at times, treated me like one of them. My travelling partner at the time received no such courtesy and was open about expressing her disdain toward this dynamic. For the record, I did try to help her learn the languages alongside me. However, she wasn’t very interested because she felt we would encounter enough English-speaking locals to manage without all that trouble.
Ironically, this was also my first experience with Americans abroad. I learned why many Americans affix Canadian maple leaves to their luggage when travelling abroad. I found it very easy to pick out an American from a crowd in Mexico. This isn’t to say that all were quite so brash and boorish in their entitlement, but every time I witnessed someone behaving in an overtly aggressive manner, it was always an American. To be clear, my point isn’t to trash Americans in general because I’ve known several who are decent people, but we can’t ignore the psychosis plaguing the nation at the moment without lying to ourselves about how much of it has existed for a long time. It had just never been so apparent before the afflicted began donning their colours in a political alignment of hatred as we have now.
At any rate, Mexico was and is a capitalist country, and that’s what this answer to the question intends to address. Of the many things I noted and was in awe of, such as the culture and witnessing with my popped open eyes, and the marvellous artworks of notables like Diego Rivera’s murals, was that the nature of its capitalist culture stood in stark contrast to what I had experienced in the much more subdued Canadian environment.
For example, my younger and naive self was quite shocked to see armed guards outside and inside every bank and shop that sold luxury goods like jewelry. This was in the “Zona Rosa” (Pink Zone) in Mexico City — a multi-block area expressly set up for tourist accommodations. Poverty was rampant, and street vendors, known as “ambulantes,” were everywhere outside the Zona Rosa in Mexico City that we travelled who set up tables at the train stations. (I remember being excited to see the Metro Station area we used as our starting point to our daily destinations a couple of years later in the 1990 movie Total Recall.) Walking around Mexico City in parts was like walking through a gigantic outdoor flea market where one could buy from an assortment of cheap electronics, music CDs, and crafts.
We travelled a lot by bus on excursions outside Mexico City while there for about one week. Each time we boarded a bus or when the bus stopped at locations along our route, three to five vendors wearing strapon trays filled with goods stepped on board to make their rounds and entice people to buy sticks of gum, candy, breath mints, and what have you of small goods they could carry.
(This is a screen grab from a video on a NYC subway that I found while searching for vendors at transit stations in Mexico. The hustle-culture trend from impoverished nations to the south has moved Northward. During my visit to Mexico, this was such a common event that no one responded with the shocked surprise and suspicion seen in this video. There would have been at least two or three other candy vendors on this subway if it had been the Mexico I experienced.)
This was the definition of a “hustle culture” before the term was coined.
Every poor person was a budding entrepreneur.
Mexico was dealing with serious political issues that were mainly responses to the widespread poverty that existed then. I remember hearing news of a Zapatista uprising nearby when we stayed in Oaxaca for a time before arriving at our final destination in Puerto Escondido, a beautiful and secluded beach resort.
At this beach, I experienced my most stark introduction to the world of capitalism through the lens of poverty.
I had been lazily falling asleep under a tree on the beach when I felt something graze the top of my head. I initially swatted away what I thought was an insect, but it continued to flicker on the top of my head. When I opened my eyes to see what was going on, I saw what must have been a barely eighteen-month-old child wearing only diapers and holding a wire coat hanger with handmade bracelets attached to it.
I was pretty confused by the scene as it presented itself to me, and then I saw a woman standing about ten metres behind him with a smile, nodding her head and pointing to the child. That was when I registered that this child was a street vendor in the making and his mother was using him as emotional leverage to make sales.
That’s the image I can’t get out of my mind when I think of capitalism.
Capitalism is a promise made to the desperate to survive that they can succeed if they’re willing to be creative and put in the effort to work at selling either product or themselves to get their material success.
Unfortunately, it’s a promise made by the Lucys of the world to the Charlie Browns of the world that they, too, can kick the football over the goalpost if they concentrate enough and put all their effort into making that magic kick to achieve their dreams.
The desperate to survive have no choice but to play the game while knowing after a while and after having the football yanked away at the last microsecond before each kick attempt that capitalism is a game played at their expense.
There have been too many times in my life when that magic kick was within my reach, and it was yanked away by some greedy sociopath who decided their desires outweighed the needs of the many. Their Lucy attitude was rationalized in the same terms every person who combines psychopathy with manipulation as their vocational strategy for material wealth does; collateral damage is justified as the cost of doing business. If people go bankrupt as a consequence of some decision to benefit personally, then it’s their fault for making a bad choice.
Because we have put no restraints on greed, capitalism will fail, not because capitalism is flawed but because humans are flawed in their social contract-betraying greed. Moreover, humans lack the desire to regulate greed, which has always resulted in the harshest lesson in life, as history has repeatedly informed us and that the Brian Thompsons of this world have been ignoring.
There are many more Luigis among us, and if the perceived solution for the billionaires is to beef up their security, they will also regret not taking the road less travelled… not because anyone wants that. Victims only ever want justice.
“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t big businesses reduce profits instead of increasing prices when forced to raise wages?|
Never in the history of generating income for oneself has anyone ever said, “Gee… I think I earned too much money. I should give some of it back.”
The answers you’ve gotten essentially echo the above sentence.
For example, many companies, like Walmart, deliberately underpay their people by enforcing tactics like union-busting and denying employees full-time status to permit them to qualify for additional benefits.
What they save on employee costs forces their people to qualify for government benefits. So even if you’re not their customer, you still subsidize their operation through your taxes. Their major shareholders laugh at you and your question.
There is no way to solve this problem within the status quo. Even worse, this problem will continue to worsen as technologies in AI and robotics mature while automation replaces jobs to reduce employment costs even further.
The Walton family doesn’t care about how their employees might struggle. Jeff Bezos considers employees dying on his warehouse floor as collateral damage and the cost of doing business. A few thousand dollars toward a token effort to address optics is a low price to pay to force people into running according to the inhuman scheduling they’re forced to endure by filling orders according to a timed system.
Part of the problem with this question is that it presumes wages determine the costs of products that you pay for when that is the furthest thing from the truth. Wages are a minimal determinant in the price of products you buy.
Products are priced at the highest level that a market will bear. IOW, the price of a product is based on a formula applied to the speed at which shelves for that product are emptied. You have probably heard of the phenomenon of “supply and demand.”
The more demand for a product, the easier it is to justify its increased cost. The company knows it will still sell its product but get a higher margin, growing annual revenue and making it more attractive to investors. In turn, its stock value increases, and it appears much more successful as a company doing business in the marketplace. The entire system is geared around pricing products as high as possible while reducing costs as much as possible. The cost of labour is considered the most significant repeat cost of an operation, so it’s always targeted for reduction. Capital costs are written off in tax deductions, so a one-time purchase far exceeding the cost of labour for the year is still cheaper than labour because of that tax benefit.
When employers, capitalists, and their flying monkeys threaten higher costs for products due to higher wages, they’re just lying to the public to create the optics that their products require price increases that are functionally unnecessary but acceptable because people believe the justifications that are given. This happened due to the COVID lockdown when companies took advantage of public sentiment to indulge in price-gouging strategies.
Solutions to this and many related problems, such as the persistence and even increase in poverty, involve multiple strategies.
First, the downward pressure on wages can be addressed by eliminating the leverage of destitution that employers have with employees. Suppose an employment candidate doesn’t like the pay scale offered by an employer. In that case, they currently have a choice to begrudgingly accept being underpaid or face the risk of homelessness, starvation, and premature death. The solution to this problem is easily implemented through a Universal Basic Income. If candidates are free to turn down insufficient wages, then employers are put into a position of being more competitive to attract those they want on staff.
Corporate structures are an inherently antiquated holdover from medieval organizational structures. Corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that function like mini-autocracies. This dynamic existing within a democratic society cannot be but at odds with the society it operates within. It is in the “corporate DNA” to essentially function as a subversive entity within a democratic society that inevitably plots the demise of democracy and its overthrow to institute an oppressive two-class society of owners and serfs. The solution to this problem exists within worker co-ops.
Worker Co-ops (continued) Richard Woff is an economist and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts who provides compelling arguments in favour of worker co-ops. — Richard D. Wolff — Wikipedia — RDWolff –
4. (Numbering Bullets in this kind of HTML formatting truly sucks the big one) Finally, the primary solution to the greed infesting human behaviour today that functions as a threat to human society is to place a global cap on personal net worth. This is the most difficult of all challenges to implement because it’s already hard enough to have an entire nation agree on something. For the world to develop solidarity in this matter appears to be an unreal fantasy, but it may be the case that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are opening the door for the world to get on board with it. There is no valid argument against it, particularly since the only argument that once held validity — financing large-scale endeavours — is now rendered moot through crowdfunding. The more money that exists in the working class’s hands, the more able the working class can participate in a democratic economy rather than be subjected to the whims of psychopathic power-mongers. We must first drop this delusion that wealth is accrued only by “special humans” who stand above the rest of us. It’s becoming ever more apparent to the public that not only does power corrupt, it is the corrupt and corruptible who are attracted to power.
We are rapidly approaching a point of no return in which we will either quickly resolve the problems threatening human civilization or lose the ability to respond to a global environmental threat.
thotbag 