That’s your opinion.
Property is make believe, each individual and/or collective gets to draw the lines wherever they see fit, if they draw them at all, and then we can discuss the implications and ramifications of drawing them here and/or there.
This is how I see it: just because you pay government to protect a place for you, doesn’t make it yours, if you rarely or never physically occupy or occupied it, than it’s a kind of theft from those who’re occupying it now.
That’s not the point, the point is this is fundamentally a capitalist system, contrary to your assertion that it isn’t.
Competition is also physical.
Capitalists have incorporated corporatism in order to further monopolize the economy.
The rich have money but the poor have numbers, we’ll just have to see which class wins out in the end.
Winning isn’t absolute tho, rather battles are won/lost, class warfare never ends.
There’s no utopia, only better/worse conditions for some/many.
I never said they were your responsibility, I said they were partly the responsibility of capitalists, and I gave reasons.
I’m not a Judeo-Christian either, not only am I an atheist, but I don’t believe we’re all equally responsible for everything bad or wrong that happens to people, that was never my point.
Some poor people are more responsible for their circumstances than others.
You paint the poor with a broad brush, but perhaps I paint capitalists with a broad brush too, some capitalist are better/worse than others, but as a whole it’s a bad, or at least a now largely obsolete system.
This isn’t about charity, it’s about taking back what’s arguably ours, mainly, but also about how we and the environment could probably do more good with it than they could.
The cost of living has gone up significantly more than wages have gone up.
I’m not sure if they’re mostly socialist, I’ll have to do more research on them, from what I know all western countries are basically degrees of capitalist.
I’m either an eco-socialist or an anarchist, what I am is in my signature.
There’s no such thing as an absolute win/win, but in my opinion my ideals would make life better for many-most people living today in the west.
Not all socialists think alike.
Originally socialists were pro-direct democracy and militias, that is to say, if government should exist at all, every able bodied citizen should be a politician, legislator and enforcer, and so pro-gun. I’m pro-gun.
While I hope the state can make life better in some ways, I don’t trust it as much as you think.
The only chumps here are the ones who vote in their own servitude and slavery.
It’s not just the fittest who survive, in nature or society, it’s also the luckiest.
Bill Gates made billions of dollars…but does that mean he’s millions of times better than the average joe?
Of course not, he may be a few times smarter, harder working and so on, but not millions of times.
He just happened to make a product that was a little bit better than everyone else at the time, but if he didn’t, if lightning had’ve struck him down instead, one of his competitors would’ve been a billionaire with their slightly worse product, or someone would’ve come along in several months and built a product just as good or better than Bill Gates.
So a lot of that was just being at the right place at the right time.
If all Bill Gates money was taken from him, and he had to start all over again, would all things align perfectly in his favor as they did in the past, so he could become a billionaire again?
I think that’s about as likely as lightning striking the same place twice in a row.
So money then isn’t really a measure of greatness.
Furthermore, it was the people below and around Bill Gates too, that made it all possible, not only was he standing on the shoulders of his employees and partners but on the shoulders of all Americans, of civilization itself, but because of how patents and property is defined, Bill Gates reaped much-most of the rewards.
So while Bill Gates is a great man for having done what he did, he is not a God, he is not actually worth millions of times more than the aveage Joe, that’s just how much he has, and while he should’ve been richly rewarded for what he did, billions of dollars is absurd.
Capitalism doesn’t strictly = merit, it’s also a kind of roulette, where even halfwits could, and often do strike it rich, just for being at the right place at the right time, like a lot of reality TV stars, or cranks, quacks, infomercial guys, who manage to get lucky turning their gimmicks into gold.
So let’s not pretend capitalism is just ‘doing God’s work’, the invisible hand is not the ‘hand of God’, it’s a cainso economy, societal roulette.
It wasn’t just Bill Gates intellect or work ethic that lead to that superior product, or even his colleagues, it might’ve been the food he was eating at the time, maybe it was a little healthier or gave him the right kind of energy, unbeknownst to him, maybe his personality quirks just happened to make him the right man for the right place/time, maybe it was his wife or girlfriend cheering him on, all these variables that were largely outside his conscious control that gave him the momentum he needed to accomplish what he did.
It’s all these little things, why one man beats another one day, many of them inside the man, many of them outside.
It’s kind of mysterious how people get rich/famous, there is no exact formula, obviously genes/memes, artistry, intellect, working hard and so on are part of it, but there’s also environment. A lot of it can’t be articulated or written down in a book, so much of it is out of our control.
That is no longer capitalism then, but is Corporatism. Capitalism drives prices of goods down, due to competing businesses, and drives wages up, again due to competing employers.
It’s somewhat entertaining to see all the excuses for one’s own spiritual and moral weakness people use to blame others for their own failures, and scapegoating away personal responsibility and accountability for failing to get ahead in life. It’s obvious very uncommon and rare for somebody to begin to take account of their own life, and, you are responsible for your own wage, your job, your career, your lifestyle, and the risks you make throughout life. Instead of looking up to those who become successful, of their own accord, they are instead shamed and successes are inverted into failures. “He was born into it” “He doesn’t deserve it” “What about everybody’s lack of opportunity” “Equality” No, these are all self-serving excuses, conjured up by weak souls and individuals who are, simply put, losers in life.
Winners don’t accept failure, but will keep on trying, keep on moving forward, keep on risking, despite the losses. That’s the American way, and the premise of western capitalism, the heroes who built the country from the ground up.
Sad to see such mentality in this forum, filled up by the opposite, quitter, loser mentality.
No the losers are members of the middle and working classes who’re working harder and harder for a standard of living that’s getting lower and lower year by year, decade by decade, expecting the opposite to miraculously occur.
On the one hand, we have to make do with the system we got, but on the other, we can also opt for a better one at the voting booth and in other ways.
In what world does this even happen?!
In a world of money cushions, that’s where. Let us at least be more realistic and not compare apples and oranges here.
Are you really going to sit there and listen to the likes of bill gates or zuckerberg giving you, a regular Joe Schmoe, a pep talk? If I can do it you can do it too! Please!
We live in the world where proper connections matter, and where money helps money: cnbc.com/2017/10/04/bill-ga … bucks.html
Become an activist, or a writer, try to join a union, or form one, take advantage of social services when you need to, shoplift from Walmart…
I never agreed to the rules of this game, they’re rigged in their favor.
When you live in a world where people turn to socialism, taxing, third-party interventions, all wanting to take cuts and pieces from the individuals (capitalists) who are successful then you know you’ve lost, and you’re on the wrong side of history. It’s easy to steal from others, by advocating for taxes and increasing taxes. It’s much more difficult to actually make money, profit, work hard, and owning up to failures, mistakes, losses. The capitalists are still the heroes of today. They’re not yet defeated, but hope does look dim, after reading this thread and the socialist advocates.
How many people are advocating for personal responsibility? Just me?? That’s it.
If a worker is not getting his/her wage, then don’t whine and bitch about it, demand a raise, or quit. The onus is upon you, not the employer. Or better yet, start your own business, see how well you do there. But these are words falling upon deaf ears. Nobody wants to do the ‘right’ thing. Everybody still wants to steal bites and crumbs of the pie. I understand that, because it’s addictive. In the US socialists already voted themselves about 22% of the pie, and want more.
I’m the anti-popular position here. If it were up to me, I would get rid of the government almost entirely, or entirely, reduce taxes down to 0-5%, and it only goes to military spending. No public education. No public roads. Private roads, tollbooths, privatize everything. More capitalism, more competition, not less. Strike out the minimum wage and child labor laws completey. If a 14 year old teenage boy wants to work then let him. That’s real education, not socialist liberal-left propaganda of the public education system, teaching kids to steal steal steal more of the pie.
You are all being a bit disingenuous and pedantic towards urwrong. The issue is not an exact dollar figure of $200, the fact is that accommodations can be had for cheaper than what most of you are assuming livable is, asian girl or not. What is livable anyways? Roof over your head and food in your mouth? What kind of roof? Or does it include transportation, entertainment, comfort, indulgence? A whole apartment for a person? Why is a room unreasonable? Do you mean the same “livable” benchmark as a minimum wage worker? Which is starting to get back to the original topic of this thread of raising minimum wage to $30 an hour. If $30 an hour is livable is this also what welfare and disability should pay out to? How would this not result in the halting of the industriousness of a nation? I am not saying that we shouldn’t review what level of “livable” we intend to provide, but a $30/hr equivalent is ridicule worthy.
Sorry, but anyone who has actually had to work hard, struggle, sacrifice for and to keep their place in the world understands this stuff intuitively. In fact, socialists’ lack of understanding of how healthy human societies function is the root of all their terrible ideas. The comment about keeping track of all the help someone didn’t deserve as a child is a perfect example. Your parents (assuming they weren’t dead beats) worked to earn enough “deserving” (aka “privilege” to leftists when trying to use the idea to their advantage) so that they could live a “livable” life according to the balance of their own abilities and desires. Privilege/deserving is EARNED, and as a child you are the direct result and only possible outcome of the choices your parents made and the actions they took. And it is the same for them and their parents, and so on and so forth. There is no randomness about it. It could only have happened that way because that is the way it happened. A parent spends their earned deserving on the child, and in a healthy culture/family there are no ledgers for this sort of thing. Likewise, the amount of deserving a parent or family patriarch/matriarch/bread-winner can spend or transfer to their child is of course limited by that which the parent has earned themselves to spend. This makes up part of what is a cultural inheritance as it occurs across a society’s population.
If you want to derail that by talking about rich people not earning their keep and just exploiting everyone or taking advantage of X loophole, then we can also talk about disability and welfare fraud, and in the case of your $30/hr per person idea we can speak directly to the examples you have given. So, one parent works full-time or both parents work part time, but if both parents work full-time but only one $30/hr income is actually required, then the parents could use the additional income to become rich by any number of means. This would be no different than your idea of greedy employers, the money comes from the people. If $30/hr is livable for a 4 person family, then isn’t $60/hr unreasonable to expect from the taxpayer for the same 4 person family, and if not then surely it won’t be unreasonable when they use that money to invest and become financially independent and no longer have to work and become the very rich people you are whining you aren’t one of? Like exactly how it is today? And if you think as you say that you would expect people who are currently making $30 an hour would get raises accordingly, then how do you expect you will maintain employment levels while simultaneously increasing costs to the employers? Could it possibly be that producers/suppliers have to raise their prices to compensate and then the precious $30/hr becomes the new $15/hr? Keeping in mind that if you fix taxation (even you yourself mentioned LOWERING taxes, fancy that, not very socialist of you. Just for the things you want, right?) there will be no need to impose a $30 min wage. The ironic thing is that leftist social experiments were responsible for the switch from comfortable one income families to required two or more income families today. Leftists are the people that blindly push for X change and then two generations down the road the same type of people start crying about the state of things. So they blindly push for another short-sighted change. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Those that cannot EARN their deserving exist only due to the compassion and earned deserving of others. This is also what is left of natural selection and darwinism. Socialists think they can usurp this earned deserving by taking it by force. They don’t understand that “socialism” occurs as a natural mechanism within a healthy and homogeneous society, usually within a family unit. If we fixed the things that appear in the first paragraph of the OP we would solve many of the problems (and others that the leftists are causing, like disintegration of traditions, morals and family values which religion and culture are downstream of) we have because the society would be more capable of taking care of itself as it once largely did. You wouldn’t need to mandate a $30 an hour minimum wage because the society would return to a state where one full or two partial incomes would provide enough deserving to support that system. Mandating a $30/hr minimum wage when the market is not ready for it not only forces an unnatural cultural state (which is why imposed socialism ALWAYS fails) it presumes the undeserved have a right to take from those that have earned deserving, and it presumes to elevate the virtue of compassion (of course in their own twisted and intolerant way) to the exclusion of all others . If you fix the actual problems and maintain a healthy society, those that earn deserving will support those that can’t/don’t to whatever level is healthy for that society. Sorry it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, but it is the height of stupidity and arrogance to think that we can out think a nature determined by our evolution that has ruled us since our very beginning, which by the way, we barely understand. Especially since forced socialism has been tried many times and always ends tragically. But you’re smarter than even that right? Socialists think they are more enlightened but they are still bound by human nature which includes stupidity, greed, dishonesty, vice, violence and hypocrisy. What’s the excuse we always hear when giving examples of failed socialist states? “That wasn’t real socialism, we know better than X, we will do it right”.
The exact dollar figures were the issue when he made claims about exact dollar figures. The feat was to live on $600 like wrong claimed was possible which he never showed in any fashion of budget how that would work out. There is no range of money beyond $600 when that is one’s budget, so wrong needed to provide what he specifically claimed regarding the $200 as well as the rest of his easy breezy use of that $600 to live high on the hog.
We used to have no minimum wage and child labour laws, no obligatory education, no welfare - we already know how it looks, just read a history book. You think you’re a Libertarian of sorts no doubt, but you’re unknowingly just advocating Feudalism, which it would turn into very quickly. Do Americans even get taught European history prior to their country’s hostile takeover? The most actually free countries in the world are third world shitholes, the experiments have already been done and still continue today - learn about Pinochet’s recent presidency as a good example - there’s very good reason why we don’t go for Tea Party nonsense in more developed parts of the world, where the best performing nations are actually more Social Democratic with welfare systems - fact.
If things were still like how you want them to become again, unless you have noble ancestry and statistically I’m willing to guess you don’t, you’d be working the fields or some modern equivalent as a serf and living in a shanty town, walking through streets glazed in human waste, dying early from easily treatable diseases like in the third world. Then you can work as hard as you like! After all, if you didn’t, you’d not provide enough for your vassals (essentially the military) and have enough left over to feed yourself and your family, which will be larger due to lack of education and to make up for all the premature deaths. Those in power in the West say North Korea, which resembles this, is Communist - it’s actually more Feudalist if people actually cared to learn the actual definitions of each term.
We’ve moved on, keep up! There’s a reason your position is anti-popular, particularly by the educated, who for some obviously conspiratorial reason tend to be left wing . It must be because they have no life experience (unlike the minority of right wingers also in education and the many left wingers who have experienced the world of work for many years, right?) and not because they actually know things!
The educated left even read about attempts at achieving Socialism as a gateway to Communism and all the difficulties in orchestrating such a revolution (the same difficulties with all the same violence that has always occurred throughout history when significant socio-economic change was attempted e.g. the hostile acquisition of America to install its notion of Classical Liberalism). As such we know the difference between something run by the people, and some top-down dictatorship that called itself “Communism” - I already explained and you sympathised with how progressive things are appropriated by the opposition to mean their opposite. We know it wasn’t actually Communism because we know what Communism actually is compared to that which it was named after, which failed horribly because it was actually Totalitarianism.
I’ve already explained the rationale behind what you’re still calling “taking cuts and pieces from the successful”. Necessarily, for every winner there is a loser - that’s fine. Let me repeat, let there be inequality and reward for the productive, but for God’s sake let there be controls to curtail the degree to which winners can absolutely dominate the losers. The unplanned market demonstrably can’t do it itself without its inbuilt, inevitable, periodic and catastrophic market crashes bringing the whole system back into the 3rd world, which they would without the unappreciated government safety nets that we enjoy (and suffer) today, just to re-level the playing field to an extent. In order to keep but also control inequality such that we can maintain some semblance of social mobility and utilisation of talent that would otherwise be lost to lack of opportunity, there needs to be redistribution - aka a wage expense to not only direct employees but also the rest of the economy for its indirect part in you acquiring all your riches as an employer - aka TAX.
Personal responsibility is inbuilt in my propositions here (even with application to capitalists! Crazy) - it is still very much required, you are not alone in its advocation. My point about the biology of behaviour is not to be overlooked however, it’s not as simple as just saying “take responsibility”, it’s pre-determined that many won’t just because of biology. You can’t avoid that, even if you were to arrange things such that they literally died out like in non-human species. Nature’s crap-shoot for excellence inevitably results in losers as well as winners, except we have the ability to allow them to live out a life of minimal dignity, we only need to choose to do so (the left) or not (the right).
Maybe I’ve not properly explained, but the pool of unemployment plays a necessary role in the economy. 1) There’s those who will never be fit for useful economic participation, the disabled, the elderly, infants etc. - we need to pay for them to stay out if anything. 2) There’s those who can be educated to be useful, we need to pay for that if they can’t themselves (teacher salaries need to be high enough to justify how difficult they can be, burnout is particularly high for such an essential job), and 3) there’s those who are able and willing to work but can’t get anything yet - this maintains a level of competitive strain for people to keep their job and work hard at it to justify their employment over someone who is after their job. The second category cannot be overlooked in case there is talent that would otherwise be lost, and I’m not in favour of the third - I don’t think fear is the optimal incentive to work, but this is the valuable role unemployment currently plays for our economy and it’s in our own interests to pay for it. It even helps stem inflation: see the Phillips curve.
But there’s also the overstated category of 4) “able but not willing”, which everybody likes to focus on. In reality, this group is going to exist: there will exist people willing to sacrifice their dignity, social status and their position on the ladder of sexual desirability (moreso with males) just to not have to work. On one hand you just have to accept that due to the importance of the first 3 categories, the 4th will exist as an unfortunate side effect and that’s just tough, because it can only be managed to a very limited extent without oppressive measures that spill over and negatively affect other parties too. On the other hand I’m absolutely in favour of personal freedom, including the freedom to not work - cue the incoming hate towards my position here. Admit this though: not all valuable productivity has its place within paid work - there is a lot of creativity that could go on here but can’t because the necessity to enter into paid work is so high. And yes, I support the right to live with minimal dignity despite being out of work and sacrificing social and sexual status like I said, I’m sorry. They are a minority and this is cheap to fund, just let them be. On the whole though, the unemployed are very very much worth their pay.
Finally, robots! Technological creativity is replacing human necessity in the workplace, it’s actually increasingly cheaper and better to not pay us to work, to even pay us to not work when a machine can. Back to my aversion to the third category, the further justification is here: if there wasn’t the pressure to accept a bum deal to perform unskilled work that this category is all after just to get a foot in the door, it would be more economical for employers to invest in machinery to do the job instead of having to pay higher wages just to reignite the incentive for this category to still try.
Again, pay the unemployed to not search for work if they don’t have something skilled to offer, pay for machinery to do it instead.
This is going to happen anyway - eventually to skilled work too.
Technology is encroaching more and more, the pool of unemployed will only grow as a result, particularly once a certain threshold is hit.
What will you rightists do then? Deny them welfare and let them suffer and starve just to prove a point about responsibility? Do you have an ounce of civility? Soon it will affect you types too, and what then? Will you then be in favour of welfare or suicide?
Accept reality. Leftism is necessarily the future because of this, any perceived rise in its popularity is only the beginning of an adjustment to the coming reality, whether or not such a rise is actually happening at all. The future is happening though.
I’ve stolen the following from someone young advocates of the right seem to worship at the moment: Jordan Peterson. He speaks of iterative trading games coming to adopt a pareto distribution where the median and modal wealth quickly approaches literally zero, and the end result is all the wealth ending up in the hands of 1 person - just like a game of monopoly. This has been simulated even where the outcomes of the trades are random, and the same result happens. Our current inequality would have happened even if it was all just luck - and due to determinism in my opinion all skill and ability actually is entirely luck: you don’t choose your initial conditions, and every subsequent decision to change these conditions or otherwise is necessarily the result of your luck in these initial conditions. That’s all it is. Rightists need to get off their high horse and respect the realities of nature, your philosophies are all just manifestations of the fundamental attribution error.
If you’ve not yet read and appreciated my position @Inconvenient Reality, then do read and appreciate the above. These are far better arguments than I see being presented by other leftists here (and most other places I’ve come across too). They can be very wishy-washy, but the above should all be abundantly clear, logical and very real.
Democracy can only work when peoples incomes are somewhat equal.
When the richest are worth as much as a small country, and the poorest don’t have a pot to piss in, the rich can just buy the politicians and the courts, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Democracy doesn’t work without equality.
Of course we’re not all equal and we shouldn’t make the exact same amount of money, but the gap between rich and poor has never been higher in the history of the world as it is now.
The gap between the richest and poorest class in say Ancient Athens pales in comparison to the chasm we have now. It seems the more wealth humanity has…the more concentrated it gets.
The game is rigged.
The minimum wage should be increased to 30 dollars, and after that adjusted for inflation annually.
Either that or government should takeover some or all of the food and housing industries, so we can have cheap, affordable rents and food.
If healthcare and education are universal, and they are in Canada, and most of the developed world, food and housing should be universal too, as they’re far more essential.
The living standard keeps going up in the Western world, mostly due to technological advancement. It’s not getting lower. The shrinking of the middle class isn’t necessarily a bad thing when put into the context of inflation. A century ago, making $50,000 per year meant you were rich. Today it means middle class. And it also depends on where you live, in a city or rural. As such, your broad claims don’t mean much without specific examples and contexts.
. It must be because they have no life experience (unlike the minority of right wingers also in education and the many left wingers who have experienced the world of work for many years, right?) and not because they actually know things! 