You think we’re gonna fight corporations as individuals if we strangle government?
No. Government is our protection from those who would want to consolidate power, especially corporations. I understand that the government often fails at that protection, but it’s still a hell of a lot better than being completely defenseless.
The whole point of the founding fathers was to spread power and attempt to keep it spread. They wanted to avoid both the abuses of monarchy and the eventual decapitation of leadership (seeing as how that’d be their heads).
It ain’t going well for the little guy lately - the thread in my Lemmy right below this one is “Amazon, SpaceX and other companies are arguing the government agency that has protected labor rights since 1935 is actually unconstitutional”.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the working man that labor unions were gasp COMMUNIST
Wouldn’t it be an interesting few years if governments banned companies from owning companies (maybe with carve outs for pension funds)
Government is our megazord. Got it.
Edit: added wiki link for the curious. In short, episodes of the Power Rangers often end with the rangers battling a monster that inevitably revives as a much larger, Godzilla-scale version.
As the rangers are suddenly too small to fight the larger foe that towers above them, they must instead organize their individual vehicles into one giant “megazord” — a large mech, like a gundam crossed with a transformer — in order to defeat the enemy.
That only works if it can be meaningfully said that the working class directs the state, rather than the owner class. In America, the Owner Class dominates the state via lobbying and being able to contribute to election campaigns.
The working class directs the state. The owning class directs the working class. The owning class doesn’t give two shits about abortion beyond how they can use it to get the people they want elected.
It’s why they bother with Fox News and all this propaganda. At the end of the day they still need votes.
The Working Class does not direct the state, because they must pick between candidates chosen by the Owner Class. The system itself is designed to protect the Owner Class, and it does so through picking representatives to prevent truly democratic processes.
Fox, CNN, NYT, all of the major media outlets owned by the same group of companies serve as the bread and circuses to distract the Workers.
Yes, the owning class are the ones who picked George Santos. Not just anyone can run. He was the chosen one.
Things are difficult, yes. They’re not completely hopeless.
George Santos never rocked the boat and was never a threat.
Reform into a worker-controlled system is largely impossible, but that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. The system needs to be replaced.
The Founding Fathers built the state to support the interests of the Owner Class, because they were Owners.
One might argue that the government is there to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. James Madison certainly did
Thus the beheading part. Spreading power was good for everyone.
I’d rather have a billion USD as an American citizen than have 10 billion USD as a Russian oligarch. For some reason the GOP doesn’t seem to understand why.
Yes. The point of government is to fight things too big for us to fight ourselves. That is the only reason government has to exist. All the other things are nice to have features, but a government is a fighting force.
That doesn’t mean we give up our own weapons though. We need an army to fight the other armies, law to fight the power of money, and government for those. But we also need weapons of our own to prevent the government from physically fighting us.
Our weapons keep the government polite. The government keeps other governments and other large organizations polite.
It’s the minimum structure necessary for a society where respectful interaction is the norm.
All these weapons and power structuring aren’t about dominating. They’re about maintaining a power balance to prevent domination … and make space for respect and trade.
Government therefore exists in order to:
- Prevent any individual from dominating any other individual, creating guaranteed space for respectful trade
- Ensure the first item by having enough physical power (army) to control any individual including removing them
- Also configure that army to oppose other armies so that they can’t come dominate the local individuals
- Be unable to dominate the whole polity if it fights together (government carries a sword but each individual carries a small knife; only large groups of individuals can oppose the sword)
It all starts from needing a way to enforce nobody is dominating anyone else.
But we also need weapons of our own to prevent the government from physically fighting us.
And the most important and effective weapon is collective action. The reason people look weird at Americans about gun culture is because alone, you can have as many guns as you want, the police will bash your head in either way. Together, you don’t even need guns, you can cripple the government in a week by just not going to work.
And that ability is incredibly heavily regulated in the US. From our perspective, the US is the country where people don’t have the ability to fight the government.
That said, guns can be good against nazis at your door, but at that point, the government has long failed at taking out the trash.
What i take away from this is that when an individual becomes too powerful (e.g. rich) it becomes a threat for the government and the government should consider it a threat and intervene. Yes, I’m talking about the billionaires.
That’s why it’s important to study the mechanisms of the state to see who actually controls it.
As someone who’s self employed, I feel like self employment is a form of rebellion against this system.
My dad teases me that his socialist son is now a capitalist because I give music lessons and host events. I’m pretty sure I’m not because I don’t profit from the labor of someone else, I do all the work and anyone who helps me isn’t existentially tied to me.
Sounds like your dad has fuck all for a grasp on what socialism is
Yup. The good part about it is that if I know the trip wire words to avoid, I can get him to agree on some really progressive things.
Like I got him to agree that history is uncomfortable and that victors tend to write history, so we should be critical in how we learn it and teach it. We should consider the perspectives of who “the losers” are to get a true grasp of what actually happened, and that the society you grow up in will shape your world view. Our history classes should confront these issues and teach events with consideration of different groups of people and how they were affected, even if it may make us uncomfortable.
Hmmm what does that sound like?
Sounds like The Great ReplacementTM. BETSY, GET ME MY GUN!
So many people and absolutely incapable of defining socialism or capitalism.
Every damn one of them has an opinion on both.
We want them both at the same time. We want to be winners, but we imagine that if we were, we would be fair, thereby creating a utopia.
People associate those words with their fantasies, not with the ideological tenets that actually define them.
The way should be socialism and collective help for the poor, free market capitalism and taking risks for the rich. The point is, the more you have, the less the system should help you. In many places, it’s the other way around.
Socialism isn’t public safety nets. You’re referring to Social Democracy, ie Capitalism with strong safety nets, not collective ownership of the Means of Production.
Socialism=communism. Communism=red. Red looks like blood. Blood means someone might die. Socialism bad cuz it means dead people.
That’s usually how conservatives who I have talked to look at it. 💀
So many lost causes…
Oof… Who’s gonna tell (U.S) conservatives what their primary party color is?
A boomer!? (presumably) There’s a shock…
There is no badge for not hiring people. Its better to hire someone and treat them better than another employer than pretend like you are virtuous and not “profiting from their labor”.
An interesting thought. A kind of harm reduction. Alternately (or perhaps coinciding) I’m very interested in workers co-ops where the distinction between employee/er kinda goes away. You can still have managers and people setting the quarterly goals or whatever, but they aren’t “above” you, except maybe in their skill at managing people.
I am all in favor of any work relationship that is consensual. I just dont like it when people keep wanting to make laws that “protect employees” when they are actually harming everyone instead.
Mark Cuban put his money where his mouth is. He made 300 millionaires out of the 330 employees in one of his earlier companies by giving them stock ownership.
Workers paid by the hour are ‘always going to fall behind, - CubanWow when the billionaires are worried about income inequality you know the shit has gone too far. It’s like it’s not even fun for them anymore.
Thought provoking article. Thank you got sharing. I certainly don’t agree with everything said, but it’s interesting to hear a different view.
I remembered that Cuban was on record for saying & doing this & that link was the easiest to source from because so many people know who he is. I wanted to highlight the deed itself. More recently, was the open letter written by over 250 billionaires & multi-millionaires pleading to be taxed more than they currently are.
As you say, you know it’s almost pitchfork levels when the letter, which was read at WEF in Davos, says“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society. This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”
According to the article, “Imposing a 2% tax on the world’s billionaires alone would raise almost $250 billion annually”
Question is, why are governments so reluctant to grant them this?
It’s better entirely to set up a worker co-operative and cease exploitation.
I’m pretty sure I’m not because I don’t profit from the labor of someone else, I do all the work and anyone who helps me isn’t existentially tied to me.
Idk, I’m in a similar boat. I work at a state-run hospital, but I also own a company with my wife and friend and we do all the labour together. I think sometimes to deal with the work load I have a “home me” and a “work me”.
Home me is chill, just wants to relax and have a good time.
Work me… He’s a scoundrel who doesn’t work nearly hard enough to afford “home me” more leisure time. You can’t trust him, gotta watch him like a hawk. I’m going to wring that guy dry until I can retire off his sweat.
So it makes an odd amount of sense to me, but I’ve constructed an odd coping mechanism i think.
Self-employment is detrimental to people. Because it has the workers support all the risks. It’s not the solution.
If we’re being honest, corporations don’t “pay” taxes at all, those costs are instead passed on to the consumer. They collect taxes from you, just like the government, they just hide it better.
Also the employees! Your employer and you split your taxes. If the company didn’t have to pay ~15%, they could theoretically increase your salary by that much. They wouldn’t, but they could.
You’re right. Unless the only alternative for an employer is to raise wages or die, they won’t.
And people don’t pay taxes either, since they get money from companies to pay the taxes! Nobody actually pays taxes, it is the circle of money.
That is what you sound like.
Circle of money is incredibly important. People get money they spend it, improving their lives.
Goverment spend money building and maintaining infrastructure, and in normal countires education and healthcare.
Companies get money (pay less tax) they give most of it to shareholders to hoard. Who sits on a bigger and bigger pile of societys life blood, draining it to a lifeless husk. Parasites pure and simple.You’re closer to right than wrong.
Exactly. They just pass the cost onto consumers because there’s no way they could reduce CEO pay.
But please ignore how stock buybacks and c-suite pay was way lower when corporate taxes were high. That’s a silly correlation that has nothing to do with price inelasticity.
Reducing CEO pay is a logical fallacy. They will find a way to recoup those lost monies in another, harder to find and even harder to tax way, generally by reducing quality/ quantity of product, making cuts to workforce costs, or passing on costs to consumers in the form of increased prices. Altruism doesn’t keep the lights on.
Hence the need for minimum wage.
Just because you have to play more layers of the game doesn’t mean the game is impossible.
And the cost of raising the minimum wage kicks off the cycle of increasing costs, which in turn gets passed off onto the customer, or reduced compensation / hours for workers, or any number of other cost cutting measures. I’m not sticking up for them, just saying what will happen in that case. Sad, but true. They will always find a way to shift those costs or the company will likely eventually fail, in turn losing all those jobs, whether that’s due to being priced out, major drops in investors, etc. It’s a huge shit sandwich, and, unless you’re at the top, we’re all forced to take a bite.
It’s not linear. Raising minimum wages by a dollar raises costs by less than a dollar because wages aren’t 100% of costs.
…so lower income earners can get bumped up into a higher tax bracket?
Small employer, where they will actually feel this, sure. Might work. Might put them under too, but that doesn’t matter since corporations do their best to crush the little guy. And for them, when you multiply that “just a dollar” by the number of hours worked, across all employees, and the bigger bumps that executives will then demand, that shows up as red on next year’s ledger. And once again, hours get slashed, benefits get cut, jobs get lost to automation…
The ripple effects of taxing companies, increasing labor costs, and the costs of compliance and litigation, real or frivolous all wind up hurting the little guy. You seem to think a corporation will just take it and move along with their tail between their legs, but they don’t. They always find a way around it, through all the things I’ve already stated. And throw in legal tax loopholes, lobbying and subsidies.
That’s not how tax brackets work. You pay a higher rate only on the amount above the bracket. You don’t pay a higher rate on the whole thing. You still end up making more money. Not understanding this should indicate to you that you really very much need to learn more on the topic.
The rest of your point is defeatist. You think corporations are some super powerful infinitely sneaky things. They are not. We have allowed them to become so through neglect. They can easily be reined back in. They were quite functional and much more heavily taxed in the 60s, and citizens were much better off. As a start we can just go back to that.
If we tax income then employees will just demand higher salaries! Don’t tax income, just let corporations pay more tax without having to enrich their greedy employees even further. There’s no point to income taxes, employers just end up paying for them anyway.
Companies charge for their products and services as much as they can get away with charging, quite independently of taxes - it’s all about how much customers will pay, not about taxes.
The only taxea companies collect for the State are Sales Taxes.
Your view is the same delusion about how Markets works as the one were companies will raise salaries if they increase prices: no they won’t, they charge as much as they can get away with and pay as little as they can get away with since what’s in between the company owners (and upper management) get to keep.
This is basic Economics.
Pretty sure you’re thinking I’m supporting the “companies”. I’m not. Their sole purpose is to make money, be it for the ownership, board, or investors. Regardless of how you feel about that, it’s “real world” economics. , Raising taxes on them comes with consequences, we need to be honest with the ripple effect it causes. The board, shareholders, ownership, etc isn’t going to just “take it” and lower their own compensation. They will lower their costs to compensate, in the form of reducing hours, lowering quality of their product, raising prices on their product, lowering other compensation provided to employees, drastic cuts to their workforce, contracting workers, even famously “giving you less chips in a bag” for the same price. Companies will only willfully raise wages when the alternative is to be pushed out of lucrative markets.
Nothing about economics is “basic”.
Profit is literally the top objective of a For Profit company and they will charge the maximum they can get away with independently of taxes because that maximizes profit.
If as per your theory a company charges X because it pays lower corporate taxes, and when the taxes it pays go up it starts charging X + Y, that means it could’ve been charging X + Y all along (as in that theory of yours people clearly are willing to pay it) but didn’t, so logically it was not maximizing profits. which goes against the very objective of a company.
In financial and accounting terms corporate taxes are not costs (they apply to profits only and can never make a profitable company become unprofitable) and hence don’t cause the same effect on prices as actual cost increases which can push prices up because they force all market participants to do so as otherwise they risk losing money.
Ditto on your whole lowering of costs “theory” - if a company can already lower costs and is not doing it, then it is literally refraining from maximizing profits, so going against its reason of being.
You assume a causal relation that isn’t there because the driving motivation for any company is profit maximization and all those things you say they would start doing if taxes went up they have an obligation of doing it right now as that maximizes profits and if they’re not doing it that’s because they can’t, and there is no logical explanation for not being able to do it now because their taxes are lower.
You’re correct, there is nothing stopping them from lowering costs right now, aside from market competition. If prices on the exact same item are different between Target and Walmart, for example, the market trend is generally toward the retailer with the lowest price (excluding external factors such as time/distance, familiarity, etc). However, as taxes (or any realized cost of doing business, for that matter) goes up, the pressure from investors/shareholders goes up, necessitating these moves sooner than later.
Jacking up taxes or the cost of labor, materials, energy or compliance will be offset by things I’ve already stated ad nauseum. Business will do what it does and continue to grow wealth at the top and keep the rest of us as complacent as possible.
Am I remembering wrong or is this the first NSF “terrorist” leader’s monologue in Deus Ex?
Yep. Remember, kids, don’t talk to terrorist. That’s how they get in your head. Always shoot on sight.
Weird how much of it still works just fine 24 years later
Whats weird about it? The global paradigm is unchanged.
If anything, it’s closer to Deus Ex now
What are you talking about, that will only take place 28 years from now.
PS: What the fuck we’re almost halfway into Deus Ex
Technology has changed a lot but not society.
You are not afraid to kill. I am pleased. The last thing I would expect from the brother of Paul.
Can you work for the terrorists in Deus Ex?
Eventually; lots of things are possible in that gem of a game.
It’s not possible to avoid joining them actually.
You don’t have a choice. You have to work for them.
governme-
nts
He had to catch a breath.
Mid-syllable hyphen >:(
90% was self employed in 1900.
That can’t be right can it?
Yeah, it’s correct if by “self employed” you mean “subsistence farmer”. The US was basically a third world country in 1900. We only won the Spanish American War in 1898 because Spain was a dying empire.
50% according to this article. They mention 80% in 1860.
I’m not 100% sure of the source there but I have heard similar numbers around 50%. Think of all the self-employed people doing jobs that just don’t exist today in the US - delivering milk, fruit, fish, newspapers, door-to-door salesmen, and that’s on top of jobs that still exist today with a lot of self-employed people like AC repair, plumbing, etc…
From 1860 to 1900 the average size of American farms had declined from 199 acres to 147 acres and the percentage of farmers in the labor force declined from 58 to 38 percent.
No, doesn’t seem right.
Don’t even get me started on the litigation terrorism against states that want to implement green laws
This guy is gonna get laid
…off.
Also likely, but it doesn’t invalidate his point
If you talk to me that way you can have me any way you please. I’m more bear than femboy though, but still. Any hole a goal?
Even today, Deus Ex proves to be relevant and provokes discussion. True art.
Who’s reinstalling it right now?
“Maybe you should try getting a job?”
“Okay, where?”
“Majestic 12.”
“Maybe you should join Majestic 12, in a body bag.”
“Remember, the GEP gun is the best way to make a silent take-down.” -Paul Denton
4chan
A bombs a baad choice for close range combat.
That’s not what Helldivers has taught me!
Yo I wanna hang with you at the parties.
So whats the context for the original image ???
A club called Milk in Edinburgh posted it on their Facebook page. Presumably it was taken there.
Of course it’s Edinburgh lmao.
He’s from the future and there to tell her about all the things the internet will be making him say once the photo goes up.
Is this a meme, is it, or is it real life?
Is this just fantasy…?
Caught in a meme slide…
Can have little a escape from reality, as a treat.
Yeah? well I don’t see any corporations getting hot puss puss. Later nerds.
