12 ms·
I liked this comment from the article: Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue
by zwieback 5y ago
I liked this comment from the article:
Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.
- Supermancho 5y agoThis is the kind of backward thinking that the wealthy hypocritically espouse. There is no shortage if you have too much money. The wealthy dont need a covid test from a (poor to middle class as Dave Chapelle mentions in Closer) mediocre everything store when they have a personal physician.
- joshsyn 5y agoWithout the wealthy (who run the company), we wouldn't have great products, and jobs, and pursuing our careers and self interests.
- cycomanic 5y agoWhy?
- breadbreadbread 5y agoThe wealthy dont create products. Working class people do. It is a brain worm that has convinced you that the managerial class deserve to be rich but the working class dont
- joshsyn 5y agoThis kind of division you put is exactly what I am talking about. Most of the employees of successful companies don't share your views or think of themselves as us vs them and fall into your classification of the working class. They are pretty happy there working with a great CEO hence making great products/providing services.
- devin 5y agoCite your sources.
- redweer 5y agoYou mention "most", but that is not an easy qualifier to back up. More likely, it is "some".
- joshsyn 5y agoWealth is relative concept. So its bizarro in the first place to create this kind of division. Anybody can take his money and put out a business, so he becomes capitalists or them to speak in your terms. Likewise someone in a poor third world country sees them as working class and people complaining here as rich but a whiner.
- breadbreadbread 5y agoThis isn't a division invented by me. It is a division that is put in place by those with money and power. You are talking about a fictional company with a "Great CEO" and employees are "pretty happy" with their position and pay. Even with your platonic ideal of what a "Great CEO" is, you'd have a hard time justifying the pay gap between bottom rung workers and C-suite
- joshsyn 5y agoYour division mentality is just irresponsibility. Why is the pay gap between C-suite and workers? Because it is not easy to hire C-suite executives who makes careful decisions to steer the company in the right direction. Companies are subject to profit and losses. Its not static. Do you know how many round of interviews there are to hire C-suite? >16 interviews over a period of 3-6 months. Workers are in abundance competing for the same role. If I were hiring between 100 workers, everyone put our their bid of the salary, I would be looking for best offer and best quality. That is in-fact a reality of the free market. There is nothing stopping you from creating your own company and paying out your workers what you think is fair. I even encourage you to do just that. But to complain that all rich band together and create this working class and pay them low-wages is simply irresponsible of yourself. If your education has misled you I am sorry.
- option 5y agoUSSR tried putting workers and peasants before the entrepreneurs and elites. Didn’t turn out well
- joshsyn 5y agoIt seems like the so-called progressives want to take a stab at solving socialism again by making everyone miserable.
- option 5y agoYes, it blows my mind that in the last century not one, but 2 countries have been divided in half producing as perfect AB-test of capitalism vs socialism as one could imagine and people still think socialist economy is a great idea. Not to mention dozens of other socialist countries which produced nothing but misery for their people.
- joshsyn 5y agoExactly, mob ruling never works. No matter how extreme length you go to prove it. So many examples, but somehow either they don't learn the history or this time it will be different. They are most the ignorant and the irresponsible. Most normal people just want freedom to work, freedom to trade and pursue their own interests and helping those in their circles, not being enslaved to everyone else.
- imtringued 5y ago>Most normal people just want freedom to work, freedom to trade and pursue their own interests and helping those in their circles, not being enslaved to everyone else. Then they should welcome negative interest rates because that is exactly what they do.
- joshsyn 5y agoThats totally a different discussion and don't see how that is related. Monetary supply/control is a centrally planned policy.
- 988747 5y agoWorking class people alone wouldn't create shit. They have to be provided tools, trained to do the job, and then overseen, so that they do not fuck it up. That's why many industries prefer to replace them with robots. You vastly overestimate the role of working class people in creating consumer goods.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joshsyn 5y agoI agree. The downvotes rain are coming, but this categorisation of working class vs wealthy, (Infact I am a working class according to them) from so called progressives (really nihilists) is cause normal everyday people problems for their agenda. We don't need your help. We can stand our grounds.
- coopierez 5y agoJust because you can't understand what a group aspires to doesn't make them nihilists. Is this coming from the Jordan Peterson book of philosophy?
- joshsyn 5y agoThe result speaks for itself. There isn't much understanding to do at this moment. If this group wants to throw themselves off the cliff, I am not willing to go with them.
- coopierez 5y agoFrom the perspective of a _more_ socialist (but still ultimately capitalist) European country, it seems that the group throwing themselves off a cliff are the more purist capitalist types in America. There are other solutions than full-on Soviet-style planned economies. Ultimately, we live in a society - a rising tide lifts all boats.
- waynesonfire 5y agoi disagree, wealthy people create products. they own the means of production. workers don't produce shit as they don't own the machines.
- baremetal 5y agothis is not true for homebuilding. which is a huge sector of the us economy.
- rurounijones 5y agoYou are making the assumption that the people who run the company _must_ be wealthy which is not something that has to be so. Take Japan Airlines CEO. Certainly well paid but does not earn the crazy amounts that western CEOs of large companies tend to earn. You can have everything you stated as a benefit without the requirement of a person who runs the company having to be wealthy.
- VictorPath 5y ago> Without the wealthy (who run the company), we wouldn't have great products, and jobs I watch birds fly around, and they seem to need no wealthy heir birds, inheriting the right to expropriate the value of surplus worker time of the birds searching for seeds to eat. "We", the poor humans, apparently need the wealthy to have jobs. The inhabitants of Sentilinese Island and the hunter gatherers still roaming around the Amazon seem to make do without these wealthy people bestowing the gift of jobs upon them. I suppose Russians had the beneficence of the czar and his family to thank for their living as well - that is until the Bolsheviks blasted and then bayoneted them all. Somehow, jobs seemed to continue in Russia after they were gone.
- adwn 5y agoCommunist Russia is a terrible example if you want to argue against capitalism/private companies/"bosses". Everyone there was equally poor (except for a tiny elite, which was slightly less poor), and the system worked so badly that it imploded.
- imtringued 5y agoThey are obligated to spend their money (investments count as spending) or work less. Waiting for billionaires to retire and then recognize that they don't need the money by doing philanthropy is like getting spit in the face for laziness by the person who told you don't have to work.
- freewilly1040 5y agoRemember when Covid tests were scarce, and the rich and powerful were getting special access to them? The argument here is that without abundance Covid tests don’t make it to the mediocre everything store.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lettergram 5y agoWe call that capitalism... this is my biggest concern from the “universal basic income” argument. Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working. The system starts to falter and honestly it looks like it could collapse.
- habitue 5y agoI'm a big fan of tying the basic income directly to tax revenue collected (ideally monthly instead of yearly). That way, people can adaptively choose how much work they want to do, and it feeds back from what the actual economic production is. Basic income is really complementary to capitalism. It provides a cushion to people on the very bottom, allowing them to stay in the game, and for other people it helps push them out of a subsistence loop and into "maybe I should start a small business" or "Hmm, I've saved enough that I could pay my bills with basic income so I could retrain on this new technology" etc.
- joshsyn 5y agoTotally agree with you. The nihilists want to burn everything to the ground so they can prove themselves wrong.
- danShumway 5y ago> Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working There are a huge number of inputs going into supply chain breakdowns, and I find all of these takes to be wildly oversimplistic. Taking a look at even just one aspect, the chip shortage: what you're seeing is a combination of underestimated demand (manufacturers assumed demand would decrease during Covid), bottlenecks in production, factory shutdowns, inflexible scheduling and sourcing, transportation difficulty, increasing demand from both companies/individuals who have shifted to remote and from cryptocurrency attention, etc... And all of these shortages affect each other too, increasing and redirecting other goods and services, which can form complicated feedback loops. Chip shortages make transportation harder, which makes it harder to manufacture chips. Employment is certainly a factor, but it's also certainly not the only factor. We are seeing stress fractures in a global system right now. There is no one cause (other than I guess the existence of Covid in general), and there is no single, one policy that anyone, Progressive or Conservative, can pass to fix the problem. Anyone (Progressive or Conservative) who is trying to sell you the current shortage as simple proof of their ideology is not doing a good job of looking at the issue from a holistic perspective.
- joshsyn 5y agoThere is a real problem in today's society which is the today's so called progressives worldview and divisive mentality.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoDon't you find that there's a fair bit of irony in the statement you just made?
- joshsyn 5y agoNope. What is the irony?
- jjulius 5y agoYou're lamenting divisiveness while blaming one group as the sole source of the problem. That itself is divisive.
- joshsyn 5y agoYeah I corrected myself to "so called progressives". They are really nihilists instead.
- iammisc 5y agoSo the claim is that no one group can be singled out as a cause of division? That means one would be unable to ever say that some person or group of people is divisive, which means there's no such thing as divisive speech (since labeling anything as such is apparently itself so divisive that one becomes a hypocrit).
- burkaman 5y agoAnybody have an example of progressives advocating redistribution of something that we don't have an abundance of? I can't think of one. You might say housing, but I don't think I've heard anyone call for the "redistribution of housing", because that doesn't really make sense. Progressives generally call for universal housing, and redistribution of wealth to achieve that goal.
- breadbreadbread 5y agoWe do have an abundance of housing. There are millions of empty homes/housing units. Housing redistribution would involve cracking down on the landlord class to release those homes from exploitative pricing and rental strategies.
- pirate787 5y agoWhat are you proposing by "cracking down"? I disagree with your sentiment but do think that it is absurd the federal government subsidizes mortgages on second homes. But I haven't heard a single proposal from the left to eliminate that welfare program for the wealthy.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoProbably because once you get away from the coasts, you realize that a lot of people with second homes are not what you'd typically think of as wealthy. Around here a second home is often a cabin "Up North" or a trailer home on a few acres where you go hunting a few times a year or spend weekends. Something your average electrician or plumber can afford. Good luck to any politician that goes up against that!
- breadbreadbread 5y agoJust to be clear, Landlords and Home Owners aren't the same. I do live in a coastal city, but I think even rural/suburban areas would agree that the real estate market has made home ownership less and less achievable. I suppose that the issue I'm concerned with is more generally about the American real estate market at large, landlords/the rent cycle are just a part of that.
- vernie 5y agoMany online lefties are of the "fully automated luxury communism" flavor that presumes everything is plentiful and made by nobody.
- mberning 5y agoExactly. Everybody will have some kind of lifestyle job where they dick around a few hours a week on their muse and magically everything they ever want or need is provided for them by "the system". They don't consider that the more likely outcome is them living in squalor while also going to a shitty job which they hate. No, no, no. That won't happen. Not to them.
- joshsyn 5y agoI wouldn't call them progressives. They are nihilists. They hate seeing the triumph of success.
- Barrin92 5y agoI feel like I'm living in bizarro land. The lesson from a society that lives on the edge of over-consumption is ... more abundance? We need a name for this ideology, the Mad Max mentality? It legitimately reminds me of those monster trucks driving through the climate change wasted landscape with people spitting what little gasoline they have left into the engine. shiny and chrome!
- zwieback 5y agoI don't think he's advocating over-consumption. The point is that if your policy goal is to re-distribute wealth you have to consider that your policies also have to make sure that the global supply chain is working smoothly. Otherwise the currently already disadvantaged groups are hit hardest. I can easily pay extra or wait out the shortages but if you're just scraping by it's much harder to survive if the shelves are empty.
- akkartik 5y agoYou're making a great point that I didn't find in OP. It muddies the waters to conflate holiday shopping with paper towel shortages.
- Tade0 5y agoThis is what always kills my suspension of disbelief - the idea that somehow gasoline would be available in a post-apocalyptic world. One zombie pulp fiction author - by the name of Jonathan Maberry - got it right though. In his work they drive quads fueled by ethanol.
- whatshisface 5y agoIf it helps, there's still a functioning oil refinery run in the Mad Max universe. It's basically declared by fiat that exactly those parts of civilization remain that are necessary to run war vechicles and make bullets. I think it was about answering the question, "what would happen if we only had the parts of modernity we didn't like."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- micromacrofoot 5y agoThat misrepresents the argument. Progressives want to better distribute wealth so everyone can have reliable food, healthcare, and housing. The primary shortage in those areas in terms of necessity are where existing capital is located. More taxes on ultra high earners, closer to what they were at the start of the 20th century, would help achieve a lot regardless of good/labor shortages. Additionally... I would happily sacrifice paper towels and vinyl for seats if it created more equity... but that's not what needs to happen at all. The article creates a false dichotomy.
- dgb23 5y agoThat "lesson" old and is in essence one of the key points of socialist thought, especially but not exclusively in Marxism. An additional, more radical view point would be that the term "redistribution" is misleading as wealth is generated by the worker and then extracted by private owners. And what do they do with it? They cripple their ability to make things in exchange for short term gains: > For decades, many U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas, taking advantage of cheaper labor and cheaper materials across the oceans. In normal times, America benefits from global trade, and the price of offshoring is borne by the unlucky few in deindustrialized regions.
- imtringued 5y ago>An additional, more radical view point would be that the term "redistribution" is misleading as wealth is generated by the worker and then extracted by private owners. That primarily applies to monopolies like land or ISPs. Most markets work well because there is a reasonable amount of competition and the supply of goods can grow according to demand.
- arrosenberg 5y agoDo progressive really need this lesson? They aren't the ones who JITed the entire economy, it's the neoliberals and conservatives who did that. If anything, progressive ideas about onshoring supply chains and distributing resources more evenly would make the country actually robust against disasters, unlike today.