Why do people honestly hate capitalism so much now?

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A few comments on posts on this page.

1. Street level drug dealers make plenty more than minimum wage. Maybe not if they’re slanging dime bags of weed for ultra low margins, but hard drugs to a constant stream of addicts? They’re making more like a highly skilled wage in cash.

2. Not sure if mine wage or ubi is better as we’ve never had ubi. Min wage is $15.65 here, but it’s not enough to live on. Stay alive? Yes. Live? No. I’ve read it’s a low % of people earning min wage so when it rises only a few percent of people’s income goes up a bit, not enough to impact costs of much more than the dollar menu at McDonald’s. But it irritates the much larger number of people earning working a few dollars an hour of minimum wage.. like the woman I know that’s worked at Walmart for 17 years and is paid less than $2/hr above minimum wage. It’s these jobs and employers that frustrate worker bees near minimum wage the most.

3. Not sure why Walrus says min wage should be no more than 55% of median, but here based on google results it’s roughly 60% and is still nowhere near enough of an income to have any sort of quality of life. After tax full time minimum wage Nets $1700 or so. It now costs more than $1000/mo just to rent a bedroom. Food transportation clothing medicine etc - people can stay alive but it’s impossible to have any sort of quality of life even as a single person never mind with any dependents. Then there’s entertainment, education, recreation, travel and all the other categories beyond shelter & sustenance.

4. USA has a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr and parts of the country where wages are so low for such vast distances that people are trapped as they literally cannot afford a bus ticket out of there to seek a better opportunity elsewhere. They’re only paid enough to return to work, basically. An old forum user said he had friends in those areas being paid $10/hr at 12h/day factory jobs and for their areas that was considered Good money. Gross, just absolutely gross exploitation of people for profits with a whole lot of human suffering thrown in.

Do you have any experience working in that field?

Because both personal experience and Freakonomics (Chapter 3) disputes what you're claiming.

The only drug sales I'm aware of that ever approached minimum wage level pay are my friends that wholesaled magic mushrooms. Low wholesale prices and high labour time for production meant they either had to produce way more, or scale down and get jobs. Those that retail them on the beach gross more than 5x the wholesale price and can do very well at the retail 1g chocolate level - however - that market is drying up now that there are several mushroom dispensaries all over Vancouver where people can buy fungi or chocolates and no longer have to make a trip to the beach to buy them. But other than wholesale shrooms, pretty much all street/low level dealers I'm aware of make far more money.

Worked with a few brothers that one of them took over their uncle's position doing that and he told me how much money he'd make each time he went down there. Later that year he died of an accidental fent overdose because his supplier dosed his coke. I went to his funeral.

Friend's wife's younger brother is/was a dealer for one of the gangs in the area. He dealt out of a really shady hotel room. He told me how much he'd make on a regular day and then how much he'd make on cheque day - better than skilled wages on cheque day.. but your job requires you to have weapons and be prepared and willing to dish out a little ultra violence when crackheads try to rob you. Plus the whole risk of jail or death thing = I'd rather do unskilled hard labour. Cheque day he could profit a few grand in a day or so.

An ex-drug dealer I know used to do street level dealing in that area, then ran a whole building. He graduated on to running dispensaries during the grey market boom and at peak had 14 locations across Canada that he opened up in under 2 years and did final revenues of $17M worth of weed sales in their last year before legalization. But that fortune dwindled with a high cash burn rate once revenues stopped + legal fees etc so it was spent vs. banked. Not exactly street level, though.

Also, in my time on the DTES in recent months, some of the older lifer type addict-dealers disclosed how much money they'd make dealing up/side/down on the corner, and it's Definitely a hell of a lot more profits to them at the street level than they'd make working for minimum wage.

I've also had some of the lowest level coke dealers just starting out selling cocaine at parties etc tell me they made easy money - plenty more than their construction labour jobs paid, so, they stopped lifting materials 40h/week and just go to parties evenings and weekends and slang to their coke addict friends for a higher income.

Anyone selling drugs for minimum wage is working in some small town with very few customers vs. a big city with nearly insatiable demand from all sorts of addicts. In the roughest area, there are literally Thousands of addicts buying and using around the clock. It's risky dangerous work, but if that's your niche in the economy and you don't get robbed/killed over territorial disputes or whatever, people make a hell of a lot more money than minimum wage. If they didn't they'd just go get a job doing anything for more money. There are some addicts that are unfit for actual work, and others with criminal records shut out of the regular employment market, but for the most part people in that game take the risks for the rewards. Crime definitely pays - it's just that it ALSO comes with another near certainty: Only two ways out; dead or in jail.

I'm aware of some other drug dealers that have made a lot of money, but those people aren't exactly street level and fit the description of being higher up the ladder and taking larger portions of potential profits. Then there are also some who were such addicts they never sold enough to cover their own use and ended up in debt, and in some cases dead. Low level or high - nah - I'd rather dig ditches.

Practically every one of those cases sounds like someone who's a few steps above the ground level. For everyone person in that sort of position there's 10 or more who aren't coming out ahead.

Seriously, there's a reason the trope of drug dealers living with their moms exists.

Wut?

Beach retail is literally below street level - 480 stairs down to the sand and ocean at sea level. Same level in the hierarchy as street, only retailing organics to naked hippies instead of crack to crackheads.

Street level.

Street level moved up to seedy hotel level on the same strip.

Started at street level, profited enough to move up, exited the industry after he was attacked with a knife that almost killed him.

Street level literally on the corner of Hastings and Carrall, the epicentre of DTES street level drug dealing - it doesn't get any more street than that. Same place that the now deceased guy I mentioned above slanged on the street.

"Party level," - one step indoors from the street. Bit of a different scene - safer retail, but still the lowest level retail vs. wholesale, distribution, or import/export involving shipping containers, boats, planes/helicopters/drones etc that the higher level folks utilize.

Not sure how you can possibly state that crack dealers slanging crack/side/down on a literal street corner in the ghetto is above street level. It's literally the definition of street level drug dealer. I'd show you, but the live streaming webcam that was at Main and Hastings called crackheadcam was taken down a couple years ago - otherwise you could have a reality TV looksee for yourself.

Literally MOST of the examples above are street level. And they make more money than working a minimum wage job. That is just a fact. One girl slanging mushroom chocolates on the beach raked in $2k in sales on a busy Saturday w/o much effort. Her costs were probably less than $200 in shrooms and chocolate. That's one of the higher volume sales days I've heard of there, but people typically make hundreds in profits - ain't getting that at minimum wage. Same same or better for people slanging hard drugs on street corners.

Even you reveal what I'm getting at when you mention he 'moved up'.

Being able to cite examples of drug dealers who do make decent money doesn't negate the study from that book or other studies supporting the idea that a lot of drug dealers make very little profit.

That doesn't mean none of them do, but most people don't end up becoming plugs who do enough business to come out substantially ahead. If it was easy money, more people would at least dabble in it, especially with softer drugs that carry lower penalties.

Most plugs are examples of people who have moved up from nickle and dime level sales, but nickle and dime level sales don't typically have margins that make a lot of money, unless you're a plug who also does that level of sales. If you're buying from the guy who bought from that guy, there's less room.

Also: Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms

Chapter 3 begins on page 56, although the whole thing is pretty interesting.

Personally I believe the min wage should be 1 dollar per hour or so if we have one at all.But I really dont believe in a min wage.

That’s patently ridiculous. Why go back to the 19th century?

I just believe in almost total free market.Why not make the min wage 100 dollars an hour.The companies will just automate a lot of jobs if you make the min wage 15 dollar an hour

It’s going to be $15 an hour very soon, anyway. The Walmart minimum wage is now $14 an hour.

Good point.

Automatization happens anyway. The same amount of goods can be produced with less amount of human work.
It's just a reality economies and societes need to adapt to.

Ya its gonna happen regardless one way or the other but I wish I could of lived in a different time in history that had way less of it.

In that different time in history, on average, people could afford much less with the same amount of work.

Of course, thinking of old times, we like to imagine the elegant rich or at least middle class people... but I recommend to you to read some non-fiction from the time e.g. How the Other Half Lives - it's free domain, so you can legally read it online.

Crime, poverty, typhus, infant mortality, infanticide, prostitution - all these atop of extremely hard work all the waking time.
With all the problems of today, it's not worth reviving.

Well I know life was tough back then.I would much rather of been a cattle baron in Texas in 1910 than the modern upper-middle class life I have now.But you do have a point because I heard something like a poor or lower middle class American has a better standard of living than the kings of thousands of years ago.I dont know if its true or not.I would much rather go to a time when we needed all of those workers.

In some ways modern people have luxuries kings didn’t have - music at our fingertips, foods from all over the world etc but truly poor Americans today would probably rather life the life of a King a few centuries ago. Especially people who go without food and proper clothing. But there’s some truth to modern middle class people having more luxuries than Kings used to.

Why wish we were in a time where everyone had to work? Why not do wish for automation to free people from having to work so they can do other things - art, music, travel, writing/whatever because machines and AI produce what they need.