I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who wouldn't exist in this system.
"Let's just try a planned society one more time, THIS time will be different, look how nice and kind we are!" is a perfectly reasonable statement to many educated people today.
It's really an indictment of the education system.
As of today, I think Russia's idiotic invasion to Ukraine has destroyed those mind-games of a functioning society with very strong central planning. Even if it might truly include thoughtful, interesting ideas in countries that by now have a long, unbroken tradition with democracy, I guess people of the former Soviet Bloc are extra careful these days. YMMV, of course.
It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).
What practical difference is there in your life now that Musk is worth 200B versus when he had 100B or 0B? Probably your life is actually better because there is now Starlink and Tesla and you have more options.
Let's say we can push a button and grow the economy 10% in real terms, but some rich guy like Bill Gates gets his wealth not increased 10%, but 10x. Do we press it? Next time we press it, some other billionaire gets 10x-ed.
The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
That’s right there in my premise! So what? It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; and one or two get boosted to orbit for a generation or so.
Your arguments against Starlink are so silly I struggle to believe someone typed them into this site. Don’t you think one more internet option for most of the globe is a good thing? And yes, it directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors. It’sneven helping Ukraine defend itself against another totalitarian state right now.
None of which is relevant. It’s another internet option and therefore a good thing in and of itself. You don’t even have to like it or use it for it to make your life better.
No, it doesn't. It helps the people who are lucky enough to already have one foot in the race. But that's not remotely everyone.
> directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors.
Perhaps, although that's not really "directly". But then you're saying that we need to allow multi-billionaires in order to have things like Starlink. How about we stop ISPs from being stingy with their money and suddenly we don't need to rely on one rich person to save us from the other rich people? You seem to think that if the government takes some control/wealth out of the hands of these people, we're suddenly going to have stagnation. I don't see why it has to be all-or-nothing; we don't have to implement scary, spooky communism. You know what I think is even better than having Starlink? If we had Starlink and we didn't have exploitative, ruthless businesses that led to needing to have Starlink as it is now. It would just be the new technology that Comcast or Verizon made, without the weird "Elon Musk will save us all" fanfare.
Apart from land, Inheritance and seizing power, individual and community wealth comes from what you create and invest in
We simply don't know if a different system could produce the same, because the few attempts we had were either corrupted or actively sabotaged. I'd argue if we look at China we actually can see how something other than capitalism can improve people's lives: hundreds of millions raised out of poverty through basic planning.
Another aspect is that many of the issues with previous attempts at something other than capitalism happened without the technology we have today. This would change everything.
> The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
Of course it would be if there were zero bad consequences from it. But every time you press that button more people starve, the planet dies faster, workers conditions deteriorate, more people go homeless and so on.
But the big issue with your entire premise is that growing the economy means we improve people's lives. That's exactly the issue with the wealth gap: it doesn't. The economy right now basically only grows for the rich, not for everyone else. It's always money being siphoned from the bottom into the top.
It's very easy to pretend that everything is alright when you are in a privileged position, but the main reason 1st world countries like the US "grow" is by exploiting the poorer countries. You get access to better living standards at the cost of child labor in another country, deforestation, workers without a living wage or all the other nastiness that we don't want to know about.
There's no free lunch. It's the same siphoning of wealth, at all levels.
Monkeys living in a cave could drastically improve their lives by banging rocks together and making simple tools. Another big improvement comes from fire. Again when the rocks are stacked into buildings. By having more rocks, and arranging them more intelligently, we can hugely improve life. This is economic growth.
Your arguments against growth fail: first you say “other systems” (they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned) can cause growth just as well as capitalism. Second you say growth is bad because the environment. Third you say that only rich people get the growth anyway. Fourth you say growth comes from siphoning wealth from the poor.
Well, I have news for you. The people who benefit most from growth are the poor. In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
- the state left the farmer alone for five whole minutes and it turns out he managed to grow some actual food when he didn’t have to pay so many bribes, taxes, and obey 1000 regulations
- technology improved business and trade, so mom and dad can buy food now
- some guy named Bill Gates donated mosquito nets and medicine and genetically modified crops that have all the vitamins.
Your ideas are rooted in ancient, pre-growth economic models. Poor people simply aren’t a good source of wealth; otherwise why aren’t dictators who do seize their wealth from the poor indredibly rich & celebrated? Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
> In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
And that's great! But it's not a given, and global climate change also has a huge impact on geographies. And clearly, Mr. Beast was actually doing something when he paid for a bunch of wells to be built in Africa. The wells don't just come out from economic growth magically, unless maybe if you wait fifty years and more people die in the meantime. Mr. Beast is rich, which is why he could have wells built.
Saying that capitalism promotes economic growth may be true, and saying that economic growth lifts everyone up may be true, but the timescales and proportions don't match up to what many would consider fair, and our current model of capitalism isn't necessary for economic growth. That economic growth has benefitted them is less a boon of capitalism than of economic growth in general, so don't conflate the two. Also, should we talk about all the people in Africa and elsewhere who are employed at a pittance to make clothes, harvest crops, and sift through AI training data?
> Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
https://scribe.rip/bc-digest/the-xerox-thieves-steve-jobs-bi...
Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) profitting from the work of people at Xerox. Maybe not outright theft, but they're clearly not tech gods who somehow had everything planned out.
https://investinganswers.com/articles/how-did-bill-gates-bui...
Don't have a source for this right now, but Amazon has used many underhanded business practices involving driving other businesses out of town. It's also a thing Walmart was known for.
https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
The details emerald mine stuff seem hard to discern, so take that with a grain of salt.
I'm not saying that Bezos, Musk, or Gates have done nothing useful and they're just lucky all the way. At least Bezos and Gates, I acknowledge that they did had an entrepreneurial spirit and could grasp their opportunities well. But people who have a lot of money or are in a wealthier country have an outsized proportion to people who don't, there are numerous instances of unscrupulous business practices, blah blah. To say that they are producers is right, but they aren't the pinnacle of human excellence. People who were oppressed and live in squalor, people whose inventions are taken without due credit, people who are expendable laborers. Bezos, Musk, Gates aren't merely a product of themselves and their wit. They were already placed above most due to the circumstances of society, and as they succeeded more they gained disproportionately more power to continue climbing up.
I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it.
Most people read somewhere that the USSR failed because of their planned economies, therefore it doesn't work. They had so much more going wrong that simplifying why they failed with "planned economy" is preposterous.
Not to mention capitalists conveniently forget all of the failed capitalist experiments. Perhaps because now the bigger capitalist countries benefit from exploiting those same countries.
From all the answers I've seen you give in this thread, it's clear you're very deep into the capitalist mindset. It really seems you don't even attempt to consider alternatives. You have your winner and everything is a confirmation of that. I would earnestly ask you to reconsider your position. Really read up on the subject.
There is no perfect solution, but the current one is absolutely unsustainable by definition. There is no infinite growth, and the pursuit of it has now reached the point where it only harms everyone that is not at the top. We could save the planet, we could house all the homeless, we could end famine, but we choose not to because it's not profitable. I personally can't look at that and think: that looks reasonable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.
The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show country despite being "democratic"?
This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding
Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part.
That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death.
That’s what happens when both sides are spinning the same propaganda.
BTW I’m equally not a fan of Marxist material dialectic as I am the trotsy-lenin unholiness or the American oligopolies.
We need a true state-free attempt at anarcho socialism but that’s nearly impossible as such a concept fundamentally threatens the basic structure of the modern state.
In no revolution are the poorest and weakest persons ever benefited it’s only typically been to the benefit of some small group they just recycles hands so in fact, the last thing I want is some kind of hard break.
No, I’m an anarcho syndicalist. Which is a gradual reappropriation of the means to worker collectives slowly and peacefully.
“enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever“
This assumes a lot about the foundational structure of the environment these agents are operating within
Unless you address who reaps the benefits of commerce then its just the same situation with slightly different tyrants
What you describe is precisely the structure of what exists now - but you’re not satisfied with the rates
That's something I hadn't thought of before. I suppose the part of the solution that addresses that would go hand-in-hand with TFA?
So for example, if I own a table saw and my neighbor doesn’t and needed one for his labor, anarcho-syndicalism would suggest that if my saw was not planning to be used for a day, and he uses it for a day of creation, then the neighbor owns 100% of the resulting value. Much like if you rented a tool from Home Depot.
That makes sense and there’s no reason to believe that simply because I own a fallow tool, would benefit even equally from the labor.
Now look at how companies are created they are created in such a way that 100% of the value is retained by the organization and labor does not get to set its own rate. It Hass to simply be responsive to the rate offered by the organization decoupled from an alienated from, the labor that I’m inputting into it.
This isn’t accidental it’s a type of accounting that assumes labor inputs are not valued based on the productivity outcome they are simply, and only based on the relative bargaining power of the respective organizations.
This is why you see corporations, so aggressively fight the concept of collective bargaining because it creates the power dynamic that is actually appropriate for equitable relief, but reduces the amount that the more powerful organization can determine the relationship between the less powerful individual.
So anarcho-syndicalism is really about ensuring the individual worker cannot be put into a position of deprivation or suffering such that they have so little relative bargaining power in labor production that they can only choose between oppressive tyrants.
The key fallacy that people love here is that it’s all about relative deprivation so people have exceptionally varied views on what is considered oppressive or what a lifestyle would look like that is, let’s say inequitable.
Often times and you’ll see in many threads is the argument that “Actually we’re objectively more comfortable and well off that really, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything because you’re not starving to death”
The problem here is that it’s a completely separate argument than the argument for long term concentration of power, and who is actually controlling the economy, and has the ability to be flexible and create a life free of intermediaries that are confiscating your labor.
It all comes back to who has the power to set their own destiny in the economy, and the reality is, it’s always been small groups of exploiters who are able to do whatever they want to do because they’re taking advantage of the relative deprivation around them to not make things actively better for everybody. The people in situations like this, take no responsibility for their surroundings, their community their environment, they simply say how do I take advantage of this environment to my own best ends, and if that is the foundational conceit of a society, then you will not have a society that long and history tells us that society is built on this go through this political cycle, which so far has been basically every society in recorded history, unfortunately.
Anyway, there’s a lot of Intersectionality here with, for example, global finance, how this got really amplified after Bretton Woods two and the kind of fiatization, and then financialation of all possible value so there’s a giant kind of systematic thing here that is encoded in a lot of these as foundational assumptions in western capitalist economics.
The reason there has been no successful implementation of it is that the process of enacting it is inherently fragile. And some bastard is going to exploit that fragility.
Then you're screwed and we end up with the bountiful historical examples that people love to cite & then others refute as "that's not real xyz-ism".
You're absolutely correct that they're not "real" xyz-ism. And that should make you very worried about supporting something that has the same or similar end goals as those initiatives once had.
Socialism is nothing more than extending democracy beyond the state to the workplace. It is no more collectivist than democracy is in any other economic system. And like any other form of democracy, it is naturally opposed to authoritarian rule, not conducive to it.
As such, the problem with socialism is not at all that it's easy for it to fall into dictatorship. The problem is that it is hard to convince the rich to allow it to form without aggression, since it necessitates them losing much of their power. The same problem that democracy faced: kings rarely step down, and bloody revolutions are typically worse than the status quo (and you can never be sure what will happen after one).
Social democracy has numerous successful implementations (eg Scandinavia).
But the more “hardcore” collectivist -isms have from what I can recall basically zero successes, despite numerous attempts.
Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
And it’s easy to argue (EDIT: more like assert without evidence) that cherry-picked aspects of the status quo for the last forty years is the linchpin of everything.
Asserted without evidence.
Shortly thereafter CEO pay started to skyrocket. There's no evidence CEOs started doing a 10x better job running companies but their pay sure as heck increased, 10x then 100x!
Countless studies have shown that workers are not motivated by money beyond around low six figures.
There is no reason to suspect a CEO earning $100 million is 100 times more dedicated to the job than one earning $1 million dollars.
God, don't threaten me with a good time.
You are swapping cause and effect. First comes the item, then the compensation.
That doesn't measure underemployment, nor does it measure people who've given up on finding work. That's why it needs to be considered alongside things like the labor force participation rate - which has been on a downward trend since 2000 - and alongside wage growth, which has lagged below inflation since the 70's.
> January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023.
Which jobs, specifically? At what pay? Destroying a $50k/year job to create two $25k/year jobs ain't progress.
Wage growth beat inflation by almost double most months last year, rising around 5-6% YoY each month vs ~3-4% inflation. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...
This focus on unemployment is absurd. It has nothing to do with the wealth gap.
More people working, but always with less wealth, while companies keep getting richer.
We could as a society literally end unemployment at any time by redistributing some of the wealth. We don't because it's more profitable to have people worrying if they will be able to eat every month.
Wage growth has lagged behind inflation and cost of living since the 70's. There have been multiple job market crashes in my lifetime; I entered the workforce in the middle of the 2008 recession. There have been multiple layoff waves since COVID alone, during each of which companies would lay off significant fractions of their workforce despite making record profits for no discernible reason other than "well everyone else is doing it so we'll do it, too". How much longer of a time frame do you expect me to examine?
> Expecting a system to be getting strictly better every second of every day is utopian.
Employers have been increasingly shafting their employees for decades. I expect a system to not spend multiple decades getting worse.
> shutting down legacy industries
My last two jobs were as a cloud infrastructure engineer. If even cloud computing is a "legacy industry" then the vast majority of the users on this website are utterly screwed.
If you're talking about people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates who have giant wealth because of their investments in businesses, then arguing that they should have that wealth taken away would literally take money out of the coffers of businesses that are currently using that money for things like payroll.
The GP is correct -- these people are not sitting around on a vault of gold like McDuck. Their money is in the economy, doing stuff. That's what investments are. That's why investors exist, and why they get a cut of the profit for taking a risk and lending their money to industry.
Which are the examples driven by extreme wealth (note: not just regular 1%er wealth and not people who became extremely wealthy - I mean people who expressed that the reason they created something was because they knew it would make them extremely top-0.01% wealthy)?
That's because for 99.999% of people, being paid money has utility. So the payment provides some benefit for them. But for someone with $2B, my argument is precisely this: whatever it is that drove them to make $2B (inveting the best product, or whatever) is NOT what drives them to make the NEXT $1B.
> you can't just take all their future wealth and expect them to continue > they will stop the instant they stop making money, just like any other person.
You cabsolutely can, and they absoluteluy will not.
That's the whole point again: assuming a high enough "cap", we are talking about people who will never not be extremely wealthy. Whether the cap is $100M; $1B or $10B can be argued, but the central point is that the utility of more wealth is diminishing. That's why me giving you $1B would make a massive difference, but then me giving you another $1B would make almost no difference to your lifestyle/happniess/whatever measure you choose.
No they don't.
Satya has a much lower cap earning money at Microsoft then Bill or Balmer did.
Does that make him a worse CEO? Does it mean he is less dedicated?
Very few people who are competitive are competitive because of money.
They want to be known as the best, have the most power, the most influence, run the largest company, their name the most number of history books.
Money is a rough proxy for power, but, to give an example, pharmaceutical companies have an outsized influence in American politics versus how much their CEOs are worth.
Heck for the vast majority of companies their leadership has 0% chance of becoming billionaires. Most industries are too low margin. That doesn't mean the leaders of those companies still don't want to win in their chosen market.
I’d rather do art or open source or go fishing.
(That’s not quite what you asked but I don’t know how many actual billionaires will read your comment so figured I’d chime in — to me it doesn’t seem unreasonable that calling wealth would change what people work on and how much they produce.)
Edison was famous for caring about money more than other inventors. One of his most famous quotes was “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” The guy helped found some of the largest companies of his era and died as one of the richest men in the world.
Who said anything about not being allowed to get rich? 10s of millions of dollars is rich by any measure.
People with positive inability to create wealth self-appoint to control the people that have demonstrable ability to create wealth. Doing so is the only way for the former to end up in control of wealth, again because they are incapable of generating it themselves.
It's a bit amusing that no one about the commie paradox - the group of people that profess the greatest ability to central plan and redistribute wealth is entirely devoid of individuals with a track record of creating wealth. A reasonable person would expect a strong correlation there.