71–80 of 153 posts
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Nothing significant stops people from forming worker collectives. Maybe it's telling that they're so uncommon?
Did you not read the part where thousands upon thousands of people trying to unionized were murdered?
Keep writing! We are just one or two more articles from everyone susddenly realizing that capitalism is mean and overthrowing the system. What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That's not nearly as much fun as whining.
> whining We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds. However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining". Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".
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Visit any large city in the US and you'll find hundreds or thousands who have made that choice. They line the sidewalks and alleys. Yes, you have that choice; you may not like the lifestyle it provides but you have that choice.
but you don't have the choice of living like a hunter-gatherer, because all good lands have been swallowed up by capitalist megacommunities
If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Eve…
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively p…
How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?
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> We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide. So then why do we have inherited wealth, why not ban that. Make things equitable, born with nothing but you can scavenge yourself. > To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn. You mean like "private property"? Your logic only makes sense in an equitable world, where everyone is born equal, b…
This is diving into a conversation that may be best not had on HNN. @Dang - delete this if you like man, no offense taken. I don't think the goal is equity but equality. At least, that is my goal. I want the lowliest shoeshine boy to have the opportunity to do amazing things. I make no apologies for the country I was born or the circumstances. I grew up on a poor farm in a broken trailer surrounded by my backwoods re…
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Part of the issue (in countries where you're not liable to be shot or accused by the police of running a cult or what-have-you) is that worker co-ops do not generally have access to significant capital or loans from VCs and banks which are scared of them, so cannot usually spend outside their means to grow - while companies that mesh well with current financialised society can. As a result, co-ops need to grow differ…
I'm very interested in this point! Do you think there is something about the structure of co-operatives that intrinsically makes them less attractive to investors? Or do you think that the fear you mentioned is just a result of them being currently unconventional, and this problem will be fixed once we culturally become more open to alternative ways of organising work?
It's the intrinsic structure of being owned by the workers that makes co-operatives less financially attractive to outside investors. My previous comment about why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166080
Co-operatives also have to compete in the marketplace (compete in both the costs & revenue) with other companies that are not co-ops. This financial pressure from other global economic actors is what causes co-ops like Mondragon to outsource labor to subcontractors or workforce in other countries who are not true members of the co-op. Mondragon appliances, etc still have to compete in sales with everyone else.
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This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person... The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...
I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized... Do the math. It's literally division. When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is…
Belle Époque was circa 100 years after the French Revolution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively p…
People always bitch about CEOs. Do the math. Intel employs 120k people. The CEO makes $10M per year. Distribute his salary evenly to everyone at the company, it's not even a 0.2% increase to the average person's pay. Let's say there's 10 execs like this. Still not even 2% (and there aren't 10 execs like that). Most of the megacaps look the same. The salaries are massive. But they employ a LOT of people, and the avera…
A counterpoint with 5 minutes of searching: from [1], Peter Kern (3rd highest paid CEO) got $296M in 2022 overseeing ~15k employees (from [2]). Distribute that salary evenly and everyone gets a ~19k boost which, on an average base of $108k (from [3]), is about +17%, if I'm not mistaken.
If you want an even more ludicrous example, David Baszucki (Roblox, 7th highest, also [1]) got $232M in 2022 overseeing ~1600 employees (from [4]). Even distribution gives a $145k boost on an average base of ~$135k (from [5]) is about +107%. Which is a bit better than Intel's +0.2%, no?
In summary, you can pick and choose examples to make either point.
[1] https://www.equilar.com/reports/95-equilar-new-york-times-to... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EXPE/expedia/numbe... [3] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Expedia%2C_Inc... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279348/roblox-number-of... [5] https://www.comparably.com/companies/roblox/salaries
Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly. Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet. It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for…
> tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you An employer does not give a raise and disposable income to a worker. The worker is the creator of wealth, and the heirs collecting dividend profits are who are being given to. Your confusion about the directionality of created wealth within the relations of production is the whole point of the article.
Marxists do think that way and they are wrong. The thing they are missing is the third factor of production (labor, capital, land) that was magically omitted from classical economics to make the conflict strictly between labor and capital. You end up with the left right divide blaming each other for wrongdoing even though these two factors are in symbiosis. It's the slumlord on the sidelines that enters the equation unnoticed, convinces the the parties to hate each other, while sucking away their blood like a good parasite.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized... Do the math. It's literally division. When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is…
> Belle Epoch in France before the French Revolution Belle Époque was circa 100 years after the French Revolution.