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Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

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Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#131

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

oreally wrote: post #130
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still you gotta admit there is a problem with CEOs making off with huge salaries/stock value especially in very hot sectors, with some of them even trying to dodge taxes. I couldn't agree more. It doesn't mean they're the reason workers aren't significantly richer.

Imo, part of the reason at least. Still, I'm interested in your other reasons if you got any.

We don't produce enough!

Imagine a world in which the only product is apples.

If everyone needs 3 apples per day to be healthy and happy - and you only produce 1 apple per person - it does not matter if the richest 0.1% get 200 apples per day. If you distributed them evenly, there is still not enough apples. And distributing them evenly does not even improve things in any significant way.

Sure, it is a problem. The bottom decile that lives on .1 apple per day now gets .3 apples per day. But they still don't even have close to enough apples! Neither does anyone else!

People like to hand-wave this away. But GLOBAL GDP per capita is less than $11,000 per year. That is NOT enough money for everyone to have a house with a white picket fence, and a car in the garage, and a chicken in the oven, and a wife who stays at home and takes care of the kids. It's not even enough for everyone to live a life that resembles being upper lower class in France.

And remember, the rich pay most of the taxes. Now you have to pay an even share - so of your $11,000, 25% of that is taxes! You only actually get ~$8,200.

~$8,200 per year wouldn't even qualify you for a mortgage to buy a $35,000 house. That's barely buying you enough materials to build a dollhouse. It's not buying you land anywhere you'd want live. And it's definitely not enough to connect to utilities.

Distribution is a problem. THE problem is total output. ~$11,000 per person per year. Remember this is in inflated 2022 dollars - ~$9000 in 2019 dollars - this is including all-time highs due to massive stimulus and unprecedented levels of debt. ~$9000 in 2019 dollars is Mexico's GDP per capita - Bulgaria & Belarus. I love Mexico to death - but these are not paradises.

Globally, the much bigger problem is that there are not enough apples being produced!

Locally, in the US and the EU - GDP per capita is quite high. If we lived in a socialized society, sure, things could definitely be better for minimum wage workers.

But I'm quitting my job at FAANG tomorrow to be a yoga teacher if I make the same amount of money. I don't know who in their right mind is going to continue being a nurse or most doctors. I'm not sure why many people are going to do hard physical labor like construction or dangerous jobs like fighting fires and crime - if everyone makes the same amount of money... Good luck keeping production high and society functioning...

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#132

Post by yreg »

pwinnski wrote: post #125
yreg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>does none of the actual work himself How did this person become the sole shareholder of a 100 person game company producing wildly successful game without any work in your story?

Bank loans and venture capital.

Banks are handing out game studios now? Did you get one as well?

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#133

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

pwinnski wrote: post #119
refurb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, absolutely not "wage theft". Presumably the CEO bring something to the table - capital, fundraising ability. I mean why else have him/her? CEO hires a bunch of employees, all who get paid. The game is a success and since he put the capital at risk, he gets most the reward. The employees get their salary. Unfair? Well, what if it doesn't work out? Employees all get their salary, CEO loses his capital. Workers can…

> Presumably the CEO bring something to the table - capital, fundraising ability. I mean why else have him/her? You're so close! In fact, there's an expectation that the more you pay a CEO, the better they perform, and that those making the most must be the best. This seems to be a largely-unexamined assumption that "just makes sense," but it turns out when you try to see whether it's true, it's not[0]. By and large,…

> By and large, highly-paid CEOs are a drain on corporate profits. As the research paper I linked shows, even those highly-compensated CEOs who win awards end up performing worse than their non-award-winning counterparts.

You're forgetting who decides CEO pay - the board / shareholders.

They are aware of this. And despite that, they keep these pay packages.

Is it fair? I dunno. I personally don't think CEO's should be getting paid what they do. Does anyone care? No.

Is anyone's salary fair? I dunno.

If you distribute the CEO's pay to the rest of the company it wouldn't materially impact average workers wages (less than a 1% increase) - except in rare cases (less than 5% of large companies).

Why should I get raged out that my CEO makes $100M+ per year? If you distribute that to everyone at the company - it's not even a 1% increase. There's much easier ways I can make 1% more money...

It's really not worth discussing except in rare cases - and those are exceptions that don't change the larger picture.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#134

Post by lr4444lr »

alexb_ wrote: post #39
lr4444lr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I condemn violence, but that's not what I meant: nothing stops the people from quitting and forming their own worker-owned company.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#135

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

pwinnski wrote: post #124
pwinnski wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not so much a one-time cash grab, it's that with that concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power that distorts society. Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to ha…

As an example of the sort of societal distortion I'm talking about, consider Elon Musk, who wanted people to buy his cars rather than take trains, and so lied about a fantastical system of tunnels he would surely build, and... well, the quote is "So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt…

If the California High Speed Rail project was ever going to succeed - it would've went from Los Angeles to San Diego (118 miles almost entirely densely populated).

The fact that they planned for it to go from Los Angeles to the Bay (340+ miles almost entirely nothing) is pretty strong evidence that basically everyone involved was only trying to win elections and not really make HSR happen.

Los Angeles to San Diego is makes much more sense. Just having a bullet train from the West Side to DTLA to Long Beach to somewhere in OC would've had massively higher ridership and cost less money.

Everyone involved just wanted to waste money to win elections (and to no surprise, it worked).

I hate Elon as much as anyone. If he even played a small part in this - the much larger blame goes to the politicians.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#136

Post by becquerel »

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #18
becquerel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can choose who we work for (sometimes), but we can't choose not to work at all. Our engagement in the capitalist labour market is mandatory; otherwise we starve to death. Doesn't sound like we have much control over our labour to me.

I'm concerned my response will be taken poorly so I will try to phrase this well. I hope you take this in the manner I intend it - with love in my heart. We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide. To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn. Now, we as people are also compassionate and we want the elderly to not starve and we want the in…

> We, as humans, are only entitled to what we can ourselves provide.

Humans are entitled to nothing, because there is no metaphysical overseer that decides who does and does not deserve things. Entitlement is an idea created and perpetuated by human beings to justify certain kinds of behaviour.

> To believe otherwise may be to hoist the black flag to take from others that which they did not earn.

Capitalist labour, by its very nature, is an extractive process that takes from workers what they earned. This is the genesis of that thing known as 'profit'. I followed the same logic as you when I became a socialist bent on upturning the current social order.

> But, to believe that a normal human being can do nothing and that someone else will provide for them - wholesale across our country - doesn't seem very sustainable.

I don't really care about what's sensible or sustainable, compared to what is good and just. (Our current way of doing things is certainly neither!) I wouldn't feed someone because they're infirm and can't get their own food; I'd feed them because they're hungry, end of story.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#137

Post by JoeAltmaier »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #108
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude. The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.

Look, I'm close to as far left as you can get. But this is leftist propaganda that makes no sense. I just disproved that ALL billionaires (including the centibillionaires) do not have a meaningful amount of money to distribute to the country (or the globe) in any reasonably fair way. Singling out the centibillionaires - Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Gates and Buffet - doesn't make my point irrelevant. If you're o…

For those in the top of earnings, it feels good to ignore wealth inequality. To imagine it's somehow 'ok' that a handful of people own over half the economy, is tragic.

Consider: the bottom half of American wage-earners (those below $97,000(!)) have combined wealth of approximately 1% of the American total.

So maybe we're talking about the wrong 1% - we can instead consider those sharing I have to imagine, the parrot in the room is not me. I wonder why somebody "far left" can fool themselves this way.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#138

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

croon wrote: post #27
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

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…

> In the US - Billionaires have $1.4T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ Correction: It says 4.2T on the site you linked when I clicked through to the google doc [0]. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE9...

Thanks.

That was $1.3T they made in the best 11-month period (which they have since lost $622B).

They had $4.2T at their all-time high, and are now at $3.6T.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#139

Post by catlifeonmars »

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #96
catlifeonmars wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are equating work with the production of value (in some way shape or form). However, machines can till the earth.

Whos sweat and blood was used to make the machine that was taken from him and given to someone else? Look, at some point we may be in a true post-scarcity environment where we can fabricate food/clothing/items with just energy from an abundant resource. At that time, I will consider this question anew. Until then, I just don't think it has legs.

I think a post scarcity environment is achievable with today’s technology. It’s today’s political and socioeconomic systems which are preventing that from becoming a reality.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#140

Post by oreally »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #131
oreally wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo, part of the reason at least. Still, I'm interested in your other reasons if you got any.

We don't produce enough! Imagine a world in which the only product is apples. If everyone needs 3 apples per day to be healthy and happy - and you only produce 1 apple per person - it does not matter if the richest 0.1% get 200 apples per day. If you distributed them evenly, there is still not enough apples. And distributing them evenly does not even improve things in any significant way. Sure, it is a problem. The b…

I do think relying on production has it's limits. Countries would rather save up on apples, be self sufficient for a rainy day rather than spend them.

Given how my (non-western) dollar converts to USD, I wouldn't hire a US person for grunt work unless he/she had specific expertise to teach or a local knowledge bias for when my firm expands to the US. So there's less inflow to the US, and only to a select few people. So where does that lead us to? The US printing money and doing as much as it can to mitigate the side effects.

So your population has only a select few who get the inflows. And you can tax them for distribution.

And chances are you're not going to get other countries to spend their apples. You could get workers to accept lower pay rates, but I highly doubt it's possible without upsetting stability. Are you doomed to huge amounts of money printing then? Maybe you'd get away with it since you're the US after all.

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