Rich people are just better, and because they’re better anything they do with their money is automatically better. So they should get all the money and if you want to be a good person just get rich like them.
It’s funny because it’s really close to the truth:
Rich people are just better [at getting other’s money], and because they’re better [at getting other’s money] anything they do with their money is automatically better [at getting other’s money]. So they should will get all the money and if you want to be a good person [at getting other’s money] just get rich better [at getting other’s money] like them.
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.
The difference is that when you say “I can’t pay my employees more” most employees begrudgingly accept the pay they get anyway. But when someone says “I can’t pay my rent”, the landlord evicts them.
If not paying your employees more actually resulted in having no employees, they would be equivalent. The only practical way to make that happen is unionization.
It’s bizarre seeing that disconnect in real life.
At my last job, the wages were stagnant for years. The company held meetings to boast that they were making record profits, the highest increase yet. The following month, they refused to raise wages because it would be too expensive.
Somehow, they were shocked when practically everyone who was skilled left. They couldn’t get new people in the door, either.
They ended up having to raise everyone’s wages. (YAY union!)
You’re so close to hitting the fundamental truth here.
A landlord evicts someone who cannot pay rent because there are other people who can pay rent.
Employees leave if an employer pays too low if there are other, better-paying options available.
As there are typically, though not always, more available workers than available jobs at a given pay rate, the workers lack the employer demand necessary to set pricing wholesale.
The reason wages have been rising lately is because employers have been unable to find workers at previous salaries. There are most definitely businesses that have folded because of this - the business model for those companies did not account for higher wages, and raising prices was not possible in the interim.
That’s the actual interplay between these market forces, and yes, the reason that unionization is effective (and often necessary) in raising wages. It’s why collective bargaining is an essential control on labor markets
Correct. In one example the tenants are against the actual contract they need more than the landlord. In another it’s the other way around with business owners and employees.
It’s about negotiating power. Life isn’t perfect. Everybody has their own idea of humanism, fairness etc (albeit often similar to many other people). From that point to synchronize you either walk away, negotiate or use violence. The latter should cause immediate removal of the initiator from the society, though that doesn’t happen IRL - IRL that initiator is sometimes rewarded by various cockroaches. Walking away or negotiating is what normal humans in general do with varying results.
They accept it because what else can they do? A lot of them aren’t in unions and even if all of them quit, how are they going to find new jobs?
The thing is that it hurts the employer just as much as the workers if everyone quits, so if you unionize first, then threaten to stop working, then you’ve got someone who can negotiate with the employer so that you don’t have to quit and you get paid enough to not make you want to quit.
At my job, and I am looking for work elsewhere, you had to sign an employment contract saying you wouldn’t unionize. That doesn’t sound legal, but this is Indiana, so it probably is. If you want to know why I signed, I was desperate for a job.
If the corporations are making record profits, that means theyre hiring, it means you can go work for a rival.
Both wages and prices are those most advantageous to the owning class as most oppressive to the working class.
The purpose of the post is to challenge the austerity narrative, of the immiseration of the working class being natural or necessary, more than simply desired by the greed of the owning class.
It’s Murphys golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules
They think they got rich by sacrificing lattes and avocado toast. Therefore… you can be rich too!
I still remember reading a blog by someone explaining how easy it is to become rich like them. Step 3 or 4 was “Rent out the downtown condo your mother gifted you when you got married and continue living at home working at your parents non-profit” because obviously everyone gets a free condo when they get married.
As much of a joke as it sounds, the person was completely serious.
Mitt Romney’s wife shared this lovely story of when they were in college, they didn’t ask anything from their parents. They’d come visit and got them a nice dinner, that was it. Ann Romney had to order carpet samples and sew them together so they didn’t have to walk on bare floors. Sometimes, they were so stripped of cash that they had to sell stock to get money. They had to sell stock. SELL. STOCK.
She probably thought it was an uplifting story.
Rationalizing something that just happened to you in life’s lottery is a very common thing for humans.
I mean, some people here thinking that they are not “rich” because of being honest, cause all the “rich” are dishonest bastards, is of the same root.
I agree that both are wrong and also that being that disconnected from the reality is bad. It’s just that there are much more categories other than rich/poor in which many of us got the longer stick.
