30 Dollar Minimum Wage

It looked great. It would look great today too, if imposed.

Bullshit, the 21st Century is a different environment. If the US was stripped of government, taxes lowered, then society would actually progress. People would have several magnitudes more buying power. Everybody could afford healthcare, because of that same buying power. (Many would choose not to buy it though.) Deflation would occur too. People would increase their wealth as companies would be pressured into hiring workers. People would want to work, need to work, and companies would want, and need, to hire. Increased competition is good for those willing to work, the ones who matter.

Competition benefits the hard-working, risk-takers, men in general. As it stands now, socialism is weak, apathetic, whiny, more focused on avoiding work, voting yourselves money instead of making, creating, earning money. Socialistic compulsions are more likened to the decay of (feudalistic) society than anything else. Rather than people knowing that they must solve their own problems, in socialism they turn to authorities to fix problems for them, hence depending on monarchical representatives or theocratic, priestly authority. Turn to God to fix your problems. Pray harder.

All of that is inferior to capitalism. If you want something then the onus is upon you to get it. No voting for it. No praying for it. Only working for it.

Why should winners be curtailed? Somebody bets $10,000 in roulette. Who are you to say winning $10,000,000 is “too much”? That’s the loser mentality I’m talking about. Hands off his winnings. It’s not yours. You seem salty that another guy risked his $10,000 and won. While you risked $10,000 and lost? So now you have nothing and he has everything. That’s the result of gambling, winners and losers. But the losers, having nothing, now want to gang up and steal from the winner.

Exaggeration, humanity literally cannot go back to the third world with all the technology we now have at our disposal. Smart phones make it impossible to go back.

Civility implies that those who are closest to the disabled, children, vexed, are responsible for them. It’s like a mother or father abandoning their child on a doorstep. Rather than blame the deadbeat parent, you blame the person opening the door, for being inconsiderate and ‘hateful’. It’s not the person’s responsibility on the doorstep. And by ignoring the deadbeat parents, you are being immoral, by blaming the wrong people for the causes.

So it is with Capitalism too, economics and society. As long as you keep blaming the wrong people (the ones opening the door to the abandoned child), the more you are perpetuating the types of ills you denounce.

You have not reconciled the differences between personal liberty versus the socialistic compulsions. Obviously an individual cannot be ‘free’ when society (socialists) impose all matters of restrictions, beginning with taxation, and then proceeding to a mountain of laws and legal binding. If the government and third-party intervention already takes 22% of your lifetime earning and value, then isn’t that enough? For Gloominary, apparently not.

If socialists were rebuked, and people retained their earnings, then consumer buying power would go up. Socialistic and welfare programs would not be “needed”, except by those who can’t work, or refuse to work. But this still doesn’t the matter of responsibility by which people can’t work, or won’t work. If average people had more buying power then it would be possible for families to take care of their own disabled, the ones who cannot work. Thus it would not be the burden of the rest of society (who had no part in spawning or causing the disability).

Children are already the property of their parents, by law, or the property of a “guardian” who supplants the parent.

From my perspective, a parent has absolute authority over his/her own child, as an extension of his/her own self. Yes the parent can do what s/he wishes.

It’s socialists like yourself who believe “The Government” or “God” is a higher authority, and has the “Right” to stick its nose in, to interject between Parent and child.

So who is the real slave, if you cannot own yourself, if you cannot own your child?

Animals don’t have rights.

You’re not free unless you can sell yourself into slavery, if you choose to of course.

Mostly correct, I’d say the parent-child relationship is more immediate than the grandparent-grandchild relation.

If you were truly free then what would stop you from entering into any contract?

Did you guess it? “The Government”, “God”, “The State”, “Society” these are all restrictions to freedom.

Freedom means, hypothetically, that you could do anything you want (within your power and responsibility to do so). Freedom also means paying the price of consequences, winners and losers. Freedom does not mean rigging the game.

Why even use the word responsibility? That word does not align with freedom. True freedom has no constraints, especially not self-imposed ones.

You can’t know the difference between what is free, and what is not, without responsibility.

A free person wouldn’t give your existence, let alone your understanding of freedom, responsibility, or anything a second thought, not until you got in their way limiting them would they counteract your existence. Even then, they wouldn’t care one iota what you thought. Primal survival of the fittest would be true freedom now.

You’re talking out your ass.

So what, if anything, gave serfs the right to rebel against their feudal lords?

What gave Afro-American slaves the right to rebel against their white masters?

It was never a matter of rights. It was a matter of force, power, and violence.

Anybody who has ever became free knows that it is through ferocity. Freedom is won, and earned. “Freedom isn’t free”.

And we’re back to square one, the law of the jungle, might makes right, amoralism.

And sometimes, or at least occasionally, the poor slaves, serfs and wage slaves are more powerful, and can outwit the rich few.

And just as they made the world a better place to live in yesterday, at least for themselves, they can make the world a better place to live in today.

If it was ‘right’, or at least made sense to partly emancipate themselves yesterday, it may and arguably is right/makes sense to more fully emancipate themselves today.

Maybe. :evilfun: Just following your lead. :evilfun:

There is no freedom in civility and you’re describing freedom from that of a civilized and constrained man. There is no deep thought, imaginings, fantasies in being free. Freedom is more doing, less thinking. Contemplation restricts doing, thus restricts freedom.

There’s degrees of hierarchy, master/slave is the starkest one, serf/lord is a little less stark.
Wage slave/capitalist is a form of hierarchy too, a little less stark than serf/lord.
Hierarchies are often bad, at least for the ones on the bottom, but they’re not always bad, like the hierarchy that exists between parent/child, or between wise, just leader/follower.
But just because you or your ancestors consented to a hierarchy, or a hierarchy was imposed upon you or them, doesn’t mean you can’t or it wouldn’t be in your best interests to rebel, doesn’t mean it would be necessarily ‘immoral’ or ‘irresponsible’ to rebel.
If we didn’t rebel in the feudal age, well, we’d still be in the feudal age, and that wouldn’t be very good.
Not all capitalism and capitalists are bad, not all socialism or workers are good.
But to the degree capitlaism has been found to be bad and can be oppoosed, it ought to be, just because some of this was consented to by our ancestors, or is being consented to now, doesn’t mean it’s in our best interests.
Fundamentally we never consented to any of this, this system, we were all born into it, I wasn’t asked if I’d like to be a citizen of Canada, you weren’t asked if you’d like to be a citizen of the US or the UK.

African Americans didn’t ‘earn’ their freedom so much as it was given to them by the unionists from the confederates, so I guess they don’t ‘deserve’ it, by your standard, and they should still be slaves.

How did people become serfs?
Were their ancestors defeated in battle by stronger, smarter or luckier adversaries?
Did their ancestors lose their freedom in a relatively ‘free’ agraian, predinustrial market through sheer incompetence or bad luck?
Perhaps all of the above.
Whatever the case may be, they were serfs because of ‘decisions’ they or their ancestors made, so I guess they had no right to rebel, and the responsibility to submit.

It’s not that government is my God, to the degree government is oppressive and can be resisted, it should be resisted.
However, a democratic government is less likely to be oppressive than a megacorporation owned by just a handful of individuals.
The more participatory the government, or the corporation, the more I’m inclined to trust it.
Our democracy isn’t very participatory, because it’s representative and manipulated by corporations, and so isn’t very trustworthy.
If more people voted for a broader range of parties and better parties, I’d be more inclined to trust it. Instead, essentially what we have is a two party dictatorship.
Both parties are demonstrably beholden to the corporations, with only slight and stylistic differences between them.

What does it mean for the middle class to be shrinking?
It means the prices of things in general, or essential goods and services like food and housing are rising more than their wages, so they can buy less and less stuff in general, or stuff they need, and that’s exactly what’s occurring.
I’ve already used a couple of statistics to prove this point.
If the standard of living for the middle and working classes was visibly growing, then I probably wouldn’t be complaining, but it’s not, even tho the economy as a whole visibly is, and that’s what tends to happen under a capitalism with little-no safety net.
A few exceptions to the rule like computers and cell phones cheapening doesn’t disprove the rule.

Are you serious? It sounds like you are, in which case I guess you “deserve” such a society, but I will do everything in my power to stop things for me regressing back to some illiterate Trump-like fantasy about how everything used to be better when it objectively wasn’t (but don’t worry, I have very little power with which to fight this fight). I wish there was a way for you to forge your own 3rd world disaster just so you could realise how misguided your rose-tinted nostalgic prayers are - I’m sure you wish the same thing with an entirely different expectation.

You can keep saying if there was no government then things would progress and it still wouldn’t be true. You need to stop praying.

The fantasy that people would have more buying power without taxation shows complete economic ignorance. Let me explain how this actually works under your dream scenario:

  1. Company tax expenses decrease to zero
  2. Revenues are initially the same, profits increase proportionally to the decrease in tax expense
  3. The company now has the option to increase wage expenses back up (hire more staff and/or pay the current ones more) so that their profits remain unchanged (though there’s less reason to keep profits down than if tax was applied to them before), or to enjoy the extra drawings and spend it on themselves, or to invest in growth of the business.
  4. Employees have the option to ask for the aforementioned payrise, and are more likely to get it if they cannot be easily replaced by someone who will do the same job for less if the role is a highly skilled one. Unskilled employees are less likely to get it, but still might depending on the philosophy of the employer - they already have more income if they used to incur direct taxes and things are cheaper if there used to be indirect taxes on them. Initial higher spending power.

~this is where you stop thinking~

  1. What happens when spending power increases? Supply temporarily dwindles because it can’t adjust to an immediate change quickly enough, demand for the same products increases because people now have the money to buy them.
  2. What happens when supply dwindles and demand increases? Prices are increased to mitigate stock shortages and to take advantage of higher demand: inflation!

What did you think would happen when more money was introduced into the private sector? Why would this be ANY different to governments increasing money supply through quantitative easing, which you guys all love to hate on?! I thought you said you understood economics and were even masterful at it?

You can have any amount of total money supply, and it will still be allocated to all the goods and services that we currently have the infrastructure to offer, in the proportions that we currently see that merely reflect the current power imbalance and what resources are physically accessible. More money supply = all goods and services scale up in price in the same proportion and likewise they proportionally decrease with less money supply. Any disruptions always eventually resolve back to the same imbalance, regardless of their nature and extent.

But who says any of the above would happen at all when we have all these government services that were in demand but have now disappeared?

Either they are immediately bought up by private buyers, new businesses are formed to cater to the same demand for which the government formerly provided the supply, or you are going on incur the aforementioned inflation because the money supply was increased in the private sector. If the business is not picked up or replaced, GDP decreases, and with that the country’s borrowing power may also decrease because they now have less wealth to back the credit arrangements with other countries that all countries heavily rely on. If it is picked up, then there’s no extra money like you imagined.

Either way, no extra spending power. None of your fantasy comes true.

Taxation doesn’t actually affect the wealth proportions that naturally emerge due to the private sector, all it does is act as just another market force in just the same way as a major supplier on whom your business relies or a highly paid indispensable employee. If anything, taking away taxation only increases the speed at which these proportions spiral inequality in favour of an increasingly small minority. But that’s going to be quick anyway once technology significantly starts replacing the need for humans to do work that a machine can do better.

I say let gamblers risk, win and lose their bets… but to an extent. $10,000? To some that’s nothing, maybe a holiday to others, probably not that life-changing even to someone who is poor - though enough perhaps to get somebody who has nothing back in the game. $10m? Wow, nice! Life-changing to most, a big lottery win that we often see, go nuts! $10trillion in winnings? Once sums get high enough they start to have significant effects on the economy, and their absence in certain areas becomes noticeable. Like I said, let there be inequality, reward people when it is beneficial to everyone to do so, but how much is enough reward? When it stops being beneficial to everyone and starts being more detrimental just for the sake of rewarding one person - that’s when we have a problem.

No exaggeration, you assume too much.

Smart phones aren’t “just here now” whatever happens. If the technology needed for them to operate cannot be bought, maintained and upgraded, they don’t work anymore, SORRY! If credit “crunches”, floors drop out from markets, nobody has confidence to lend anymore, since modern transactions are now utterly at the whim of lending and borrowing, things can’t keep working the way they do anymore. This even goes for all the things you clearly take for granted - even energy and food. It’s entirely possible for them to stop getting to everyone, even today, if nobody can afford to pay anybody to operate things anymore. This would be less so for renewable energy, but you just can’t profit quite as much from something of which you can’t control the supply! - hence why non-renewable energy just won’t go away. But thanks to entropy, even renewable energy sources break eventually.

Our only chance to maintain our current conditions after a big enough market crash, without government to bail out the most important services, would be if people who worked in those important services all agreed to work for free: becoming even more clearly the slaves we all always were to the market.

You have a messed up notion of civility. Civility is picking up the pieces of incivility, such as abandoning a baby on a doorstep - an absolutely immoral act no question, and any parents who do such a thing do not escape blame for their actions. But civility isn’t black and white, it isn’t EITHER one party’s fault OR another’s. To be civil would be to ensure the health and safety of that baby to whatever extent possible (not necessarily taking care of the baby yourself) - what any moral person would do regardless of the immorality of the action that required their morality. The household at which the baby is abandoned have a civil responsibility should such a thing happen to them, and they are also to blame if they do not fulfill this responsibility. They shouldn’t have to, but incivility happens and it only gets worse if it is responded to with incivility.

As such the primary blame is obviously with the parents. Obviously. Don’t stupidly assume I would just blame the wrong people. But those who don’t respond to incivility with civility can also be secondarily to blame for their immoral actions. You don’t seem to get how moral systems can be bigger than just one individual, I’m kinda concerned that you don’t appear to have a conscience from some of the things you say.

Nobody is ever free in society. Period.

As soon as you cooperate with another, compromise is required and you each mutually benefit from the distribution of labour amounting to a better outcome than if you both went it alone - or even worse if you competed with one another and you each actively tried to undercut the other. Maximum individual freedom is only possible to a hermit, but they cannot be free to enjoy the benefits of working with others, nor are they free to break physical laws, nor are they free from the natural dangers around them from which a society would protect them. To socialised individuals, working with others actually increases the overall feeling of freedom because it exceeds the freedom felt from going it alone.

All these restrictions that society “imposes” on poor Libertarians are there to result in the maximum freedom across all these types of freedom to and freedom from, for the most possible people. This has become skewed in favour of the rich, of course. But even they are never entirely free. You might as well blame the frontal lobes in your brain for restricting the freedom of your limbic system #-o The whole brain, like an economy is a system, each part dependent on every other to achieve the overall result that you enjoy - debts are owed all around, whether you understand the connection or not.

Just because you aren’t aware of, don’t appreciate, or have unrealistic expectations about certain parts of society, doesn’t mean you have a revolutionary new understanding of it that if only everyone else could see, we’d all be better off. You just need to do a lot more thinking, and learn a lot more context.

It really gets me how all these people obsessed with maximising freedom actually have very little understanding of what it actually is and how it works. In many ways it doesn’t even exist. In the only way that it can really be said to exist, you lot all seem to think that just because restrictions to freedom are more cleverly hidden in certain ways of arranging economies, that they don’t exist and that those ways are better. So naive.

Some corporations are much more “progressive” than the government.

Just because a government is formed doesn’t mean it’s “necessarily good” as you are implying.

You’re ignoring the fact that, in spite of any middle class “shrinkage”, the whole economy is growing. Thus the middle class is actually stagnating from the widest view of economics. And that can be acceptable in many areas. The delusion that “we must always be getting richer” (without working) is ludicrous.

Barely anything you’re saying is accurate or realistic. With low-to-no taxes, companies gain much more profit which can be channeled anyway they want. Some companies will give their owners bonuses. Some companies will expand. Some companies will hire more. Some companies will give raises to workers. It depends on each company. Now my point is this; they have more freedom. It’s obvious and true. Companies immediately profit from lowering taxes, as taxes rarely or never help companies. This doesn’t change inflation rates. It’s not until money starts cycling through the workers, middle class, that inflation would be impacted.

Deflation would occur, because again, more money would go to workers and the middle class, as direct result of the companies that do grow, hire more, or companies which hand out raises (thus increasing loyalty from their workers and gaining good reputation in society). Employees flock to better businesses. Capitalism encourages this. Happy workers lead to a successful business and growth.

You’re not looking at the whole picture. Lowering taxes takes money out of the public sector and puts it into the private sector. Deflation occurs when consumers have more buying power, which they would, from low-to-no taxation. “It’s their money anyway”. What third-party-taxation does is redistribute money out of companies, and workers, and the middle and low class, toward whatever institution is funded: medicare, social security, military, roads, schools, etc.

Though public services would convert to private, and also become more efficient. Public sectors run privately lead to efficiency. Private schools are more demanded than public, for example, because private schools have more interest in actually educating children instead of indoctrinating them (although some private schools have their own indoctrination).

More money (buying power) would cycle back to workers and average people, giving them more economic power. Social services, welfare, would be defunded. Then people, individuals, families, would have the choice to spend that money on what he or she wants. Instead of being forced to ‘buy’ healthcare, people would have a choice. Health insurance would become affordable to appeal to average consumers, as would all other forms of insurance.

The way insurance works now, in the US, is that they leech off the public sector. If you defund them, then prices would be cut in half overnight.

And they should be defunded when the medical system is charging $1000 for tylenol and $5000 for 3 mile ambulance rides.

Taxes hinder economic growth. That’s basic knowledge. Companies receive less profits. Workers receive less money on their paychecks.

Taxation is (theft) redistribution of wealth, taking it (by force) out of the hands of average people, average companies, and into the pockets of politicians, crooks, welfare recipients, etc.

Socialism is a racket of thieves, stealing from hard-working, honest people.

That’s the thing though. What country is “free” if no countries in the world allow real freedom, unlimited betting?

You’re advocating for world slavery, that there is no place in the world for capitalists to go and rake 100% of the winnings on their own bets. That’s what Capitalists want. If I put in $10,000 then I want to win $10,000,000. If you lose that money then no whining. No turning into a socialist. You need to work for it back. You have no right to the choices of what other men do. Some will risk. Some will save. But it is their choice.

You are advocating for slavery, taking choice away from free society.

No, they don’t just disappear.

If electricity went out then people would quickly use other means to start the engines again. People would turn on the phones and internet quickly.

I knew that you would twist this example, blame and shame the one opening the door. You and your kind, socialists in general, are quick to forgive and ignore the deadbeat parents. You would rather shame the person opening the door, for thinking about shutting the door. This indicates to me that you lack an objective view of reality. Instead you’re focused on justifying immoral behavior to begin with (leaving babies on doorsteps). You would rather punish the person who opens the door, than the deadbeat parents.

If society were under my control then the deadbeat parents would be tracked down, and the baby shoved back into their hands. And if they refused then they would be thrown into jail, for trying to unload their mistakes onto others, onto strangers. My rationale is more objective and ‘moral’ because I seek the causes at their roots. While you are more “forgiving”, and claim, that other people should clean up after (immoral) people’s messes.

But I don’t see you adopting any abandoned children from the orphanage? Are you a hypocrite? How many orphans do you care for?

Thanks to socialists like yourself.

You are pro-slavery. I am pro-freedom.

No, working with others is not “cooperating”. It’s a business deal. An employer pays the employee wage, or, the employee is not obligated to work. Cooperation is only implied through the monetary transaction.

You stumbled.

You admitted that society is based upon slavery. Therefore in being pro-socialist, you are also admitting in being pro-slavery. And this is further demonstrated through your justification of taxation (stealing from average people and companies) and furthermore of attempting to shame those opening the door to abandoned babies. You would rather rebuke the strangers refusing the baby, than the deadbeat parents who try to pass their mistakes off onto others. And that’s a perfect analogy of Socialists and Socialism, passing mistakes off onto others.

Or quite simply, stealing from workers’ paychecks.

Hey man, do you think it’s important to note that while the DJIA is at all time highs, that the dollar is on a significant downturn?

That means that the economy isn’t necessarily growing, but that it just costs more to buy into the indexes. So the price of the stocks isn’t higher because they’ve generated more value, it’s higher at least in some part because the dollar is worth less. This isn’t a problem for people who’s needs are met for the rest of their lives. But it sucks for young people who want to invest for their futures because they have to put more dollars in to get the same dividends, and the amount of dollars that they are able to get from their work hasn’t changed to keep up with the devaluation of the currency.

It means that foreign currency is increasing in value, as other countries and nations are banding together to compete against US dominance.

It’s the looming aramco IPO and OPEC’s desire to keep prices high so that the Saudi’s can get 16 trillion for 5 percent of the state oil company. That’s why we’re fracking our national parks and why in spite of the condemnation of Qatar by so many Arab countries, our troops are still there making sure that LNG keeps flowing. Gotta out produce em to keep the oil price down so that we can stave off the effect of the aramco IPO for as long as possible. Right now they’re laughing at us because we’re using our strategic reserves to fight an economic war that we will inevitably lose. Why we don’t just go straight to the bombs is a mystery. If it weren’t for Abdullah’s need to keep oil high for the above stated purpose, then they could price most of our production out of its viability.

What am I? A super-villain in a movie that you’ve just uncovered? :laughing:

I didn’t stumble, I stated a philosophical fact: in a deterministic universe, freedom does not and cannot exist.

This isn’t a moral statement about whether freedom “should” or “ought” to exist, it’s a statement that freedom does not and cannot exist whether or not you want it to. See the distinction? This seems to be the source of your misunderstandings, so I’m going to address it as a priority over all the other things you said (most of which was just repetition and often without further explanation anyway).

Consider two exhaustive types of decision: an intentional decision and an unintentional decision.

i) Intentional decisions are made consciously considering your prior experiences and your imaginings based on them: they are determined by these things and your thoughts and feelings about them - you are not “free” to base your decisions on anything other than these ingredients because you physically don’t have a conception of them upon which to base your conscious decision. This already determines an ultimate boundary to your unfreedom of choice.

Now, the strength of your preference one way or another within these bounds is going to determine what you choose. Your attitude to contrarianism is also restricted to these bounds, in case you’re the type to try and “test” your “free will”. It might feel like a close choice once you finally decide, or maybe you were pushed by forces outside of your control (and thus denied your freedom), but either way, your ultimate choice is neuro-chemically determined by which impulses fire most strongly in your brain: the state of your brain at the time of your decision, within the unfree bounds of your limited conception, biologically determines the choice you make.

The current state of your brain is in turn determined by previous states of your brain and decisions made in just the same way as above but in the past, all the way back to the beginning of your consciousness and ability to intentionally choose. Before that, the state of your brain was determined by things out of your control: you were not free to choose your genetics nor your environment - the interaction between which entirely determines the entirety of your behaviours.

Intentional decisions are not free in a deterministic universe.

ii) Unintentional decisions are even simpler, you don’t choose them any more than you choose to start the process of choosing in the first place. These decisions grip you unthinkingly, likewise determined by the state of your brain at the time of the decision, which is in turn determined by previous states of your brain all the way back to your initial conditions that you weren’t free to choose.

Unintentional decisions are also not free in a deterministic universe.
So you see… it is necessarily the case that freedom is an illusion.

But what is this illusion based upon?
We don’t “feel” unfree when we can’t fly without technology (assuming you’re not psychotic), because well-adjusted, reasonable and sane people don’t expect to be able to - we only feel unfree when we recognise that there are realistic conditions that could easily come about where we would be able to do the thing we wanted to do, but can’t. But even within our expectations, some restrictions still don’t “feel” like the kind unfreedoms of which you’re speaking e.g. if you are about to be attacked by a bear because you “freely” chose to put yourself in a situation where that might happen, you just do whatever you think is best to avoid harm in such a situation, given what you happen have at your disposal.

There has to be a human element in the way in order for us to feel like our freedoms have been infringed upon - it’s an emotion based on dominance hierarchies and nothing more. You are most free at the top and least free at the bottom.

As such, complete freedom in society would have to somehow require everybody to be at the top, which just means everyone is the same, which still doesn’t feel free. It’s an impossible goal. And even at the top, in order to hold your position you are bound to fend off competition, and in a market economy you must do this by catering for your customers: even the top are subject to the whims of others. The more people at the top, the less free they feel due to all the extra realistic competition imposed on them by others who seek to topple and replace you, and the more people at the bottom, the more free the top is and the more those at the bottom are subject to the whims of those at the top.

When you want more freedom, you are simply stating you want the opportunity for you to be higher up the hierarchy. No shit. The higher up we are, the more access we have to things we want - everyone wanted that already. Realistically, more capitalism means the top can get even freer at the expense of the bottom, and more socialism means the bottom don’t incur this expense quite so much because the top are hindered from climbing too high. Winners mean losers also exist, and a democracy (allegedly) takes into account all ranks in the hierarchy.

This doesn’t mean I think things “should” be this way, these are just facts.

Please tell me you understand and appreciate why the ideal of a more free society is bullshit now? You’ve been sold this ideology by people already at the top who want to get higher, which they can do by getting you to play their game that they’re more than likely to beat you at. “Flattery flattery flattery, I bet you could get rich too!” You even might. You’ll probably only climb minimally at best and make those already higher in the hierarchy climb even higher - you’re being played.

The only difference between societies that we regard as more or less free, is that the “less free” ones have a more visible and understandable human presence in how things are run. “More free” ones, are governed by much more vague and much less accountable forces, such as “the market”. But this is just an aggregate of the choices of those in economic power in exactly the same way as a dictatorship is an aggregate of the choices of those dictating things. At least the former is less centralised, so although we get less accountability, power is potentially more spread out. We get the benefit of more people having at least minimal power over the outcome that would otherwise solely be in the hands of a dictating few. But the controls and restrictions in play are just as present, even if they are more obscure and more complex - meaning many people don’t understand them or even know they are there (such as yourself).

In the interests of increasing freedom in this way (the only way that it ever could be said to be increasing) you really ought to be more of a historical materialist and recognise the shift away from less people being in power: from our old monarchies and aristocracies delegating to lords through the Feudal Age, further delegating power to business owners in our present Capitalist Age, through to delegating power even further to employees and so on into a Socialist Age.

The funny thing is I’m actually advocating pretty much the same thing as you, only I clearly understand it way better than you and others like you do.