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Notes -
The upper classes benefit a lot from not having to grow their own food, drive their own trucks, fight their own wars, build their own houses, fix their own plumbing, spend hours a day working on computer programs, personally attend to the boring details of government and corporate machinery, and so on.
The upper classes can import people who are willing to do all of those things for much much cheaper than locals are, and even better, the new citizens will actually be thankful for it, unlike the lower class ingrates that populate the west at the moment.
The lower classes benefit from having upper class people able and willing to pay $5 for a sandwich instead of 30 cents. The beneficial relationship goes both ways but it's far harder to replace people willing to overpay for sandwiches compared to replacing people who're willing to be overpaid making sandwiches.
(I'm defining upper classes as everything from low PMC upwards here).
So you agree that the upper class does benefit from the lower classes, it's just that they might benefit more from replacing the existing lower classes with new ones?
The upper classes are able to pay $5 for a sandwich not just because of their own efforts, but also because of the entire society of which they are a part, which includes the lower classes. If the lower classes vanished tomorrow, there would be no sandwiches at all until some of the upper classes moved to the farms and learned how to be farmers. In order to have a functional modern society in this scenario, so many of the upper classes would have to start doing lower class type jobs that the overall ability of the upper classes to innovate would decrease by a lot. It is hard to be a gentleman scientist or a business entrepreneur after spending the day growing food or working in the factory.
Of course, society is a positive sum game, I never disputed that, I said that the lower classes at the moment are capturing more of the economic surplus society generates than they are due if you just look at supply demand etc. If they were being "exploited" they would be capturing less of it.
All true. And even now the upper classes pay for not having to do these jobs, and they pay more than the global market determined fair value for these jobs because of immigration controls which shield the lower classes from competition while upper class jobs have to deal with competition at a global level. In a fair world they would be paying less for these jobs, hence the lower class western people who're getting the jobs at the moment are overpaid and yet they have the gall to complain!
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