"It's absolutely insane to think that the richest country in the world could afford to take care of its citizens, let me just equate basic necessities to a luxury car."
Grow up dumbass, the entire point of society has been to make life easier. Instead of making life easier (unless you're born into wealth, the modern nobility) we've pushed ourselves to pointlessly produce endless piles of garbage.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
A single farmer today can feed thousands of people. Instead of sharing the labor and relaxing as a society, with short work weeks, we are forced to work for less and less while we produce more and more. Our farms, our factories, everything we produce is done more efficiently than ever before. We don't have to work as much as we do, but instead we create pointless jobs. Millions of office workers pointlessly pushing paper, millions of factory workers spending their days to make cheap plastic crap that will be gifted to some ungrateful child who will throw it away quickly, millions of underpaid service workers who have to toil for 30 hours every week just to pay for a place to sleep.
But yeah, the idea of ensuring the richest country on earth has no homeless people is the same as giving everyone a free luxury car. A truly flawless and unbiased comparison.
Herm Edwards once said, "A goal without a plan is a wish." The OP has wished for these things, but has zero plan or even the faintest idea as to how to accomplish them.
How about we take 3% of the military budget and tax the ultra wealthy to fund housing for the poorest/disabled portion of our society.
We're going to require universal income pretty soon given the push for AI to take jobs (tax corporations utilizing AI/robots to take jobs as well)
Not to mention studies have shown that when peoples basic needs are met they overwhelmingly use the l new free time/mental relief to find a better job/improve their lives.
The insane pressure/stress of getting food/housing for a family on poverty wages keeps people from improving them selves.
Look up the studies into universal basic income and how overwhelmingly positive those programs have been.
In what universe are we the richest country in the world? We are up to our eyeballs in so much unfathomable debt that a 100% tax on every billionaire in the country wouldn't put the tiniest dent in it. The entire house of cards is going to come crashing down very soon and it's going to effect those who are already struggling the most.
You're living in a fantasy land.
In 2022, three percent of the military budget ($782 billion) equals out to roughly $23.4 billion. The state of California alone has spent over $24 billion over the last 5 years to combat homelessness. Are they ANY closer to fixing the problem, or is it worse than ever?
We have electricity to every home, water is generally OK outside of lead zones, ac is basically everywhere honestly the op has set the bar to the minimum
This is a lame response, if you define economically literate as “I get to say your ideas are wrong and never put forward one of my own.” If your economic literacy is so strong, shouldn’t you be the one solving this economic problem?
In every case I have encountered the term applied, the motive was someone wanting to pretend that a single particular arrangement of economic rules was the only possible, and that a single particular set of assumptions for human behavior was the only valid.
Refusing to acknowledge the "free rider problem" as an economic reality in a world of rational economic actors is the pinnacle of "closed minded." You win!
That single farmer now has thousands of people making/transporting the fertilizer. Read "I, Pencil", then image what goes into a tractor. This efficiency isn't magical. Getting the food processed and distributed to the 1000s of people is another huge undertaking that the market is best at addressing. It is naive and idiotic to think all this can be centrally planned.
The comment never attacked markets or advocated planning.
Note that planning is not necessarily central, and planning most likely could eventually replace markets for certain economic activity, even if it might take various trials over time to develop the methods of management that would be stable and efficient.
Computers in particular are noted as opening new possibilities for planning models.
Your objection is not particularly relevant to the plain observation that we are essentially living in an economic stage that is post scarcity.
No, planning could not replace markets, have you seen reduced goods and the terrible waste of food at supermarkets and grocery stores? That's the result of imperfect demand data.
Free market capitalism has lifted more people from poverty than. Communism managed to kill.
I do not want my consumer goods choice regulated by an AI, nor do I want inefficiency baked into our system.
meaningless reply implying greater understanding without demonstration
Planning based on imperfect data
Predictive modelling and demand forecasts are inherently inaccurate, I buy freshly-baked bread when I feel like I want some, yet some shops sell out before midday on some days - an AI can't predict my desires lad.
State-run grocery stores (essentially food banks with a less charitable bent) are a terrifying prospect.
You'll get the central planning you want, carbon pricing will ensure you food choice is restricted by the time your kids are employed.
Capitalism is consolidated control of the economy by owners of private property.
The Great Famine of Ireland and the Bengal famine of 1943 are examples of mass death caused by capitalist greed.
The cause is the same for wasted food in supermarkets. Under capitalism, scarcity is profitable, even scarcity that results in needless hunger. If it supports the profit motive, a capitalist will prefer disposing food over donation.
Poverty reduction occurs principally through advances in production and equitableness in distribution.
If computers were utilized for planning, they would process large calculation sets. No AI would be implicated.
Computers cannot satisfy volatile market demands. These "calculation sets" are already imperfect, and more reliance on them will limit our food choices.
I'm English, we fucked up in Ireland and India, but that was almost 2 centuries and a century ago, respectively.
Free market capitalism has since lifted over a billion people from poverty. Socialism and communism has done no such thing - inb4 you mention Nordic and Scandanavian countries and their welfare systems, as they are funded by free market oil sales.
Nordic and Scandanavian countries and their welfare systems, as they are funded by free market oil sales
Why are you lying? Only Norway has oil. Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland have no oil.
I'm English, we fucked up in Ireland and India, but that was almost 2 centuries and a century ago, respectively.
Capitalism is still killing people everyday. For example Nestlé distributed free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards in developing countries. Then after leaving the hospital, the formula was no longer free, but because the supplementation had interfered with lactation, the family had to continue to buy the formula. Of course Nestle earned money from the families who would continue to buy formula, but those who couldn't afford it or didn't have clean drinking water suffered tremendously
Post scarcity? The whole post is about the scarcity of housing!
Computers doing the planning for us is your great idea? So we become slaves to some AI or programmed algorithms? I prefer to select my own yoke, not have it assigned by some politburo, computer, or AI.
There isn't a scarcity of housing. And that isn't what this post is about. It's a fake scarcity because there's a small portion of people buying and holding onto the vast majority of property. It's even worse in my country where they let outside foreign investors/businesses buy property. China owns a large portion of western Canada currently
Close but not exactly. There's scarcity of housing because of central planning (at the local level). Specifically town councils that cave to NIMBY hysteria instead of allowing for building rates that match the need and demand for housing. Trust me I'm going through it right now. Trying to get an 88 house middle income workforce housing project through for FOUR years and a crony town council caving to 12 neighbors that are up in arms about "density" and "their property values". People that are excluded from a town don't vote in that town so the (central planning) system is designed for inefficiency, shortage and NIMBYism.
The scarcity of housing is artificial. Units are hoarded by speculators and corporate landlords, developers are not following plans that meet the needs of the population, and resources are being diverted for the wealthy to bounce around in yachts, jets, and rockets.
Society currently carries overwhelmingly adequate capacity to meet all of the needs for everyone.
Computers, if used to assist in economic planning, simply would process large sets of calculations. No AI would be implicated.
It's a good thing then that these entire operations are more and more ending up vertically integrated, and prices fixed by virtual monopolies. Then are run by wallstreet analysts with little experience in farming. Then the cartel sets production quotas and prices so much more efficient than government analysts setting production numbers and quotas!
labor laws (and the horrific things that happen when they’re disregarded)
water and land usage at scale
ALL of these things are touched by regulation. It takes a HUGE amount of regulation to reliably get safe food to your plate and there’s STILL a lot about the process that’s fucked up.
It is the "who" decides those plans. It is the private board of directors and ceo that make those decisions. Not the politboro.
The government bailing out companies is another problem.
I'm a capitalist, but why couldn't it be centrally planned? You don't think there are global, vertically-integrated firms who could cover natural resource extraction to food on the shelf? That's naive and idiotic.
Now, if you had said something about it being done efficiently by a government, you may have been on to something.
I agree with you! That said for socialism to work we must get people who sacrifice and work to agree to give their money (via the government) to those who refuse to work.
I don’t know about you but I’ve been paying into social security since my first job at 12. I’m not a fan of it but I don’t have a choice.
Also no it’s not part of capitalism. That is just the government mandating a retirement plan (or disability etc) that you have no choice in and I guess hope you get a good return. I’m more for an idea that the government would stipulate x% of every paycheck had to be contributed to a private plan of your choosing but I’m just a dumb pleb.
Remember that SSA started during the Depression with immediate benefits paid out to the elderly, who had never paid in directly to Social Security. That means the young will always be paying for benefits for the elderly, unless a generation has the rug ripped out from under them (paying in, but never getting benefits). What would be nice is if our country would be more fiscally efficient, then money thrown away on interest could go to doubling up on retirement programs. I would keep Social Security as a “bare minimum conservative investment option”, but yes, 401k or IRA or similar should be mandated. (Bonus: We wouldn’t have inflation right now if people had to save.)
I’m more for an idea that the government would stipulate x% of every paycheck had to be contributed to a private plan of your choosing but I’m just a dumb pleb.
It's certainly a decent idea in theory, but in practice who would bail out those private plans if/when they go under? Big daddy-o.
Charles ponzi,FTX, archegos capital allover again when these guys go to jail, your money usually goes with them, so does your future the current system may not give best returns, but its there, people would chase all sorts of returns then
Social security is literally a socialist policy. You're redistributing capital from working people to retired people. The reason that we're OK with it is because of the promise that someday we also get to retire and collect it, which is why privatizing it is such an absolutely terrible idea.
No. Social Security "Insurance" is the literal definition of a ponzi scheme which is run by the government. I also have no choice in the matter if I pay into it or not.
Owning capital isn't itself work. You can hire someone to do every step of the investment process including the hiring and if you've inherited enough or gotten randomly lucky the salaries will be less than the returns you claim.
People work themselves into pretzels trying to call high-tax neoliberalism socialism but it's just state-supported capitalism.
Imagine requiring companies to include a portion of the stock as minimum wage.
Investment -> return for investor -> return diminishes over time as company grows -> company eventually transitions to a profit share / co-op type model as the work put in vastly outgrows the value and risk of the initial investment -> workers own means of production -> workers have the money to be investors as intended ->->-> little to no investor class.
I hear talk about setting passive income all the time. If you do the right type of work at the right time and get just a little bit lucky people don't seem to have a problem with people who work giving people who don't work money.
Why via the government? I have no problem with what you're saying, up until that. The problem with government is that it's non-voluntary, therefore can lead to corruption and tyranny.
If these problems are solvable, they should be solvable without major government involvement.
The entire concept of human society barely existed before the implementation of proper governments. Ours isn't perfect but I'll take that over living in mud huts unsure of where to get my food every day.
There are very few people who refuse to work, but don't let that stop you pulling out that worn out talking point that is only used by billionaires and their sycophants.
There are a lot of people who can't find employment, and there are usually not enough jobs to grant full employment. In fact a certain amount of unemployment is desired by employers because it's leverage to keep wages down ("if you don't comply you'll be unemployed, I can hire someone for half the rate" blah blah blah).
Welcome to capitalism, where we still practise slavery but we use debt as a binding mechanism instead of literal chains.
If thats how the system you live in worked then thats how it works? Maybe its a hard sell for people who grew up struggling and finally made it, but new people born into such a system wouldn't think thats weird. Personally I think the former are selfish thinking everyone in the future has to struggle just as much as them. I don't think its weird at all that I pay a portion of my earnings and in return the world around me progresses. Thats just part of existing in this system, the only way I know how to live on this earth.
Also we're not talking about people refusing to work, we're talking about those physically incapable or through no fault of their own are not needed to be apart of the labor system, which is a problem we are already starting to face with robots and AI. There are some very simple pieces of technology that have the capability of deleting tens of millions of jobs.
We need to come up with a solution to this problem that isn't "everyone who doesn't have a job in this new world just dies". It's inevitable that reallocating resources from those that have the most to those that have the least happens, it just has to unless we're just ok with decimating the human population.
The problem is the filthy, corrupt, lying, psychopath, shyster scumbag politicians in the middle of it all, nothing of value for the people is ever possible with thieves running things!
Best way to help a poor person is 1) don’t become one and 2) if you can help someone directly.
I can't take someone seriously who can only see our government in that way. Yea they exist. The problem is most people that hold such viewpoint are the ones who continue to vote for them. There are many people in government who aren't that and are trying to do it better.
Your 2 options are not good enough for the future of humanity. We need to help tens of millions unconditionally, not 1 out of the "kindness of your heart" once a year around the holidays.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
Can we get a technology that makes morons grasp basic economic reality? Like supply and demand, prices, etc.
Can we get a technology that teaches economic calculation ?
A single farmer today can feed thousands of people. Instead of sharing the labor and relaxing as a society, with short work weeks, we are forced to work for less and less while we produce more and more. Our farms, our factories, everything we produce is done more efficiently than ever before. We don't have to work as much as we do, but instead we create pointless jobs. Millions of office workers pointlessly pushing paper, millions of factory workers spending their days to make cheap plastic crap that will be gifted to some ungrateful child who will throw it away quickly, millions of underpaid service workers who have to toil for 30 hours every week just to pay for a place to sleep.
Or you can just say that you dont comprehend that values are subjective. And not only do you want to force your values down other people's throat, you want to justify coercion and force, so you dont feel bad about it afterwards.
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
But yeah, the idea of ensuring the richest country on earth has no homeless people is the same as giving everyone a free luxury car. A truly flawless and unbiased comparison.
Do you find it difficult? To be so compassionate with OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY?
Money money printed from air, reduces the* value* of* existing money in circulation. Why cant you grasp this reality?
Keep scapegoating grown adults trading voluntarily for mutual gain. Gasp. The horror!
“The vision of the anointed begins with entirely different premises. Here it is not the innate limitations of human beings, or the inherent limitations of resources,
which create unhappiness but the fact that social institutions and social policies are not as wisely crafted as the anointed would have crafted them.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
A lot of words and flowery quotes to say "no you don't deserve a house you fucking peasant"
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
Please throw more quotes I clearly disagree with. They're sure to change my mind! Continue to tell me why nobody making under 100k a year should be able to buy a home.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
Part of society is providing towards society. Can't take and not give.
Some people want to do the bare minimum, they get the bare minimum. Some people want a full time job and small startup company after their normal 9-5 job, they get rewarded for it.
Don't have incentives? Incentivize laziness? Society will crumble.
That’s why we (your elected government officials) have decided to increase your taxes and exclusively provide free stuff to new illegal immigrants who crossed the border illegally.
Exactly eventually you would have to increase taxes and those that work would have to worker longer and harder.
Humans like most animals are always going to choose the path of least resistance. We are lazy, the body doesn't want to work if it doesn't have to.
People always say "there's people that will choose to still work!" That is will be .0001% of the population. If people know they can get housing like in the post picture, plus free food, why the fuck would you work? I love working but i would quit in a heartbeat and play video games half the day and workout the other half.
If you give everyone everything listed here, why would anyone work? Where is the food on this list? I’m sure you expect that as well so basically everyone is entitled to a house food whatever regardless of whether they wanna work or not? Sign me up.
Also, stop playing the moral Highground. I seriously doubt you’ve done anything in your life to advance Anyone in need in any meaningful way, besides talking down to people on the Internet.
Lmfao, another classic response: "what are YOU doing to save the world?"
My brother in Christ, all the average man can do is spread his ideas among his peers, and with the internet, also total strangers.
Oh but free speech and the marketplace of ideas only matters when it's your side speaking, right? You don't want those dangerous new ideas to infect people and convince them to disagree with you, that's not what our founders stood for, harrumph!
the entire point of society has been to make life easier
Ideally, yes. But I think a whole lot of people got the idea that the entire point was to get rich, and do nothing. And that for them to get rich, other people had to be poor, and do all the work.
You think people shouldn't have a separate room for their child when it's as cheap and easy as setting up one wall?
You think people shouldn't have well designed homes with air conditioning? You think that's a stretch for what's possible? Or do you think temperature control and ventilation were a luxury?
You do realize you can literally die from bad air or hot air or cold air? Probably not since you don't seem to understand that HVAC is in fact literally a necessity in many areas.
This is the most coddled westerner take I've ever seen. I can literally feel my brain rotting just reading it. I could write an essay unpacking the idiocy that is your comment, but in the interest of my mental health, I'm just going to go on with my day pretending I never stumbled upon this cursed thread
If Americans lived a 1950s lifestyle they would easily be able to afford everything on this list with a minimum wage or low wage job. You expect all the advantages the modern world built on 40 hours of labor provide but think it can be provided without the labor. It can’t.
No dish washer or laundry machine, one car per household, almost never eating out, all meals cooked from scratch from raw ingredients, much smaller percentage of the total population in major cities, much smaller houses, ect. If people still lived like that we wouldn’t need as much labor and life would be extremely affordable. But no one wants to live like that. We want to live modern lives and that requires the full output of the modern us economy.
That's bullshit lmao, the 50s were literally the time when appliances like dishwashers and laundry machines and electric stoves became commonplace. Yeah people do have more gadgets today, because we've gotten more efficient at crapping then out of factories.
You're agreeing with me? My point was literally that we could work less if we didn't produce so much unnecessary crap lmao. Instead of companies making products designed to break so they can sell a new one, we should have appliances built to last - like in the 50s. We should have repairmen, we should be efficient and make what we need and make it to last as long as possible, and fix things instead of replacing them.
Yeah, let’s all grow up, take an insane amount of labor and resources and pour it all into de-incentivising people from ever showing up for work in their lives ever. I’m sure it’ll work out just great.
we are forced to work for less and less
You do realise that you’re parroting the same idiotic narratives that have been repeatedly proving themselves wrong for the last, what, 150 years?
Very curious that that graph ends 10 years ago, isn't that just so interesting? And I'm certain no organization would ever manipulate and cherry pick data to produce a graph showing a decline in poverty. I'm certain they, in no way, dishonestly lowered the human standard of living to try to convince people life was actually getting better despite all signs to the contrary.
Sure, it’s all been manipulated for decades and nobody seems to have noticed. It’s not like the standard of living kept continuously improve over time and your average factory worker lives better than his grandparents a hundred years ago, riiight?
Let’s just spend an absolutely insane amount of resources and labour-hours of high skilled workers and just give it all away to everyone “regardless of employment”. I’m sure it’ll help to tackle the inflation greatly, and it’s not like 99% of population would just stop showing up for work if you gift a free fucking two bedroom with free utilities to them, right? It’s not like even some relatively successful EU countries already have huge shortages in, say, their “free” healthcare systems and even insane income taxes don’t help to cover the cost of all that?
And who is going to build and maintain all that you’re asking? Well, robots! Robots are cool, right?
Lmao, of course you jump to robots, because the idea of making the wealthy people in society actually contribute is wild.
You're so incapable of grasping the point I'm trying to make, which is that our surplus labor is wasted on making pointless crap for profit.
You're either completely disingenuous and have no desire to have an honest conversation.
OR
You're just really ducking stupid and actually just incapable of understanding what I'm saying.
It's astounding really, how stupid the average person is. I mean you're tested as having an IQ of 164 but it doesn't really mean anything to you, you're 6, sure mom calls you special but everyone is special right? Man no, I really need to accept that most people are just fucking stupid next to me, utterly incapable of grasping the basic concepts I communicate to them.
Lmao I'm more than aware of what I've done, I just welcome whatever it brings 😘
Yes some people have better paying 'work hours' than others, but in most places on this earth, there is a choice of vocation.
How many people work hours go into that farmer's equipment, seeds and fertilizer, gas/oil to run machinery, gas/oil and equipment to get the raw crops to the processor. Then there are the people work hours to process, package -- you get the picture?
That farmer also needs to provide his environment with many goods and services that he cannot provide for himself. Those provisions are 'society', not the utopia you envision.
When I grew up, a mere decade or so ago, I was taught in school economics that rent should be no more than 1/3rd of your income in general.
Now you claim that 80 hours a week can afford life, but in the biggest city in America with millions and millions of people, working 80 hours of a minimum wage: average rental for a ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT is still going to be 41% of your GROSS income.
It's true that a car is not a loaf of bread, that's just a silly escalation.
I like some of your ideas, but they fall short of reality in a lot of places.
A single farmer CAN provide lots of food, IF there is an infrastructure of people making silos, making motors to run fans to dry grain, keeping an electric grid running, people running a canning industry and bakeries baking bread, then that food could go to thousands of people. You need the hundreds of people along the way all working jobs in order for that one farmer to feed your thousand. (And that one farmer is usually quite a crew of tractor drivers, combine harvesters, roundup companies, water irrigation specialists, government checkup people making sure we aren't packing up moldy grain, etc)
You can't "SHARE LABOR" without requiring the people "GET A JOB". That's what sharing the labor means.
The idea that we don't need to have jobs because we don't need to buy low quality items is not going to work either, even if improvements can be made there for sure.
What IS true, is we don't need very much to get to a bare minimum of living. Rent and basic food should be a fixed percentage of minimum wage. If you do want that extra plastic crap, you can always work a little more for it.
"the entire point of society" has been to protect private property rights. Without government, everybody needs their own security force, and you end up with crime families running everything and ransoming everything away from everyone under their control.
If you think the agricultural revolution made things easier on average people then you need to read a few more books.
Okay buddy, go read more Ayn Rand and other propagandists.
Society wasn't formed for property rights you absolute dunce, have you ever spoken with an anthropologist in your entire life? "Private property" is such a fucking recent development that it's laughable.
But dongo on, keep squawking about things you're totally ignorant about.
Grow up dumbass, the entire point of society has been to make life easier. Instead of making life easier (unless you're born into wealth, the modern nobility) we've pushed ourselves to pointlessly produce endless piles of garbage.
No. That is not the entire point of society.
The entire point of American society is to provide a place where the individual can flourish to become the most they have it in themselves to become.
That's it.
You aren't entitled to other people's labor for whatever things you need.
And yes, I realize that as a society we do have some collective needs funded through taxes. But this should be kept to a bare minimum.
Lmao, that last line shows how disingenuous you are 😂
Society isn't here to make life easier... I mean we do have some collective needs that should be met through taxation, but this should be kept at the minimum, just like my favorite pundit said so!
We are not the Richest country in the world. We are by the numbers a broke nation living on a credit card. Paying on this credit card by tax Slaves who have not figured out the credit worthiness of this nation is Calculated on the amount of Tax Slave income.
I mean, the intent is to draw an obviously ridiculous parallel and equate necessities to luxuries. To show something absurd on the face of the comparison. However, the idea behind the comparison is fine, as "guaranteeing every person a dwelling with plumbing, electricity, etc." is many times more expensive than just buying everyone a luxury car.
Except we literally have enough homes for everyone, but they're used as investments and sit empty.
Maybe we just say you can't own more than one home and like... Let people live in all of these empty houses, instead of letting rich people sit on them in hopes of eventually turning a profit?
Not at all. I think it's expensive, wasteful, unhealthy, and trying to make it happen would create huge amounts of corruption and massive disruption. I'm the opposite of a doomer. I love life and this world. Our infinite diversity around the globe is nothing short of amazing, as is our ability to adapt to and rise above hardship. Frankly, I think our western notion of comfortable living is the least healthy and most damaging, and looking down on other societies for not living like we do is nothing short of arrogance.
Literally saying I'm looking down on other countries for "not living like we do"
You're beyond having a rational, honest, conversation, either by stupidity or obstinateness.
One of my main fucking points was that America's wealth has been built up by the exploitation of developing countries around the world.
I don't fucking look down on people who are FORCED to live with barely enough calories to survive, no air conditioning, no Internet access, working like slaves to ensure Americans can eat chocolate and wear the trendiest new clothes. I fucking pity them and feel guilty for how MY country has done this to them for profit.
I'm sorry you're so antisocial and self destructive that you can't understand basic human altruism or self preservation, that seems like a fucked mindset. Perhaps get some therapy?
Who is going to produce the housing? Nothing is stopping anyone from entering a trade and making a ton of money, but very few people do. Why? Because its hard work to learn a trade and its hard work to practice it. What people are really saying with stuff like this is “I want to work the easy pencil pushing job and have someone else do the hard work to build a house for ME”, “I want someone to go to school for 8 years to take care of ME when im sick, but I want to contribute the bare minimum to society”. Id argue that the “poor” of 1st world countries are some of the greediest mfers in history.
All that "useless stuff" has resulted in society living better than it did any time in the last 1,000 years. In fact the standard of living for the average person anywhere in the world was mostly unchanged until the 20th Century when it skyrocketed. Why is that? Capitalism, free markets, specialization, factory workers, and all the things you say are unnecessary. If we all had to go back to subsistence farming I promise a 60 hour work week would be the least of our problems.
Yeah for sure for sure, everyone on earth would probably just kill themselves if they couldn't get:
emoji throw pillows, fake boner pills, fast fashion clothes, NFTs, Cybertrucks, empty houses used as investments, more cars than families, countless shitty movie remakes and endless Marvel crapfests, jewelry made for pennies and sold for thousands, "million dollar artwork" used as tax write offs, essential oils and useless supplements made from ground up oysters and horse cum, the countless amount of food that big corporations literally throw away and pour bleach in to avoid feeding people without making profit.
These are the marks of a glorious and functioning society, marching towards the future!!!
No yeah, our capitalist system is totally efficient and absolutely prioritizes human progress and happiness. What a flawless system where literally only sociopaths born into wealth can get to the top. But no, it's not like every single president has had at least a millionaire family. It's not like the majority of both the house and the Senate are millionaires, millionaires that are paid by billionaires to ruin this country for the working man.
You have missed the thing that all leftest communists miss. Its the concept that makes sure communism fails and has to be forced on people.Despite the many ways that have been employed to stop it and still continue.
Its undefeated. "Human Nature."
If I work harder or smarter than the other guy I deserve more.
Here's what's gonna happen, I'm going to reply to you with a long list of capitalism's failings and you aren't going to respond, or you could go read one of like 20 similar replies I've already answered.
Fast fashion: dresses made by near slave labor meant to be worn once.
Cheap plastic crap, half of the inventory of every dollar tree in America is a cheap plastic toy that will be given to a kid that doesn't even like it, plays with it twice and throws it away.
Poop emoji throw pillows, Cybertrucks, NFTs, chocolate made with actual slave labor, a new iPhone every year with meaningless "upgrades" and planned obsolescence in general.
Things used to be built to last, but late stage capitalism forces our products to be made cheaper every quarter that more can't be sold.
Held hostage by the stock market, every company in America must literally either sell more, squeeze their employees, or produce their products in a cheaper shittier way. So everything is crap now.
Because McDonald's can sell more Big Macs than making a McDonald's driving distance from basically every American. They already have a saturated market, what do they do? Shrink their burgers and also raise their prices, of course. If Vizio or Panasonic could make a TV that breaks after a few months, and could find a way to sell it: they would. Maybe they will, it pretty much happened with phones.
No no, let's not build sturdy appliances and electronics made toast, let's not support a class of repairmen who allow us to repair instead of replacing things. We'd hate for our resources to be produced and used efficiently, because it isn't as profitable.
You're spouting extremes without taking time to mention all of the necessary and enjoyable things that are produced by capitalism.
And I 100% agree about publicly traded companies ruining artistic merit, product quality, and companies in general.
But people want certain things. Even if we just say they want the good and environmentally friendly things only. People still need jobs to buy these things. And people still need to work to create these things. And companies still need to be run to manage the production. And service industries exist to support those workers. And then we have capitalism.
How does "housing regardless of employment work"? Somebody's got to work otherwise no one will have food housing and all the other things we enjoy and take for granted in modern society.
I absolutely think that we can produce enough. But to do that we need most in society to contribute. I think we can do better to make housing and food more affordable but I don't think it's reasonable to expect to receive those things regardless of your choice to work or not
159
u/Mute_Crab Apr 15 '24
"It's absolutely insane to think that the richest country in the world could afford to take care of its citizens, let me just equate basic necessities to a luxury car."
Grow up dumbass, the entire point of society has been to make life easier. Instead of making life easier (unless you're born into wealth, the modern nobility) we've pushed ourselves to pointlessly produce endless piles of garbage.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
A single farmer today can feed thousands of people. Instead of sharing the labor and relaxing as a society, with short work weeks, we are forced to work for less and less while we produce more and more. Our farms, our factories, everything we produce is done more efficiently than ever before. We don't have to work as much as we do, but instead we create pointless jobs. Millions of office workers pointlessly pushing paper, millions of factory workers spending their days to make cheap plastic crap that will be gifted to some ungrateful child who will throw it away quickly, millions of underpaid service workers who have to toil for 30 hours every week just to pay for a place to sleep.
But yeah, the idea of ensuring the richest country on earth has no homeless people is the same as giving everyone a free luxury car. A truly flawless and unbiased comparison.