Rich people are just better, and because they’re better anything they do with their money is automatically better. So they should get all the money and if you want to be a good person just get rich like them.
The ol’ more money = better than theory
It’s actually about power and leverage, not lifestyle. Rich people don’t actually spend most of their money on personal luxuries, they spend it on acquiring more wealth, which translates into more control over resources and people’s lives. Regular people don’t actually spend most of their money on luxuries, they spend it on maintaining their place in a world someone else owns.
The narrative that it is about what level of material status someone is living in or deserves is a distraction. It wouldn’t matter at all if the rich started living more spartan lifestyles. They still have the wealth and power, that will manifest one way or another as control over other people’s lives, and that’s what they’re really there for.
It’s Murphys golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules
They don’t care, you do. Change will not come from them, only from you.
The problem is that if it doesn’t come from them then there will be no change.
That’s not true. Labor laws today are much, much better than 100 years ago, and not because billionaires decided to be good.
No, it’s because when taking wasn’t getting shit done and the owners used cops to get violent to force them back to work, workers got violent right back, but they stopped too soon. The owning class should have been hunted down and eaten right then.
General strike. Nobody shows up to work worldwide.
Problem is more that 50% of humanity are scabs.
Lots of bootlickers are simply not understanding the intended message, of challenging the austerity narrative promulgated by the ruling class, which supports their selfish interests of private accumulation by oppressing the working class.
I was curious, so I pulled some quick numbers about Jeff Bezos.
Bezos has what I think is the biggest yacht in the world. It cost $500 million, according to the NYT. I am not intimately familiar with yacht ownership, but from 20 seconds of Googling I found a rule of thumb saying the yearly costs can be expected to be about 10% of the purchase price.
Currently, Amazon has over 1.5 million employees. That means Bezos’ yacht money could have given every employee a bonus of about $333, and the maintenance cost could give everyone a permanent raise of about $33 per year.
It’s a drop in the bucket.
Of course there are other ways you could slice this. According to Amazon’s own PR piece from 2018, they had about 250K employees earning their minimum wage of $15/hour. That money would go a lot further if concentrated toward the lowest-earning employees.
That yacht isn’t the only unnecessary thing he owns and Amazon has plenty of other overpaid executives as well.
I hate this bullshit logic of “But this one person’s salary would not give everyone else very much!” Bezos is not the only one that should be making less. All of the chief officers should make less. All of the regional presidents should be making less. That money would absolutely be more than simply a drop in the bucket. I do agree that it should be concentrated to the lowest paid workers.
I’m not digging this anti-science streak running through progressive movements lately.
It’s to the point where “capitalism bad” is also “space bad”.
They’re not protesting NASA or any other public space agency. It’s the private ones owned by billionaires they have issues with.
Just about every rocket launched for a NASA mission was built by a private firm.
You are implying what I am outright saying, that there is a growing anti-space sentiment growing within progressive movements.
You’re just straight up putting thoughts in people’s heads and getting mad at them for it.
Anti-space is not anti-science.
Space exploration (which is not even the target of any reference in the post) is profoundly expensive, and carries comparatively minimal scientific benefit.
The objection is against the personal thrills of the immensely wealthy paid by the labor of their immiserated workers.
No objection was given against projects that promote the common welfare.
They can afford to give the employees a bigger wage, they just don’t want to because the employees are willing to work for the current wage.
That’s a strawman argument. Yeah, if you can’t pay your employees what you owe them, then you go to jail. At least that’s how it’s supposed to be in the ideal “capitalism”. And we are comparing ideas, not real implementations (cause then somebody wouldn’t have any working examples to present).
The argument is not giving a strawman, but rather identifying one given previously.
Supply and demand. There are many workers and relatively few employers, so it’s much easier to find a cheaper worker than a more generous employer.
The broad discussion is based not on a misunderstanding of labor organized as a salable commodity, but as a challenge against such organization.
