Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Funny thing is you can "hit" the boss, the Mayor and the President if you start voting your own self interest instead of against your fellow worker. We need to reunionize all the work places until we have one big union and have the power to demand fairness from the wealthy. Solidarnosh!
i want you to tell me how the unions protected americans against the illegal immigrant onslaught that they are now facing. we have a disproportionate number of workers to the labor supply, yet the unions were virtually useless the whole time that was happening. now we have the ever useless AFL/CIO standing up for illegal immigrant rights. sheesh.
we don't need another layer of bureaucracy for the workers.
what we do need is tariffs and penalties for companies that outsource their labor force, and rewards for companies that stay american. big business can't be allowed to have it both ways-where they can sell freely to the strong US market but send the jobs to other countries for cheaper labor.
Which is not relevant to the point that was being made. I agree that comparisons to the distant past can be dicey, but the point is when some people are working a lot harder to support others who aren't working nearly as hard or at all, resentment sets in and it just generally doesn't work as it encourages laziness and there's little incentive for the harder workers. An oversimplification maybe, but an overall valid point. That's but one reason why communism (real communism, not the twisted dictatorships that called themselves communism in the 20th century) failed and it's been largely abandoned.
At every job I have been at I have worked a lot harder then my bosses. They mostly just stand around telling people what to do or go sit in their office.
Perhaps they became bosses because they busted their butt to get there in the first place. That's the incentive to do to so, which is my point. ie get to a position where you make more and don't have to bust your butt as much to get it.
PS obviously there are all kinds of circumstances; that doesn't invalidate the overall point.
Re unions, what sandy said. Unions have become the very thing they were created to combat (corruption, mistreatment, inefficiency etc). More of that is the LAST thing we need.
I really cannot imagine a hierarchical capitalist society without poors. Poors are the must:
1) cheap, scared, docile labor keeping costs down and flow of wealth up
2) scaring hell out of the middle class as well as providing an additional "stimulus" to work harder and to "behave"
3) redirecting anger of the taxpaying middle towards the poors who ate everybody's cake while top 10% of Americans own 80% of wealth (bottom 40% owns 0.4% of the wealth).
4) making people feel better about themselves. Most satisfaction in life does come from feeling superior to other people. Having somebody on the lower perch instantaneously creates meaning, purpose and fulfillment in top guy' life. Even bums have their pecking orders helping them to cope with their lot in this way.
Why poor are the poor? All personal responsibility in the world would not change the fact that a capitalist society is a pyramid of wealth with really broad base and narrow top. Thus, working harder, education & skills, running rat race more energetically would not eliminate poverty, it may help some poor to get close to a trough, yet it is not universal solution, since for everyone who moved up will be the one who moved down. Poor are poor for one and only one reason - they are deprived of independent of "free market" means of subsistence and forced to accept wage jobs in order to survive. That's how capitalism began in England - expropriation of the communal land, turning peasants into desperate for a job wage seekers. One just don't wake up in the morning and says, "hell, I think a fair price for an hour of my life is $8/hr". People don't just gather voluntarily together and decide who's gonna get all kinds of professional diseases at the bottom and who's gonna skim the top based on their individual "merits". Nobody, no matter how dumb&"uneducated", values his life any less than the most bright and "people' savvy" CEO. Nobody in his right mind would say "I'm such a lowlife, I better work an unhealthy&dangerous job for peanuts to make much better people wealthy&healthy". People must be forced into making those choices.
Topic starter' faith in "free market" delivering poor from their lot is somewhat perplexing. How to provide affordable goods for the American poor without Chinese slave labor? Outsourcing of misery, exploitation and poverty created certain illusions about the power of free market, but free market rests on the shoulders of the poor and dispossessed. How can you eliminate poverty and preserve free market as we know it simultaneously?
Perhaps they became bosses because they busted their butt to get there in the first place. That's the incentive to do to so, which is my point. ie get to a position where you make more and don't have to bust your butt as much to get it.
Busting your butt is the least effective strategy of getting to the top trough. Sure, it may have worked once or twice somewhere but you give really bad advice to the aspiring top earners. You just don't get to the top by busting your butt alone, not gonna work, most likely people who knows little bit more about upward mobility (and less about butt busting) "would" use your butt busting to get to that coveted trough first.
Regardless, of what I said, nonzero, minuscule probability for a poor to break into top earner bracket cannot be used to defend wage slavery relying on the ample supply of poor. After all, there was non zero probability for a slave to work his way to a freedom and buy his own slaves. Happened many times in Rome.
Busting your butt is the least effective strategy of getting to the top trough.
No, sitting on your butt is far less effective, actually.
Quote:
Sure, it may have worked once or twice somewhere but you give really bad advice to the aspiring top earners. You just don't get to the top by busting your butt alone,
I never said you get to the top by busting your butt alone - which is possible but generally agree it's not enough itself.
Quote:
not gonna work, most likely people who knows little bit more about upward mobility (and less about butt busting) "would" use your butt busting to get to that coveted trough first.
I assume you're trying to say that politics often play a part. Well of course. Sad but true.
Luck can certainly play a part too (I would say most significantly what "lot" you are born into), but people often tend to make their own "luck."
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
