It’s actually about power and leverage, not lifestyle. Rich people don’t actually spend most of their money on personal luxuries, they spend it on acquiring more wealth, which translates into more control over resources and people’s lives. Regular people don’t actually spend most of their money on luxuries, they spend it on maintaining their place in a world someone else owns.
The narrative that it is about what level of material status someone is living in or deserves is a distraction. It wouldn’t matter at all if the rich started living more spartan lifestyles. They still have the wealth and power, that will manifest one way or another as control over other people’s lives, and that’s what they’re really there for.
The point is that if that money is used to pay employees properly, the wealth/power balances evaporate, and we’ll have a much fairer society society where our democracy isn’t undermined by monied interests.
if [yacht money] is used to pay employees properly, the wealth/power balances evaporate
Several issues with this. As other comments have pointed out, the specific money in question here isn’t actually very significant. But say you expand what’s considered to all company profits. A company won’t voluntarily pay more for a service of a given quality than they have to, because its existence depends on being better at profit seeking than other companies. If they do have to (maybe because of a regulation) pay more than the market rate, the priority is going to be reorganizing the business to employ fewer people, overwork the people who are still employed, or otherwise arrange themselves so that as much of the profits as possible are still going to the owners. The power dynamic between employer and employee remains the same, because their relative negotiating power is largely unchanged, and so would be the balance of wealth.
the specific money in question here isn’t actually very significant.
It’s all the revenue leeched away from workers to shareholders - that’s the majority of the entire global economy. What are you talking about?
A company won’t voluntarily pay more for a service of a given quality than they have to, because its existence depends on being better at profit seeking than other companies.
I’m not proposing we make it voluntary.
If they do have to (maybe because of a regulation) pay more than the market rate, the priority is going to be reorganizing the business to employ fewer people, overwork the people who are still employed, or otherwise arrange themselves so that as much of the profits as possible are still going to the owners.
Companies aren’t welfare schemes - they run as lean as possible today. I’m proposing the workers be the owners.
The power dynamic between employer and employee remains the same, because their relative negotiating power is largely unchanged, and so would be the balance of wealth.
Workers own the company, workers get paid fairly, workers decide how the company is run. Shareholders no longer exist, and must live off the welfare state or get a real goddamn job.
Many other distractions, like skin color, religion, sex orientation. Poor have one advantage and that is the numbers, at least in democracies. So you need to gerrymander them in any way you can think about.
No, having superior numbers is not necessarily an advantage. Crowds have unpleasant effects due to scale, when you’d want to organize them on some issue or even just inform them.
