The wealthiest own like 87% of the stock market, which both parties refer to as "the economy"...
So while I get how the thought of a general strike where we stop working is attractive.
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities. Leave them holding the bag on capitalism.
I've always thought the push for "average" Americans to get into stocks was just another way for wealth to trickle up. You're not savvy for buying what Nancy Pelosi bought a month ago, you're just pumping her numbers so she makes more when she sells.
The only way to win is not to play, but enough people need to refuse to play for it to work
The wealthiest own like 87% of the stock market, which both parties refer to as “the economy”…
First, the stock market only represents publicly traded companies. Privately held companies aren't on stock exchanges. If you own stock in privately held companies there are usually very strict rules about how and when, and to whom you can sell. Its not a quick thing.
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities. Leave them holding the bag on capitalism.
The non-rich selling all their stock would likely help the rich. Here's why: The rich use brokerages that monitor the stock market in realtime and can trade faster. As soon as a sell off would begin, the brokerages would get in and sell most of what they had first, meaning the non-rich would get a fraction of the value of the stocks they are selling. As soon as the selling of the non-rich ended, the rich would come back into the market and buy up the same assets they had before (and more) for a fraction of the price.
It was a travesty that pensions were largely replaced with 401ks in the 80's in the US (curious if a similar thing happened elsewhere in the world), effectively forcing participation in the stock market to have any chance at retirement.
They found another way to shore up the continuation and capitulation to capitalism while boosting their share prices at the sane time.
What an absolute con.
Well, to be fair pensions werent like cash reserves, they were investment funds.
Which is a different issue all together.
But that's how Bernie Madoff got so much, in addition to wealthy individuals he scammed the pension funds of major cities.
Shit didn't get fucked up overnight, it was a slow progression. Which is why we can't just roll back 50 years and pretend it's solved, shit will just fuck up again.
Edit:
And even when it was a cash reserve, it was basically tied to the stock of that company.
If they went bankrupt, no pension.
So say you got a Walmart pension, it was dependant on Walmart existing till you died. If a major player was dethroned, it meant a bunch of people losing pensions. So there was still a lot of institutional momentum even back then
Thankfully, my employer still has pensions. For how much longer? Hopefully a long time.
The only way to win is not to play
Not "playing" the stock market is a loss by default. Your money WILL devalue over time, your savings account WILL NOT keep up with inflation, and if you don't invest in stocks or have some other special financial backing/windfall, you WILL retire many years later (if at all) than you would have if you invested in stocks properly.
Though, you need to be very careful with your definition of "playing". As an individual/retail investor, buying individual stocks and trying to time ups and downs is not the way to go. If you manage to not lose any money that way, you're very very likely to make less money than if you had bought a broad market ETF like the S&P 500. In general, "playing" is bad and simply buying and holding boring funds for 30+ years can 10x your money by the time you retire, if you start young. Market up? Good, buy more! Market down 50%? It's on sale, buy more! Auto-investing is your friend. This is backed by solid math and like the entire history of the stock market.
The thing is, the rich make the rules. They want you to invest in ETFs like that because they can use your money to play their little games, inflate their wealth, and stay on top. As long as you do that, they'll make sure you make solid and consistent (over the long-term) returns, because it benefits them financially and anything else would lead to a societal collapse.
Trying to beat them at their own game by buying/selling individual stocks is a losing battle. They can see your incoming trades and act on them before your order goes through. If you find a big mistake they made, like GME, they'll simply change the rules and steal your money. It doesn't matter if it's illegal, nobody can stop them. They literally make the market.
Your money WILL devalue over time
Yes, that's why as much as politicians say they hate inflation, it's necessary for capitalism.
Otherwise people just shove their money under a mattress and the "inverted funnel system" collapses.
But inflation isn't inevitable just because capitalism needs it to maintain the machine.
Quick edit:
What you're doing is like back before we had laws as a society, saying we can't outlaw crime and murder, because the people who don't agree will kill us and steal all our stuff...
We're talking about a drastic change to society, it ain't just a tweak. You can't use bits of the old system that are gonna be gone for a rationale to preserve the old system.
If we get rid of capitalism, we get rid of forced inflation that only exists to prop up capitalism....
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities
Isn't not being rich means you don't have stocks and already can't buy the necessities? Or is it just me?
But if we really want to hurt the rich, it means selling all your stocks and only buying the bare necessities.
I think this is going in the wrong direction, because A) nobody cares about how much you've got in your 401k when 87% of the market is controlled by six guys and B) its the bare necessities that are skyrocketing in price, not the luxuries.
I’ve always thought the push for “average” Americans to get into stocks was just another way for wealth to trickle up.
It was a way of back-dooring a tax carve out for the mega-rich. Mitt Romney's Roth IRA was worth $100M when he ran for office in 2012. Consider how somebody turns $4000/year in deposits into $100M in assets over 30 years and you can see the corrupt nature of our financial system clear as day.
The only way to win is not to play
The appeal of a general strike, I think, is misplaced. It fixates on the goods and services that make life in the US comfortable while neglecting the speculative assets that make wealth in the US grow exponentially.
Better than a general strike would be a debt strike. If you could convince 10M people to refuse to make a credit card payment in a given month, that would rock the fuck out of the capitalist class. If you could convince a union of service sector workers stretching from Walmart to McDonalds to simply refuse to collect payment for sold merchandise for a day, that would terrify the banking sector.
Because so much of this system is ultimately built on credit, not real material assets. So much is built on the theory of compounded interest, not materialist value. Wealth is, at its core, a promise of future income on rent. Attack the mechanisms by which people collect their rents and you can liberate the general population from an unnecessary expense rather than threatening them with a sudden onset of material insecurity.
Under capitalism the people are a natural resource to be exploited for wealth, just like minerals, wood, and arable land.
The clue is in the term "Human Resources". I can't believe people just accept the existence of this phrase.
Yeah. And "human capital" is another one that just makes my skin crawl.
FWIW, there are a bunch of folks trying to shift the practice over to "People Ops", while refering to employees as actual people, which is way better. As a bonus, this gives the formerly called HR people a more meaningful scope for their work.
That said, the name or the idea does't keep some from whitewashing or running with PeopleOps as a kind of virtue signal. Consider this article that minces all of this together while making it sound normal: https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/articles/rise-of-people-ops/
Agreed, but please remember that this is the same under fascism and communism.
The final conclusion of capitalism is one solitary person holding all money. Like some crazy real life form of monopoly.
That's because the game was specifically meant to show people what capitalism does.
Show what they know. I've been highly inefficient at it.
If you are ever stuggling in life, you can always
shopliftsurprise civil asset forfeiture items from a corporate chain store. 😉But you run the risk of ~~ incarceration~~ surprise litteral slavery
Serfdom reinvented
Slavery by any other name
So dramatic! If you didn't want to be enslaved why did you walk right into the enslavement machine, designed specifically to ensnare you an make you a slave?
I hope this is a joke but I actually didn't. I dropped out bc I refused to take a loan out
This ought to keep you busy enough until you die, right?
Hope I’m not thinking too abstractly here:
If you’re an individual with only their bare hands in a society that doesn’t need manual labor, not even necessarily a capitalist society, then that society would have to give you something (education) in order for you to give back to society. Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
“The rich get richer” through things like stock buybacks are their own issue. I just don’t get the implication this is a genuine multi-layer representation of an issue.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
I disagree that all relationships between humans must be transactional, which is what you're implying here.
Not all relationships are transactional: any relationship you have with family and friends is free and clear. We should take care of all of our people to an extent. Feed the hungry, house the homeless who want housed, provide basic income to everyone, etc.
BUT
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don't want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Why can't you get anything for free? Because everybody saying "oh no don't be transactional!" is on the take. Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached. If you push a religious viewpoint, those are strings attached.
Everybody wants something, barely anyone just wants to give something. Ergo you give a promise to work, a promise to teach, a promise to give back, because otherwise MOST people only take. Call me a pessimist, but I'm waiting for the first libertarian who wants to pick and choose what they pay for so they can contribute to what matters, and not get something for nothing.
EDIT:
To put a finer point on it, why should you WANT to take without giving something back? That is a gross violation of the reciprocity principle which is basically a bedrock of society in general.
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Do you also believe you have a debt to your parents that needs to be repaid?
Legally, no. Morally? Probably. I try to take care of my parents, and make their lives easier where I can, when I can, to try to at least somewhat alleviate how I've made their lives harder at earlier stages in life.
My parents will never make up for forcing me to exist on earth. I pay a terrible price each day so they could have their precious dopamine hit.
Next time smoke, inject, injest, or boof methamphetamines and leave me the fuck out of it.
Like exasperation said, I feel I owe it to them to make considerate Christmas gifts, call often to socialize with them even if some days I'd rather be playing video games, etc.
And, some people probably don't feel that obligation because their parents didn't respect them or help them grow up well.
A good, free education is to the benefit of society.
You do not incur a debt for the 12 years of school you're already mandated to receive, because that education makes society better. You become a better, more productive adult as a result of it.
But now we find that that education is not enough. Most people are not graduating high school with the necessary skills and knowledge to become that fully functioning adult. So, it is too society's benefit to extend that education.
This should not be transactional. We the people provide the education, and we the people benefit.
Otoh, there's always work digging ditches or nursing. Most people would prefer nursing in that scenario. Extend this metaphor to whatever job we're short of and make that education free until we're not short of it anymore.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
Most advanced countries will give you all of your formal education for free or with a heavily subsidized cost.
It usually don't create an obligation, or some kind of moral one. Managers have this joke (that for some reason they never think about) where they are deciding of they'll train their employees, and one asks "what if we train them and they leave?", so the other respond "what if we don't train them and they don't?". State payed education is just that, but at a society level, and for everything the society expects from people instead of just work.
expecting a return
It's called taxes. In many normal places, some people qualify (based on secondary education grades or other things like military service) to receive free higher education (basically sponsored by the government) that is paid off later over the years by taxes or contributions to the GDP.
I guess I take issue with the fact that you can't realistically opt out. Maybe if you are a wilderness survivalist type then maybe you can go do a Thoreau or Davy Crocket or whatever and just build a log cabin in the woods somewhere. But that's very rare these days, and society is moving forward so fast that tens of millions of people are being left behind because they lack the technical skills to thrive in a modern economy, and the survival skills to thrive in an old school agrarian economy. When that many people are left behind, it becomes a major social problem that'll come home to roost eventually.
There are sci-fi depictions of perfect utopias where automation has maintained so much of modern life that people need neither learn nor contribute. But, not only would I be somewhat opposed to going in such a lethargic direction, we're also a very long way from that sort of utopia, and we'd need more educated people to handle it.
I certainly don't claim that the current pattern of "No one can afford medical school, no one can become a doctor, and thus no one can AFFORD a doctor" is a good one. But the work needed to invest in giving the world more doctors is still an investment, be it monetary or otherwise. Medical schools do not purely operate out of the goodness of their heart; they expect to work within a system (and be given their own means for survival).
Fuck that, I never asked to be born. Send the bill to my parents.
Ah no, educated citizens is to the advantage of the society. Not in working power but in not falling back to a totalist system with low living standards.
Don't forget they raise the cost every year to match what it's gonna cost to keep you on the whole wheel in case you get ahead
Life of Haiti
Not a meme
All of us serve the same masters
The circle of life?
That sounds like of like the circular water cycle, which means... <insert gold medal in mental gymnastics>... the economy is therefore a liquid and trickle-down economics does in fact work.
Unless you live in a country with free education. Or borrow from a credit union. Or work as a contractor. Other that that, very Spot On.
If you're living in country with free education you borrow money from poor people to get education to make rich people richer and make poor people poorer. Taxes are regresive.
Civilized countries offer the poor far more in benefits than they would take in taxes such as the obvious health care and higher education, but housing, food allowances, and even preschool are available without the BS you have to put up with in the US to access such social safety net benefits if they’re even available at all. There’s a huge difference between the poor paying a little into a system that they can access without undue burden vs the US where they pay taxes and get nowhere near the benefits civilized countries offer.
Who are you making rich if you are self-employed? And how is you working making poor people poorer?
Where I'm from taxes are progressive...
They don't even borrow their money to you, they were granted the right to print that money.
*oligarchs
Sounds like every record deal when you put it that way.
