Rich companies are totally jerks.

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How would a non-capitalist system solve this tho? A shared income system?

In the current communist countries we see all their people are poor except the leaders.

In socialist countries like Canada.... well, their economy is capitalist too, no western country is purely socialist.

Last edited by The_Face_of_Boo on 13 Dec 2020, 2:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

It is all in human nature.

Yeah, but when said businesses suppress wages by claiming raising pay will only cause prices to rise, but raise prices anyway, it's clearly a case of capitalism becoming corporate greed.

But when you were young it wasn’t that bad, from the very same article:



Obviously the wealth gap between employer and employee was much smaller back then.

You need incentives for workers to be paid more, if that does not work you need a redistribution via taxes to make sure people can live comfortably and be able to live in a way to encourage innovation. Against what a lot of people say, I don't think innovation is just on how much infinitely more the people at the top can get more money. If a business could get more money by providing a treatment rather than make a cure, it is going to do that, it is why there has been such a slow movement towards energy efficient vehicles.

You might find this article about Boots the Chemist interesting.

It's one of the UKs most recognisable and loved brands, but behind the scenes it's an empty shell.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

So, for-profit businesses are in the business of making profit?

Not exactly "man bites dog" material...

But there are companies like Timpsons that treat their employees like human beings, so it is possible to turn a profit and be a decent company

https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/working-for-us/benefits/

Ever watched "Who killed the electric car" ?

I had experience working in a company that bought into the capitalist model too deeply.
It wasn't fun.
In trying to ensure profits for shareholders, they set our fees unrealistically high - we were forced to charge clients 3 or 4 times our actual cost in wages, during a tightening market.
We couldn't win work, we just got out-bid all the time. On the few occasions we got something, we had to cut corners to bring it in "within budget" - i.e. to ensure maximum shareholder profit. It was horrible.
When they found their overheads were too high for the amount of work coming in there was a round of redundancies. A few years later the company was bought out by a US company and I believe they lost the majority of their staff at that time.
I wasn't there then, I got taken out in the first round of redundancies - which was actually a god thing because I'd found another job by the time everyone else jumped ship.

So I agree that rich companies are totally jerks, but at least they all topple sooner or later, if only to be replaced by the jerks-in-waiting. Competition prunes out the worst.

The most important thing is to have strong regulatory bodies in the government sector to catch companies that try to cut corners in the pursuit of profits - and whatever you do, don't let the private sector take over the regulatory functions. Here in Australia we're having issues with shoddy building construction due to taking the Building Certifier role out of local government and letting the private sector do it all.

Also, government should be careful with privatisation of essential services. I've heard in the UK they're having problems with privatising schools and hospitals - and then needing to bail them out when they go under. When I lived in Hong Kong they tried building an important tunnel by private finance, with the idea of recovering costs through tolls. But the toll was set so high, hardly anybody was willing to use the tunnel, they'd face the congestion at the old one instead. Again, the government had to chip in.

But tech companies like Apple, it doesn't really matter if staff pay doesn't match profits. Sooner or later another company will come along and knock them off their perch, and we'll just end up buying another brand.

That company is impressive.

This is how capitalism works.

And why the objectivist principle of 'be selfish' only works for employers - employees couldn't get away with it and most people need some good start up to even have a small business.

Small businesses can be superior to this because they know the employees as people. Around here, some of the first shops to shut voluntarily during coronavirus were small businesses. Sure, they needed the profit more than big companies did. But when 'I'm the employee' or 'me and Sue are the employees' is stacked up against 'a bunch of strangers I will never know are the employees', the employees someone actually knows win/people have self-interest in mind.

I don't think it's possible but it's why I think an ideal system would encourage small businesses not big businesses. I'm glad to live in a town with a lot of successful local businesses.

I'd actually disagree on the basket categories.

You have people who are creatives, artists, musicians, philosophers, add that you have people who are in the 'caring' professions whether education, nursing, etc., and really there are all kinds of places where our society needs intelligent people - in the current ordering of things - to take a hit for their principles and get paid $30k a year even after going to college, such as is the case for teaching. You can similarly have people who are interesting, great to talk to, great to have as friends, they're not going to come to you looking to borrow money but they can be lower-middle class or living even more precariously.

So you have a pretty good sized useful and responsible portion of the populace where, judging on their income numbers, if we're judging place in social hierarchy by income (as we're wont to do based on prevailing norms) then they're 'low-status' people. We're then signaling that 'status' comes to those who'll run at the pile of money and put that over their fellow citizen - whether that's their natural inclination or not.

I'm going to add that if you get to where half or more of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, no space for anything but nail-biting, that's where the economic system starts overshadowing the social system what to do. At that point you'd be insane to just tell your kids to do the right thing, rather you'd want to train them to win in Hunger Games. That's where I don't think our culture's values, particularly endorsing cooperation, fair well when things are this tight.

One could try arguing perhaps that those half of house holds deserve the worlds smallest violin because obviously they spent the money themselves - where did it go? Why do they have the size of house they have? Why do they have x brand vehicle instead of y brand that's cheaper, or why not have one less vehicle? Or why do they have x rather than y children? Sure, you can depend on a lot of people to be irresponsible, however when it gets to be closer to half you're starting to see that this situation has captured more people than one would expect, particularly if basic economic sense generally comes before any sort of political common sense because it's closer to basic survival.


For anyone with questions on the economics, and political effects of the economics, at present I'd really have to recommend Mark Blyth's analytics. He's done a whole host of interviews for his book 'Angrynomics' and he's given some great lectures over the past few years about the different systems of economics we've transitioned through including the formation and breakdown of Bretton Woods and how the neoliberal era has been a rebirth of similar dynamics to those we had from 1900 thru 1945 (where that regime only tapered to an end with two world wars).

Canada isn't a socialist country by any reasonable definition.

That said, if the employees had collective bargaining they could conceivably force higher wages for themselves.

You could also address some of the structural issues that encourage these outcomes. Raising taxes on corporations would make them less willing to hold on to large amounts of cash; raising taxes on high earners would discourage large bonuses for the executives who are rewarded based on the quarter (reducing their disincentives for not raising wages).

I don't believe some sort of revolutionary Marxist ideology would be the ideal solution. Ideology doesn't make market forces vanish or cease to be meaningful.

What I'm describing is more of a return to a tax structure more like the Eisenhower era.

↑↑ I really cannot see how your post addresses my post.  Would you please re-phrase your post in a more concise and orderly manner?  Thank you.

A real tidy way of encapsulating my meaning, and I forgot to say it earlier, economics is a mathematical pressure and success amounts to algorithms. It's Pareto distribution and it's the constant shaking and rarification of Pareto distribution. Standing on it's own it has absolutely no opinion on the viability of society, the survival of people, if it turns a country to neo-feudalism or corporate fascism or some form of Banana republic - it's math, math is math and it has no say in that. When we become dutiful obligate servants to that math then it breaks free of ground anchors and lands in the lake somewhere.

If we see that economic arms races and multipolar traps have no reverse circulation or at a minimum anti-trust behavior to recalibrate the system then we're in a place where we can look forward to Mars colonies on earth. Our biggest problem with capitalism isn't that it's capitalism but for some reason we've decided, as a species, to give in to the idea that markets can tell us what to do, what we should do, and worse, who we should be. They're algorithms, based on what works in specific narrow parameters, and there's no reason for them to be pro-human even if it's billions of humans exchanging short-term interest.

Where we get screwed by this logic - we all want to outcompete our neighbors because our genes are better than theirs (because they're ours!) and we want our kids to kick their kids arses. That means people will say f' the world for their own narrow interests. If we can't kill that instinct, or even shouldn't because in turn someone who still has it would kill or enslave us, then the trick is to at least spin up some durable counter-current or circulation in the opposite direction so it's not an unchecked positive feedback loop.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 13 Dec 2020, 12:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.