Just not allowing myself to behave like an envious little punk. I do see problems with the existing social systems, it’s just that being prevented from robbing those who have more is not a problem. It’s a very good design feature.
There’s no billionaire who didn’t steal from the hard work of others. Every billionaire is a scoundrel of some sort, a thug if you try to take their cash cow from them.
Billionaires have constantly stolen wages by not increasing wages in line with inflation for their employees. Most recent examples: Jeff Bezos, Fast food giants.
Dude obviously you are out of your league. Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard. But even if you aren’t ready to learn about Marxism…
Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart…
#1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages.
Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.
Please use your brain. Bezos’ company bans their sellers from selling lower somewhere else, forcing a monopoly on low prices for Amazon. Those companies and people make less money… Like… C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…
Google steals your data.
Apple bans companies from repairing their products.
Oil companies literally cause problems in the middle east in order to control gas prices…
CEOs are making TONS of money off of… stealing… war… propaganda…
All of this creates more profits, and takes more money from you or their employees. Literally takes no effort to look this up. You are being contrarian for no reason. Or you are deliberately creating propaganda, because even if you don’t believe in Marxism, billionaires are still, easily, obviously, objectively, stealing…
Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard.
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
If you don’t like the architecture of this with the owner and his employees, or many owners, look at cooperatives, a very old anarcho-syndicalist idea, which, believe me or not, does work. It’s not very popular, but cooperatives and things similar to them do exist. Like kibbutz in Israel (I’m sure there are more mundane examples).
I mean, it’s the same logic. Working as part of a system has different efficiency that working alone.
Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart… #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Only I don’t get how this is connected to capitalism. This actually (still being illegal, but being unlikely otherwise) utilizes trademark, patent and IP laws, which I’m against exactly because these are very notably not capitalist.
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life. Some enemies are orders of magnitude stronger than you. You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Same with Apple.
You are being contrarian for no reason.
That’s called the iterative process of improving oneself and the society around. I’m arguing so that we both could find and fix flaws in our worldview, only you are not even trying to do that, why?
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Powerful people can more effectively influence one center than many (that’s just logic and probability theory, nothing else). This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.
let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don’t. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don’t think my ideas are unique, and I don’t think they are hard to self-research. I’ll provide quick overviews as best as I can.
For example:
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.
Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I’m not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn’t you, or me. For now I’m going to chock it up to “politicians”, which in this case includes “lawmakers”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.
Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.
The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a “person” entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.
Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
This is asking the five “whys” of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.
–
Okay some other minor points
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
I didn’t say that…, I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is “worth it”. More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren’t rich. This is a different situation.
Also I’m very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform ‘worse’, even if it’s just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there’s a lot of difficulties with them.
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Yup, you are correct and you’re hitting a core ML idea. You can’t vote people out, you can’t ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.
I am very smart dot jpg
Just not allowing myself to behave like an envious little punk. I do see problems with the existing social systems, it’s just that being prevented from robbing those who have more is not a problem. It’s a very good design feature.
There’s no billionaire who didn’t steal from the hard work of others. Every billionaire is a scoundrel of some sort, a thug if you try to take their cash cow from them.
Name a billionaire who has stolen from you or somebody you know and describe how.
Billionaires have constantly stolen wages by not increasing wages in line with inflation for their employees. Most recent examples: Jeff Bezos, Fast food giants.
Arguably almost all of them since they all seem to engage in some unethical behavior or another for profit.
A better question is to name which ones haven’t.
This should make it even easier for you to name one.
Dude obviously you are out of your league. Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard. But even if you aren’t ready to learn about Marxism…
Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart… #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.
Please use your brain. Bezos’ company bans their sellers from selling lower somewhere else, forcing a monopoly on low prices for Amazon. Those companies and people make less money… Like… C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…
Google steals your data.
Apple bans companies from repairing their products.
Oil companies literally cause problems in the middle east in order to control gas prices…
CEOs are making TONS of money off of… stealing… war… propaganda…
All of this creates more profits, and takes more money from you or their employees. Literally takes no effort to look this up. You are being contrarian for no reason. Or you are deliberately creating propaganda, because even if you don’t believe in Marxism, billionaires are still, easily, obviously, objectively, stealing…
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
If you don’t like the architecture of this with the owner and his employees, or many owners, look at cooperatives, a very old anarcho-syndicalist idea, which, believe me or not, does work. It’s not very popular, but cooperatives and things similar to them do exist. Like kibbutz in Israel (I’m sure there are more mundane examples).
I mean, it’s the same logic. Working as part of a system has different efficiency that working alone.
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Only I don’t get how this is connected to capitalism. This actually (still being illegal, but being unlikely otherwise) utilizes trademark, patent and IP laws, which I’m against exactly because these are very notably not capitalist.
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life. Some enemies are orders of magnitude stronger than you. You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Same with Apple.
That’s called the iterative process of improving oneself and the society around. I’m arguing so that we both could find and fix flaws in our worldview, only you are not even trying to do that, why?
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Powerful people can more effectively influence one center than many (that’s just logic and probability theory, nothing else). This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.
let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don’t. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don’t think my ideas are unique, and I don’t think they are hard to self-research. I’ll provide quick overviews as best as I can.
For example:
Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.
Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I’m not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn’t you, or me. For now I’m going to chock it up to “politicians”, which in this case includes “lawmakers”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.
Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.
The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a “person” entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.
Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
This is asking the five “whys” of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.
–
Okay some other minor points
I didn’t say that…, I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is “worth it”. More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren’t rich. This is a different situation.
Also I’m very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform ‘worse’, even if it’s just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there’s a lot of difficulties with them.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
Yup, you are correct and you’re hitting a core ML idea. You can’t vote people out, you can’t ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.