4 ms·

I'm not familiar with the situation, but this "refutation" sounds bleaker than the original claim

• pdonis 3y ago
  The situation is basically that railroad workers asked the Biden administration to weigh in to improve the terms of the latest contract that the railroad company management was offering them, and the Biden administration told them tough luck. Which is indeed a bleak situation. But misdescribing it as "railroad company management wants to pay zero money and take all the profits" does not help; it makes it worse because it makes the workers sound unreasonable since the claim is obviously false. (Btw, I'm not saying the actual railroad workers are making that claim. Only the post I originally responded to was.) The fact that railroad service in the US sucks is also bleak, and is a product of the same government regulation that has put the railroad company workers in the bleak position they are in. If you don't like the obvious implication of my previous post, which is that the government should open up railroads to free market competition and force the railroad company management to either show actual business acumen or give up their profits to someone who can, there is another possible response: since the government has created a railroad monopoly, the government should grant ownership of the railroad companies to all railroad workers, not just the company management. That way all workers would naturally share in the profits, because they all have a share in ownership. That would actually be more in line with what "socialism" claims to be about: everyone gets a share in the ownership of the capital they use to produce value. But the article that was cited doesn't make that argument either (once more, for ideological reasons that are obvious to anyone who is familiar with the history of socialism).