October 20, 2017

7 Ways Workers’ Rights Still Need To Improve

By wise sloth

1: Workers should get paid what they’re worth.

Most of the workers at the place I work get paid minimum wage, but the work we do generates millions of dollars of profit for our company every year. The people who generated that money only see a fraction of it. They eat like shit because they can’t afford real food. They drink to forget their shitty lives, and they’ve accepted that they’re going to live shitty, hard-working lives forever. The top two or three people in company live in mansions, do very little work and smile all day, every day.

This describes most companies. The standard business model is based on a modern version of slavery that allows the masters to exploit their workers with plausible deniability. The end result is unmistakable though. The masters make all the money for controlling the means of production while the people running the economy get paid nothing and waste their lives in humiliating servitude.

I know all the excuses for why we should live under corporate slavery, and I don’t buy them. If we ever hope to live in utopia or even just be decent human beings we need to figure out a way to share profits equitably within companies using a better system than supply and demand, which really just amounts to, “screw whoever you can, however you can, whenever you can.”

 

 

2: Workers should not have to take shit from customers.

Worker’s aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their bosses. Parent’s aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their children. Teachers aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their students. You can’t verbally abuse a random person on the street without fear of repercussions. Everyone is protected from verbal abuse except customer service workers. Customers can bitch out customer service workers as hurtfully as they want and the customer service representative has to submit to it. If they demand to be treated with the basic level of human dignity everyone else is afforded under the law they’ll be labeled insubordinate and get fired.

I have no idea how/why my parent’s generation allowed this to happen, but if its’ wrong to verbally abuse people, then it’s blatantly a violation of basic human dignity for a company to force it’s workers to submit to verbal abuse from customers. Customer service representatives need the law to protect them from verbal abuse and give them the right to tell jerks to go screw themselves.

 

 

3: Workers should have more freedom of expression.

People should be allowed to dress however they want. Nobody should have the power over another person to tell them what to wear. Basic human rights don’t get any more basic than that. Being forced to wear uniforms or even conform to certain standards of appearance is humiliating, degrading and oppressive. If we want to live in a free society we can be proud of the very least we can do for our children is let them dress themselves how they want and quit forcing them to conform their identities to the soulless, exploitative standards of professionalism.

 

 

4: Stop drug testing.

Nobody with any intelligence thinks drug testing really accomplishes anything productive. People who use drugs aren’t bad. Most people who use drugs don’t use them at work. The purpose of drug testing is defeated by allowing people to drink alcohol. If there’s a legal way to get high, does it really matter which way you get high? No.

And most high paying jobs don’t drug test. Politicians don’t get drug tested. CEOs don’t get drug tested. Important people don’t get drug tested because important people use drugs, and it doesn’t matter. The only thing drug testing accomplishes is making life harder for people whose lives already suck so bad that the only realistic chance they have at any form of happiness is through ingesting chemicals. Help their lives suck less by ending the practice of drug testing or drug test everybody.

 

 

5: Employers shouldn’t get a carte blanche on contracts.

Workers are exploited, stolen from, abused, humiliated, forced to live in fear and fired with complete disregard for their dignity because people need jobs to eat. This means employers can put anything they want in their contracts and people have to agree to it to get a job. Then when the company wants to abuse their workers they can say, “But you agreed to this. See you signed your contract.” Of course, we signed the contract. We need to eat. So we had to concede to your extortionate demands. Workers should be protected from this kind of unethical treatment by the law.

 

6: Make shorter work weeks.

What are we doing here people? The year 2000 has come and gone. We’re living in the age of technology. There’s no reason to work 9+ hour days 5+ days a week. All we’re doing is lining our masters’ pockets with thicker pads of money. We’re wasting our lives at work, and it’s making us miserable, stressed and volatile. This is so pointless a child can see it. We should be working 7 hour days 4 days a week. You know what will happen if we do? Everyone will be happier. That’s it. So why aren’t we doing it already?

 

 

7: Create one national job board.

People can’t find jobs because networking is more important than skills. The “good old boy” system is outdated and detrimental to the national economy. We should get rid of the millions of avenues business have to advertise jobs and force them all to post on one federally funded job board. That way everyone will have access to every job opportunity.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Oppression in the Workplace

October 20, 2017

Stop Treating People Like Shit And They’ll Start Giving A Fuck

By wise sloth

If Generation X ,Y, and Z act lazy, aimless, apathetic, disrespectful, and not giving a shit, it’s because the Baby Boomers treated them like shit their entire lives. From the moment a child is born in the West they’re automatically considered a second-class citizen relative to adults by law. Children don’t have the same rights and freedoms as adults do. Putting aside the argument of whether this is philosophically justifiable, consider the psychological impact that has on children. During their formative years of development, when children are forming the perception of reality they’ll use through the rest of their lives, they take it for granted that they’re second-class citizens. Children are even legally allowed to be beaten during the formative years of their life. Children who are hit enough tend to develop battered person syndrome, and somewhere in the world right now there’s a group of kids having a bragging competition over whose parents or siblings beat them the worst.

When children go to school they’re forced to address adults with higher titles than them as if they were in a military cult, and nonconformity is punished swiftly and harshly. And each school has its own rule book that imposes a whole new level of rules on children and is effectively law to the students; school rulebooks are effectively comparable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and like the UCMJ, school rulebooks tend to have a lot of absurd, random, pointless rules that serve no productive use other than to get the people who live under them used to following rules and fearing punishment for nonconformity.

 

 

For the first eighteen years of their lives, children endure a brutal, haphazard gauntlet of tests and assignments at school that judges their worth as a human being, and when they don’t perform well they get smacked on the nose hard, and the worse they do the harder they get smacked. Children who do endure the beatings and pass the tests are told that when they graduate they’ll get go to an even harder school with harsher punishments and more tempting distractions, but they’ll have to go into half a lifetime of debt in order to do it, and once they graduate they’ll get to go sit in an office cubicle that is effectively a sensory deprivation chamber where they’ll endure another lifetime of belittling, absurd rules, minimal pay, absolutely zero company loyalty, constant tests to determine their worth as a human being and indefinite punishment for nonconformity. In order to get one of these jobs, they’ll have to sign a contract that waives a significant amount of their legal rights away effectively putting them under a private version of the UCMJ.

The Baby Boomers understand all this. They’ve seen Office Space. They know there’s at least a little truth to Fight Club. They’ve read Dilbert. They know what kind of a life their children have in store for them. They know the best most of them have to look forward to is being a faceless servant in a droll, stressful, ungrateful, disrespectful, lying, cheating corporate world. Generation X won’t get a pension because the Baby Boomers destroyed all the unions, and Generation X won’t get social security because the Baby Boomers will have bankrupted that long before Generation X retires. The Baby Boomers have systematically destroyed any hope of their children achieving the American Dream, and yet Baby Boomers act surprised when the younger generation doesn’t give a shit.

 

 

The Baby Boomers went out of their way to raise their children in a series of Skinner Boxes that rigorously conditioned them to not give a shit and then set them up to spend the rest of their lives in an environment that doesn’t give a shit about them. That’s why young people don’t give a shit.

Stop treating them like shit and they’ll start giving a fuck. And stop accusing young people of having an undeserved sense of entitlement when they complain about being treated like an inferior species.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Oppression in the Workplace

October 20, 2017

Advice For Young Workers

By wise sloth

If you’re just finishing high school and are about to enter the adult workforce, your brain is probably full lofty ideas about what to expect. You were likely raised to believe if you work hard, then all your dreams will come true. You were told your future employers are looking for bright, creative problem solvers who are energetically looking to change the world. You may have also had it beat into your head that all humans were created equal and everyone has the right to life, liberty, dignity and the pursuit of happiness. Well, let me save you a few years of slow, painful, confused disillusionment and just pop your bubble right now. All of those promises were lies.

 

"Not sure if I"m working hard so I can have a good life later, or if I'm wasting my life working."

 

The economy isn’t designed to help each and every individual achieve their full potential. It’s designed to make business owners and investors as rich as possible at all costs. Bear that in mind when you apply to work at a business. Their bottom line isn’t their workers’ lives. It’s profit.

The managers who will be interviewing you understand this. They don’t care about your happiness, potential or fulfillment. They don’t even care about improving the company. Those kinds of big decisions are made by people who do business on golf courses and never get their hands dirty. Your managers’ job is to be your slave driver. They take orders from above and make sure everyone below them keeps their noses to the grindstone. So the last thing in the world they want to hear an interviewee say is, “I’m a genius who wants to change the world and a creative problem solver who can help you improve your business.”

 

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers." John D. Rockefeller

 

If you say something like that to a prospective employer, all they’ll hear is, “I’m going to question your instructions at every turn and be a huge pain in your ass. Plus, I’ll probably end up quitting when I realize I’m nothing but a disposable cog in a machine that will be worn down, broken and replaced at your convenience.”

If you want to win the interview game, don’t tell your boss how bright and creative you are. Instead, stress how eager you are to serve and how good you are at following orders. You don’t want to come across like you can’t think for yourself, but when in doubt, err on the side of caution. It’s better to come across as an obedient dog than a self-respecting human being.

When you do finally begin your life of thankless toil, remember to live up to the promises you made in your interview. Never tell your boss any good ideas you have for the business. It’s not that they’ll see your potential and realize that you would be better at their job than them and thus feel threatened by you. There’s no chance of you taking their job. Business doesn’t work that way. They’ll just peg you for an insolent brat who doesn’t know your place. So act like your boss, and don’t ask questions. Just take your orders and complete them.

Also, remember to address your superiors the way a slave would address their master: by calling them “sir” or “ma’am” gratuitously. And always smile and pretend like the greatest thing to ever happen to you was being granted the esteemed privilege of sacrificing your life to make your employer richer. They’ll appreciate that, not enough to pay you a fair share of the profits your work generates for the company, but enough not to fire you and replace you with the next poor person willing to trade their dignity for a paycheck.

If this kind of life doesn’t sound appealing to you then start your own business, and do the future generation a favor: Don’t run it the way your parent’s generation ran theirs. Give your employees a fair share of the profits, and treat them like they’re more important than your next car.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Oppression in the Workplace

October 20, 2017

A Novel Approach To Taxing The Rich

By wise sloth

The big argument against raising taxes on the rich is that the fewer taxes the rich pay, the more incentive they’ll have to work hard and create jobs, but if we tax the rich heavily, then they won’t be motivated to grow their businesses. This theory ignores a fundamental truth about capitalist economies: You become a millionaire by working hard, but there isn’t enough time, energy or opportunity in one person’s life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way is by underpaying your workers and overcharging for your products or owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and overcharge their customers. So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it’s still stealing.

 

 

One way to fix the economy is to put a 100% tax on individual’s income over $1billion. No human being needs more than $1billion, and if you made it impossible to make more than $1billion then you will eliminate the incentive for anyone to try. This won’t stop people from working harder. It will just stop people from exploiting their workers and their customers or cutting jobs to maximize profit.

Plus, you could use those billions of tax dollars you’ve liberated from the greedy to stimulate the economy by creating new businesses. If you want to create jobs and stimulate the economy… then create jobs. The government could sell on of every product. If the government used the money it requisitioned from the rich to start businesses, it could regulate those businesses and make sure its employees got paid a fair percentage of the profit their work generates. The government could guarantee its workers are treated with more dignity than McDonald’s. Plus, it could guarantee the quality and safety of its products, which this would stimulate competition with the rest of the private companies.

Best of all, if the government sold one of every product, then the extra profit those businesses generate could go directly to paying for public programs instead of paying for a CEO’s new yacht. If the government made enough money off the goods and products it sold, we could eliminate the need for many of the taxes and fees we pay. If nothing else, we could subsidize healthcare, give our teachers raises, or invest in free education.

If you believe America is a welfare state, then instead of giving money away to the poor, clear out every other floor of the projects and replace those apartments with offices and pay for it with the money the government takes back from the ultra-wealthy. Give everyone in the projects jobs right there. That will eliminate the excuse of not being able to find a job as well as the need for the poor to buy cars and gas to travel across town to demeaning jobs that pay demeaning wages.

Americans are raised on the idea that working like a slave without complaining and hoarding money are hallmarks of virtue, but some people don’t want to work like slaves nor do they want a lot of money. If the government opened businesses that didn’t set Asian sweatshop work quotas and paid their workers good wages with lifetime job security, a lot of individuals who would have otherwise turned to a life of crime to support their unambitious lifestyle would gravitate to part-time jobs where they would be happy and not bother anyone.

Billionaires could just pay and treat their workers humanely, but they’re not going to. Poverty and crime aren’t their problems. If they won’t treat workers with respect and foresight, then the government needs to step in and do it.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Taxes

October 20, 2017

12 Things Wrong With America’s Tax System

By wise sloth

 

1: Americans can’t vote directly on what their taxes are spent on.

Few, if any, of the problems listed below would exist if Americans were able to vote directly on what they want their taxes spent on, but there are only a few minor times and places where Americans are allowed to do that. Despite the fact that Americans have no say in how their taxes are spent, they’ll be sent to jail at gunpoint if they don’t pay whatever amount the government demands of them. This is the definition of extortion, and it’s the opposite of freedom. If your political representatives don’t spend your taxes on what you want them to, then that constitutes taxation without representation.

 

2: Americans aren’t allowed to know what a lot of their taxes are spent on.

The White House, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, each branch of the military operate top secret facilities the average American isn’t allowed to know anything about. There are other agencies taxpayers don’t know exist. Taxpayers aren’t even allowed to know how much they’re spending on these programs, but if you don’t pay for them, you’ll go to jail.

 

 

3: Billions are spent spying on Americans, controlling them, and destroying their lives.

In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked information detailing how the U.S. government is using the NSA, in cooperation with the military, to spy on American citizens. The government responded to this by labeling him an enemy of the state and reminding the rest of America that whistle-blowing is punishable by death or life in prison.

Since September 11, 2001, the average police department is militarizing, but they’re not using their expensive resources to protect the people who pay them. They’re using their power to hunt civilians and dole out enough fines to fill their quotas to pay for more militarized gear. At the same time, the police are filling private, for-profit prisons with non-violent offenders.

The entire world knows America’s “War on Drugs” is a failure that creates more problems than it solves. Every expert and most laymen agree on this, but America won’t change its laws because there are too many industries with lobbyists that are making too much money off of it.

Americans not only have to put up with this constant intrusion into their lives, but they have to pay for it all, and they have no way to opt out.

 

 

4: Billions are spent funding industries that rely on selling their product to the government and are allowed to lobby the government for more funding.

Industries like the prison system, standardized testing companies, weapons manufacturers, military contract staffing agencies and mercenary groups are funded almost completely by taxpayer money. Those industries then take that money and use it to lobby politicians to buy more of their products and services. The healthcare industry’s lobbyists were able to go as far as to strong-arm the government into forcing every taxpayer to buy nearly-useless health insurance and be fined if they don’t, and law enforcement is complicit in fining and jailing anyone who doesn’t obey the insurance companies’ demands. The cost/benefit analysis of funding these industries doesn’t add up to the taxpayer. They’re not getting a positive return on their investment.

 

5: Billions are lost on subsidies for the rich.

Private businesses that sell their products and services directly to the public can also lobby politicians to give them taxpayer money. When the government gives away subsidies to big businesses, the taxpayer doesn’t get anything in return. In theory, they should get cheaper products, but the rich don’t get rich charging as little as possible. They get rich by selling the cheapest product for the highest price they can get away with.

 

 

6: Billions are lost to legal tax evasion.

The law frowns upon people putting their tax dollars in off-shore tax havens, but there are ways to legally do that. You can also legally take advantage of tax loopholes that allow you get out of paying the same rates as everyone else.

 

7: Billions are lost on pork barrel legislation:

When a government-funded industry becomes big enough to lobby politicians, they’re almost guaranteed to be able to fleece taxpayers indefinitely. For every business that relies solely on the government, there are hundreds more that will successfully lobby politicians to give them one-off payouts that benefit the business owners more than they benefit taxpayers.

 

 

8: Other countries can lobby the government to give them taxpayer money and representation in government.

America gives away at least $70 billion to foreign interests annually. Foreign governments and businesses can use this money to lobby American politicians to give them more money or vote on policies that benefit them regardless of whether or not it’s in the best interest of the American public.

 

9: The tax code is literally impossible to understand.

The federal tax code is so big, the IRS doesn’t even know how big it is, but it estimates it to be about 7,400 pages long. This doesn’t include state and county taxes. It’s so difficult to calculate how much you owe in taxes, people spend $7 billion annually to hire tax experts to calculate how much they owe. Even those experts are only trained in niche sectors of the tax code. Nobody understands it completely.

 

 

10: Small businesses are choked by convoluted taxes.

Working class citizens are frustrated by the fact that they don’t know how much taxes they have to pay or why, but as long as they cough up enough money to stay out of jail, their lives can go on as normal. Small business owners’ livelihood depends on their ability to navigate the labyrinth of tax codes that apply to them. If your business is small enough, it’s possible to file your taxes yourself, but if you’re not good at math, you won’t be able to open a lemonade stand. This is a huge part of why half of all small businesses fail. However, if you were born rich, you can pay someone to manage all of that for you.

 

 

11: Regressive taxes oppress the poor.

Some people would say America has a progressive tax system, because the more money you make, the more you have to pay in taxes. But consider that if you make $1,000 per month, the government will take a little over $100 out of each paycheck. If you only make $1,000 per month, you almost certainly don’t have any savings. So you’re paying 10% of your total net worth in taxes every month.

Millionaires who pay 40% of their income to taxes annually will complain that they’re taxed too high, but they can still afford to eat steak and lobster dinners, buy their own home and pay for their kids to go to college. The consequence of poor people paying 10% of their net worth to taxes every month is the difference between eating fresh food or boxed food, fixing your car or walking, seeing a dentist or buying Ibuprofen.

The 10% the poor pay in federal taxes don’t include sales taxes, property taxes, auto taxes, county taxes and state taxes. When you add it all up, taxes cripple the poor more than they help them. Once they run out of money, they may be able to qualify for some kind of welfare, but it’s not enough for them to have a decent quality of life. With or without government assistance, the poor still live in constant fear of starvation and homelessness. This regressive tax code amounts to institutionalized economic oppression.

 

12: Billions are wasted on corrupt, ineffective social programs that treat the symptoms of poverty, not the causes.

Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted every year on ludicrous bureaucratic expenses like requiring a military veteran who lost his legs to submit forms every year stating he still doesn’t have any legs. It doesn’t take many internet searches to find more examples of government waste.

America spends over $1,066 billion on Medicare, welfare, and other social services each year, but poverty, fear, and misery still exist. Doubling the money spent on these programs wouldn’t solve the problem because this money is spent addressing the symptoms of poverty, not the cause.

No matter what you do, you’ll still have to pay for taxes, food, clothing, utilities, and housing. There is no finish line in the rat race. There’s no point where you can stop working and live your life free from the bill collector. You’ll always be forced to pay landlords, banks, grocers, utility companies and the IRS, and everyone is charging their customers as much as possible. Giving the poor handouts to pay banks and big businesses ultimately amounts to redistributing the nation’s wealth to the rich.

 

 

Conclusion

Taxes keep citizens mildly safe from criminals and terrorists. Taxes also build roads, schools and other services that help people fulfill their potential, but we all live in a predatory economy that is designed to bankrupt the poor, and there’s no safety net. Once the rich succeed at taking all your money, you have to sleep on the streets, which is illegal in many cities. Until you reach rock bottom, you have to live in fear of running out of money. That fear drives the poor to work as much as possible without complaining, and they’ll never be free to stop working long enough to join a successful protest. Even if they could, the police will beat them and send them to jail.

Given the choice, no rational person would agree to this social contract. This raises the question, what’s the alternative? The answer to that question is deceptively simple. In order for a person to be secure, free and happy, they need the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, and education.

If it costs $86,100 to build an apartment unit, the government could build an apartment for all 318 million taxpayers for $274 billion, which is well within America’s budget. This would eliminate homelessness and the gut-wrenching fear that comes from barely being able to afford rent.

It would only cost $30 billion to feed the entire world. If the American military spent 5.4% of its $664 billion budget, it could feed everyone on the planet. At the very least, it could feed every American very well. Then no American would ever have to live in fear of starvation again.

For another $100-$200 billion, every American could have free utilities and education, especially if the government isn’t paying inflated prices to private utility companies and schools.

For about $500 billion per year, every American could be housed, fed and cared for. This would eliminate the need for social security and welfare, which Americans currently pay more than twice that amount for. It would also eliminate the desperation that drives so many people to use drugs and commit violent crimes.

You don’t need to raise taxes to accomplish this, you just need to stop spending taxes on things that don’t benefit taxpayers. Instead, use the money people already pay to help them directly. If that sounds radical, then that just proves how dystopian America’s tax system has become. We’ve strayed so far from reality that sanity looks crazy.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Taxes

October 20, 2017

What America’s Class And Tax Systems Really Look Like

By wise sloth

A friend sent me a Youtube video and asked for my opinion on it. I had so much to say about it that I wrote a blog about it. The video argues that America’s progressive tax system rewards the lazy and punishes the rich. If you don’t want to watch the five-minute video, I’ve summarized it in a one-page comic below.

 

 

The lowest class is lazy and ungrateful. The Middle class is doing the bare minimum, and the upper class works constantly and is happy.

 

In case the message in the video isn’t clear, the producers at PragerU.com made at least two more, Do The Rich Pay Their Fair Share? and The War on Work, reiterating the point: Poor people just aren’t trying hard enough, and rich people are hard workers who have to feed the leeches. PragerU probably isn’t run by capitalist conspirators who are knowingly creating misleading propaganda to placate the masses into accepting a life of indignity, fear, and toil. There are millions of other Americans who have the same perception of reality and want to spread the truth as they see it.

Recently a story went viral after a twenty-six-year-old woman lost her job for writing a blog called, “An Open Letter To My CEO” about how little money she made and how hard it was/is to survive. Then a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a response that went viral. She basically told the first girl to suck it up, work harder and stop expecting handouts. She’d probably tell me the same thing if she read the open letter to my CEO I wrote five years ago.

Nobody wants to give handouts to lazy people who don’t want to work. Saying that poor people are just poor because they’re not working hard enough is a warped perception of reality at best and a straw man argument at worst. Below is a comic that more accurately reflects America’s class and tax system:

 

Comic about the upper class exploiting everyone else

 

The poor are not America’s enemy, they’re its victims. The ultra-rich aren’t heroes. They’re the creators and sustainers of economic oppression. They’re going to continue to make economic inequality worse as long as they have all the money and thus all the power, and they’re going to hold onto their money and power as long as Americans justify and glorify their own slavery.

The economic revolution America needs has to happen in the minds of Americans. They need to understand how the economy is stacked against them and start pointing fingers at the real source of the problem.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Taxes

October 19, 2017

Who Will Help Me Make Some Bread? (A Metaphorical Story About Capitalism)

By wise sloth

This is a satirical retelling of the classic children’s story, “The Little Red Hen.”

One day Mother Hen gathered all the farm animals together at the big red barn in the middle of the farm and asked them, “Who will help me make some bread?”

All of the animals said, “We will help you make some bread, if we can help you eat the bread”

Mother Hen said, “Who will help me plow a field to grow some wheat to make the bread from?”

The horses said, “We will help you plow the field.” Then the horses went and plowed a field.

When the field was plowed, Mother Hen said, “Now who will help me plant the wheat?”

The birds said, “We will help you plant the field.” Then the birds went and buried seeds in field.

When the seeds had grown into tall wheat plants, Mother Hen asked the farm animals, “Who will help me harvest the wheat?”

The goats said, “We will help you harvest the wheat.” Then the goats went and harvested all the wheat.

When the wheat was harvested, Mother Hen asked the farm animals, “Who will help me grind the wheat?”

The cows said, “We will help you grind the wheat.” Then they went and ground all the wheat.

When the wheat was ground, Mother Hen asked the farm animals, “Who will help me bake the bread?”

The mice said, “We will help you bake the bread.” Then they went and baked all the wheat into a loaf of bread that rose bigger than the big red barn in the middle of the farm.

When the bread was ready to eat, the farm animals lined up to get their share. Mother Hen plucked off a crumb for each animal. All of the animals groaned and shouted, “Why are you giving us so little?”

Mother Hen shouted back angrily, “I did most of the work. So I’m entitled to most of the bread. Plus, I could have chosen someone else to do your job. So you should be grateful to get anything at all.”

And all the farm animals except Mother Hen lived abjectly ever after.

Leave a comment | posted in Socialism and Communism

October 19, 2017

Billionaires Won’t Save You, And Socialism Won’t Kill You

By wise sloth

In 2010 I wrote an essay titled, “The fundamental problem with the economy,” in which I argue poverty exists because most business owners pay their employees the lowest wages possible while charging their customers the highest prices for the cheapest-made products, and I suggest that business owners could eradicate poverty by paying equitable wages and fair prices. A few days ago, one of my readers left the following comment and video in response to that blog:

 

“We can start by having the biggest US companies follow your example; like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Exxon-Mobile, Chase, Wells-Fargo and Berkshire Hathaway. You think they would do it? Most of the giant corporations are run by liberal-leaning CEOs.

Look at Venezuela, they have Socialism and the governments seized too many companies and they’re not producing enough food to feed people. People are going hungry and babies are not getting their milk. What is your analysis on the Venezuelan condition? You should do a blog on it.”

 

 

CEOs could end poverty tomorrow if they all collectively agreed to pay their workers a fair share of profits and charge customers fair prices, but small-to-medium-sized business owners can’t do that. As long as most businesses charge extortion prices, they force each other to pass on their operating costs to their workers and customers to keep up with the price of doing business in a cut-throat economy.

Every Fortune 500 company could afford to lower their profit margins, but they don’t, not because it would hurt their business’s chance of survival, but because the owners and investors wouldn’t be able to horde as much money for themselves.

If Microsoft and Berkshire and Hathaway needed every penny of their profits to operate, then Bill Gates and Warren Buffet wouldn’t have been able to pocket billions of dollars in profit. So the price of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway’s products and services aren’t based on necessity. They’re based on two factors:

1: How badly Gates and Buffet want to stockpile money they’ll never spend

2: How little Gates and Buffet care about their workers and customers’ quality of life

This makes them either the most evil or delusional people in the world. They may talk progressive and give fractions of their fortunes back to the poor through charities, but they’re still driving the train of economic inequality full speed ahead. Even billionaire, George Soros, who American conservatives hate for sponsoring Democratic politicians, is still raping the lower classes to feed his insatiable bank account. Today’s billionaires are the modern-day version of feudal lords or colonial slave plantation owners. No matter how neat their ideas are, or how many pet charities they support, they’re still the reason poor people’s lives are a living hell.

Take a minute and let the gravity of this sink in. Generations of our ancestors wasted their lives, working themselves to death at jobs that treated and paid them like they’re less than human. They spent their lives working against their will, doing things that had no personal meaning to them and only kept going to work out of fear. Fulfilling their boss’s contrived responsibility robbed them of the time they had to fulfill their potential and give their lives meaning.

This is why economic theories like Socialism and Communism were invented, because business owners have been literally and existentially killing their workers and customers for all of human history, and they still are.

The poor need a new economic system more than the rich need more expensive luxuries, but America is the world’s dominating superpower, and the majority of America’s population identifies as pro-Christian, conservative and Capitalist. Most Americans couldn’t tell you what Communism or Socialism are, but they know they’re evil and, every country that has tried them has failed, which proves (to them) Capitalism is the best economic system.

America can’t change until it can have a sane national dialogue about economics. It can’t do that as long as the majority of Americans believe anything divergent from Capitalism is evil. To that end, they need to learn it doesn’t make any sense to demonize Communism and Socialism for at least four reasons:

 

1: None of the countries that called themselves Communist or Socialist were what they claimed to be.

Immediately after Lenin seized power in the Soviet Union, his countrymen raised an army and went to civil war with him because he didn’t implement Communism. He implemented a fascist dictatorship with some poorly implemented aspects of Communism. When his followers pointed this out, he justified this by basically saying, “Yeah, I know it’s not really Communism, but that’s a goal we have to work towards, and these are desperate times. So what we’re doing right now is ‘War Communism,” which will be replaced by real Communism when things settle down a bit.” But instead, he reinstated a limited amount of Capitalism and turned a blind eye to black market Capitalism.

 

 

After Lenin died, Stalin took Lenin’s fascist leadership style to the next level, and in less than one hundred years, corruption and greed imploded the U.S.S.R. before anything resembling Marx’s Communism could be implemented.

China’s ruling party calls itself Communist, but the country is run by billionaires and is full of sweatshops. The definition of “Communism” is, “a political theory advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.”

The definition of “sweatshop” is, “a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours and under poor conditions.” Billionaires, sweatshops and iron-fisted authority are all antithetical to Communism.

If you were to study any Communist country without knowing it was Communist, and then tried to identify what kind of government it has, you’d probably guess fascism every time. That doesn’t mean Communism is fascist. It means fascist leaders use doublespeak.

I’m not saying Communism is better than Capitalism or that it should be tried again. I’m just pointing out that claiming Capitalism is the best system in the world because Communism failed, is like saying Coke is better than Pepsi because Faygo is disgusting, and Juggalos are crazy.

 

 

2: America has made efforts to destabilize every country that has ever called itself Communist or Socialist.

 

A long quote by Will Blum from "Killing Hope," which says every non-capitalist country has been sabotaged by capitalist ones.

 

The Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis were campaigns in the war between Capitalism and Communism. America orchestrated dozens of coups and bloody revolutions in its war against alternative economic models. So the argument that Capitalism is the best economic model because every Communist and Socialist experiment has failed, is like saying your Nike shoes are better than someone else’s Adidas shoes because you won a race against them after shooting them in the face.

 

3: Socialism is a blanket term for a wide range of nuanced economic models.

Socialism is defined, “a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, as well as the political theories, and movements associated with them. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective, or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity. There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them. Social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.”

Ultimately, Socialism means employees share ownership and profits of the company they work for. This means co-op grocery stores are the smallest example of Socialism, but you can scale the concept up and mix and match it with different government styles. Just look at Wikipedia’s list of different flavors of Socialism.

 

Saying Socialism doesn’t work because Venezuelans are hungry is like saying it’s impossible to raise dogs as pets because you know somebody who tried to raise a wolf and it ate their children. Even if Chavezism is a legitimate example of one type of Socialism, the argument that Socialism doesn’t work because Venezuela is collapsing, would still be tantamount to saying fishing is a failed method to get food because people have been injured fishing with dynamite. Just because dynamite fishing is crazy, that doesn’t prove hunting is the only way to get food.

 

 

Technically, those metaphors don’t apply to Venezuela anyway, because Venezuela is arguably no more Socialist than China is Communist. Hugo Chavez nationalized a few industries in Venezuela, but he didn’t nationalize every business. So the economy was still predominantly Capitalist.

In theory, the companies he nationalized became the property of the state, and since the state belongs to the people, therefore those companies belong to the people. However, the people didn’t get an equitable share of the profits. A lot of it was stolen by corrupt politicians, and the rest went to subsidizing prices and giving away free stuff.

Plus, the workers didn’t have any control over the companies, and even though Chavez was democratically elected, the policies he implemented and enforced, were his own creation, not the will of the people. When civilians protested him, he ordered police to shoot them in the streets.

If Socialism equals social ownership of businesses, then what happened in Venezuela wasn’t Socialism. It was just fascism, corruption and inefficient bureaucracy failing to fix the problems of a predominantly Capitalist economy.

 

4: Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism aren’t the only possible economic models.

Communism is one man’s theory on how to fix a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Socialism and Capitalism are both spectrums of ideas. The flavor of Capitalism used in America can be more accurately described as “Predatory Capitalism” than “Free Market Capitalism.”

Capitalism is defined, “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”

Ask anyone who works for a co-op, they’ll attest private ownership of business isn’t inherently evil. Capitalism only becomes predatory when business owners squeeze the life out of the people they’re meant to serve. So claiming Capitalism is evil because America has apocalyptic levels of economic inequality, is like saying nobody should eat cake because your dad owns a poison cake business.

The easiest solution to economic inequality is for business owners to treat their workers and customers as they would want to be treated. Barring that, there are a million other economic models we could design using concepts taken from Communism, Socialism, Capitalism and new ideas we haven’t thought of yet.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Socialism and Communism

October 19, 2017

Americans Need To Learn The Difference Between Socialism, Communism and Capitalism

By wise sloth

TL;DR:

Socialism is, “a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production.  Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.”

Communism is, “a social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.”

Capitalism is, “an economic system based on private ownership of the means of businesses and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by the owners of the factors of production in financial and capital markets, and prices and the distribution of goods are mainly determined by competition in the market.

 

Socialism

Socialism basically amounts to cooperatively owned businesses. In its purest sense, it has nothing to do with government. You can appoint political leaders any way you want and still have an economy where the workers share ownership/profits of the business they work for. Though a government can be socialist if it dictates businesses must be jointly owned by the workers.

Americans tend to think socialism is the government giving away free stuff like healthcare, welfare, housing, and food to people who don’t work. Socialism isn’t giving away free stuff. It’s people getting a fair share in return for their work.

Having said that, countries like Spain, Italy, Australia, the UK and the Nordic countries have universal healthcare and call it socialized medicine. Hugo Chavez and other politicians who want to spend taxes on social services call themselves socialists. If everyone is going to start using the word “socialist” to mean getting stuff in return for paying taxes, then we can do that, but if that’s the case, then public roads and schools are socialist.

Getting stuff from the government in return for paying taxes looks like socialism because workers are getting a share of the pie, but it’s not really socialism unless everyone gets a fair share of the pie. When you work yourself to death your entire life, and all you get in return is a police state and a few free visits to the doctor’s office, you’re not getting your fair share. That’s not sharing ownership of anything. That’s just getting a negative return on investment.

In order for these services to be truly socialized, the workers would own the hospitals, welfare offices, and public utilities, etc., but in the real world, they’re just allowed to access them to a limited extent as determined by the government. They don’t own these organizations. They’re at the mercy of them.

In many cases, the government doesn’t own them either. The funding for socialized services often trickles down into the pockets of private businesses the government contracts their work out to. That’s not socialism. That’s subsidizing a capitalist economy. Ironically, Americans hate socialism, because it’s obvious that paying companies to give people free stuff is throwing money down a bottomless well. They’re right. It’s a recipe for bankruptcy, but that’s not because socialism doesn’t work. The root of the problem is capitalism.

The goal of capitalism isn’t to spread the wealth among the workers. The goal is for business owners to siphon as much money as possible by underpaying their workers and overcharging their customers. The guiding principle of capitalism is the law of the jungle: survival of the fittest. So when the government pays a company to provide a service, they get the lowest quality product at the highest possible price, and the price is always going up. This isn’t socialism. This is feeding yourself to the wolves.

It would be socialist if everyone paid 50% of their income to the government, and in return, they were given ownership of their own home, free food produced on government owned-land by government employees and bill-less utilities for life.

 

 

Communism

Americans use the words “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably. In reality, they’re not mutually exclusive. Communism includes socialism, but socialism can and does exist independently of communism. Socialism can be as small as a cooperatively owned grocery store. Communism takes socialism to the farthest extent possible: The people own the government, and the government owns everything. Plus, communism goes a thousand steps further to structure every aspect of the government around the philosophies of Karl Marx.

Of all the countries that have called themselves communist, none of them fully adopted all of Marx’s ideas. Blue collar workers never even came close to functionally owning the country’s infrastructure and sharing the profits of the nation’s labor equally. Russia, Cuba, China, and all the Eastern European countries that called themselves communist, were oligarchies or dictatorships that stole the fruits of the people’s labor and gave them barely enough to survive in return. Plus, they all contained pockets of capitalism, especially China. Any country that has miles and miles of sweatshops can’t be communist because slavery is the antithesis of communism.

The Soviet Union didn’t collapse because communism doesn’t work. It collapsed because Leninism and Stalinism don’t work. Nobody knows if communism works because it has never been tried. I’m not saying communism would have worked if anyone had executed Marx’s ideas exactly. I’m just saying, don’t point to failed, self-proclaimed communist states and say they prove communism is evil, especially if the only alternative you’re willing to offer is capitalism.

 

Picture of Joseph Stalin with the caption, "Implemented a dictatorship, called it 'communist.' Generations later, conservatives unable to correctly define 'communism.''"

 

Calling Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders communists is as ludicrous as calling China communist. Barack Obama gave trillions of dollars to predatory banks, crushed social outcry for economic reform, fed the industrial war complex and forced everyone to pay private health insurance companies for low-quality care. Barack Obama is the poster child for extreme capitalism.

Bernie Sanders wants to roll all the costs of medical care and education into the tax fund. If he does that by subsidizing private companies, he’s a capitalist too. If the services are completely government owned, that’s just a socialist island in an ocean of capitalism., which is barely enough to warrant calling Bernie Sanders a socialist, and it’s in a completely different ballpark than communism.

 

Capitalism

Americans love capitalism because they’ve been indoctrinated to since birth. Pro-capitalism propaganda is ubiquitous in American culture. It’s built into elementary school textbooks and children’s cartoons. American patriotism and capitalism-worship didn’t become staples of American culture organically. It was carefully crafted during the Cold War.

Every time a country like Vietnam became “communist” it would stop selling its goods to America, and more importantly, America couldn’t sell their goods to them, buy up their natural resources, or use their workers as outsourced slave labor. The more countries that became communist, the more money American businesses lost. If communism spread to America, business owners would lose all their money. CEOs couldn’t allow that to happen, but they couldn’t tell the American people the real reason they feared communism because poor people wouldn’t fight for the profits of big corporations. So the government and the big businesses convinced the people communism is just evil, and fighting it amounted to fighting for freedom and economic opportunities for everyone.

In theory, capitalism should provide opportunities for everyone, but America arguably doesn’t even have a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, every business competes on an equal playing field, but the American laws strangle small businesses into bankruptcy and subsidize big businesses.

 

 

Even without laws that favor the rich, American business can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage or charge their customers fair prices. Business owners have to be as sociopathic as possible to compete in America’s cut-throat market. Perhaps greed and sociopathy are so ingrained in human nature that capitalism needs regulations to work. If that’s the case then capitalism, let alone libertarianism, is as doomed as Stalinism.

Millions of Americans consider it heresy and treason to question the preeminence of capitalism, but it can’t be evil to criticize an economic system. Economies are just tools we’ve created to accomplish a common goal: create an environment out of anarchy that helps everyone survive, fulfill their potential and enjoy life.

Capitalism, communism, and socialism could all work when done efficiently. They could work in conjunction with each other. Every inch of the earth doesn’t need to have the same kind of economy, and everyone doesn’t need to be equal, but everyone deserves the bare minimum of food, water, shelter, healthcare, and utilities.

The only way the masses will ever secure that is if they cooperate. We can’t fight our way to utopia. We have to work together. In order to do that we need to stop dividing the world into “us and them,” and we need to stop demonizing the enemy and focus on uncovering our own flaws.  If we each objectively analyzed our economies and found logical solutions to the problem of poverty, we’d all end up with systems that work.

We could speed up the process If we all just stopped being evil of our own volition. Then we wouldn’t even need to design a new system. We’d just take care of each other and get on with our lives. Either way, we need a revolution in education before any political or economic revolution will work. As it stands, America can’t have this conversation because it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Socialism and Communism

October 19, 2017

Collapse Is The Product Of Unsustainability. Sustainability Is the Product Of Sustainability.

By wise sloth

The economy is bad, and every politician running for office these days gets hard pressed to explain how they’re going to create jobs and raise wages. The problem with looking to campaigning politicians for answers to the world’s problems is they’re only going to tell you the answers that win them votes. So you can only expect to get the “Sunday school answers” from them that gloss over the hard, embarrassing roots of economic crises.

They’re never going to tell you the economy is bad because it’s fundamentally broken, and it’s not that the economy just all of a sudden broke after working properly for some time;  it’s designed to eat its own tail. So, technically, it was successful at doing what it was designed to do.

If you don’t know how America’s economy works, here’s a quick introduction. Companies try to sell as much stuff as possible. They try to spend as little money as possible for the things they buy and charge as much money as possible for the things they sell.

On the surface, this formula may seem reasonable. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt because they made products that lasted forever, and once everyone bought one, the business couldn’t sell anymore. So companies have learned not to make things that last. They make products as cheap as possible not only because it guarantees them more sales after those things break, but cheap junk is also cheap to produce. So companies make a higher profit at both ends of their business model. Then they can make even more money if they constantly raise the price of everything for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable.

 

 

There’s no giant conspiracy behind this. The state of the economy was probably inevitable. Businesses that minimize expenses and maximize profit make more money than businesses that sell high-quality products at reasonable prices, and once a business has more money than their competitors they can buy all the advantages they need to put their competitors out of business. In a free (or even not so free) market only the most profitable businesses survive, but when the majority of businesses sell the cheapest products at the highest price you cross a tipping point where the economy just eats itself alive.

Mass consumerism is burning through all the world’s natural resources at a mind-boggling rate. This destroys the environment and raises the cost of goods as resources become more scarce. Instead of those resources being used to build a permanent world, they’re used to fill garbage dumps and pollute the eco-system. Then we have to divert more resources to managing these problems we’re creating. All the while the businesses we rely on to sell us the products to manage the problems we’re creating keep raising keep selling us cheaper and cheaper tools while their cost keeps going up for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable. So for every two steps, we take towards a stable economy and a clean environment we take one step back.

But that’s a best-case scenario. In the real world, we’re running as fast as we can towards an economic collapse by making everything as expensive as it can be. The more expensive everything gets, and the more often people have to repair the things they’ve already bought, the less people can buy, which means the less demand there will be for new products, which means unemployment will go up, which means people will have even less money to buy more products to justify more jobs. This is a straight-forward domino effect straight towards collapse.

 

 

But the cure sounds as bad as the disease. If everyone made products that lasted and sold them for reasonable prices then many businesses would go bankrupt, and the ones that survived would never make enough capital to expand significantly.  This is a recipe for unemployment and ultimately… starvation.

However, unemployment is only a bad thing if the only reason people need jobs is to make as much money as possible because everything is expensive as possible and everything breaks. If people could survive for free (or next to free), then they wouldn’t need to work 40+ hours a week. We have the technology and skills to allow people to live for free if we would only use them.

Consider what you need to survive. You need a house, food, clothes, water, and electricity. How expensive is it to get those things? As it stands rent costs at least one-third of your wages. Food is grown in foreign countries, covered in toxic preservatives and shipped to foreign supermarkets that charge such high prices they can afford to have regular sales and still make money off of deeply discounted sale items. Your clothes are made in sweatshops in foreign countries and shipped to stores around the globe where their price tag is marked up thousands of times higher than they cost to produce. Utilities are largely run by private companies that charge as much money as they can while their executives live more luxuriously than any medieval king could ever dream of.  When you lay it out like that, there’s obvious room for improvement in this system.

There are ways we can make housing, clothing, food, and utilities drastically cheaper. If we do that, the economy won’t make as much profit, but people won’t need to work for (or save) as much money to survive. Plus, if they don’t have to spend money on housing, food, clothing, and utilities then they’ll have more money to spend on job-creating products.

I’ll make a few suggestions how to lower costs on these expenses, but I’m not trying to convince you those are the right ideas as much as I’m trying to convince you that everyone (especially politicians) should be thinking and talking about lowering the cost of survival to improve our quality of living and our chances of survival.

Here are a few suggestions to stabilize our economy and our lives:

 

Housing

Taxpayers pay a lot of money to the government through the course of their lives under the assumed condition that their government will use that money to improve their quality of life. Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and similar social services are all swamped by people who are too poor and sick to survive. Half the problems those social services address could be solved if people had free housing, even if that “house” was nothing more than a cramped efficiency apartment. If it was free and guaranteed then everyone will have a better chance of building a secure, healthy life…and career.

Governments can claim eminent domain over property, and we can build extremely cheap, strong, eco-friendly buildings with sandbags. America certainly has enough prisoners to put to work filling sandbags. Once these are built, there’s no need to charge citizens extortionate fees or taxes to live there. If poor people can live there freely and securely then the cost/benefit analysis of doing drugs and committing crime will plummet with their stress level.

This isn’t giving the poor a handout. The poor pay more in taxes in their lifetime than it would cost to build sustainable sandbag houses for every person in the world three times over in sin taxes alone. Even if that’s not precisely true, the point the remains.  Poor people pay taxes with the understanding that the government will use it to raise their quality of life. You can pay for houses for the poor with poor people’s own money if governments would just stop spending poor people’s taxes on such aggressive police and militaries who prey on civilians. And stop having the poor subsidies tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

I really want to beat this horse to death, because this is such a simple and obvious concept that it’s easy to take for granted, but it’s profoundly important. Governments exist to help the taxpayers who fund it. Nothing…nothing…nothing…nothing… in the world will help first-world taxpayers more today than having a free house. Setting up a system to provide everyone with a free house should have been one of the first things any government ever did. And with the technology we have today this is more possible than ever.

 

Food

There’s no need to get rid of super farms altogether or ban international food shipments. They serve a purpose, but there’s no need for the world to rely solely on them for its food supply. You can grow food anywhere. You just need a place to grow it and someone who knows how to make it grow. If you grow it right next to you then you don’t have to ship it anywhere but your kitchen before you consume it. If governments build free housing complexes they could incorporate gardens and small strips of farm/ranch land into the layout. It would be inefficient to try to grow all your food there, but any amount you could grow onsite you don’t have to pay to import. If you can grow 30% of your food onsite then you can reduce your living expenses by 30% while creating local agriculture jobs for skilled and unskilled workers. That’ll also reduce food-shipping-related pollution and resource-consumption by 30%.

But this method wouldn’t work in suburbia because suburbia is so inefficiently designed. That’s not a reason to disregard urban agriculture. That’s a reason to abandon the suburban city model.

 

Clothing

If we can’t clothe ourselves without forcing children to work in sweatshops then we should just walk around naked. But we don’t have to rely on sweatshops, and we don’t have to pay $90 for a shirt. There should be a global ban on importing sweatshop clothing. That doesn’t mean sweatshop workers should lose their jobs. That means factory workers should get paid a living wage and get to work under inhumane conditions. But that’s not going to happen as long as CEOs reserve the right to exploit their workers and have the incentive of being able to pocket as much of the company’s profits as they want. Cap executive pay and put a limit on how high the cost of products can be marked up. Make profit sharing mandatory. And finally, let an impartial, international health organization set health and safety standards for commercial merchandise.  The only “negative” consequence these changes have to cause is stopping executives from being able to afford to live in utter, shameful luxury. As long as business executives can’t pass their costs off onto their workers or customers then everyone else will enjoy a higher quality of living while still being able to afford clothes, shoes, and all the other products we buy.

 

Utilities

Technology exists for buildings to collect their own rainwater, process their own waste and generate their own electricity. If building standards required every building to be environmentally sustainable then there would be little need to pay for public utilities or their upkeep. Cities could still keep public utilities in a backup fashion instead of being the single point of failure that they are now. I’m not saying it’ll be easy to convert the world to using sustainable architecture/technology. I’m just saying, as long as we keep doing what we’re doing we should expect the same results.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Fixing the Economy