u/Mysterious-North-551

Its a hypothetical scenario, you have a house and a lawn and you just hate mowing your lawn, so you hire a person to do it for you. But you have a lawn mower and you have gas for it. So once every week he comes over uses your lawn mower and your gas to mow your lawn.

One day he has an accident, he falls and somehow the lawn mower cuts off his fingers on his left hand?

How would you feel about this?

Jeff Bezos has a networth of 263 billion dollars, i mean he is rich beyond belief, and he is only paying around $23 per hour for his employees, isnt that unfair?

Well it is not that simple. Amazon as a company pays out 90-110 billion dollars in wages per year is that how Jeff Bezos gets rich? Did he steal those 263 billion of dollars from his employees.

Jeff Bezos only earns $81,400 per year, I mean if he earned that money through what he is getting paid, he would had to work for Amazon for 3.2 million years, and maybe im wrong here, but i dont think Jeff Bezos is that old and i dont think Amazon has existed for that long. So what is amiss here?

Did he really steal 263 billion of dollars from his employees?

They complain about AI taking jobs, i mean that is a fair point to make.

But they do seem to all understand how a robot could take a job from a real person.

That means they do understand that a robot would be cheaper then a real person. Which shows us how they dont care about people. They never once considered the person who needed help cleaning in the first place and her financial situation.

Maybe she is paralyzed from the neck down, and she has to get help for everything and how fragile financial situation she is in. Not a single consideration there.

Socialists without knowing it are pure evil. I dont know why but they seem utterly unable to take reality into consideration even so much as once.

I know you wont like this very much. There is a reason why socialists and communists gets called the flat earthers of economics. We look at the same evidence and only one side cant understand what it actually means.

As an example, globe earthers says the horizon is clearly proof we live in a sphere, and that flat earthers says "nu hu"

A comparison with socialists and communists, capitalist say supply and demand and you say "nu hu" even though that single thing proves nearly every single thing.

Trying to even read a socialists or communist comment about how capitalism is wrong, and what they actually complain about is the state, not the free market.

I am however in no way saying capitalism is perfect, it has a million billion flaws, but the outcome is always better for everyone, why is that? Because economics is about the real world, we compare the outcomes between countries for example. We do not compare the problems society has with our imagined utopia.

Socialists and communists knows so little about basic economics that when they are actually arguing about an economic system which capitalism is only, they understand nothing at all. It actually reminds me of a flat earther called "sleeping warrior" and in an interview he was asked about the iron age and when that happened and he said "around 150-200 years ago maybe" im paraphrasing here. He said because that was when we started to make boats out of iron. Imagine even being that wrong in the first place.

And when it comes to economics, that is how wrong socialists and communists almost always are. But there is another saying in economics as well, "if socialists and communists understood economics they would not be socialists or communists" and that statement is very very true. Because i have seen socialists and communists learning and understanding basic economics and they never remain as socialists or communist. Not once has that actually happened.

And when i say economics, that is 100% only a study of the real world, compared to other parts of the real world. We see "with a few exceptions notably oil or a natural resource" the more production a country has, the richer the people in that country. And looking at production, we also see the less capitalism the less production.

China is sort of a good counter argument but not really, its not the free market the dictates anything there, just the communist government that tells you "you work here and you work 12 hours a day 6 days a week". The market doesnt demand that. the people arent free to choose how much they want to work the state does.

And to some degree that is also true in capitalists countries as well, because the state has a vested interest in that you work more, you work more you also earn more which means that state gets to take more of what you earned. So they want you to work.

You know so little about basic economics that you rarely even know when its the state or when its a company that does something. And when the state does something wrong you say "look at how capitalism is failing the people" or some dumb nonsense. When companies does something they shouldnt do, you rarely if ever say this company did something wrong. When a company uses its money to bribe the state, that is exactly what they should do because it can give them even more money. Now we the citizens dont like when this happens obviously, but notice trying to offer a bribe is not the same thing as accepting one. And the politicians writes all the rules and since they havent banned this process, they obviously likes to get bribed. Even though it is very very wrong and both capitalists and socialists agrees here.

That reminds me of another thing in just this subreddit, when the state was handing over money to failing industries a couple of years ago. A shit load of socialists were saying something along the lines of "you got what you wanted now, are you happy?" And not a single capitalist were in favor of it. We were all against it. Neither socialists nor capitalists wanted the state to do that. But for some stupid reason the socialists here just never managed to understand that prior to its happening, even though not a single capitalist said they thought it was a good thing. And that is how poorly socialists even understand what we capitalists actually wants. they simply dont have a single clue. They think we are just bootlickers for the companies but no we are not at all.

It is a very simple question, and explain how that creates wealth.

Noting if i say "the full moon creates weatlh" i would have to say how that actually works.

And we will have to begin from when all of us were poor. If you say money for example you will have to describe how he got that money in the first place.

What ideas do you have, that will help the poor, and or the working class, that will not hurt the rich?

I know what kind of answers i will get, but i just want to demonstrate how you actually dont give a fucking damned about the poor and you actually only hate the rich, so all the capitalists can see for themselves.

So i am a bit of a music nerd, and maybe all of you guys, both socialists and capitalists and everyone inbetween or on something completely different.

Maphra is a singer who makes covers of other bands songs.

And i will gladly recommend both Doomed and Unethical (her covers of those songs) and please if you like it, go check out the original artist.

Bring me the Horizon - Doomed

Faiuzia - Unethical

I am not in any way linked to either of them. This was just a singer i heard of 3 days ago.

So as i have said before i am a Swede, we used to have only 2 large companies selling grocaries. ICA and Konsum (Konsum) later changed their name to Coop, which is short for cooperation where the workers makes many decisions. So Ica the for profit company roughly had 540 billion dollars in profit last year.

So here is the problem, Coop has between 2-6% higher prices, and wages and staffing is the same.

How could this ever be? Coop has the same expenditure for number of products sold (staffing), Coop also has higher prices, and ontop of all that Ica is making 540 billion dollars a year and coop 0.

How does that work?

I know why and i both want to tell you, and i also dont want to tell you so you can make a fool out of yourself even more, especially all the socialists and communists.

But how can a for profit company make a profit, pay the same in wages, and have lower prices at the same time. Ica holds roughly 46% of the market share and Coop 16-17% that can not explain it, at the very best coop should have a profit of lets say 200 billion dollars which they dont have. The difference in market share is because of their prices as people prefer to have more money left over, and since ica sells their stuff cheaper then coop does so that is where most people go.

So explain it. Same wages, same number of employees, and cheaper prices as well as a profit.

Why did so many people flee from east germany?, and why did people from west germany not flee to the east?

Why did people from the utopia of socialism want to flee to the hell hole of capitalism, and why did the people living in the hell hole of capitalism not flee to the paradise of socialism?

Between 1949 and 1989 roughly 3,5-4 million people flee from west germany to the west, and roughly 500,000 moved to east germany? I mean there is no contest really, most people that moved from west germany to east germany did so because the rest of their family was trapped in east germany.

Why did the guards in east germany shoot at people that tried to flee, while the west just accepted them, and the west didnt even try to stop the people that wanted to move to east germany. Why this massive difference?

Lets ask this question again: Why did people from the utopia of socialism want to flee to the hell hole of capitalism, and why did the people living in the hell hole of capitalism not flee to the paradise of socialism continually under a 40 year period?

Something i guess most of you have not spotted yet.

State capitalism seems to only be real, once the state has seized the means of production.

I can understand why you call it state capitalism, because once the state owns the means of production, it needs the workers to become efficient so it will continue to pressure the workers to become more efficient.

No one blames capitalist countries for being state capitalist, even though some people have started to blame the USA for this lately under Trump.

But notice just how bad that excuse even is to begin with. Capitalism is just two things, it isnt anything more then those two things. It is private property and free markets. And both of them vanishes the same instant the state takes control over the economy, it is 1 single holder of the means of production, and there is no competition on the market at all.

So what people call State Capitalism, lacks the two things which makes capitalism actual capitalism, which are private property which no longer exists and free markets which also doesnt exist, and somehow this is also some form of capitalism.

Its an argument i have heard a thousand times if not more by now. I use China as an example for why communism is bad, and then a communist says "What happened in China was because of state Capitalism" or something like that.

What i have never heard at least so far is how china had state capitalism, what that even means or what it even is. Same thing with the Soviet union.

Do you have any insights?

I am a Swede and when i grew up state media was inflamed with what the unions had fought so hard to provide the workers with and that was lunch.

A 1 hour long state mandated lunch, and the unions had fought tooth and nail with the companies over it. And they finally delivered this massive win for the employees.

At least that was what the media and the state said (we were ruled by the social democrats at the time) However that wasnt exactly what the unions had given to all the workers, they conveniently left out that it was a 1hour long unpaid lunch and that you would still be working 8 hours a day, which meant in reality that you either started work 1 hour earlier or left work 1 hour later.

At the time i was young and naive, so i really thought that the workers couldnt have lunch before. But i started working, and talking with older people they complained a lot about that their work day was 9 hours long instead of 8. But i was also pretty young back then too so i didnt ask, i assumed they were unhappy because they had to be at work 1 hour longer but forgot how important lunch was.

And this stayed pretty constant for a few years, then i got promoted to manager and i really cared about the people working under me, so i brought the question to them, what they thought about lunch and they said they sometimes did enjoy a 1 hour lunch but for the most part the would love to get home 1 hour earlier and would prefer to eat their lunch either on a break or while working. So i broke the rules, which is punishable by the state, they could fine me and the company a lot, but they never did.

So i got rid of their 1 hour mandated lunch, they were free to still take a 1 hour lunch if they wanted to, or they could eat during a break or while working. The only difference was that if they had a 1 hour lunch they stayed at work for 1 hour longer. And all of a sudden almost no one ever decided to have a 1 hour lunch.

So how anyone can say that the unions works for the workers i just can not see. And i have had a lot more interactions with the unions since then, and their deals towards the companies are always equal meaning that the companies never has to pay more or that the workers have to work less. If they work less that comes out of their breaks, if they get paid more that also comes out of their breaks or even longer working hours. But what i always see is that the unions gets more and more while the workers dont. So the unions are clearly not working towards what the workers wants, they are working towards what they want.

Then we should add the elephant in the room, in order to be protected by a union you need to pay the union fees which are roughly $70 a month. So from my perspective every single employee would earn $70 more a month if they were not a part of a union. Because the unions has never given the employees anything that the employees didnt pay for first.

But that is my perspective on it. You are free to comment anything you like obviously. The unions have complete state backing here in Sweden so the unions have a lot more power then the companies does.

I have not read all the comments, but here in Sweden where i live we were a quasi socialist country 70-80ish and union participation grew steadily until around the mid 90s, and since then union participation has declined steadily every year.

This coincides perfectly with when Sweden turned to capitalism again, we abandoned socialism, we slashed regulations to shreds, made it easier to start companies, and if you started a company you could get rich again and we cut taxes a shit ton too. And since then Sweden have slowly become more and more capitalistic, we are more capitalistic then the USA is today, mean time union participation has dropped year by year, and you cant forbid someone to join a union, companies doesnt have a clue if someone is part of a union or not, because those unions are free entities that doesnt have to listen to what any company tells them.

So no pressure to leave a union exists, so why does union participation drop as Sweden get more capitalistic?

To refine the question a little bit, a country goes either more capitalist or less capitalists slowly over time, would union participation follow that to a degree or not? IE capitalism goes up and union participation also goes up, or capitalism goes down and union participation also goes down.

What do you think yourself?

Under a very capitalistic country do you think union participation would be high or low?

Depends on music preferences, but you should absolutely check out Porcelain Hearts - Redacted.

I think you may like it. Its more anarchistic then socialistic, but there are indeed elements of socialism in the song, and if you ask me, it is a good song!