one of them wrote a song about it. basically: they didn't start the fire.
Ok, Capitalism is Spiraling Out of Control Right?
- Thread starter BWoog
- Start date
one of them wrote a song about it. basically: they didn't start the fire.
Unfortunately no. It's likely still chugging along warts and all.
US collects a lot of information.
And it's saying people are buying more TVs, more fast food, eating out more at restaurants post COVID. After adjusting for the impact of higher prices.
US collects a lot of information.
And it's saying people are buying more TVs, more fast food, eating out more at restaurants post COVID. After adjusting for the impact of higher prices.
Pure capitalism is an absolute unworkable nightmare just as a purely communist/socialist system would be an unworkable nightmare. Every modern government out there is about finding some kind of balance between the two.
Most colleges and universities are private nonprofit or private for-profit. I assure you they absolutely have very robust libraries that are critical for getting any real research done at that level.
Fascism is rising for a reason, to protect the capitalistic elite from the pushback, It happened before WWII, it's happening now. It seems like people got gaslit into thinking that capitalism and fascism are opposites, fascism is a tool of capitalism to confuse and create in-fighting in the working class.
Perhaps because no one is bothering to save anymore. A lot of my friends have given up on the concept of retirement.
Debt.
Americans' credit card debt hits record $1.13 trillion
Credit card debt increased by $50 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, a 4.6% jump from the previous quarter.
abcnews.go.com
I don't think you can have a balance between the two, honestly. Either the workers own the means of production, or they don't.
That's fair. I'm a square and still contribute the max to my 401k, but I don't blame anyone not feeling like it's worth it.
As an Autistic person it completely blows my mind how anyone isn't able to see how Capitalism and Faschism are wearing the same trench coat
This is what I was going to say. I know a bunch of people in jobs that don't pay enough. Either they're living with parents and spending money on travel, hobbies, etc. or they're dead broke just trying to live. None of them are saving because what they have doesn't feel like it'll turn into anything worthwhile.
Likely because they don't understand the concept. Putting a trivial amount of money away in a 401k or similar each paycheck early enough means retirement is a certainty. NOBODY wants to be in a position where they're still working retail or whatever at 82 years old.
Centuries of propaganda and capitalism facilitating overabundance of useless shit to buy.
I don't agree. There's plenty of folks I know that understand that concept but are putting a focus on experiences now instead of saving because they know they will work till they are 82 regardless.
What is a trivial amount to you? I looked up a quick calculator and at my age if I put $200 a month away till retirement, I'll still need over $1 million more.
This is a laughably simplistic view. What is ownership? How do you define it? if workers have the opportunity to buy shares which would grant voting rights (which is what most employee stock purchase plans are) but decline to exercise it, do they still own the means of production?
What about workers whose employer is a government entity? State, federal, or local? Who "owns" that, given that only a minority of citizens bother to vote?
The obvious answer is "how old are you."
I would consider $200 a month for your entire working career pretty low- this assumes that you work for an employer with no 401k or 403b matching *at all* and your wages never increase over the 45 year period most people tend to work- which is quite frankly insane. This would never happen outside of edge cases where someone was almost entirely unemployable outside of the lowest possible occupation.
But even given those conditions, if that person invests $200 a month with no matching over a 40 year period and never increases it, with an 8% average annual return that person retires with $698,201.57, and that's not including anything social security gives you to live on.
Retirement would be easy.
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That shouldn't be a problem. US life expectancy is only 76 years and if you have retail employee level healthcare, that might be a stretch. /s
I agree that people should be doing it anyway and putting away something. Even if they can't comfortably retire, they could hopefully at least have flexibility in the type and amount of work they have to do.
It's why they push racism so much.
Poor people have more in common which each other than they have in common with rich people. So they try to keep up poor people divided so we won't notice how different the rich people are.
It's the definition of socialism. Declining to exercise voting is up to the people but if the workers as a whole own the means of production instead of a capitalist class, then it's socialism.
Whether folks vote or not is irrelevant to if they own the means.
With the future leaking bleak, enjoying the present just seems like a better idea.
What's the point of saving when your closer to being broke than ever owning a house?
Right, and in an ideal world this is the right idea.
however, I also think you're failing to grasp that a lot of us are banking on being dead LONG before retirement age even hits.
i think in any system, the common factor is the type of person who wants to be in charge are the kinds of people who seek out positions of power, and corrupt the system for their own self-interest. in capitalism, there are a lot of incentives to drive this. it's pretty baked in. in a socialist one, there would be fewer, but that would not stop people from twisting the ideals to lie to people in order to suit their personal wants and needs. i honestly don't know if we've seen a true socialist state and if there is an example, how it functioned (or did not).
i am not sure what need there is to gatekeep that knowledge behind a private university/college outside of capitalist incentives.
I mean I don't disagree but we're talking about people who are struggling to even maintain employment. Everyone who is able to retire comfortably here not only has savings, but also a nest egg in the form of property. That is something that is becoming wildly out of reach for a lot of people of my generation in my industry so not only are they not bothering to save up for a downpayment, but the lack of ability to do so makes their future feel even more bleak so a lot of people are just spending their disposable income on experiences and i dunno, stuff. This is not something I agree with but it is just the reality of how beaten down people are right now.
This logic doesn't make sense. Just because we identify ways go improve capitalism with regulations does not mean the underlying idea doesn't work. You can replace capitalism with any other economic model. Private libraries don't exist because the government funds public libraries and the return on renting books is not worth it for a for profit business.
You can't put away x% if you need the x% for monthly bills.
Exactly. Though, I still don't agree that it's a trivial amount that will make folks ready for retirement.
I could save up $3K or so in a year to take my wife on vacation to wherever or I can put it into a 401k where it still won't be enough to retire. Nevermind that we need a vacation just to not go insane. Even then, $3K is not a trivial amount for us.
The underlying idea is that a small number of people own all the means to actually exist, and in order to not fucking die the rest of us sell our limited time and bodies to those people for a pittance of what they're reaping. Pretty awful idea, if you ask me.
Oh I agree, I've done the math on how much money you need to comfortably retire (nevermind how much you need to afford a half decent, non abusive retirement home later down the line) and it's in the millions. I don't blame anyone for looking at that and going "fuck it, id rather go on vacation". I'm just thankful my partner works for the public sector and has a generous pension.
*Why not use the money to save and make more money?*
*With what money?* Over 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, if some make alittle more don't they deserve to use it for some small semblance of happiness? Do nothing but save till you might retire if you live long enough, is just not a great outlook for most.
Public libraries tend to stock only what's generally needed by the public they serve. University libraries specialize in serving people who need a lot of specialized help and materials for research that's simply too expensive for your typical public library to keep on hand, or maintain subscriptions to databases that cost an arm and a leg because they're highly specialized.
I don't do a ton of research for my degrees, but to the extent I do I'm REALLY happy those library resources have been there when I needed them.
I'm in my forties now and the only thing that still gives me hope is the increase in protests. Like just the last few years seeing the mobilization around racism, war, genocide, climate change... protests are necessary like the air we breathe.
It feels like there are more protests coming up faster and that's a good thing. Some of these will hopefully connect, grow and stay radical and grow into a revolution with an overthrow of power/capitalism/authoritarianism and the creation of alternative ways of life/communal living/organizing. It's a slim chance, but it's the only hope we have of surviving the coming decades.
This is an active, angry hope.
It feels like there are more protests coming up faster and that's a good thing. Some of these will hopefully connect, grow and stay radical and grow into a revolution with an overthrow of power/capitalism/authoritarianism and the creation of alternative ways of life/communal living/organizing. It's a slim chance, but it's the only hope we have of surviving the coming decades.
This is an active, angry hope.
We are kinda in that boat. We just think we might as well enjoy things while we can because, as of right now, our retirement while be non-existent.
Exactly.
Like Nepenthe said, propaganda and capitalism realism. Sadly the majority got fed terrible propaganda that Democracy and Freedom = owning shit, so in their mind Capitalism is just the natural way of the human race.
i was using libraries as an example because i think most people like the idea of them even if we don't use them all the time. private roads exist, private fire departments exist, private schools exist. these don't appear to be for the betterment of society - just the betterment of the people in control of those things. when california decided to deregulate electricity, it took less than four years before there was an electricity crisis in the state. it's the same story that companies would compete against each other to have the best product. no. companies will seek out as much money as they can possibly make.
i guess i'm still not understanding why that would cease to be in a non-capitalist society. i don't know why we would not seek out knowledge and why the public or the government wouldn't fund that kind of research or make it more widely available.
I agree with you, outside of the whole "private libraries don't exist" part because they do.
you misunderstood me. I was only responding to your assertion that you've never been to a private library to check out a book. Those ABSOLUTELY do exist, but they exist to serve a very specific population- i.e. people doing university level research that would be too expensive for your neighborhood library to accommodate on a regular basis.
Could "the government" fund *every* library so that it fits that definition? Not really- it would be wildly inefficient since 99% of those resources would never be used for a neighborhood library, and libraries tend to be funded by local government, not giant federal pentagon sized budgets. Since government budgets aren't infinite, choices would have to be made about spending priorities and its unlikely that makes the cut.
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And we have not even seen the real impact of AI on the workplace yet. Things are only to get worse and the government will not do anything because guess what? These politicians are on the payroll of these companies. US campaign finance laws are abysmal and responsible for the majority of the issues in the US today.
I like that there's so much useless shit that you need websites dedicated to telling you which of the useless shit to buy and now because of AI those websites are useless too... so you go to Reddit to figure out which useless website is the best for telling you what useless shit to buy.
i won't hide behind an implication that i secretly knew private libraries existed, because uni/college libraries didn't cross my mind. but it was also true that i couldn't remember the last time i visited one to check out a book. it would have had to have been in the mid-late 2000s when i was still attending college. even during that time, i was checking out books from the local city library more regularly.
but my point was less about the existence of those or the importance/relevance of them, and more about what would drive those to exist in the first place. i think in general, if people knew they could go to the hospital 'for free', have access to uni libraries 'for free', or hell - universities 'for free', that they'd be a lot happier in general than having to pay up front and individually for access and a sense of ownership.
Debt and nobody saves anything anymore. A lack of faith in institutions and pessimism about the future have everyone trying to enjoy life while they can.
Yes, and that's not even looking at the US government debt and other issues. The entire system will probably collapse in the next 10-20 years.
Ironically all of the Reddit posts are being fed to the AI machine. But yes, I go there now for my recommendations lol.
I'm re-reading this comment and I want to revisit it because it reminds me of a conversation I had a couple months ago on this site that seems relevant:
Why do Video Games Cost so much to make with each generation and How can devs reduce cost?
This isn't a "capitalism" problem, it's reflective of one specific school of thought that focuses on shareholders over all other stakeholders (customers, employees, the business itself) that got floated by Milton Friedman in the 1970s...
www.resetera.com
This isn't a "capitalism" problem, it's reflective of one specific school of thought that focuses on shareholders over all other stakeholders (customers, employees, the business itself) that got floated by Milton Friedman in the 1970s.
Capitalists" prior to that *explicitly did not endorse this view*.
Freidman's theories unfortunately were the darling of the "greed-is-good" Reagan-Era conservatives that took power in 1980, and they did everything they could to rewrite tax and economic policy to embrace it- leading widespread economic inequality as well as a series of inevitable financial scandals and disasters that culminated in the 2008 financial crisis.
Modern economic theory- even the "capitalist" ones- largely acknowledge that Friedman's theories promoting shareholder value over everything else were not only widely wrong, but extremely corrosive to the public good and "bottom up" economic theories carry more weight. So your beef isn't with "capitalism" it's with Reagan-Era conservative economics.
The inherent problem with capitalism is that we have to beg capital owners to cede power it gives them by default. Their is no enforcement mechanism to keep things fair for the working class and whatever they give is never willingly as they only ever give enough to keep their heads off the chopping block. They are forever skirting that line and will use a police state to overplay their hand. An organization of the economy exists to make society a better place for a productive working class but until the power dynamic changes a true improvement can never happen if we continue the capitalist structure of the economy.
:edit:
Before anyone asks I mean social democracy, which is not my platonic ideal but its better than what we have in the US
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I honestly think the class of execs and billionaires are so psychotic and divorced from reality that even attributing what they're doing to "shareholder value" or whatever is giving them too much credit. I think they've gamified growth. I think they just like seeing number go up and there's no amount of human suffering they're not willing to inflict to see that through.
It's pretty normal for us to use things that require oversight or regulation because they confer certain advantages but call for caution and ongoing vigilence with their use. Electricity, dangerous chemicals, drugs, knives, democracy, whatever.
Alternative modes of organizing the economies have typically given up on pure command economics because it, too, has major pitfalls. Centralized authority over distribution of goods lends itself to corruption and cronyism by those with the authority unless carefully managed, as party officials and senior beaurocrats somehow wind up with lovely summer homes and unlimited access to all the best goods even as the country faces shortages. The longest lasting and most successful communist states have economies that are not really communist in any true sense, as they gradually gave way to markets and opened up to price signals and wage differentiation as organizing forces. They still feature strong interventionist powers held by the government but these are hybridized state-capitalist economy even under the most charitable read.
I think there is a spectrum of workable economic models humans can operate under effectively, but I don't think any of them don't require significant oversight or compromise on their theoretical "pure" foundations.
Well...universities in this country (at least the public ones) largely WERE free until the mid to late 1960s. You'll find that date popping up A LOT in every question about "why doesn't the US just do things that make sense."
It's the racism.
Free college was once the norm all over America
WASHINGTON– When people involved in the fight to cancel student debt demand free college education they are not calling for a new, radical idea. Countless numbers of lawmakers, for example, got their educations at free colleges that they now say are out of reach to the nation’s students.
www.peoplesworld.org
Again- Reagan era conservative principles absolutely destroyed a system that was working pretty well.