Greed

[Tinker]

Well my point is not egalitarian. My point is about expecting people to do with less while you do with more. If an executive lays off my whole department and then gets a bonus greater than my departments budget, we cannot justify that as the behavior of a job creator. When that becomes understood, then the social contract breaks down. If my part of the social contract requires me to starve or worse, watch my family starve while the boss man gets more and more money, then the contract has been broken and there is no reason for me to respect private property. If a tiny proprtion of the population owns the property and they cannot figure out how to make it productive for me and mine, then that is a problem for them.

[Demon of Undoing]

Why do they owe you a living at all? What right do you have to a department at all? It's their department. Make your own.

You don't have a job that they lose for you. They let you have a job that is not your own. They are doing you a favor.

Damn, but that sounds harsh.

[YMix]

[monster_gardener]

[Demon of Undoing]

Ymix

Yes, a group of people can always beat up one guy and take his stuff. We call it a mugging. If they owned every molecule I could see it, but they don't. If they prevent you from making your own job, I could see it, but at least in the US, they don't. The 1% simply do not have that kind of control. If they are being that greedy, that unfair, stop taking the advantages they gave and work elsewhere. Or don't work, be a nomad, whatever.

But without an employer, you have to build an income out of scratch- it's all on you for an idea, tools, a market, legal protection, all of it. An employer gives you a ton of shortcuts so that all you have to do is show up and do something, and a paycheck pops out. I find it ridiculous that an employer should be responsible to give an employee even more when the labor bought simply doesn't support it in the marketplace. When I buy angle iron, I don't expect to have to fix the guys washer and dryer, too, just because I got the " privilege" of buying from him. We are talking about a fair wage- what about a fair deal for the guy that only seeks to buy labor, and not a full boat of social welfare to boot?

If you bake in, say , $15/hr of welfare into every hour of $5/hr jobs by law, well, I guess people can make the law however they want. That's fine, feather the nest. But even if everybody including the owner makes the same money, no ugly robber baron stuff, you still have raised even the most mundane, 'tard- capable job to a $20/hr specialist's position. People in Bangladesh will do it for much less. The business owner can be all righteous for everybody and keep the factory home, everyone is now in fraternal socialist comradeship- right until Yang Guanyue builds that factory in Lahore. Then everybody is out of a job. It's a recipe for becoming uncompetitive. There are too many workers- too many robots- to be that picky. Again, the world simply may no longer bear our demand for convenience.

[YMix]

The employer needs workers just as much as the workers need the employer. They aren't doing favors to each other.

[Demon of Undoing]

MG

See, the thing is, nobody made anybody take a job. Don't like it, make your own. The OWS guys are complaining about no jobs when the fact is the jobs they would have had went overseas precisely because of all the other stuff they are demanding. As shitty as regulations and protections and safety nets are and have been here, even with that little of them, the market decided those extra costs were too much. and who is that nasty, unfair market? Everybody at Wal Mart.

But let's not forget that the main reason that the price was too high was because of how much we told the rest of the world our dollar is worth. That job goes overseas not just because we built( shoddy) health insurance into our labor costs, but also the market skew that allowed for 14 battle carrier groups for years. All our advantages are coming to their inevitable unwinding, the fingers on the scales have been burnt. We don't get off that easy.

I call it justice.

[Demon of Undoing]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

Just so you are aware though, people are trying to figure out how to make it so that you as the small business owner gets more business and the big transnational conglomerates get less. That's really the core pre-occupation with OWS.

When people realize that it's unpatriotic to shop at Wal Mart, we will have succeeded.

[Demon of Undoing]

[Tinker]

[Demon of Undoing]

So. If I need some of your kids' food, you're good with that? Good with letting me decide how much I need?

Think this through.

[Tinker]

[Ibrahim]

[Ibrahim]

[monster_gardener]

[Demon of Undoing]

[cincinnatus]

[crashtech]

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth..."

I think that is pretty explicit.

Good thing that we are not expected to be perfect.

[Demon of Undoing]

In fairness, cinci, this is theory here, the kind of mental apeshittery we have yanked about for years. I would not expect this conversation to be indicative of anything but thought experiments. In some ways I know I am playing devil's advocate, and I am sure Tinker is too.

However, I would be lying if I didn't say much the same thought as you have expressed has not come up. Not just because of this conversation, but because of the, shall we say, atmospherics. I am trying to keep an open mind, maybe mostly because I would like to think we can do better than reheating the red scare/red threat thing. Fuck the 20th century, it was almost all bad, politically speaking.

[Tinker]

Cinci, my point is people only adhere to the social contract to the degree that it benefits them. I adhere to capitalism for as long as it efficiently distributes resources. The moment it stops doing so is the moment, I, you, or anyone else stops believing in it and all of the consequences that entails. I might start by hunting deer on your ranch, try to stop me and I start hunting you.

[monster_gardener]

[cincinnatus]