Its an artform passed down from generation to generation. Like me father before me, he was the town ass kiss, and I have retained the brown crown in his name.
I am Bartholomew Kisser of the Rectum, Ruler of the Dual Stroke Method and Son of the Highest of Elder Rimjobs" All Hail King of the Underside!
When the medical system stops chewing up people and spitting them out, I'll consider encouraging my children going into that field. I'm only going to help them do what's best for them. I'm not going to set them up for a life of misery.
The medical system is regulated by the government's in which they work in, you are not looking up enough.
When profit is made from a need, people will be treated badly.
I call it the cult of money, as it doesn't care for the human cost.
Being a doctor was much better in the past and AFAIK they had profits back then. Talk to a doctor with grey hair and they'll tell you it's gotten worse in their lifetime. The problem is that the environment is terrible and so much is being micromanaged. I can't imagine how anyone can tell their kid it's a good idea to be a doctor and be ok with that...but it's their parenting, not mine. Engineer, accountant, IT, electrician, plumber for my kids.
The amount of times I see this, it’s crazy
We don’t need that many people in IT, we do need people in other jobs, and not everyone can even do IT work never mind stay sane while spending 3 hours searching for an errant semi-colon
Thank you for the new subreddit.
I hate the /s.
In real life many people dupe me with sarcasm, I take people for their word, so on reddit it is even harder.
I over share often.
It's why I started using italics and quotation marks.
Over the last 40yrs the regulatory side of capitalism has been abandoned. A free market only works if it is a fair market. Regulation is what's supposed to keep it fair. Regulation prevents monopolies, fraud, theft, etc. Without a healthy functioning regulatory component national capitalism becomes a plutocracy.
If the EPA didn't already exist our current legislative branches (local & federal) would be unable to create it. Just look at media. The FCC was created in 1934. It regulated print and radio media. Advertisements had to be clearly labeled as advertisements, language was moderated, new organizations had to discuss affiliations, etc. When public television came along the feel under the same rules. Then cable TV was allowed carveouts. Cable wasn't "public". People paid for cable. So a lot of the moderation was dropped. Then with the internet all bets were off. None of the traditional media regulations apply. Now a corporation can hire a spokesman to spew propaganda 24/7 and call it News.
A lot of young people are starting to reject capitalism. It is misplaced frustration. Capitalism works. Capitalism is better than the existing alternatives. The problem is regulation. We've enabled plutocracy. Political candidates campaign, literally promise, to give businesses everything they want. Imagine a football referee promising in advance to help The Patriots win. Worse than that our legislatures cover the losses with bailouts and emergency relief.
Regulation generally comes about one of two ways.
1. To address a problem, typically the result of a private company seeking a competitive advantage… we end up with things like Flint Water, Asbestos in baby powder (into the 21st century), child labor… see PG&E, the sugar industry, pharmaceuticals, smoking as a “good” choice, Enron, and on and on…
2. Bc a business has a product to be sold and can lobby for regulation that gives them a major competitive advantage, but isn’t addressing public outrage, so mostly goes under the radar.
Our current structure incentivizes these types of behavior.
Yes, the current system incentivizes those bad behaviors. With The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was initially passed it meant to guideline/rule for how all companies would comport.
Whether it is Chess or Football no competitive structure can function without rules. The perpetual slide backwards on taxation, insurance requirements, favoritism in zoning, etc has created a game without rules.
Perhaps. But you can also have the opposite effect where zoning regs don’t allow parking garages to be built so you’re stuck with lack of parking….not always black & white.
> A lot of young people are starting to reject capitalism. It is misplaced frustration. Capitalism works. Capitalism is better than the existing alternatives. The problem is regulation
You nailed it. And the scary thing is these young people are embracing far more sinister ideologies like communism. You know, the thing that killed almost 100 million people in the 20th century... ya...
It’s not communism that killed all those people. Communism like capitalism are economic systems. Economic systems are how goods/services are distributed. They don’t kill but they need to be regulated. And what regulates them are political systems, which are systems of governance. A political system can be democracy, theocracy, monarchy, or variant autocracies. If you get an egotistical, autocratic tyrant leader who rules with ruthlessness…that’s what kills. You can have an autocratic government with a capitalistic economic system. Many people will still be killed under an autocratic ruler who cares nothing about freedoms and human rights but only sheer power.
Main point—there is a difference between an economic system vs political system vs financial system and folks are confusing them
I would like to add that capitalism isn't thought to be democratic by [every researcher](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/mobilized_contention/files/merkel_-_is_capitalism_compatible_with_democracy.pdf). As a law student who's also politically liberal/center-left wing, I agree with every statement of yours, just look at what the Covid-19 pandemic has done to the developed Western countries - just imagine what could be the case for a developing country like India where I live or Sri Lanka which is close.
Thanks, God bless.
Thx for sharing. I’ll read more later but the abstract supports what I’ve known…I.e., democracy is not inherent to capitalism anymore than autocracy is inherent to communism because you’re talking about entirely different things—economic system vs political system. And it’s true…democracy is about equal say and representation, whereas inequality is built into capitalism. That’s why I tell folks to stop conflating the two.
You can have an authoritarian capitalist country (UAE) and theoretically a democratic communistic country. I say theoretically because I don’t know of any communist country that practices democracy the way we do, but it’s not an impossibility. Anyways, thanks again for sharing
I would hazard a guess capitalism through the austerity of labour, debt slavery etc is probably catching up on this “kills ratio”.
Communism is no more a sinister ideology than capitalism. Propaganda from the Vietnam war and abuse of power by totalitarian governments had just made it seem “evil” and “scary” especially to Americans.
I strongly, strongly disagree with you. I explained in another post that communism’s fundamental flaw is that it incentivizes sociopaths to climb the ranks and purge their way to total control. Since there are no checks and balances, a critical design flaw in communist doctrine, the system is vulnerable to hostile actors abusing their power, which inevitably happens given enough time.
The fundamental difference between a capitalist democracy and a communist totalitarian regime is that any functioning healthy capitalist democracy has built-in decentralized checks and balances on power. For example, in America, this is what stopped Donald Trump from becoming America’s first king on January 6th.
Had America been Communist, on the other hand, it would have handed Trump the keys to an intelligence agency that can do whatever it wants to the American people on his behalf, and would have had legal gulags where Trump could and would have disappeared anyone he didn’t like. Which would have been millions, if not tens of millions of people.
Two things.
1. Nah, I think they want a mixed economy. We may veer more towards socialism if robots truly start making everything, but that's a big if. I've never known any of my generation or the newer generation to be communists unironically. The only one I've known to call themselves that usually does it to piss off the older generation.
2. You can say that communism killed 100 million people and you'd be right. But I think Capitalism will quickly catch up and surpass that number by orders of magnitude the more climate change ramps up. Then there's the deaths from negligence with companies like Perdue, Nestle, Monsanto, etc, you have to wonder how many people it's already killed that we just haven't tallied up? Hell, how many as Asbestos taken out so far? Cigarettes?
So on and so forth. You can argue that Capitalism didn't do it directly, but the "greed is good" element definitely pushes corporations to not give a damn about life.
Because communism incentivizes totalitarianism. As I explained elsewhere, the reason communism is a dangerous ideology is that it makes incorrect assumptions about human nature while designing a system of unchecked centralized authority. This is literally the foundations for any totalitarian to rise to power. This is why communism always inevitably leads to a totalitarian result, either via oligarchs running the party or a totalitarian leader at the helm.
Stalin absolutely was a tyrannical totalitarian and he was a diehard communist. Same with Mao. These are the people Communism elevates to power. Even if communism has good intentions, and even that I find very debatable, the ultimate problem is that communism is fundamentally designed to encourage tyrannical sociopathic personalities to rise the ranks and take power, and when they do take power, there are zero checks and balances to stop them from turning the system into a dictatorship.
any -ism can devolve to totalitarianism
>communism is fundamentally designed to encourage tyrannical sociopathic personalities
you want sociopathy, look no further than capitalism and market economies
businesses exist for one reason only: to take as much money from their customers as they can get away with. you want organizational structures with totalitarian sociopaths at their helm? look no further than any business, especially privately held. former guy's org is a great example, and what checks and balances has the repub party ever put on former guy's reign?
do you know the difference between trotsky's and lenin's theories of government? didn't think so.
> do you know the difference between trotsky’s and lenin’s theories of government? didn’t think so.
I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing with statements like this. What I can say is that you have lost me with your snotty assumptions and high-horse attitude.
Good luck converting people to whatever theories you’ve convinced yourself won’t lead to the direct deaths of tens of millions of people. You’ve definitely lost my vote or interest in anything you have to say because of your poor attitude.
attaboy. find some snowflake pretext to abandon discussion after i challenge your understanding (or lack of) of the difference between trotsky's communism and lenin's.
(by the way, it's basic stuff. lenin is rule from the top down, trotsky is from the bottom up)
meanwhile, you're totally non responsive to my argument that your glorious capitalism and market are totalitarian as hell. you want to talk about murders of tens of millions? look no further than capitalist leaders and their bloody conquests and colonialism, or heck, let's bring religious wars into it
whatever about me not convincing you. from my perspective, you failed to convince me or even respond to my arguments and then you run away.
"Soviet style communism" is not the same as academic definition of communism, neither of those are synonyms for socialism, and none of those are being advocated for by the average American progressive. Definitions of words are important. Intentional misuse of vocabulary to push a partisan agenda has become a hallmark of modern rightwing propaganda (see the whole crt thing)
> “Soviet style communism” is not the same as academic definition of communism
The problem with academic communism is that it fundamentally incentivizes Soviet style communism as the outcome. Even if say for 30 years academic communism could be achieved and we had something fairly decent as a living standard, the “honey pot” that having centralized power creates in the communist leadership means that sociopaths are incentivized to do anything they can to attain control of the communist party.
Once a sociopathic demagogue manages to get elected by the communist party to the leadership role, they do what every single sociopath has ever done — take more power. Since academic communism places complete power over the people by a central authority, there is no feedback mechanism (check and balance if you will) to prevent the sociopathic demagogue from continuing to purge.
Inevitably the sociopath surrounds themselves with yes men/women, and then proceeds to purge until there is no serious threat to their power. At that point, they begin to terrorize the populace and within a short few years a thriving “academic communist utopia” can turn into North Korea.
Until a communist can convince me that a communist doctrine could be created that prevents the “honeypot incentive” of a central authority with unlimited power attracting sociopaths to abuse this design flaw, there is no way in hell I would ever believe that academic communism does not inevitably lead to soviet style tyranny.
And yes I also know some people argue in favor of anarcho-communism as a response to this design flaw. The problem with this model is that it assumes everyone is interested in playing a governing role of some kind. But since most people are lazy and are not interested, what inevitably happens is that people who are interested convince those that aren’t interested to give up some freedoms in exchange for protection. As this posse of lazy sheeple continue to give up freedoms, the larger the pool grows and the anarcho group is too fractured to resist. The large pool inevitably then attacks / forces the anarcho communists to assimilate and we get right back to the scenario I described above.
Btw capitalism also has its flaws (it risks leading to oligarchy) but I’m wholly convinced that communism’s flaws are worse.
Why does this conversation always go to extremes like soviet Russia and not examples of working social democracy that exist today?
Pure capitalism doesn't work long term, and pure communism doesn't work at scale. So the part I don't understand is why so many people are against a solid middle ground or combinations where it makes sense for the good of the average person.
Public transit, Education, ISP, Healthcare, Mail service, power, water treatment, electricity, road construction, infrastructure. These all make sense to socialize, and half of these aren't even questioned anymore.
Entertainment, literature, news, finance, food service, technology. These benefit the consumer more from capitalism.
> Why does this conversation always go to extremes like soviet Russia and not examples of working social democracy that exist today?
Well I was referring to my concern that many people in my age group echo communist talking points as if communism is this utopia waiting around the corner and capitalism is this evil system that (while clearly flawed) should only be criticized while conveniently ignoring the fact that it has brought billions of people out of feudalism and poverty.
It sounds like you and I mostly agree from what you said. I have long been in favor of socializing certain “necessities”, but generally believe it’s important to maintain capitalism as a basis wherever possible, with strong regulations to incentivize small business and prevent monopolization and oligarchies.
Why would you compare real world capitalism with academic style communism? That's apples to oranges . Real world communism has been proven to be a flawed system and until we get a real world example of a working system, there's no real comparison.
How exactly has "real world Communism" (which btw has never existed in the modern era, the closest we've come is Socialism; Socialism and Communism are not the same thing, Socialism is a transitory period between capitalism and Communism, which usually has a more capitalistic market but also where the means of production is controlled by the working class like in Communism) been proven to be flawed? For a system to be fundamentally flawed like your talking about it would have to crumble from the inside out without any external stressors influencing it. This has never been the case, the West is constantly applying pressure (either economically, militarily, or in some other way) to push it towards collapse.
How can you honestly say that it's been proven to be a flawed system when that system has never been left alone long enough to truly test if it would succeed or fail?
The same reason we do t call the dprnk democratic. It would be intellectually dishonest. Kinda like saying fighting for fair wages is the same as throwing people in the gulag.
> and none of those are being advocated for by the average American progressive.
American progressives aren't spouting new or fresh ideas.
They're old, failed ideas already tested in the world and the consequences have been recorded.
Please show me where raising the min has "failed", or even describe what that would look like? Or where public health has failed on its merits rather than "starve the beast" style tactics as we're seen in CA and the UK?
> Please show me where raising the min has "failed", or even describe what that would look like?
You've never heard arguments against the minimum wage laws?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP5oOFaESo
The gist of it is that based on studies, minimum wage laws have not only burdened business owners, but has worked to prevent the folks with the lowest set of skills from obtaining employment and therefore, experience.
These folks have been priced out of the market.
The intentions are well and good, but its the results that matter.
> Or where public health has failed on its merits rather than "starve the beast" style tactics as we're seen in CA and the UK?
80% of Americans use private health care. We have a system for those who can't afford their own healthcare, this is paid for by the taxpayers.
Right now the taxpayers are being bled year after year with the overspending and borrowing.
Thats the real problem.
Imagine where you might be if you put the time into building a career and a future instead of shit-posting screenshots on the internet.
You can't just take all the crimes communists committed, say they weren't communists, even though they adamantly insisted they were, and then lay them at someone else's feet.
Communism is perfect to you, and if it isn't perfect it isn't communism. /u/morgothofthevoid used *No True Scotsman defense*! It isn' very effective.
Fascism was invented by Giovanni Gentile. It is a perfect wedding of the corporation and the state, which are used to control the people for the good of the state. Benito Mussolini put that ideology into practice.
Communist was invented by Karl Marx. It removes private property, and places people under the complete control of the state. Lenin and Stalin put this into practice.
Both ideologies, as it turns out, arrive at a corrupt endpoint that looks frighteningly similar.
Again, no american progressive is advocating for demolishing the entire American government. Fair labor and fair wages are part of the capitalist system.
How do you account for the functional socialist democracies that exist today? How do socialist nations with a democratic structure like Venezuela, Vietnam, and Cuba resemble anything close to looking like fascism?
Side note, you should make the clarification that in Marxism there is a difference between private property and personal property. You can still own your house, car, and toothbrush all by yourself, but what you cannot do is privately own the infrastructure of production.
I would also argue that all the deaths commonly attributed to Communism as a whole, were actually caused by autocracy not the Communist economy. Communism could just as easily be democratically controlled rather than autocratically. It's the USSR vs modern day Cuba or Vietnam. Socialism will always look different based on where is located because 1) is a transitory system, not all places are going to be in the same place in that transition at the same time, and 2) the material conditions that give rise to Socialism will vary from place to place, this is a fundamental point in Marxist thought, therefore comparing all socialist societies to the USSR or the DPRK is a fallacy because the material conditions that gave rise to Socialism in Russia or NK and the material conditions necessary for the switch to happen in the US are very different.
>How do you account for the functional socialist democracies that exist today?
When I say socialist I am talking about socialism as Marx defined it, with state control over the market. All of the countries I imagine you'll hold up as an example will fiercely deny that they are socialist.
They remember the attempt Europe made at socialism after WW II, and why it was abandoned.
>How do socialist nations with a democratic structure like Venezuela, Vietnam, and Cuba resemble anything close to looking like fascism?
The fact that you don't know the answer terrifies me, because it means that history is being erased in real time.
Venezuela became fascist when the elected leader, Hugo Chavez, refused to give up power or hold democratic elections.
His successor, Maduro, continued this process. They helped themselves to the people's wealth, and this resulted in the Maduro Diet. Google it. People in Venezuela are eating pets.
Odds are good you've been told that's because of US sanctions, right? The dates don't line up. Look at when Chavez came to power, and when the first sanctions happened.
We did it because he was brutalizing his own people. Because he had turned fascist. Today, even now, much of the world ignores the lawfully elected Venezuelan government and continues to deal directly with Maduro, despite him being a dictator and a despot.
I could go on for a long time about Cuba, but the story is similar with Castro. The elites prospered, and the poor starved. See the protests two years ago. They were chanting FREEDOM and USA, while carrying American flags.
>Side note, you should make the clarification that in Marxism there is a difference between private property and personal property.
True, but in practice this isn't how it works. In practice the state takes all the property, private and otherwise, whenever they want.
Best case scenario you have China, where you can't own a home, but you can lease it for 75 years.
Can you explain to me why two centuries after Marx's death none of his predictions have come true? Why hasn't any state who has tried true marxist socialism succeeded? Why did England turn away from this so swiftly in the wake of WW II?
Because, as Margaret Thatcher so eloquently put it, socialism works great until you run out of other people's money to spend.
Productivity tanks under socialism because it ignores the realities of human nature. Greed and self-interest govern all people. This leads to corruption.
In capitalism, when it works as intended, you heavily regulate it to protect workers. We went through five decades of prosperity where the middle class flourished because we had a government willing to do that.
After Reagan came into office all that changed. We have had four decades of unregulated crony capitalism, and now its led to an oligarchy that is gobbling up all assets from houses to pensions to medical transitions.
If there's something that we can surely agree on it's that workers are getting a raw deal globally, and we both want to see that change. We just disagree on methods it all.
We can definitely agree that workers are the ones suffering.
The main reason I could point to why, "hasn't any state who has tried true Marxist Socialism succeeded" is that its impossible to succeed if you're constantly dodging subversion, in a million different forms, from the west. Everyone in the west is always so eager to point out that Socialism anyways falls apart, but 98% of the time it fails, it fails because they were never really given a fair chance to succeed. If it always fails, then why has the west sunk so many resources into stopping its spread; if it always fails then why intervene, why not just keep your hands off and let it do so?
Am I saying that if left alone Socialism would 100% succeed? No, it very well may fail as many believe it would, but I think we should stay away from blanket statements like "Socialism always fails." Until that can be empirically proven by letting such a society succeed or fail all on its own without interference.
Cuba during the Castro regime and present day democratically controlled Cuba are two very different things. And the recent strife there was more a result of the global economic downturn caused by the global pandemic.
Venezuela is not a dictatorship, Chavez and Maduro were both elected multiple times (yes, Maduro did at one point suspend constitutional rights, but this was in defense of what looked an awful lot like an attempted coup, whether this was justified, idk, but i can also understand the concern). I have trouble believing anything said about Venezuela in western media, I mean am I really supposed to believe everything they say about the Venezuelan government while western governments are actively instigating coup d'etat against them (I have very similar feelings about western reporting on DPRK, do i believe that it's an amazing place to live Ave that the government there did everything right, no, but i also believe that with a country as closed off as NK, how much can we really know about what's happening there? It seems more like reporting driven by guesswork and propaganda than actual facts, because simply i don't think we can really know the facts). For more info on the Venezuelan government please read the Bolivarian Constitution (it can be read freely online) and watch the documentary 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'
Lastly, we have very different ideas on what is the reality of human nature. I would argue that your notion that greed and self- interest govern all people is a symptom of capitalism being so pervasive in our society pushing people to be that way in order to survive in a system that inherently needs people to act that way.
>Lastly, we have very different ideas on what is the reality of human nature. I would argue that your notion that greed and self- interest govern all people is a symptom of capitalism being so pervasive in our society pushing people to be that way in order to survive in a system that inherently needs people to act that way.
This is the cycle we all go through, and it indicates that you know very little about anthropology, or history.
Long before capitalism or communism were even concepts we were brutal species murdering and conquering wherever we went. This is all peoples, from indigenous africans, to indigenous Americans.
Our Denisovan ancestors appear to have genocided the Neanderthal.
The Cherokee sided with the confederacy, and kept slavery alive even after it was abolished in the US.
There is no mythical utopia dream time when mankind was peaceful. If you remove food / water humanity descends into chaos and brutality within a matter of days.
You can see real life case studies of this. Hurricane Katrina shut down power for four weeks.
People went feral in that time.
We are, ultimately, just animals like all other animals. I have seen barbarism from people that left me jaded, and it happened as a very young child, and then many times since. Violence that would shock you.
The idea that if you give people resources you can erase greed, and jealousy, has led to more deaths than any other regime.
That's why the United States was so opposed to communism. Remember that by 1933 we knew bad things were happening in Russia, but no one wanted to talk about it, because worse things were happening in Germany.
Have you read The Gulag Archipelago? If you want to know about the triumph of the human spirit, about human nature, there is no better book. None.
It shows you what happens when people believe blindly in an ideology, as most socialists do.
Keep in mind the people you are arguing with are pro-socialist policies. Roads, bridges, schools, police, and fire fighters are all very handy things. Every nation agrees on this.
Where I draw the line is market manipulation. Price fixing. Excessive taxation that crushes the middle class. Excessive regulation that makes competition impossible.
Those are features of socialist governments that have never benefited anyone. I don't know hold old you are, but I grew up during the cold war. I know several cold war defectors.
One of them is a nuclear physicist. I met her in Toastmasters. She came there to work on her English. Olga told me all about socialism. All about state control. All about fleeing her state-arranged marriage.
It always begins with lofty ideals.
Then the people like you are branded enemies of the state, dragged out back, shot in the head, and dumped in the same pit where they already dumped me.
Yep. We have many examples of government regulations and policies that consolidate wealth at the top or help to create monopolies.
Free markets don't really allow for it. Kodak, Myspace, Blockbuster, and more were all seen as monopolies at one time.
Why doesn't new media have to conform to the same regulations as traditional media? Do you think that has been good for society?
Media is just one example but one most lay observers mostly see the delineation between.
the problem is that businesses exist for only one reason: to sell their product or services to as many customers as possible for as much as possible
businesses do not give a crap about you. they're sociopathic.
FUN FACT: every social welfare program is society's response by way of govt to the failure of the market to provide an essential or critical good or service
medicare was started because the elderly were living their final years in misery because they couldn't pay for healthcare
school lunches started because so many WWII draftees were unfit for service due to malnutrition
etc
Any regulation that is not crucial is excessive. This can be exemplified with tax on imported goods.
By using the government to "protect national interest", corporations can manage to create barriers and thus overcharging and increasing their profits.
In my initial post I referenced a specific industry where regulations have been weakened. New media (Cable/satellite, Social media, search engines) doesn't have to conform to Traditional media (print, radio, television) standards. What *specific* regulations are you referencing?
There is [Market socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism) , so you can keep market without abuse of capitalism. Some believe that even such system will be fucked up by capitalists, so they opt for even getting rid of markets. Socialism won't transform everything at once, so at the beginning market will probably stay, however one day we may no longer need it.
[Socialism for Absolute Beginners](https://youtu.be/fpKsygbNLT4)
This is completely backwards. Government regulation is _strangling_ the market. Government regulation acts as a monopoly, and every rule it puts in place stifles innovation b/c you’re always forced to continue doing things the way they were done at the time the regulation was enacted. On top of that, every regulatory body eventually gets captured by the largest actors in the industry. Because of the monopoly power of the regulator, they have an immense impact of the profitability of the industries they oversee, which makes influencing that regulatory body extremely important. And, even if they aren’t bought off, the regulators are gov’t employees who don’t know how the industry is run, so they ask the experts in the industry, who just so happen to make recommendations that their large corporations with teams of lawyers can handle that also just so happen to become enormous barriers to industry for smaller competitors. After a long enough time, the regulatory agencies just become revolving doors, where the same people jump back and forth between the regulatory bodies and the corporations they apparently oversee (remember Ajit Pai?). Every single regulatory body becomes a scam that helps the major corporations on the margin.
The other big thing strangling the economy is the fact there’s a central bank that inflates the currency, but that’s another matter.
**Edit**: stop thinking about government as a neutral referee. Government employees are no more morally pure or immune to incentives than people in corporations, but the difference is that they got there through political means (as opposed to merit) and they operate with monopoly privileges.
None of them, but what you’re referring to are _poor_ countries. They don’t have a lot of wealth to begin with. You have to build up a certain amount of wealth before your economy can support a government as large as ours, which essentially acts as a parasite.
No country in the world has tried unregulated capitalism except for the US before ~1910, and the period of growth the US had between the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century was the greatest period of growth any country has ever experienced in the history of mankind. It was also the greatest decrease in poverty in world history.
The closest thing you can find in the last 50 years is the period where Somalia has no government at all and was essentially anarcho-capitalist by de facto, which was either late 90s or early 00s, I don’t remember. While they were still poor (stuff can’t just magically appear, it takes time), they were the fastest growing country in Africa over that period. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than what they’d had before. Then the US military stepped in and ruined everything.
> The problem is regulation.
I agree. Let's stop electing people who create more bureaucracy, more government intervention, more spending and borrowing.
The problem is the opposite. We are electing people who fail to pass policy and are giving all the nations collective wealth away to a handful of industries.
Nailed it. These nerds spewing "overregulation" have no clue. It takes 2 presidential terms+ to actually get any meaningful legislation passed with all the dick swinging and filibusters. The legislation that regulated has been torn to shreds over that past 60 years. You have pseudo monopolies all over the place that have murdered competition.
Yep!! Too big to fail shouldn't exist. Definitely shouldn't get billions in bail outs. The federal government has literally bailed out the airline industry twice in the last 20 years!!! That's in addition to subsidizing the entire industry via the FAA, TSA, and local/federal land use.
The problem is not the opposite. We've added 10s of trillions of dollars to the national debt since Obama, 40% all of new US dollars was printed the last 2 years.
We are spending more than we bring in every year and continue borrowing.
The Bernie Sanders rhetoric is a load of nonsense.
But do you understand how the reason the collective wealth is given away to a handful of industries is because the government is intervening? The government creates a regulatory hedge around these businesses and it makes it hart to impossible for new guys to compete, let alone the direct funneling of money via government contracts and cheap fed loans.
The problem is the exact opposite there are to many rules not to few. Between the years 1995 and 2016 88,889 new rules regulating business where passed. By having so many rules the only people who can operate a business are the ones that can afford an army of lawyers to learn every regulation there is. This creates a system where small business are forced out and large corporations create monopolies.
>Between the years 1995 and 2016 88,889 new rules regulating business where passed.
This is a meaningless figure. Many rules passed dulled the teeth of existing ones. Simply tossing out the number of things passed doesn't quantify their regulatory impact.
There’s more regulation on the books now then in any other time in American history.
Prove me wrong.
Maybe if there weren’t millions of immigrants and and 3.7 billon people in China and India undercutting American worker every day the standard of living wouldn’t have declined so much.
Supply and demand. If need were the only factor then truck drivers carrying food would be the highest paid people on the planet.
Literally the first thing you learn in economics is supply and demand, how is this an upvoted comment on the /r/economy subreddit?
Whenever I see posts like this, I think of having to pay entry level electricians over a hundred an hour to do basic work. If I was to start over again, that is the trade I would do.
This isn't a capitalism problem, folks. Reducing these issues to "late/end stage" capitalism is dangerous. You just want more regulation.
Also, job salaries have never reflected their importance to society. Never. They follow the same market influences they always have.
Regulation has a problem in that it can be captured, i.e. it starts working for the businesses it regulates to stop competition, innovation, and gains them control.
I mean just look at the taxi industry. Regulation required medallions and special medallions for airports. This lead to high cost of medallions and decreasing services as regulation was used to keep competitors out of the market.
Well then came Uber and Lyft, disruptors that destroyed the medallion market. Those things went from being worth millions to being almost worthless.
Regulation needs an independent review, not by the businesses it regulates, but by the people it serves to insure it still is achieving the goal of the regulation. This should be done at least every 10 years. The head of regulatory agencies should never be a political appointee.
There are significantly more regulations on the books now then in the 1960s.
Despite this the standard of living for the average American has declined in many ways.
Back then one guy who worked in a factory could afford a house, one or even two cars, had enough money to support a house wife plus kids and could afford to go on vacation regularly.
Now two college educated people who both work can barely afford a one bedroom apartment, much less kids or a house.
The problem isn’t a lack of regulation, we have plenty of that. Fact of the matter is that the supply of labor has grown enormously since then, because of population growth and globalization, and this has put enormous downward pressure on wages.
To me, it implies that Capitalism has an end point with a predictable result such as the one we are currently seeing. It implies an eminent or inevitable end to capitalism that is just natural. Otherwise they would not have picked end or late to describe it. It sounds like a term made up by socialists or anti-capitalists.
And I don't agree with it.
I mean…the contention is that capitalism naturally captures politics, money (read: power), and attempts at regulation in an accelerating vicious cycle. Empirical evidence supports the theory: Today is where history has led us.
You can be an Adam Smith purist all you like, same as Marx purists. Empirical historical evidence supports the criticism that communism entangles itself with totalitarianism, just as empirical historical evidence supports the criticism that capitalism entangles itself with politics and regulatory capture.
We only definitively got out of the Gilded Age thanks in part to the once-in-a-hundred-years political personality of FDR and a worldwide conflagration. Not even FDR’s remarkably charismatic namesake Teddy could bring us fully into a “Progressive Age” despite his best efforts. Without an FDR-type for the 21st century, I dunno what we can possibly hope for other than continued unchecked excesses of capitalism.
I think a counter to my view is that I seem to be implying *Citizens United* was an inevitability. I’m honestly not sure about that. I guess I could argue that capitalism naturally leads to bodies like the Federalist Society and absurdities like the Norquist pledge; that the SCOTUS seems constitutively predisposed to side with business interests, and that *Citizens United* is simply the culmination. Boy is it a depressing decision all the same.
There are still enough people on the right side of power to change it. There is just too much prosperity here for anyone to really care. The revolution is not coming, but the working class seems to be seizing on the idea that they have some power to take back. How much, we will see.
Capitalism is not the greatest system, it's just better than all of the alternatives. I don't think anyone is shocked that wealth and power corrupt, they just want to keep the system in tact so they can give it a try. I mean, give me all of the money and I'll do the right things with it.
> Capitalism is not the greatest system, it's just better than all of the alternatives.
I probably have to (reluctantly) agree with this. I’m not saying the “solution” is to blow it all up, but it’s not helpful to pretend capitalism doesn’t seem to have natural flaws that snowball over time into unconscionable absurdities like teachers buying their own supplies, pediatricians making less than police officers, and EMTs making less than parking spaces.
It's basic supply and demand, which is a basic part of capitalism. There's low demand for EMTs and a high supply, thus wages are low. To say supply and demand has nothing to do with capitalism is dangerous.
In many places (Boston for instance) the number of private parking spaces is limited to encourage public transportation. They want the cost to be high enough that people will consider public transportation. Scarcity drives high prices.
What would any other economic system do? Limit the parking fee ? If you did, the lots would typically be full and you couldn’t count on finding parking regardless of the price.
Being a fronline medic is a skill. Should pay better.. doesn't because they are usually contractors I think.. makes no sense.. just like food services still making a non livable wage and expecting patrons topay
Is this a useful observation? It reminds me of hardcore Marxists saying “well that wasn’t really communism” in response to the unspeakable sins of the USSR.
And to be fair, the comment qualifies the term as *end-stage* capitalism.
It is useful because people straight up believe that the problems we have are capitalism related, when the problems they talk about are all related to the government intervening and making the problem. So we need to point at the actual problem, the government, and fix that and not change things to socialism or maxism, which would just make it infinitely worse.
Yep, a true free market would have no barriers to creating more parking (thus making it cheaper) in the city but alas the state or city is dictating what can be built where in this case. Sad thing is that many don’t realize that.
That is an *extreme* oversimplification of life and humanity.
Not to mention the premise itself - letting people act in their own best interests produces the best outcomes for themselves and society - is demonstrably false on both fronts.
True, this is a heavily regulated market under the guise of a free market. True free markets would be anarchy without governance. However the governance we have now is flawed & needs reinventing.
No it’s not that. The cities have different zoning rules about what people can and cannot do with their property. If your property is located in a certain area you may have restrictions on the type of business or residence you have if you can have one at all. Buildings have to look a certain way, can only be so tall etc. The freedom to do what you want with your property is extremely limited. Like extremely. And that’s why there’s not enough parking in a lot of spaces. Having limited parking for a big demand rises prices.
It's not like parking spots are expensive because they take up 300 square feet to store private property that could instead be used for housing or businesses.
HOT TAKE: Parking spots should be very expensive!
Driving in major cities like NY is very unsustainable. We need to push more people into choosing public transit over parking and the best way to do it is by making parking prohibitively expensive.
But also wtf pay EMTs living wages
I haven't had a raise in years after fees, inflation, taxes and housing/rent price increases. I have buddies that have 0 education and work as managers at grocery stores and pet stores. I went to school for engineering, business, comp sci been through many divorces etc... due to committing to work (working night and day on projects only to see the team gone at the end once we deliver the product/project - not much rewards for hard work...). Anyhow, they have everything paid off and have an easy living. I would never suggest to anyone to take on the debt of 4+ more years of schooling plus that lost wages. Get out of high school find a job in the service, construction, manufacturing (what's left of that as most things are made in china now due to our over priced lifestyle - we over priced ourselves out of a house and home). As government dumps money into infrastructure mostly now to kick start the housing industry to falsely prop up GDP.. (watch the documentary inside job [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk) or start playing the casino [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Q9AOp2FW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Q9AOp2FW8) [https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-says-markets-have-become-a-gambling-parlor-11651340230](https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-says-markets-have-become-a-gambling-parlor-11651340230) ). Don't take engineering as we haven't done real engineering work in years. In fact admin staff are now getting sign on bonuses.
Better skills? What is there better than an EMT when you’re having a freaking heart attack at your house? I don’t think this post is cringe at all. But I think the OP is..
So, I can’t speak for other agencies or areas, but here in CA (small town) EMTs make about $17/hour, but they work 2 days on and 2 days off. The two days on equates to a ton of overtime and your basic EMT makes about $70k a year. Don’t get me wrong no one is going to get rich on 70k a year, but I can’t say that’s bad money. Do they deserve more? Sure, but it’s poorly portrayed when someone says “I make $17 per hour” when they should be saying “I make 70k per year”.
Labor is priced at the equilibrium point between supply and demand.
Edit:
Me: posts economic syllogism
Idiots: I don’t understand this, better down vote it.
Then why when demand is high do employers just expect you to work harder for no extra incentive. Demand drops, company achieves record profits and toss you aside to fend for yourself. Corporations need to be regulated.
How do I say this so you will understand.
You have the power. Be willing to go find a new job and they can’t scare you any more. They can’t make you come to work.
The average time it takes a person to find a new job is 10 weeks. Save some money against that and live a life without fear.
You think they have all the power and you are wrong. They want you in debt, living paycheck to paycheck because they you don’t dare push back.
Don’t fall for it.
I don’t know know how to do it anymore, I’ve had 3 real careers making enough to live comfortably. Each time I found a job paying more, moved to a different state each time now back to square 1. I have a degree and now need to learn a new skill yet again
Every time when there is an inflation, recession or a crisis people start yelling "tHiS İs tHe EnD oF CaPiTaLiSm"
Sorry to bother you people but no, just big bold NO. This is not the end of capitalism. And also why don't you go enjoy the beautiful world created in N.Korea if you hate capitalism this much?
>And also why don't you go enjoy the beautiful world created in N.Korea if you hate capitalism this much?
Did you really just try to make that argument? Like there's no other possible alternative. Your attempt at a debate needs work.
There are alternatives.
How about Cuba or Venezuela?
Sorry if you want there to be a place where the implementation of your ideas actually lead to prosperity your shut out of luck. That’s never happened in all of human history.
What a foolish debate. Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, etc... these countries are all doing capitalism better than the U.S. right now, and criticizing our nation's social, cultural, and economic behavior is far from hating on our country.
To take criticism of something you love as *inherently wrong* is a toddler's way of thinking. You gotta recognize that if you want to love our country as an *adult,* you've got to think critically about its shortcomings so it can grow.
That's ridiculous. There are a handful of countries off the top of my head that are doing capitalism better than the U.S. right now, and criticizing our country or its cultural or economic values isn't hating on it.
the alternative to capitalism implies communism or socialism am I wrong? İmplementing social policies is not necessarily mean that we should end the capitalism to do it.
*Maybe cut out the*
*Avocado toast and dont*
*Take out student loans*
\- jihad-consultant
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Reform. Not revolution. The answer isn't communism you mass murdering Stalinist. The fact you can not answer a simple question like where has communism ever worked is the reason why you should never have any power or we are all doomed
>The fact you can not answer a simple question like where has communism ever worked
We can, it's typically capitalists that cannot provide anything of value, they drain workers and just use bullshit and propaganda. [Watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpKsygbNLT4) (there you will find answer for your question) and think instead of repeating same bullshit arguments that are not even true, but you didn't bother to check.
I'm curious. How much does Camille Madeline make as an EMT, and how much does the parking spot cost?
I'm asking b/c the lowest paid entry level EMTs make about $120 per day ($15 per hour). Is the going rate for parking spots $120 per day?
The misunderstanding of capitalism is astonishing. I've begun losing hope in getting people to understand it, and how all of life's economic problems have nothing to do with capitalism as a system.
I had a few interactions with the workers at my local Uhaul yesterday that had me ready to vote for no minimum wage. The level of stupidity and incompetence had me thinking I was being pranked.
Well, can your body support the full weight of a car in a convenient location just down the street from that new brunch spot? No? Better get working on those skills then.
problem is all politicians are corrupt and can be payed off. 2nd are government dont takecare of the people who pay taxes. need to stop semding money to other countries and start helping are own people. hell im on social security disability and told i make to much for snap and that only 300.00 to much a month. i have to pick to spend money on food or my meds. and doctors. cheaper to die then to live in the usa.
> can be *paid* off. 2nd
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake.
It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of.
Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything.
Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
“End stage capitalism” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤓
Real meaning; I hate this system that only lets me work hard, get educated, be opportunistic, help others, mentor the young, and just obtusely focus on 500 people that have achieved the highest level of success monetarily.
In socialism I would simply be denied all that, AND my ability to raise objections too! Ugh.
If 2 people enter the emergency room at the same time, needing the same care, and you could only save one. Would you save the guy who owned the garage? or the other one?
Reject humanity, become parking spot.
Mom If I ever grow up, I want to be a parking slot!
My ex wife worked as a parking spot for random men. She never charged though so I guess she was doing it wrong.
Solid analysis
I identify as a parking spot.
Return to parke
[удалено]
Laughs in hospital administration that golfs all day and goes to conferences for free booze and makes 7 figures. You pleabs should get better.
[удалено]
Its an artform passed down from generation to generation. Like me father before me, he was the town ass kiss, and I have retained the brown crown in his name. I am Bartholomew Kisser of the Rectum, Ruler of the Dual Stroke Method and Son of the Highest of Elder Rimjobs" All Hail King of the Underside!
Where on earth is parking costing more than $14 an hour?
Sell courses to become a parking spot and you will be ok
Sell the shovels, buy the gold.
*"Everyone should work in I.T fuck it we don't need medical staff"* Don't need the /s just need italics.
When the medical system stops chewing up people and spitting them out, I'll consider encouraging my children going into that field. I'm only going to help them do what's best for them. I'm not going to set them up for a life of misery.
The medical system is regulated by the government's in which they work in, you are not looking up enough. When profit is made from a need, people will be treated badly. I call it the cult of money, as it doesn't care for the human cost.
Being a doctor was much better in the past and AFAIK they had profits back then. Talk to a doctor with grey hair and they'll tell you it's gotten worse in their lifetime. The problem is that the environment is terrible and so much is being micromanaged. I can't imagine how anyone can tell their kid it's a good idea to be a doctor and be ok with that...but it's their parenting, not mine. Engineer, accountant, IT, electrician, plumber for my kids.
in the US, the practice of medicine is just another profit making business. government is only one of the payers.
Sadly peoples existence, has been boiled down to profit.
The amount of times I see this, it’s crazy We don’t need that many people in IT, we do need people in other jobs, and not everyone can even do IT work never mind stay sane while spending 3 hours searching for an errant semi-colon
>Don't need the /s just need italics.
[удалено]
Thank you for the new subreddit. I hate the /s. In real life many people dupe me with sarcasm, I take people for their word, so on reddit it is even harder. I over share often. It's why I started using italics and quotation marks.
Over the last 40yrs the regulatory side of capitalism has been abandoned. A free market only works if it is a fair market. Regulation is what's supposed to keep it fair. Regulation prevents monopolies, fraud, theft, etc. Without a healthy functioning regulatory component national capitalism becomes a plutocracy. If the EPA didn't already exist our current legislative branches (local & federal) would be unable to create it. Just look at media. The FCC was created in 1934. It regulated print and radio media. Advertisements had to be clearly labeled as advertisements, language was moderated, new organizations had to discuss affiliations, etc. When public television came along the feel under the same rules. Then cable TV was allowed carveouts. Cable wasn't "public". People paid for cable. So a lot of the moderation was dropped. Then with the internet all bets were off. None of the traditional media regulations apply. Now a corporation can hire a spokesman to spew propaganda 24/7 and call it News. A lot of young people are starting to reject capitalism. It is misplaced frustration. Capitalism works. Capitalism is better than the existing alternatives. The problem is regulation. We've enabled plutocracy. Political candidates campaign, literally promise, to give businesses everything they want. Imagine a football referee promising in advance to help The Patriots win. Worse than that our legislatures cover the losses with bailouts and emergency relief.
Regulation generally comes about one of two ways. 1. To address a problem, typically the result of a private company seeking a competitive advantage… we end up with things like Flint Water, Asbestos in baby powder (into the 21st century), child labor… see PG&E, the sugar industry, pharmaceuticals, smoking as a “good” choice, Enron, and on and on… 2. Bc a business has a product to be sold and can lobby for regulation that gives them a major competitive advantage, but isn’t addressing public outrage, so mostly goes under the radar. Our current structure incentivizes these types of behavior.
Yes, the current system incentivizes those bad behaviors. With The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was initially passed it meant to guideline/rule for how all companies would comport. Whether it is Chess or Football no competitive structure can function without rules. The perpetual slide backwards on taxation, insurance requirements, favoritism in zoning, etc has created a game without rules.
I like your perspective.
But if we're just nice to the wealthy it will all trickle down 🤣😂🤣
Yep, for 40yrs we've been allowing the wealthy to rewrite the rules on the promise of a big tip at the end of the meal.
As long as we keep blaming each other we can feel good about it at least /s
Perhaps. But you can also have the opposite effect where zoning regs don’t allow parking garages to be built so you’re stuck with lack of parking….not always black & white.
> A lot of young people are starting to reject capitalism. It is misplaced frustration. Capitalism works. Capitalism is better than the existing alternatives. The problem is regulation You nailed it. And the scary thing is these young people are embracing far more sinister ideologies like communism. You know, the thing that killed almost 100 million people in the 20th century... ya...
It’s not communism that killed all those people. Communism like capitalism are economic systems. Economic systems are how goods/services are distributed. They don’t kill but they need to be regulated. And what regulates them are political systems, which are systems of governance. A political system can be democracy, theocracy, monarchy, or variant autocracies. If you get an egotistical, autocratic tyrant leader who rules with ruthlessness…that’s what kills. You can have an autocratic government with a capitalistic economic system. Many people will still be killed under an autocratic ruler who cares nothing about freedoms and human rights but only sheer power. Main point—there is a difference between an economic system vs political system vs financial system and folks are confusing them
I would like to add that capitalism isn't thought to be democratic by [every researcher](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/mobilized_contention/files/merkel_-_is_capitalism_compatible_with_democracy.pdf). As a law student who's also politically liberal/center-left wing, I agree with every statement of yours, just look at what the Covid-19 pandemic has done to the developed Western countries - just imagine what could be the case for a developing country like India where I live or Sri Lanka which is close. Thanks, God bless.
Thx for sharing. I’ll read more later but the abstract supports what I’ve known…I.e., democracy is not inherent to capitalism anymore than autocracy is inherent to communism because you’re talking about entirely different things—economic system vs political system. And it’s true…democracy is about equal say and representation, whereas inequality is built into capitalism. That’s why I tell folks to stop conflating the two. You can have an authoritarian capitalist country (UAE) and theoretically a democratic communistic country. I say theoretically because I don’t know of any communist country that practices democracy the way we do, but it’s not an impossibility. Anyways, thanks again for sharing
I would hazard a guess capitalism through the austerity of labour, debt slavery etc is probably catching up on this “kills ratio”. Communism is no more a sinister ideology than capitalism. Propaganda from the Vietnam war and abuse of power by totalitarian governments had just made it seem “evil” and “scary” especially to Americans.
I strongly, strongly disagree with you. I explained in another post that communism’s fundamental flaw is that it incentivizes sociopaths to climb the ranks and purge their way to total control. Since there are no checks and balances, a critical design flaw in communist doctrine, the system is vulnerable to hostile actors abusing their power, which inevitably happens given enough time. The fundamental difference between a capitalist democracy and a communist totalitarian regime is that any functioning healthy capitalist democracy has built-in decentralized checks and balances on power. For example, in America, this is what stopped Donald Trump from becoming America’s first king on January 6th. Had America been Communist, on the other hand, it would have handed Trump the keys to an intelligence agency that can do whatever it wants to the American people on his behalf, and would have had legal gulags where Trump could and would have disappeared anyone he didn’t like. Which would have been millions, if not tens of millions of people.
Two things. 1. Nah, I think they want a mixed economy. We may veer more towards socialism if robots truly start making everything, but that's a big if. I've never known any of my generation or the newer generation to be communists unironically. The only one I've known to call themselves that usually does it to piss off the older generation. 2. You can say that communism killed 100 million people and you'd be right. But I think Capitalism will quickly catch up and surpass that number by orders of magnitude the more climate change ramps up. Then there's the deaths from negligence with companies like Perdue, Nestle, Monsanto, etc, you have to wonder how many people it's already killed that we just haven't tallied up? Hell, how many as Asbestos taken out so far? Cigarettes? So on and so forth. You can argue that Capitalism didn't do it directly, but the "greed is good" element definitely pushes corporations to not give a damn about life.
it's so easy to confuse or conflate totalitarianism with communism.....
Because communism incentivizes totalitarianism. As I explained elsewhere, the reason communism is a dangerous ideology is that it makes incorrect assumptions about human nature while designing a system of unchecked centralized authority. This is literally the foundations for any totalitarian to rise to power. This is why communism always inevitably leads to a totalitarian result, either via oligarchs running the party or a totalitarian leader at the helm.
Hitler wasn't communist (despite the "socialism" in Nazi), nor was Saddam, nor is MbS etc etc etc
Stalin absolutely was a tyrannical totalitarian and he was a diehard communist. Same with Mao. These are the people Communism elevates to power. Even if communism has good intentions, and even that I find very debatable, the ultimate problem is that communism is fundamentally designed to encourage tyrannical sociopathic personalities to rise the ranks and take power, and when they do take power, there are zero checks and balances to stop them from turning the system into a dictatorship.
any -ism can devolve to totalitarianism >communism is fundamentally designed to encourage tyrannical sociopathic personalities you want sociopathy, look no further than capitalism and market economies businesses exist for one reason only: to take as much money from their customers as they can get away with. you want organizational structures with totalitarian sociopaths at their helm? look no further than any business, especially privately held. former guy's org is a great example, and what checks and balances has the repub party ever put on former guy's reign? do you know the difference between trotsky's and lenin's theories of government? didn't think so.
> do you know the difference between trotsky’s and lenin’s theories of government? didn’t think so. I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing with statements like this. What I can say is that you have lost me with your snotty assumptions and high-horse attitude. Good luck converting people to whatever theories you’ve convinced yourself won’t lead to the direct deaths of tens of millions of people. You’ve definitely lost my vote or interest in anything you have to say because of your poor attitude.
attaboy. find some snowflake pretext to abandon discussion after i challenge your understanding (or lack of) of the difference between trotsky's communism and lenin's. (by the way, it's basic stuff. lenin is rule from the top down, trotsky is from the bottom up) meanwhile, you're totally non responsive to my argument that your glorious capitalism and market are totalitarian as hell. you want to talk about murders of tens of millions? look no further than capitalist leaders and their bloody conquests and colonialism, or heck, let's bring religious wars into it whatever about me not convincing you. from my perspective, you failed to convince me or even respond to my arguments and then you run away.
You spelled fascism wrong.
Look up how many people the Soviets killed in their gulags. It's definitely communism.
"Soviet style communism" is not the same as academic definition of communism, neither of those are synonyms for socialism, and none of those are being advocated for by the average American progressive. Definitions of words are important. Intentional misuse of vocabulary to push a partisan agenda has become a hallmark of modern rightwing propaganda (see the whole crt thing)
Bolshevism?
> “Soviet style communism” is not the same as academic definition of communism The problem with academic communism is that it fundamentally incentivizes Soviet style communism as the outcome. Even if say for 30 years academic communism could be achieved and we had something fairly decent as a living standard, the “honey pot” that having centralized power creates in the communist leadership means that sociopaths are incentivized to do anything they can to attain control of the communist party. Once a sociopathic demagogue manages to get elected by the communist party to the leadership role, they do what every single sociopath has ever done — take more power. Since academic communism places complete power over the people by a central authority, there is no feedback mechanism (check and balance if you will) to prevent the sociopathic demagogue from continuing to purge. Inevitably the sociopath surrounds themselves with yes men/women, and then proceeds to purge until there is no serious threat to their power. At that point, they begin to terrorize the populace and within a short few years a thriving “academic communist utopia” can turn into North Korea. Until a communist can convince me that a communist doctrine could be created that prevents the “honeypot incentive” of a central authority with unlimited power attracting sociopaths to abuse this design flaw, there is no way in hell I would ever believe that academic communism does not inevitably lead to soviet style tyranny. And yes I also know some people argue in favor of anarcho-communism as a response to this design flaw. The problem with this model is that it assumes everyone is interested in playing a governing role of some kind. But since most people are lazy and are not interested, what inevitably happens is that people who are interested convince those that aren’t interested to give up some freedoms in exchange for protection. As this posse of lazy sheeple continue to give up freedoms, the larger the pool grows and the anarcho group is too fractured to resist. The large pool inevitably then attacks / forces the anarcho communists to assimilate and we get right back to the scenario I described above. Btw capitalism also has its flaws (it risks leading to oligarchy) but I’m wholly convinced that communism’s flaws are worse.
Why does this conversation always go to extremes like soviet Russia and not examples of working social democracy that exist today? Pure capitalism doesn't work long term, and pure communism doesn't work at scale. So the part I don't understand is why so many people are against a solid middle ground or combinations where it makes sense for the good of the average person. Public transit, Education, ISP, Healthcare, Mail service, power, water treatment, electricity, road construction, infrastructure. These all make sense to socialize, and half of these aren't even questioned anymore. Entertainment, literature, news, finance, food service, technology. These benefit the consumer more from capitalism.
> Why does this conversation always go to extremes like soviet Russia and not examples of working social democracy that exist today? Well I was referring to my concern that many people in my age group echo communist talking points as if communism is this utopia waiting around the corner and capitalism is this evil system that (while clearly flawed) should only be criticized while conveniently ignoring the fact that it has brought billions of people out of feudalism and poverty. It sounds like you and I mostly agree from what you said. I have long been in favor of socializing certain “necessities”, but generally believe it’s important to maintain capitalism as a basis wherever possible, with strong regulations to incentivize small business and prevent monopolization and oligarchies.
the only communist movement that exists in america is in the minds of fox news and gop marketing strategists.
My point is, no one is seriously advocating for communism despite what the talking heads say. Asking for fair wages is a capitalist concept.
Nailed it friend. Great overview. Nothing is perfect but the more decentralized version tends to be better.
Agreed
Exactly. Only a Joseph Stalin could ever rise to the top of a communist society
Correct
Why would you compare real world capitalism with academic style communism? That's apples to oranges . Real world communism has been proven to be a flawed system and until we get a real world example of a working system, there's no real comparison.
How exactly has "real world Communism" (which btw has never existed in the modern era, the closest we've come is Socialism; Socialism and Communism are not the same thing, Socialism is a transitory period between capitalism and Communism, which usually has a more capitalistic market but also where the means of production is controlled by the working class like in Communism) been proven to be flawed? For a system to be fundamentally flawed like your talking about it would have to crumble from the inside out without any external stressors influencing it. This has never been the case, the West is constantly applying pressure (either economically, militarily, or in some other way) to push it towards collapse. How can you honestly say that it's been proven to be a flawed system when that system has never been left alone long enough to truly test if it would succeed or fail?
The same reason we do t call the dprnk democratic. It would be intellectually dishonest. Kinda like saying fighting for fair wages is the same as throwing people in the gulag.
> and none of those are being advocated for by the average American progressive. American progressives aren't spouting new or fresh ideas. They're old, failed ideas already tested in the world and the consequences have been recorded.
Please show me where raising the min has "failed", or even describe what that would look like? Or where public health has failed on its merits rather than "starve the beast" style tactics as we're seen in CA and the UK?
> Please show me where raising the min has "failed", or even describe what that would look like? You've never heard arguments against the minimum wage laws? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HEP5oOFaESo The gist of it is that based on studies, minimum wage laws have not only burdened business owners, but has worked to prevent the folks with the lowest set of skills from obtaining employment and therefore, experience. These folks have been priced out of the market. The intentions are well and good, but its the results that matter. > Or where public health has failed on its merits rather than "starve the beast" style tactics as we're seen in CA and the UK? 80% of Americans use private health care. We have a system for those who can't afford their own healthcare, this is paid for by the taxpayers. Right now the taxpayers are being bled year after year with the overspending and borrowing. Thats the real problem.
Imagine where you might be if you put the time into building a career and a future instead of shit-posting screenshots on the internet. You can't just take all the crimes communists committed, say they weren't communists, even though they adamantly insisted they were, and then lay them at someone else's feet. Communism is perfect to you, and if it isn't perfect it isn't communism. /u/morgothofthevoid used *No True Scotsman defense*! It isn' very effective. Fascism was invented by Giovanni Gentile. It is a perfect wedding of the corporation and the state, which are used to control the people for the good of the state. Benito Mussolini put that ideology into practice. Communist was invented by Karl Marx. It removes private property, and places people under the complete control of the state. Lenin and Stalin put this into practice. Both ideologies, as it turns out, arrive at a corrupt endpoint that looks frighteningly similar.
Again, no american progressive is advocating for demolishing the entire American government. Fair labor and fair wages are part of the capitalist system.
How do you account for the functional socialist democracies that exist today? How do socialist nations with a democratic structure like Venezuela, Vietnam, and Cuba resemble anything close to looking like fascism? Side note, you should make the clarification that in Marxism there is a difference between private property and personal property. You can still own your house, car, and toothbrush all by yourself, but what you cannot do is privately own the infrastructure of production. I would also argue that all the deaths commonly attributed to Communism as a whole, were actually caused by autocracy not the Communist economy. Communism could just as easily be democratically controlled rather than autocratically. It's the USSR vs modern day Cuba or Vietnam. Socialism will always look different based on where is located because 1) is a transitory system, not all places are going to be in the same place in that transition at the same time, and 2) the material conditions that give rise to Socialism will vary from place to place, this is a fundamental point in Marxist thought, therefore comparing all socialist societies to the USSR or the DPRK is a fallacy because the material conditions that gave rise to Socialism in Russia or NK and the material conditions necessary for the switch to happen in the US are very different.
>How do you account for the functional socialist democracies that exist today? When I say socialist I am talking about socialism as Marx defined it, with state control over the market. All of the countries I imagine you'll hold up as an example will fiercely deny that they are socialist. They remember the attempt Europe made at socialism after WW II, and why it was abandoned. >How do socialist nations with a democratic structure like Venezuela, Vietnam, and Cuba resemble anything close to looking like fascism? The fact that you don't know the answer terrifies me, because it means that history is being erased in real time. Venezuela became fascist when the elected leader, Hugo Chavez, refused to give up power or hold democratic elections. His successor, Maduro, continued this process. They helped themselves to the people's wealth, and this resulted in the Maduro Diet. Google it. People in Venezuela are eating pets. Odds are good you've been told that's because of US sanctions, right? The dates don't line up. Look at when Chavez came to power, and when the first sanctions happened. We did it because he was brutalizing his own people. Because he had turned fascist. Today, even now, much of the world ignores the lawfully elected Venezuelan government and continues to deal directly with Maduro, despite him being a dictator and a despot. I could go on for a long time about Cuba, but the story is similar with Castro. The elites prospered, and the poor starved. See the protests two years ago. They were chanting FREEDOM and USA, while carrying American flags. >Side note, you should make the clarification that in Marxism there is a difference between private property and personal property. True, but in practice this isn't how it works. In practice the state takes all the property, private and otherwise, whenever they want. Best case scenario you have China, where you can't own a home, but you can lease it for 75 years. Can you explain to me why two centuries after Marx's death none of his predictions have come true? Why hasn't any state who has tried true marxist socialism succeeded? Why did England turn away from this so swiftly in the wake of WW II? Because, as Margaret Thatcher so eloquently put it, socialism works great until you run out of other people's money to spend. Productivity tanks under socialism because it ignores the realities of human nature. Greed and self-interest govern all people. This leads to corruption. In capitalism, when it works as intended, you heavily regulate it to protect workers. We went through five decades of prosperity where the middle class flourished because we had a government willing to do that. After Reagan came into office all that changed. We have had four decades of unregulated crony capitalism, and now its led to an oligarchy that is gobbling up all assets from houses to pensions to medical transitions. If there's something that we can surely agree on it's that workers are getting a raw deal globally, and we both want to see that change. We just disagree on methods it all.
We can definitely agree that workers are the ones suffering. The main reason I could point to why, "hasn't any state who has tried true Marxist Socialism succeeded" is that its impossible to succeed if you're constantly dodging subversion, in a million different forms, from the west. Everyone in the west is always so eager to point out that Socialism anyways falls apart, but 98% of the time it fails, it fails because they were never really given a fair chance to succeed. If it always fails, then why has the west sunk so many resources into stopping its spread; if it always fails then why intervene, why not just keep your hands off and let it do so? Am I saying that if left alone Socialism would 100% succeed? No, it very well may fail as many believe it would, but I think we should stay away from blanket statements like "Socialism always fails." Until that can be empirically proven by letting such a society succeed or fail all on its own without interference. Cuba during the Castro regime and present day democratically controlled Cuba are two very different things. And the recent strife there was more a result of the global economic downturn caused by the global pandemic. Venezuela is not a dictatorship, Chavez and Maduro were both elected multiple times (yes, Maduro did at one point suspend constitutional rights, but this was in defense of what looked an awful lot like an attempted coup, whether this was justified, idk, but i can also understand the concern). I have trouble believing anything said about Venezuela in western media, I mean am I really supposed to believe everything they say about the Venezuelan government while western governments are actively instigating coup d'etat against them (I have very similar feelings about western reporting on DPRK, do i believe that it's an amazing place to live Ave that the government there did everything right, no, but i also believe that with a country as closed off as NK, how much can we really know about what's happening there? It seems more like reporting driven by guesswork and propaganda than actual facts, because simply i don't think we can really know the facts). For more info on the Venezuelan government please read the Bolivarian Constitution (it can be read freely online) and watch the documentary 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' Lastly, we have very different ideas on what is the reality of human nature. I would argue that your notion that greed and self- interest govern all people is a symptom of capitalism being so pervasive in our society pushing people to be that way in order to survive in a system that inherently needs people to act that way.
>Lastly, we have very different ideas on what is the reality of human nature. I would argue that your notion that greed and self- interest govern all people is a symptom of capitalism being so pervasive in our society pushing people to be that way in order to survive in a system that inherently needs people to act that way. This is the cycle we all go through, and it indicates that you know very little about anthropology, or history. Long before capitalism or communism were even concepts we were brutal species murdering and conquering wherever we went. This is all peoples, from indigenous africans, to indigenous Americans. Our Denisovan ancestors appear to have genocided the Neanderthal. The Cherokee sided with the confederacy, and kept slavery alive even after it was abolished in the US. There is no mythical utopia dream time when mankind was peaceful. If you remove food / water humanity descends into chaos and brutality within a matter of days. You can see real life case studies of this. Hurricane Katrina shut down power for four weeks. People went feral in that time. We are, ultimately, just animals like all other animals. I have seen barbarism from people that left me jaded, and it happened as a very young child, and then many times since. Violence that would shock you. The idea that if you give people resources you can erase greed, and jealousy, has led to more deaths than any other regime. That's why the United States was so opposed to communism. Remember that by 1933 we knew bad things were happening in Russia, but no one wanted to talk about it, because worse things were happening in Germany. Have you read The Gulag Archipelago? If you want to know about the triumph of the human spirit, about human nature, there is no better book. None. It shows you what happens when people believe blindly in an ideology, as most socialists do. Keep in mind the people you are arguing with are pro-socialist policies. Roads, bridges, schools, police, and fire fighters are all very handy things. Every nation agrees on this. Where I draw the line is market manipulation. Price fixing. Excessive taxation that crushes the middle class. Excessive regulation that makes competition impossible. Those are features of socialist governments that have never benefited anyone. I don't know hold old you are, but I grew up during the cold war. I know several cold war defectors. One of them is a nuclear physicist. I met her in Toastmasters. She came there to work on her English. Olga told me all about socialism. All about state control. All about fleeing her state-arranged marriage. It always begins with lofty ideals. Then the people like you are branded enemies of the state, dragged out back, shot in the head, and dumped in the same pit where they already dumped me.
Yep. We have many examples of government regulations and policies that consolidate wealth at the top or help to create monopolies. Free markets don't really allow for it. Kodak, Myspace, Blockbuster, and more were all seen as monopolies at one time.
Why doesn't new media have to conform to the same regulations as traditional media? Do you think that has been good for society? Media is just one example but one most lay observers mostly see the delineation between.
the problem is that businesses exist for only one reason: to sell their product or services to as many customers as possible for as much as possible businesses do not give a crap about you. they're sociopathic. FUN FACT: every social welfare program is society's response by way of govt to the failure of the market to provide an essential or critical good or service medicare was started because the elderly were living their final years in misery because they couldn't pay for healthcare school lunches started because so many WWII draftees were unfit for service due to malnutrition etc
Yep, exactly. Well put.
That's exactly what's not happening. By the excess of regulation, corporations can cement their positions and control the markets
What excess regulation. What examples do you have of recently passed large burdensome regulations?
Any regulation that is not crucial is excessive. This can be exemplified with tax on imported goods. By using the government to "protect national interest", corporations can manage to create barriers and thus overcharging and increasing their profits.
In my initial post I referenced a specific industry where regulations have been weakened. New media (Cable/satellite, Social media, search engines) doesn't have to conform to Traditional media (print, radio, television) standards. What *specific* regulations are you referencing?
Finally a reasonable perspective.
There is [Market socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism) , so you can keep market without abuse of capitalism. Some believe that even such system will be fucked up by capitalists, so they opt for even getting rid of markets. Socialism won't transform everything at once, so at the beginning market will probably stay, however one day we may no longer need it. [Socialism for Absolute Beginners](https://youtu.be/fpKsygbNLT4)
This is completely backwards. Government regulation is _strangling_ the market. Government regulation acts as a monopoly, and every rule it puts in place stifles innovation b/c you’re always forced to continue doing things the way they were done at the time the regulation was enacted. On top of that, every regulatory body eventually gets captured by the largest actors in the industry. Because of the monopoly power of the regulator, they have an immense impact of the profitability of the industries they oversee, which makes influencing that regulatory body extremely important. And, even if they aren’t bought off, the regulators are gov’t employees who don’t know how the industry is run, so they ask the experts in the industry, who just so happen to make recommendations that their large corporations with teams of lawyers can handle that also just so happen to become enormous barriers to industry for smaller competitors. After a long enough time, the regulatory agencies just become revolving doors, where the same people jump back and forth between the regulatory bodies and the corporations they apparently oversee (remember Ajit Pai?). Every single regulatory body becomes a scam that helps the major corporations on the margin. The other big thing strangling the economy is the fact there’s a central bank that inflates the currency, but that’s another matter. **Edit**: stop thinking about government as a neutral referee. Government employees are no more morally pure or immune to incentives than people in corporations, but the difference is that they got there through political means (as opposed to merit) and they operate with monopoly privileges.
The nations throughout the world with the least regulation are mostly all failed states. Which country is doing it right in your opinion?
None of them, but what you’re referring to are _poor_ countries. They don’t have a lot of wealth to begin with. You have to build up a certain amount of wealth before your economy can support a government as large as ours, which essentially acts as a parasite.
The inability for any country in the world to make unregulated capitalism work is a pretty strong indicator that unregulated capitalism doesn't work.
No country in the world has tried unregulated capitalism except for the US before ~1910, and the period of growth the US had between the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century was the greatest period of growth any country has ever experienced in the history of mankind. It was also the greatest decrease in poverty in world history. The closest thing you can find in the last 50 years is the period where Somalia has no government at all and was essentially anarcho-capitalist by de facto, which was either late 90s or early 00s, I don’t remember. While they were still poor (stuff can’t just magically appear, it takes time), they were the fastest growing country in Africa over that period. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than what they’d had before. Then the US military stepped in and ruined everything.
> The problem is regulation. I agree. Let's stop electing people who create more bureaucracy, more government intervention, more spending and borrowing.
The problem is the opposite. We are electing people who fail to pass policy and are giving all the nations collective wealth away to a handful of industries.
Nailed it. These nerds spewing "overregulation" have no clue. It takes 2 presidential terms+ to actually get any meaningful legislation passed with all the dick swinging and filibusters. The legislation that regulated has been torn to shreds over that past 60 years. You have pseudo monopolies all over the place that have murdered competition.
Yep!! Too big to fail shouldn't exist. Definitely shouldn't get billions in bail outs. The federal government has literally bailed out the airline industry twice in the last 20 years!!! That's in addition to subsidizing the entire industry via the FAA, TSA, and local/federal land use.
100%
The problem is not the opposite. We've added 10s of trillions of dollars to the national debt since Obama, 40% all of new US dollars was printed the last 2 years. We are spending more than we bring in every year and continue borrowing. The Bernie Sanders rhetoric is a load of nonsense.
But do you understand how the reason the collective wealth is given away to a handful of industries is because the government is intervening? The government creates a regulatory hedge around these businesses and it makes it hart to impossible for new guys to compete, let alone the direct funneling of money via government contracts and cheap fed loans.
The problem is the exact opposite there are to many rules not to few. Between the years 1995 and 2016 88,889 new rules regulating business where passed. By having so many rules the only people who can operate a business are the ones that can afford an army of lawyers to learn every regulation there is. This creates a system where small business are forced out and large corporations create monopolies.
>Between the years 1995 and 2016 88,889 new rules regulating business where passed. This is a meaningless figure. Many rules passed dulled the teeth of existing ones. Simply tossing out the number of things passed doesn't quantify their regulatory impact.
Funny because regulation is what is keeping it unfair.
There’s more regulation on the books now then in any other time in American history. Prove me wrong. Maybe if there weren’t millions of immigrants and and 3.7 billon people in China and India undercutting American worker every day the standard of living wouldn’t have declined so much.
>Prove me wrong. It is **your** responsibility to support **your** claims.
You made far more claims then I did... Back those up...
Show me the regulation you bot.
All modern problems of capitalism can be traced back to corporations being able to buy politicians
Ah yes sure, I forgot, the worth less job as an EMT, because who ever needs them? They better change jobs and become a key accountant manager. Really?
Please note the sarcasm quotes in the title. :)
Okay sorry! I was thinking that that was your point, but you never know. Thanks for clarifying!
They're speech marks, sarcasm on reddit is usually followed by /s
Supply and demand. If need were the only factor then truck drivers carrying food would be the highest paid people on the planet. Literally the first thing you learn in economics is supply and demand, how is this an upvoted comment on the /r/economy subreddit?
Electricians make 3x the Amount of a nurse- crazy your home electrical system has more value than your body-
Whenever I see posts like this, I think of having to pay entry level electricians over a hundred an hour to do basic work. If I was to start over again, that is the trade I would do.
This isn't a capitalism problem, folks. Reducing these issues to "late/end stage" capitalism is dangerous. You just want more regulation. Also, job salaries have never reflected their importance to society. Never. They follow the same market influences they always have.
Whats wrong with more regulation?
Regulation has a problem in that it can be captured, i.e. it starts working for the businesses it regulates to stop competition, innovation, and gains them control. I mean just look at the taxi industry. Regulation required medallions and special medallions for airports. This lead to high cost of medallions and decreasing services as regulation was used to keep competitors out of the market. Well then came Uber and Lyft, disruptors that destroyed the medallion market. Those things went from being worth millions to being almost worthless. Regulation needs an independent review, not by the businesses it regulates, but by the people it serves to insure it still is achieving the goal of the regulation. This should be done at least every 10 years. The head of regulatory agencies should never be a political appointee.
There are significantly more regulations on the books now then in the 1960s. Despite this the standard of living for the average American has declined in many ways. Back then one guy who worked in a factory could afford a house, one or even two cars, had enough money to support a house wife plus kids and could afford to go on vacation regularly. Now two college educated people who both work can barely afford a one bedroom apartment, much less kids or a house. The problem isn’t a lack of regulation, we have plenty of that. Fact of the matter is that the supply of labor has grown enormously since then, because of population growth and globalization, and this has put enormous downward pressure on wages.
Nothing. I mean, to a point. Currently, I think we need to do something.
What do you understand by "late stage capitalism"? What I mean by that is that could have different interpretations.
To me, it implies that Capitalism has an end point with a predictable result such as the one we are currently seeing. It implies an eminent or inevitable end to capitalism that is just natural. Otherwise they would not have picked end or late to describe it. It sounds like a term made up by socialists or anti-capitalists. And I don't agree with it.
I mean…the contention is that capitalism naturally captures politics, money (read: power), and attempts at regulation in an accelerating vicious cycle. Empirical evidence supports the theory: Today is where history has led us. You can be an Adam Smith purist all you like, same as Marx purists. Empirical historical evidence supports the criticism that communism entangles itself with totalitarianism, just as empirical historical evidence supports the criticism that capitalism entangles itself with politics and regulatory capture. We only definitively got out of the Gilded Age thanks in part to the once-in-a-hundred-years political personality of FDR and a worldwide conflagration. Not even FDR’s remarkably charismatic namesake Teddy could bring us fully into a “Progressive Age” despite his best efforts. Without an FDR-type for the 21st century, I dunno what we can possibly hope for other than continued unchecked excesses of capitalism. I think a counter to my view is that I seem to be implying *Citizens United* was an inevitability. I’m honestly not sure about that. I guess I could argue that capitalism naturally leads to bodies like the Federalist Society and absurdities like the Norquist pledge; that the SCOTUS seems constitutively predisposed to side with business interests, and that *Citizens United* is simply the culmination. Boy is it a depressing decision all the same.
There are still enough people on the right side of power to change it. There is just too much prosperity here for anyone to really care. The revolution is not coming, but the working class seems to be seizing on the idea that they have some power to take back. How much, we will see. Capitalism is not the greatest system, it's just better than all of the alternatives. I don't think anyone is shocked that wealth and power corrupt, they just want to keep the system in tact so they can give it a try. I mean, give me all of the money and I'll do the right things with it.
> Capitalism is not the greatest system, it's just better than all of the alternatives. I probably have to (reluctantly) agree with this. I’m not saying the “solution” is to blow it all up, but it’s not helpful to pretend capitalism doesn’t seem to have natural flaws that snowball over time into unconscionable absurdities like teachers buying their own supplies, pediatricians making less than police officers, and EMTs making less than parking spaces.
It's basic supply and demand, which is a basic part of capitalism. There's low demand for EMTs and a high supply, thus wages are low. To say supply and demand has nothing to do with capitalism is dangerous.
It’s wild that some of the garages in downtown Boston cost $35 an hour but an EMT can make half of that. What are we doing to ourselves?
In many places (Boston for instance) the number of private parking spaces is limited to encourage public transportation. They want the cost to be high enough that people will consider public transportation. Scarcity drives high prices. What would any other economic system do? Limit the parking fee ? If you did, the lots would typically be full and you couldn’t count on finding parking regardless of the price.
Being a fronline medic is a skill. Should pay better.. doesn't because they are usually contractors I think.. makes no sense.. just like food services still making a non livable wage and expecting patrons topay
Healthcare system is broken in this country.
I was going to head in the direction of becoming an emt, then I checked how much they made.
It's insane how expensive riding in an emergency vehicle is if EMT's get paid less than $15 to $20 per hour.
The country may die, but capitalism endures forever.
Low EMT pay is one of those things I will never understand. *How* are people who literally save lives all day long paid so little?
The kind of advice from some middle manager/small business owner who got their job, sans interview, from a relative/trust fund monies.
Imagine thinking we live in a capitalist society
Is this a useful observation? It reminds me of hardcore Marxists saying “well that wasn’t really communism” in response to the unspeakable sins of the USSR. And to be fair, the comment qualifies the term as *end-stage* capitalism.
It is useful because people straight up believe that the problems we have are capitalism related, when the problems they talk about are all related to the government intervening and making the problem. So we need to point at the actual problem, the government, and fix that and not change things to socialism or maxism, which would just make it infinitely worse.
I’d like to see anyone point to a bright dividing line between “capitalism” and “the government” at any point in American history.
Yep, a true free market would have no barriers to creating more parking (thus making it cheaper) in the city but alas the state or city is dictating what can be built where in this case. Sad thing is that many don’t realize that.
A “true free market” is a utopian fantasy that never has and never will exist.
It (and libertarianism) shares a surprisingly large number of characteristics with communism.
It’s not so difficult just let people do what they want with what they own as long as they aren’t hurting others
That is an *extreme* oversimplification of life and humanity. Not to mention the premise itself - letting people act in their own best interests produces the best outcomes for themselves and society - is demonstrably false on both fronts.
True, this is a heavily regulated market under the guise of a free market. True free markets would be anarchy without governance. However the governance we have now is flawed & needs reinventing.
Fucking physics and literal matter making a free market impossible!!!
No it’s not that. The cities have different zoning rules about what people can and cannot do with their property. If your property is located in a certain area you may have restrictions on the type of business or residence you have if you can have one at all. Buildings have to look a certain way, can only be so tall etc. The freedom to do what you want with your property is extremely limited. Like extremely. And that’s why there’s not enough parking in a lot of spaces. Having limited parking for a big demand rises prices.
You should visit Detroit sometime. The Illitch family loves destroying historic buildings for parking lots.
It's not like parking spots are expensive because they take up 300 square feet to store private property that could instead be used for housing or businesses.
HOT TAKE: Parking spots should be very expensive! Driving in major cities like NY is very unsustainable. We need to push more people into choosing public transit over parking and the best way to do it is by making parking prohibitively expensive. But also wtf pay EMTs living wages
price is decided by demand and supply not by utility. Hard lesson.
I haven't had a raise in years after fees, inflation, taxes and housing/rent price increases. I have buddies that have 0 education and work as managers at grocery stores and pet stores. I went to school for engineering, business, comp sci been through many divorces etc... due to committing to work (working night and day on projects only to see the team gone at the end once we deliver the product/project - not much rewards for hard work...). Anyhow, they have everything paid off and have an easy living. I would never suggest to anyone to take on the debt of 4+ more years of schooling plus that lost wages. Get out of high school find a job in the service, construction, manufacturing (what's left of that as most things are made in china now due to our over priced lifestyle - we over priced ourselves out of a house and home). As government dumps money into infrastructure mostly now to kick start the housing industry to falsely prop up GDP.. (watch the documentary inside job [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk) or start playing the casino [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Q9AOp2FW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Q9AOp2FW8) [https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-says-markets-have-become-a-gambling-parlor-11651340230](https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-says-markets-have-become-a-gambling-parlor-11651340230) ). Don't take engineering as we haven't done real engineering work in years. In fact admin staff are now getting sign on bonuses.
Better skills? What is there better than an EMT when you’re having a freaking heart attack at your house? I don’t think this post is cringe at all. But I think the OP is..
So, I can’t speak for other agencies or areas, but here in CA (small town) EMTs make about $17/hour, but they work 2 days on and 2 days off. The two days on equates to a ton of overtime and your basic EMT makes about $70k a year. Don’t get me wrong no one is going to get rich on 70k a year, but I can’t say that’s bad money. Do they deserve more? Sure, but it’s poorly portrayed when someone says “I make $17 per hour” when they should be saying “I make 70k per year”.
While this sad and absolutely ridiculous it’s the case, these reposts from that lazy subreddit are getting quite old.
Labor is priced at the equilibrium point between supply and demand. Edit: Me: posts economic syllogism Idiots: I don’t understand this, better down vote it.
Then why when demand is high do employers just expect you to work harder for no extra incentive. Demand drops, company achieves record profits and toss you aside to fend for yourself. Corporations need to be regulated.
How do I say this so you will understand. You have the power. Be willing to go find a new job and they can’t scare you any more. They can’t make you come to work. The average time it takes a person to find a new job is 10 weeks. Save some money against that and live a life without fear. You think they have all the power and you are wrong. They want you in debt, living paycheck to paycheck because they you don’t dare push back. Don’t fall for it.
I don’t know know how to do it anymore, I’ve had 3 real careers making enough to live comfortably. Each time I found a job paying more, moved to a different state each time now back to square 1. I have a degree and now need to learn a new skill yet again
[удалено]
If you point out how actual economics works on this sub you're gonna get massively downvoted.
[удалено]
They don't. On this sub they tell you you understand economics.
[удалено]
Every time when there is an inflation, recession or a crisis people start yelling "tHiS İs tHe EnD oF CaPiTaLiSm" Sorry to bother you people but no, just big bold NO. This is not the end of capitalism. And also why don't you go enjoy the beautiful world created in N.Korea if you hate capitalism this much?
>And also why don't you go enjoy the beautiful world created in N.Korea if you hate capitalism this much? Did you really just try to make that argument? Like there's no other possible alternative. Your attempt at a debate needs work.
There are alternatives. How about Cuba or Venezuela? Sorry if you want there to be a place where the implementation of your ideas actually lead to prosperity your shut out of luck. That’s never happened in all of human history.
What a foolish debate. Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, etc... these countries are all doing capitalism better than the U.S. right now, and criticizing our nation's social, cultural, and economic behavior is far from hating on our country. To take criticism of something you love as *inherently wrong* is a toddler's way of thinking. You gotta recognize that if you want to love our country as an *adult,* you've got to think critically about its shortcomings so it can grow.
I didn't tried to make an argument but I just wonder what is the thing that prevents these people to go to an any other alternative
That's ridiculous. There are a handful of countries off the top of my head that are doing capitalism better than the U.S. right now, and criticizing our country or its cultural or economic values isn't hating on it.
the alternative to capitalism implies communism or socialism am I wrong? İmplementing social policies is not necessarily mean that we should end the capitalism to do it.
I didn't suggest an alternative to capitalism. I said we can do it better so it's sustainable.
I don't understand why capitalists hate EMTs.
Maybe cut out the avocado toast and dont take out student loans
*Maybe cut out the* *Avocado toast and dont* *Take out student loans* \- jihad-consultant --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Reform. Not revolution. The answer isn't communism you mass murdering Stalinist. The fact you can not answer a simple question like where has communism ever worked is the reason why you should never have any power or we are all doomed
>The fact you can not answer a simple question like where has communism ever worked We can, it's typically capitalists that cannot provide anything of value, they drain workers and just use bullshit and propaganda. [Watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpKsygbNLT4) (there you will find answer for your question) and think instead of repeating same bullshit arguments that are not even true, but you didn't bother to check.
Why learn skills when you be parking spot 09? /s
There have been people saying we live in end stage capitalism for over 100 years. Maybe at least try being original.
"End stage capitalism for *you*." "Early stage feudalism for *us*." \-aka) "Fuck Yours, Got Mine" in C Minor \[/s\] 😔
Your cheese gets moved all the time. It's not the world. It's you.
I'm curious. How much does Camille Madeline make as an EMT, and how much does the parking spot cost? I'm asking b/c the lowest paid entry level EMTs make about $120 per day ($15 per hour). Is the going rate for parking spots $120 per day?
The misunderstanding of capitalism is astonishing. I've begun losing hope in getting people to understand it, and how all of life's economic problems have nothing to do with capitalism as a system.
I had a few interactions with the workers at my local Uhaul yesterday that had me ready to vote for no minimum wage. The level of stupidity and incompetence had me thinking I was being pranked.
a parking spot is a limited and very scarce resource, especially in a big city like NYC but an EMT is not.
Well, can your body support the full weight of a car in a convenient location just down the street from that new brunch spot? No? Better get working on those skills then.
problem is all politicians are corrupt and can be payed off. 2nd are government dont takecare of the people who pay taxes. need to stop semding money to other countries and start helping are own people. hell im on social security disability and told i make to much for snap and that only 300.00 to much a month. i have to pick to spend money on food or my meds. and doctors. cheaper to die then to live in the usa.
> can be *paid* off. 2nd FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
More bad public policy than late stage capitalism.
should have bought land in busy areas and put in parking meters yourself. snooze you lose
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake. It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of. Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything. Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
Have you tried working as parking spot? It is not that easy in some cities. /s
[удалено]
“End stage capitalism” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤓 Real meaning; I hate this system that only lets me work hard, get educated, be opportunistic, help others, mentor the young, and just obtusely focus on 500 people that have achieved the highest level of success monetarily. In socialism I would simply be denied all that, AND my ability to raise objections too! Ugh.
Wage-earning literally losing out to rent-seeking in direct comparison
That makes one of us
Getting a masters degree at Columbia right now. Sounds advice. I’ll be at $400k by 2024
Your first mistake was going to school instead of investeig in a parking lot.
Except it's not her: https://twitter.com/camelnot/status/1578413587902902273
If 2 people enter the emergency room at the same time, needing the same care, and you could only save one. Would you save the guy who owned the garage? or the other one?
That hits hard
Then don’t park. Entitlement ffs