When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm usually tempted to stick to the direct question prompt or not say anything at all. But I'm going slightly off topic because I feel like MadMonzer gave a really good response. I'd like to pick your brain on socialism.
I'm libertarian. Your belief set is wild to me. Not the populist beliefs. I disagree with you that those beliefs are uncommon, but maybe that is because they are my polar opposite so I notice them more often, just like you think there are a bunch of libertarians everywhere. Its the socialist beliefs that I find wild.
I just can't ever see economic transactions as very evil, and to me most corporations are just lots of economic transactions scaled up massively. Meanwhile I find acts/threats of violence abhorrent, and see government as just scaling that up massively.
The "exploitation" narrative has never made sense to me. I'm selling labor, the corporations are buying it. Often times many different corporations are buying the labor. That price of labor is cheaper when lots of people are selling it. Just like products are cheaper for me when lots of corporations are selling them.
So that leads me to some questions:
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil. And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.
Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents. In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money. People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience. If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it. Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one. If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over. If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them. Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them. The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut. And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.
And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual. It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom. It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.
Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash. Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component. Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions. And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.
This has been become sort of the creedo of various market reform movements over the years. ESG has been the latest. "profit shouldn't be everything, other concerns should matter".
This sounds great, but the problem is that coordinating on values is ridiculously difficult. One of the easiest things to coordinate on is "we all want more wealth". As soon as you allow any other values to creep into that equation you have a huge fight on your hands. The fight is going to be over, what values can be considered important, and how much money can we sacrifice for those values. The easiest answer to this massive fight is: no, you can't have other values, and thus you can't spend money on those other values. This is the solution the US has decided to settle on. Corporations that are publicly traded have a legal responsibility to make money for their investors to the best of their ability. If they are clearly prioritizing other values, then shareholders can sue them.
There is an out to all of this: non-profits and fully privately owned corporations. Some non-profits can be very business like in how they approach problems. And privately owned corporations can certainly have other objectives. Chik-fil-a is an example. There is no way in a hell a publicly traded fast food company would close any day of the week. Chik-fil-a does it because their owners are Christian and believe that is the right thing to do.
I was also going to give Ben and Jerry's as an example from the other end of the political spectrum. When I went to double check that they are privately owned it took me down a small rabbit hole of tracking down the ultimate owners. They are owned by unilever which is publicly traded on a few different stock exchanges. But they have an independent board of directors that they say preserves their values and brand. Which is another one of the ways out of this "profit is everything" conundrum. Stake your business' reputation on being not about "profit is everything" and you can honestly claim to shareholders that you'd lose money destroying this brand by caring only about money.
Which kind of leads me into the final way out of my concern for "profit is everything" corporations. Reputation matters. Humans are very good at playing tit for tat games. And if we see someone defecting, we'll bail and hit the defect button right back on them, even if it screws us over too. Smart corporations know this. And it is why most of them project an image of something like "nice, friendly, and not trying to rock the boat". Many corporations have policies on their books (and they carry them out) that explicitly lose them money to keep customers happy. But you object "they are just doing that cuz it makes them more money in the longterm", and I say "yes! exactly! that is my point".
When the profit motive is the only motive then corporations will behave as if all goals matter exactly as much as the customers think they should matter and is willing to pay for them to matter.
That is the crux of why people tend to hate the profit motive: That not all the other customers are as concerned as they are that this corporation might be screwing over poor old ladies. In other words not all customers share their values, and as I already discussed its hard for people to agree on values. While some cities boycotted chik-fil-a, other cities made lines around the block. And still other cities had lines around the block and continued to have lines around the block.
I'm tired and probably starting to ramble. I'll sum it up as best I can:
I think the problem is far broader than that. Modern organization structures are designed to prevent accountability. The people who make the decisions never have to see the results and are almost never held responsible. I believe this makes it really hard to make ethical decisions simply because it’s not one person’s decision and in many cases each person is only seeing part of the problem.
The guy in the office sees a new market for his product. The people on the ground are tasked only with figuring out how best to sell it. They don’t care about anything but selling it. The guy in the office only cares about opening the market. The lawyers only care about being sued. There’s nobody who sees the whole picture of “we’re selling baby formula to nursing mothers who will be unable to give milk if they don’t nurse their babies in a poor country where water isn’t always safe.” Nobody was ever going to be held responsible because there was no one person responsible for the whole thing. The guy in the office didn’t know or care how the formula was sold. The spreadsheet looked good, that was what he’s accountable for. They guys hiring the salesman didn’t care how these sales happened, they only were responsible for getting sales. The guys dressing like doctors to sell formula simply wanted a bonus for more sales.
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In theory, yes officers of a corporation are required to maximize shareholder value. In practice, there is very much a P-A problem. This is confounded by the fact that the business judgement rule gives corporations wide latitude to make decisions (eg donate to charity x) because the corporation can claim “reputation benefit that in the long-run is beneficial.”
Now that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there was an easy way to punish officers who clearly prioritize other things (eg political cache) over profits. If there is value to unlock, activist investors can swoop in, fire the relevant officers, and make money once the share price reflects those efforts.
Sadly, Marty Lipton spent decades eroding the ability for hostile takeovers making it much harder for activists to control wayward corporate officers.
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I think 2 is the actual best option for an out, but doesn't play out in practice. I think this is something related to the phenomenon pointed out in Scott's "The first offender model"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
If all the companies behave ethically and then one steps out of line, then people can notice and coordinate and boycott them. If all the companies behave unethically, people get generally annoyed but can't coordinate to single out one of them out to crush. Walmart pays their employees like crap and extorts farmers and suppliers, and people shop their anyway. And Target probably does a bunch of crap too. McDonalds pays their employees like crap and is terrible to their franchisers. Jewelry shops buy diamonds from slaves and warmongers. Nestle murdered babies in Africa, people still buy their stuff.
A large part of the problem is also that it's way too easy for companies to own companies which own companies. I just googled and found out that apparently Nestle owns Kitkat? Except Hershey has distribution rights in the U.S., but Nestle owns it everywhere else. How do I boycott that? And apparently they own Purina. I don't think bags of Purina pet food say "Nestle" anywhere on them, and I doubt most people who buy it know that it's tainted by baby murder. Companies are not actually held to standards, which is largely the fault of customers not caring more, but largely the fault of it being way to easy for a company to just put on a skinsuit and avoid their tainted reputation.
If an individual human regularly put on convincing disguises and committed crimes with some of them but tried to leverage the good reputation of others, people would notice and be outraged. Companies get away with it.
I don't need companies to get involved in charities and politics and sacrifice money to change the world to make it better. Just don't be evil.
A Walmart near me is paying $16-$26 an hour for a cashier position with health, dental, vision, and PTO. Not bad for a job that doesn't require any college.
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Materialist areas of the economy tend to have materialist oriented customers and businesses. I don't know of any non-profit version of a superstore. Non-materialist businesses tend to be non-materialist oriented. It is easy to find non-profit hospitals, schools, and social clubs. I think there are plenty of examples of businesses having values other than profit. Its just that many of those values have become so ingrained with profit because they are required to be profitable that you don't really separate them in your head. For example, good customer service is expected in the US, and people pay for it.
The superstores I am familiar with pay their employees decent wages compared to their alternatives. The small stores that superstores replaced were often family run. If you asked the younger family members what they got paid, they'd laugh in your face (if their parents weren't around). Because many of them were not paid. Many of the "greeters" at stores often completely lack alternative employment options. So paying someone more than zero dollars is not a hard hurdle to pass.
It is hyperbolic to say that nestle murdered babies. In the 70s they marketed infant formula in a region with chronic malnutrition and water problems. Very dumb of them in hindsight. But the evidence for malicious seems thin. Imagine you are a sheltered Swiss executive in the 70s. You don't know much about Africa. Your country has not had a serious famine or food security problem in at least three centuries. You hear that babies are dying from malnutrition in Africa. You think "hey we have baby formula that is healthy, why don't we sell it there". The teams beneath you carry this out, no one brings up the logistical problems.
Its not really even clear how much damage Nestle' did. I tried to look up numbers, the only stuff I found was highly exaggerated. One of them blamed nestle for 1.5 million baby deaths from malnutrition. I tried to look up the total number of kids dying from malnutrition in Africa, and the scattered data I could find suggested that the total number of malnutrition deaths was also around 1.5 million. So that source basically used Copenhagen ethics on Nestle "you touched the problem, so all of it is your fault".
Africa is also not a profitable market. If some executive started selling formula there hoping to make a profit they should be fired for being an idiot that can't do math. This was likely a botched humanitarian effort.
If I'm right about Nestle's Africa thing being botched humanitarianism then ironically they ended up being evil by trying to be a charity and massively fucking up. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened in Africa.
Family owned stores also tend to have limited hours that are less convenient for the customers than chain store hours.
And the fact that the family owner's values got reflected in the store had negative as well as positive implications. If the shoe store owner doesn't want you dating his daughter, you're never buying shoes there again. That's unlikely to happen at Wal-Mart. And if he doesn't like selling brown shoes, or if his store is unsanitary, he's not very beholden to the market, so has little incentive to change.
To be fair, companies often try various things to figure out whether they are profitable. Maybe they thought the market was growing and took a chance on it being better in the future. Anoither possibility is that they decided to start selling products to a small but existing African market, and it was a local manager who decided to try expanding his sales.
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I obviously recognize the horrors that can come from violence, and I believe that we should generally try to avoid it when resonable. But it's hard for me to call all violence bad when all civilizations, bad or good, are fundamentally based on the threat of violence. Even pacifists generally have some threshold for which they find violence acceptable. Personally, I would rather have to occasionally be in violent situations than live in poverty. Given that people enlist in the military as infantry by choice, I cannot be alone in this.
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't.
He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine. I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelyhood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation.
As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
I'll copy one of my other comments to answer this:
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
Let’s assume you are right. Let’s assume management offers very little value but sucks up a bunch of the profit. Couldn’t you and the workers get together and do LBO? Presumably, the excess profit you retain can at minimum pay down debt costs until that has been paid back.
There are numerous companies of varying sizes. Yet we don’t really see this in the US (outside of management but outs of the shareholders). It suggests perhaps there is not as much productive leakage as you imagine.
I don't necessarily think they offer little value, just that their pay is often wildly disproportionate to that value. The point isn't to put all managers out to sea, but to ensure that they aren't leveraging a position of power to profit from the work of others.
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I've heard an explanation for letting the owners capture a much higher share of profit is that we want to incentivize people to create new large companies. If person A has a dream of "I want to be able to support my wife and 2.1 children by working 20 hours a week and write rationalist fanfiction in my free time" and person B has a dream of "I want a company that sells books, no, sells everything over the Internet", we want to feed person B's ambition by dangling the carrot of immense profit, because not only will he create a lot of jobs and change the way we shop if he succeeds, the journey will also create something like cloud computing and S3 object storage as side-effects.
So, Jeff Bezos having $100 billion doesn't mean his current input is worth at least $100 billion and that if we replaced him with a Biff Jesus Amazon would immediately collapse. It just means we want every Biff Jesus to look at Amazon and think, "hey, I also want to start a company and become filthy rich". Yes, 99.9% of them will lose the race and the winner won't necessarily be the most talented entrepreneur, what's important is that there's this race at all.
Again, the same reasoning applies: if there are mineral deposits under your property and you either can't capture the profits from mining them or to pass them to your children, it's better not to let anyone know they are even there. You would have to move to another plot of land, leave your house and garden and pond behind.
I don't think these explanations are completely wrong or completely right. You can certainly challenge the underlying assumptions. Perhaps we have had enough growth and dangling wealth in front of people is no longer necessary. Well, the worldwide GDP is $1e14 right now and the population might grow to about 1e10 people. That's $1e4 per person, a thousand dollars' worth of value per year. Even with perfect redistribution it's just too low. I would want the economy to grow a hundredfold before I would consider winding down capitalism and asking for FALGSC.
Maybe non-monetary incentives can be just as strong. Maybe renaming Washington (either the state or the capital) to Jeff can be enough to get him to hand his shares over to Amazon warehouse workers. But the cool thing about money is that there's always more. There are just fifty states to rename, after all.
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Let’s walk through this from the beginning.
Who bought the tools of production from their creators? The company.
Who hired the workers to be paid for tasks performed? The company.
Who arranged a worksite and brings the means and the workers together to perform productive labor, thereby creating an economy of scale? The company.
Who speculates on improving profitably or creating an economy of scale within which the productive labor happens? The investors.
Who stands to lose the most if the speculation fails and the company sinks? The investors, who will be stuck with useless means of production to sell off, a building to sell or a lease to break, a ton of money spent on marketing which never worked out, and a payroll legally owed to the workers. (The workers, meanwhile, are covered by mandatory unemployment insurance for a period of time during which they can reasonably find additional work.)
Who stands to gain the most if the speculation succeeds and the company thrives? The investors, who will now have to deal with huge taxes and accusations of being exploiters. And to keep their best (most productive) workers and managers, they need to offer bonuses and/or profit-sharing bonuses into their 401(k)’s or IRAs.
This seeems like a long way of saying that because someone is wealthy, he shouldn't have to work like the rest of us. I've heard the higher-risk higher-reward argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
Investors might invest in 100 companies, but bosses don't manage 100 companies.
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Income is independent of moral fiber, effort, worth, and productivity. Income, as from a job, is a function of supply and demand for labor. The other factors don’t have much play other than making you marginally more attractive as an employee. You don’t make more because your company can just pay someone else to do your job at your current wage (disregarding the real cost of hiring/training).
The rest of the story is that an efficient market ought to have the same yield on all investments on average. In other words, starting a business is really damn risky, so the payout has to be huge or no business are created. The exact extent to which you make business ownership non remunerative is the extent to which businesses will not be created. That looks like eg Britain over the last decade or so (stagnation). People will just park their money in real estate or other unproductive assets instead of creating the Internet.
Startup founders are another good example. They can be billionaires on paper and have literally no income for a decade. Stripping ownership (ie, taxing assets instead of income) is some mix of really really bad and impossible in practice.
You can go after generational wealth - maybe it’s the best answer actually.
That sounds to me like exactly what's already happening right now in basically every first-world nation.
I mean "bad" is subjective, but "impossible" sounds like a pretty extreme overstatement. Some assets may be difficult to tax, but most seem pretty straightforward.
Also, out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Geoism?
“Easy to tax” is doing work. A wealth tax requires establishing ownership and appraising value. Neither of those is easy in general for the class of people you’d want to target. Assets exist outside of the US and are illiquid, volatile, and not systematically inventoried. Good luck figuring out who actually owns what when the rest of the world is a mix of actively colluding against you for profit, too incompetent to figure it out in the first place, or legally disbarred from disclosing the information.
To the best of my knowledge, no country has ever successfully implemented a wealth tax. As in some (France) have tried and then shortly given up. Rich people can and will spend 100% of the money you are trying to confiscate on hiding it. If that doesn’t work, they’ll just up and leave. This is an enormous waste of resources for both parties.
As for Georgism proper… I don’t see any path to getting there. If we did, the most likely outcome would be income tax, property taxes, capital gains tax, sales tax, and a land value tax because that’s how all of the others worked and fuck you. I’d probably fight it tooth and nail. Consider the shift in the burden of income tax before claiming fairness and efficiency in victory.
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I'm glad that we can agree incentives are necessary to some degree. I think I'd disagree on the amount of free floating wealth that is actually available today.
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation. The inevitability of it also becomes obvious when viewed from the parents generation. If you survive to your old age and have a bunch of kids you love, and you are rich and well off, wouldn't you want to spend some of that money to make the people you love more comfortable? To have someone else then come in and say "no, thats not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?". Preventing generational wealth transfers seems largely impossible without just completely destroying the concept of private wealth. I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth, if you are then I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownerhsip I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Does your boss have an ownership stake? He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
Think of it this way, there are three things you can do with wealth:
Ultimately most people want to consume wealth. Even preserving it is just is a way to delay consumption. Consuming wealth is also the least risky thing to do. You've done the thing, its over, its gone. It is rare that anyone can steal your past consumption of wealth. Preserving it for later consumption carries some risk. Someone might steal your stuff, or the thing you were holding lost its value for some reason. Maybe too many people were using it to store wealth, and not enough were actually valuing the thing being stored (these are called asset bubbles).
The most risky thing they can do is invest it. There is always a chance that a business will fail, or just that it will fail to return a bunch of profits. You might as well have consumed the wealth rather than investing it.
This is why there is a price to capital, and why you pay the investors. The more investors there are, the less you have to pay them. The more likely the investors are to lose their money, the more you have to pay them.
I'm assuming your boss has some form of ownership stake. He is getting paid for that ownership stake, and the risks associated.
No, there is actually nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives. You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create. This goes back to what I discussed earlier, the various owners of the company chose to invest rather than consuming the wealth. Had they known their investment would just get stolen, obviously they would have just consumed it instead. This is both an implicit and explicit (legally codified) relationship that business owners have in most countries. The government says "we will not just steal all of your investment" and the currently wealthy people either believe them and invest, or they don't believe them and just consume or preserve their wealth. You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
There are lots of rich people. They don't all get along, or even like each other. If you are short on capital there are such things as loans and investment. If your current company is also underpaying workers then you could eat their lunch by offering wage increases to their employees and stealing their talent. Very few businesses are permanently entrenched in the US, and many that are have done so through government edicts and support. There is a huge amount of turnover in the S&P 500 decade to decade.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through. That is why they are earning outsized profits. Its a survivor bias. You meet the rich gamblers in Vegas because they can afford to stay around, all the poor sops who lost it all are dead or gone. By definition you work at the business that made it. Not at the business that failed. I obviously have no clue how much risk is involved, you haven't told me anything about the industry. What I do know is that there are rarely million dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. The business you work in is likely within normal parameters for returns on risk, capital investment returns, and share of money paid to labor.
My career has generally been one where I work less and get paid roughly the same amount. I'm in web programming. I know its not the same for everyone. But I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
There is also another thing to consider. I've talked so far about investors/owners in a business. You've talked about the workers. But we haven't talked much about the consumers. They exist and they have their own set of options. The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing. They are each all their own massive topic, so I won't be getting into them.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved. Communist countries have routinely run into these problems. What do you tell the iron nail factory to produce, and how do you know they are doing a good job? There was one point where they were judged based on how many nails they produced, so there were many tiny nails produced and not enough large ones. Then the metric was changed to weight of nails produced, and they just produced very large heavy nails. And nails as a product have been around for millenia they are one of the simplest products.
And do you not think management does anything? Have you never had a lazy co-worker who doesn't get much done? If you haven't then you've had amazing management and you should be singing their praises. More likely, you've had a lazy co-worker, and you were annoyed with management for not firing this person. But firing people is very unpleasant. Are you willing to punish a lazy worker that isn't doing their part? And if 'management' has the power to fire people, how do you know they won't just fire the people they dislike, rather than the unproductive ones?
Usually the answer to all of these questions is that you have to tie management's incentives to team productivity. So that if there is a lazy or unproductive worker the manager suffers from having that worker on the team. If all the people on the team are great then it should look like management is not doing anything. Management is sort of like the IT industry of economic systems. Everyone notices when they are doing badly, and everyone complains they are doing nothing when things run smoothly.
I am not highly against a welfare state. I just don't think we are really at the point to provide it. At best we can provide it to a small minority of people. Possibly most people that live in a first world nation. I would rather see us continue on the wealth creation process until welfare is affordable to everyone in the world, not just those born in the correct country. Welfare states tend to want to close their borders to foreigners, and one of the best welfare programs that exists is capitalism. It is unrivaled at raising the living standard for large groups of people. You yourself admitted it was great to have capitalism in the 18th century, but I'd like to point out that most of the world doesn't have much better living standards than what was available in 18th century Britain.
The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying. But there are lots of other people still waiting to be pulled out. I think it would be wrong to shut it off now. Once the poorest in the world can complain that they have to work 40 hours a week just to afford their home, food, and entertainment I might be willing to discuss shutting off the engine.
I would add that many people look at productivity statically. Maybe the bosses boss worked his ass off for thirty years and now makes strategic decisions but need not work the same grueling hours (ie he put his dues in and is being paid on the back half).
Dangling that carrot is a great incentive to get people to work their ads when young as well.
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The parents may consider it good, but I don't think even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalists would argue that it's fair, any more than it's fair that some people are born kings and some are born peasants.
I mean yeah that's kinda the idea. If I believe that it's bad for people to accumulate large quantities of wealth, then it follows that I would want to disincentivize that.
I mean I wouldn't be much of a Socialist if I didn't believe in getting rid of private property to some extent, but personally, I'm less concerned about the stuff you keep around the house and more the sort of thing that 99% of people would never be able to buy, like factories, refineries, large swaths of land and such.
Let's use a refinery as an example. Ideally, the refinery would be owned by the collective of everyone who works there. The decisions would be made by an individual elected by majority vote every few years.
This just sounds like another way of saying that because he has money, he doesn't have to work like the rest of us. This is what I have a problem with.
I don't disagree with this. Hell, half of what I post online is just variations of this exact statement. I'm very supportive of co-ops and the like. Just because I don't like Capitalism doesn't mean I'm unwilling to work within it. I'm no doomer.
I agree. That's why I'm not a huge fan of wealthy people taking things created by workers.
That seems uncharitable. I want to avoid making this sort of agreement in the first place.
I've heard the risk argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
If there's a job that doesn't have its productivity improved by automation, I haven't discovered it yet. Even the softest of social sciences benefit from automating routine paperwork.
I would add food to your list as well.
In other words, the things we don't need are getting cheaper and the things we do need are getting more expensive. The logical extreme of this sounds like a world where we're all constantly distracting ourselves from the fact that we're unhealthy, sick, and constantly at risk of homelessness, which feels very familiar.
When I say "difficult to put objective value on", I'm not talking about everything that could possibly be subjectively valued. I'm talking about things that are virtually impossible to value as they have no minimum value, like art.
Do I think they do nothing? No. Do I think they do enough to justify making triple what the people working for them make? Also no.
Also, while I've known a few lazy workers, most of them at least did enough work to look productive. I've known drastically more lazy managers who literally sat on their phones all day scrolling twitter.
As a final note, you seem to think I take issue with the existence of transactions, but I have no problem with these. If Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero, and Peter pays Paul to perform services. I don't care about that transaction. I take issue with the fact that Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero in the first place.
Imagine I work at ExxonMobil. Someone runs for election with the platform "retire now!". They gain control, sell the $206B in net assets, and give each of the 62300 employees a $3.3 million lump of cash.
Why wouldn't that happen to every company with low labor requirements? Would you just add a few million useless jobs to bring the shares down below retirement levels (actually, below time-to-find-a-new-job levels)? Require a buy-in from all new employees?
"Owned by everyone who works there" is probably not the best way I could have phrased it. What I'm picturing looks something like this, quoted from another comment:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and 30 buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for a cut of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing.
Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
...
Does everyone share in the losses as well? How good is the town's judgment?
If it's bad, do the residents become destitute after they spend their efforts on a doomed venture? If not, who is bailing them out?
If it's great, can they leverage it beyond their own borders? Would they even care to put in the effort if the benefits go to other people?
Also, that seems incredibly unstable or else totalitarian.
Imagine that someone wants to start a new business, and applies to the town. The town declines, so they decide to go it alone (Maybe it's capital-light like a sole-proprietorship hairdresser run from home. Maybe they can get money from elsewhere.) Does the town take the profits as if they had invested? If they don't, they'll be pushed into irrelevance unless they are the best judges of value in the entire market. If they do, they're hardly better than common thieves.
Indirectly, sure. A portion of their tax money is going to fund a venture in the hopes that the venture will make money for the town. If that venture fails to do so, they're not getting that money back. That sucks, but in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero, and I'd rather be taking a calculated risk than a guaranteed loss.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
No? Why would they? If I don't invest in Apple, I don't get profits from Apple. That makes no sense.
Then they won't be relevant for some businesses, which is fine. The point of this whole thing is to prevent too much power from being in the hands of a couple of rich investors, not to stop people who don't need investors in the first place. I'm not talking about flower shops and barbers, I'm talking about the kinds of industries you couldn't possibly start without an investor, hence the power plant example.
The solution seems incredibly simple: Don't tax away that money.
I was assuming they could still use normal financial strategies like loans, and would therefore be exposed to risk in excess of their investment. Regardless, the same effect could happen if they ended up with a net liability instead of an asset (like an environmentally-damaged site that required cleanup).
If they're financing everything with cash-on-hand, then how could they ever get anything done? Here's a small, true (slightly altered for privacy) story: A factory in my hometown shut down, and some local people banded together and bought it. If it had been purchased with cash split evenly by all the town's residents, it would be $10k each.
that was a textbook-perfect opportunity for your proposed system, but I don't see how it could happen. Is the town sitting on a $10 million war chest in case something interesting comes up? Do they levy a special tax and hope that everyone has savings? We know that they aren't going to outside lenders because that would expose the town to excess risk.
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Fairness is admittedly not a major concern of mine. You can't eat fairness. It would be more fair if we were all born into subsistence farming and lived a hard miserable life until the ripe age of 25. Lots of things could be more fair and awful. I think an approach of "eating the rich" (if it succeeds, rather than just transforming them into a "poor" politically powerful class) is more likely to just get rid of the rich and not improve anyone else's welfare. The math is really hard to get around. There are too many poor people still.
I think you would just discourage the acquisition of fungible or stealable forms of wealth. As has happened in many communist countries, powerful men just switch into the activity of controlling other directly.
You seem fine destroying all private incentives to create factories. Is this intentional? All the rich people invest right now because it is a safe thing to do with their money. The US system has set it up that way. If it was not a safe thing to do, then their behavior would change.
I'm sure you'd like to add food to successfully tell your story, but you'd be wrong to do so. Food has gotten cheaper as well. What hasn't gotten cheaper is labor. So any food you consume out at a restaurant, or any food that is labor intensive is likely to be more expensive. Which feels like something you would want, yes?
Its a hotly argued debate, but one of the believed causes of the cost increase for healthcare and education is also the increased cost of labor inputs for those activities. Its why medical tourism exists where you can go to a different country and get high quality doctors with high quality equipment for a fraction of the cost in the west. The place where you are saving a bunch of money is on labor, those doctors are not paid nearly as much as their western counterparts. And it is rarely just the doctors. Its the nurses. Its the cleaning staff. It is every person involved in the enterprise.
The cost of materials to build a house from the 1900's has decreased significantly. But no one wants those houses, they want modern homes that have a whole host of features.
I'm aware of what you meant. I'm telling you that the plan you have in your head is likely a very bad one. Because it has been done before and failed miserably a bunch of times. And I was trying to explain why/how it fails.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty succinct summary explaining why they get paid more, and why they sometimes look unproductive. Though perhaps it was too succinct. If a manager is not paid more then it becomes easy for the employee to simply bribe their managers. The other stuff I think I addressed quite well.
I think how peter has the million dollars is incredibly important. Imagine there is a singer that people like to hear. They find a big empty field that no one owns. And the singer sings for everyone there. There is enough people and enough wealth that the singer is able to do this for a year and eventually earn 1 million dollars. Do you think it is bad that the singer has 1 million dollars?
In some ways, we may be at a bit of an impasse here as this comes down to terminal values, which by definition can't really be argued. Like many people, I believe that fairness is an implicit good. I can't argue for this any more than I can argue that happiness is good and suffering is bad. It's one of those things you either believe or you don't. It's not my only terminal value, or even my top value, but it's still on the list. This isn't to say that it's impossible to have a nation that's fair and shitty, just that, all else being (no pun intended) equal, it's better to be fair than unfair.
Yes. This is practically the definition of Socialism. We do not want private entities to have the amount of money that would be required to do fund like this. "No one man should have all that power" and all that.
Maybe in the last 70 years, but in the last 15 years, it has pretty definitively gotten more expensive. Anecdotally, my grocery bill has nearly doubled (adjusting for inflation) in the last decade, and everything I've found in a quick google search has supported this conclusion.
Oddly enough, I completely agree with your points about healthcare and education. Doctors get paid way too much, which stems from them having an artificially low supply, which stems from them being required to attend 8 years of medical school regardless of specialty, which I think is one of the dumbest laws we have, up there with banning townhomes.
The cost of materials is not the primary cost of a home, it's the land, which has definitely increased.
Bribe them to do what? Not manage? If the manager has stake in the company and the worker has stake in the company, then both of their paychecks are determined by how well the company does and neither of them has incentive to make this trade. Now, I suppose they could choose to do so anyway, but an economics discussion seems a bit pointless if we don't assume rational actors.
I'm not sure, and to be honest, that's so far from the base case that I don't really care. Most of the time, the one doing the work and the one profiting the most from it are not the same person. In the vast majority of cases, people don't become successful singers by being good at singing. Sure that's necessary, but lots of people are good at singing. They become successful by getting a record deal, which is to say, convincing a rich person that they can get richer by funding their career. Even the ones who don't do this are either very independently wealthy or have a more informal contract with someone who is.
Generalize this to all industries, and it becomes apparent that almost all of the power is in the hands of a very small proportion of people. I believe this kind of power imbalance is inherently a very bad thing.
Re fairness, how don’t you end up with the conclusion in Harrison Bergeron? That is, if fairness is the primary concern then we need to uglify beautiful people, slow down athletic people, dumb down smart people, de-charm charming people, etc.
If we think this is wrong (because it leads to an ugly world) do you really value fairness? Or do you value fairness as but one of many competing values?
I mean yes, but I would say this is true for most values of anyone, as almost any single value, when taken to the logical extreme, would be horrifying unless you're a paperclipper.
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Could you share your calculations?
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Keep in mind, government doesn't necessarily mean the feds, just any institution directly answerable to the people of an area. Also, privately-owned and government-owned business would look similar in the day-to-day running of things; the main differences would be in who profits.
Simplified example:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and some buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing. Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
What if the town council disagrees with my idea? Am I not allowed to start the business?
Who does the hiring at the plant? Me, the "founder" or the town council?
Assuming your proposal wasn't blatantly absurd or frivolous, then regardless of their personal feelings, as civil servants, they would still be obligated to put your proposal to the vote of the town.
If you go to an investor to fund your plant, and you're turned down, is he "not allowing" you to build it? Indirectly, maybe, but that would be a really odd way of phrasing it. Same way with going to the town to fund your plant.
As far as whether or not you're literally "allowed" to build the plant in the town, yes that would probably also be up to the local government, but that's also true under Capitalism, at least in all the nations I'm aware of, and not what I'm talking about. Hell, I live in the US and my municipality votes on that kind of thing all the time.
On the day-to-day, I imagine the plant's hiring manager would make that decision. If you're asking who hires them they would likely be appointed by the COO, who would be voted in by the plant's workers every few years. If you're asking who the initial workers would be, that would consist of you and the group of people who decided to start a plant in the first place, along with anyone else from the town you convinced to join. I imagine the more of you there are, the more likely the town would vote to fund you.
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