3 ms·

OK. What I meant is for much longer time frame, not recent twenty or thirty years.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Labor and capital are both important to modern economies and it would be catastrophic to eliminate either, but in recent times the pendulum has swung unhealthily far in capital's favor. For the last forty years, the story in the USA has not been "a rising tide floats all boats," but rather "rich get richer, poor get poorer." That's a problem. Trickle down economics hasn't been working, isn't working, and will continue to not work. The problems will get worse before they get better, I just hope we can steer things around before blood gets shed. Historically speaking, capital didn't dig the coal out of the mines -- it bought the equipment and collected the proceeds, passing on the wages, but it didn't do the digging. That was Labor. It didn't fill its lungs with coal dust, that was Labor. It didn't even properly fund the retirement plan it promised in exchange for work -- Labor had to pick up the slack. Ditto for career risk. The company discharged responsibility for its piles of tailings in bankruptcy and the government had to pick up the tab. The long dead company certainly won't pay to clean up the CO2 it pumped into the atmosphere, that'll be on our children. Capital is always trying to take credit for everything. That's what they're best at, it's what they do. They always try to minimize the role that everyone else played in making things happen. We shouldn't let them. Capital doesn't even do a very good job of fulfilling their nominal purpose, which is to shoulder risk and responsibility: they offload it at every opportunity, often successfully. We are on the other side of that hustle, so it's important to not let them get away with it, because they are always trying to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. A moment's negligence will let them get away with it yet again.

Labor and capital are both important to modern economies and it would be catastrophic to eliminate either, but in recent times the pendulum has swung unhealthily far in capital's favor. For the last forty years, the story in the USA has not been "a rising tide floats all boats," but rather "rich get richer, poor get poorer." That's a problem. Trickle down economics hasn't been working, isn't working, and will continue to not work. The problems will get worse before they get better, I just hope we can steer things around before blood gets shed. Historically speaking, capital didn't dig the coal out of the mines -- it bought the equipment and collected the proceeds, passing on the wages, but it didn't do the digging. That was Labor. It didn't fill its lungs with coal dust, that was Labor. It didn't even properly fund the retirement plan it promised in exchange for work -- Labor had to pick up the slack. Ditto for career risk. The company discharged responsibility for its piles of tailings in bankruptcy and the government had to pick up the tab. The long dead company certainly won't pay to clean up the CO2 it pumped into the atmosphere, that'll be on our children. Capital is always trying to take credit for everything. That's what they're best at, it's what they do. They always try to minimize the role that everyone else played in making things happen. We shouldn't let them. Capital doesn't even do a very good job of fulfilling their nominal purpose, which is to shoulder risk and responsibility: they offload it at every opportunity, often successfully. We are on the other side of that hustle, so it's important to not let them get away with it, because they are always trying to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. A moment's negligence will let them get away with it yet again.