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.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
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- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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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.
It's Murphys golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules
They don't care, you do. Change will not come from them, only from you.
The problem is that if it doesn't come from them then there will be no change.
General strike. Nobody shows up to work worldwide.
Problem is more that 50% of humanity are scabs.
That's not true. Labor laws today are much, much better than 100 years ago, and not because billionaires decided to be good.
No, it's because when taking wasn't getting shit done and the owners used cops to get violent to force them back to work, workers got violent right back, but they stopped too soon. The owning class should have been hunted down and eaten right then.
Lots of bootlickers are simply not understanding the intended message, of challenging the austerity narrative promulgated by the ruling class, which supports their selfish interests of private accumulation by oppressing the working class.
I was curious, so I pulled some quick numbers about Jeff Bezos.
Bezos has what I think is the biggest yacht in the world. It cost $500 million, according to the NYT. I am not intimately familiar with yacht ownership, but from 20 seconds of Googling I found a rule of thumb saying the yearly costs can be expected to be about 10% of the purchase price.
Currently, Amazon has over 1.5 million employees. That means Bezos' yacht money could have given every employee a bonus of about $333, and the maintenance cost could give everyone a permanent raise of about $33 per year.
It's a drop in the bucket.
Of course there are other ways you could slice this. According to Amazon's own PR piece from 2018, they had about 250K employees earning their minimum wage of $15/hour. That money would go a lot further if concentrated toward the lowest-earning employees.
I hate this bullshit logic of "But this one person's salary would not give everyone else very much!" Bezos is not the only one that should be making less. All of the chief officers should make less. All of the regional presidents should be making less. That money would absolutely be more than simply a drop in the bucket. I do agree that it should be concentrated to the lowest paid workers.
That yacht isn't the only unnecessary thing he owns and Amazon has plenty of other overpaid executives as well.
ELKG: "Trickle down economics" is a lie, but there is a truth that nobody speaks "Trickle down memes". Billion dollars of capital spent making movies that fill all the meme networks. And audiences who bitch and complain if one CGI scene has the slightest distortion, who bitch about production quality at every opportunity. They are addicted to the billionaires who fund their "Trickle down memes" that they copy/paste to every social media website for decades.
EL_Toddler: The Population of society is addicted to the images, faces, voices of the rich and powerful - even when they are incredibly ugly icons - they can't stop speaking about their distinct orange skin color and the power that comes with political power and media stardom - "you can grab them by the pussy" power.
That power comes from the population, The People, who can't resist repeating the memes. Worked for The Church in Europe in 1450 when the population was similarly meme-addled until a priest in Germany upset the meme apple cart and translated The Meme Book to German from Latin. A new printing press in Germany helped that too, even if The Church funded the first printings.
Remember kid, Tricke down Economics is a lie, Trickle Down Memes and images of the politicians, religion symbol memes, orange skin color images, they TRICKLE DOWN and that is REAL POWER over The Population! A population who can not resist taking an image of a famous orange person and repeating it hour after hour on their meme copying machines they hold in their hands or sit on their desk.
P.S. In polices, repeating a name alone, campaign signs that just show a couple colors on meme symbols and signs - work well on the population. This is proven with statistics of voting results vs. money spent on spreading the name. People generally do not go into issues and validate the performance after election that the politician is honest and delivers... name recognition by shear trickle-down of meme signs in yards, endorsements by other meme icons of society, and repeating their image and name in other places is what it takes.
They can afford to give the employees a bigger wage, they just don't want to because the employees are willing to work for the current wage.
The illusion of choice
That's a strawman argument. Yeah, if you can't pay your employees what you owe them, then you go to jail. At least that's how it's supposed to be in the ideal "capitalism". And we are comparing ideas, not real implementations (cause then somebody wouldn't have any working examples to present).
The argument is not giving a strawman, but rather identifying one given previously.
I’m not digging this anti-science streak running through progressive movements lately.
It’s to the point where “capitalism bad” is also “space bad”.
In my ideal society, we have a state captured by the need for innovation and invention. We cannot solve our problems fast enough, and the state is driving science and technology at blazing fast speed. Joking a bit, of course.
I see Progressive is more like a political adjective. Someone who's jumping to Capitalism Bad is probably a Soc. Dem. Or a Communist. But even a Liberal could be Progressive. Those bold argument types are probably never gonna have real power anyway. Don't let a rotten apple spoil the bunch.
Space ia very divorced from Capitalism. Capitalists don't pony up the funds for it, the public does. The state collects taxes for it.
They're not protesting NASA or any other public space agency. It's the private ones owned by billionaires they have issues with.
Just about every rocket launched for a NASA mission was built by a private firm.
You are implying what I am outright saying, that there is a growing anti-space sentiment growing within progressive movements.
You're just straight up putting thoughts in people's heads and getting mad at them for it.
Anti-space is not anti-science.
Space exploration (which is not even the target of any reference in the post) is profoundly expensive, and carries comparatively minimal scientific benefit.
I'm very pro-space, however, we need to take care of people here first. If we can't take care of people here, what makes you think it'll be any better out there?
This is reactionary / luddite logic at this point. We can do both. Easily.
The objection is against the personal thrills of the immensely wealthy paid by the labor of their immiserated workers.
No objection was given against projects that promote the common welfare.
Supply and demand. There are many workers and relatively few employers, so it's much easier to find a cheaper worker than a more generous employer.
The broad discussion is based not on a misunderstanding of labor organized as a salable commodity, but as a challenge against such organization.