(09-04-2024, 08:37 AM)FlickerOfLight Wrote: ...
My experience is, I've worked my ass off, and am still poor. Poor people work very very hard. Most people are meant for labor positions. Same as most people are infantry in the military. It's the same concept------disposable people.
They get paid shit, for the hardest labor under the sun.
It's not right. It's not fair. It needs to stop.
People need to be able to earn a decent living.
That's probably true. Are you familiar with the axiom "we teach others how to treat us"? When people settle for that sort of treatment, they are teaching others that it is ok to treat them that way. It needs to stop, of course, but it will not stop until they teach others to treat them better - until they set their own value, and demand that others either recognize that value or move on to employers who will. No one needs a "union" to do that. In fact, if they settle for unionization, then they are merely changing whom they allow to set their value for them - they are still not setting their own value or demanding recognition of it. They are abdicating their responsibilities to someone else, yet another company called a "union" that usually is just looking out for itself rather than them.
I will also say that I find that situation to be more prevalent in urban areas than in rural areas. Out here in the hinterlands, we'll just tell a boss to go pound salt if he won't pay us what we are worth, and just go hunting or fishing to find our own tucker, and leave him sitting there without any employees to do the work he needs done. We don't "strike" - or we didn't, until the UMWA mucked everything up - we flat out quit, and left his ass sitting there in the dust to fail on his own.
Quote:My issue with capitalism is simply this.
Hypothetical numbers, but say the average Amazon employee made 100,000 a year, while the CEO pulled in 1 billion.
This needs to stop. And stop....it will. This will not go on forever. Nor should it.
This is America. We shouldn't be struggling like this when there's all that money. Its the 1% who actually profit. It's not fair and it should stop, and all that profit spread more evenly.
Now....yes, they are pushing for us to "minimize" so that they can have even more profit. That's why everything is being priced out. Soon they'll own it all.
And we marched our asses right into it---generation by generation.
My real beef is, I believe we are the prostitute on the beast mentioned in Revelation. But, that's another thread. If this is True, then yeah, it needs to stop so bad that it brings on the Antichrist and Armageddon.
That's my true beef here.
I personally don't have any problem with capitalism. I've seen all kinds of systems, and so far have not found one that works as well to uplift the individual. It's based upon "value" - an honest wage for honest work - and insists that both sides demand those two things. Where it fails is when one side or the other either fails to live up to their end, or else fails to demand that the other side lives up to theirs. When one side or the other simply settles for what it can get, then the system fails.
Socialism, on the other hand, is based upon the notion that everyone "owes" everyone else, which is patently false. No one owes anyone any thing. That's why it can never work. Starting out with the notion that someone else "owes" us something that they never indebted themself to us for is doomed to failure when they tell us to kiss their ass, they ain't paying what they don't owe.
Funny you should mention Amazon. My son works for them, and makes, I believe, around 60k/year. He didn't start out there, of course. I think he started out around 27 or 30k/year. Still,he has his own land surrounding a house that I would call a "mansion" - I've never lived in a place so big and fine as that - and he's not yet 30 years old. He didn't do that by just settling, allowing himself to be made a mere cog in the machine, and letting someone else just spin him. He did it by setting his own value, demanding it, and going a bit beyond to where he could set a higher value on himself, then demand THAT. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It wasn't that easy, of course. Every job one will ever work has it's challenges and aggravations. What matters is how one handles them - how we make them work for us, and refuse to let them work against us. I'd like to take credit for my son's success, but of course I cant. I didn't do it, he did, and he has already surpassed me, owning more land, and like I said, having a bigger house than I ever did, or ever will. I gave him the basic building blocks and attitudes, but everything else, all the accomplishment, is all on him.
Oddly, perhaps, he cares nary a bit what the CEO of Amazon is making. He's too busy building his own life to worry about what someone else is getting or doing. When we start envying someone else's ball, it means we have taken our eyes off of our own... and it suffers from that neglect.
I don't get to talk to him as often any more, which many would take as a sad thing. However, I choose to see it as a positive - my job here is done, I've taught him everything I can, and he's got it from here on out. That means I can die in peace when my time comes, secure in the knowledge that I don't have to fight through the pain of dying just in case I get that panicky midnight "what do I do? What do I DO?" phone call. He's got it, nothing more for me to supply.
Now, don't get me wrong - I think most modern CEOs are making ridiculous money and perks, but I also see that money is theirs, not mine to worry over, and I also see that it is what the market will bear. So long as people continue to give them ridiculous amounts of money for their crap, they will continue to gather ridiculous amounts of money from those people. If folks want to make a change, then stop shopping there or buying whatever product they're selling - or, demand a more reasonable price, or else go elsewhere. We MAKE these oligarchs, and then sit back and complain about it. A better choice is to not make them in the first place. We didn't just "stumble" in to this situation, we MADE it.
Socialism will not fix that. It will only create new oligarchs (as it always has), only give us NEW Masters to complain about. Socialism is just a different form of capitalism, one where different people suck the value out of you, with the added bonus that they can mow MAKE you give up that value to them, whether you want to or not. You can no longer "just go fishing" when they screw you over. You no longer have the freedom to exercise that option under socialism. The next "Five Year Plan" requires that you work for The Man whether you want to or not.
It's just another form of capitalism, with the added dimension of feudalism and slavery. Ask a Russian some time how wonderful their socialist worker's paradise was, and how well that wealth got redistributed down to them... and why, if it was so great, they finally abandoned it as unworkable. It might be an eye-opener.
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