Wages, Work Conditions, Socialism
So I have really debunked most of the Communist doctrines and I also criticized some of the bad parts of Capitalism but also highlighted the good parts of it, so you can't call me a hypocrite or a shill, I can analyze each political point by it's merit without being biased by my own beliefs too much, and I mostly look at the facts and the evidence when I formulate my own political positions instead of feelings and irrational beliefs.
It is time to debunk socialism, the working situation, and most of the associated positions with it, fairly but rigorously eliminating the bullshit.
Wages & Working Hours
Okay so many people would either prefer less working hours or the same working hours but more pay, or perhaps a little bit less working hours and a little bit more pay, it's a slider you either sacrifice your income for less work, or work more for more income.
So of course the obvious proposals are always minimum wages, unionization, improving work conditions and cutting some work hours by legislation.
Now these are all nonsense except the improvement of the working conditions, which is good, but let's face it, in the west we have decent working conditions. I mean it's not like your have to work in a diamond mine as a slave in Africa.
All of these positions come from Pro-State progressives who are either stupid or genuinely confused about the nature of politics and economics.
Minimum wages: Well it forces people to earn above X, it's almost like an eugenecist position to get rid of bad workers who can't produce as much, it makes people unemployed, thus more tax money is needed to put them on welfare. Thus is only increases State power, which is what these Pro-State shills either consciously or unconsciously want anyway.
Unions: Unions are like mafias. Literally. No coincidence that most unions in the US got taken over by organized crime in the 20th century, it's the same business basically. They boss workers around while present themselves as a false messiah, just throwing some bones to the dogs with a few negotiations but most of the money goes to the Union itself. It's a horrible bureaucracy and it literally takes mandatory taxes from workers. So it's a mixture between a mafia and a bureaucracy, bossing people around, telling them to wear the same uniforms, just total slavery. The union system doesn't liberate the workers like Marx thought, it enslaves them even more.
Improving Work Conditions: Yes I support this, but let's be real here, most of the west has decent work conditions. You can't demand a Jacuzzi and cocktail parties during the lunch break in a supermarket job. I would mostly focus on the health aspect, many workplaces could have mold on the wall or fluoride in the tap water where most people drink from. Those aspects need to be fixed.
Cutting Work Hours: Well this is possible, but why not just make the work system voluntary? I mean what the fuck is up with this 8 hour bullshit? Why not make the work hour flexible. And actually why not make "employees" private contractors instead of "employees". An employee means basically a serf, so the leftists are right on that. But let's make them private contractors, where they actually have the power to negotiate their wages and preferences. There should be a voluntary relationship between the business owner and his workers, whereas it increasingly becomes coercive. If you think that can be fixed through legislation, then you are missing the point of Anarchism.
Labor Exploitation
I have said it many times already, I am going to say it again. Stop focusing on the trivial things and start focusing on the elephant in the room.
They all talk about “labor exploitation” how the businesses take advantage of their workers labor to grab huge profits, which is totally false in most cases.
Most businesses operate on a 2-5% profit margin. This is a fact, ask any supermarket owner. I know personally a guy who owns a mid sized shop, he literally has profit margins around that.
So the only way the business owner can raise wages is by either:
- 1) Making the workers more productive, thus giving a part of that productivity back in higher wages
- 2) Raising product & service prices to cover the increased wages
- 3) Lower their profits and risk going bankrupt for a few % wage increases
Option 1 is pretty much stretched out, a supermarket worker can hardly do anything better. They are working hard and working fast, there is nothing much he can do to be more productive. Even if the supermarket gets 10% more customers, that is only a -10% for somebody else. So essentially this is a zero sum game if you are taking clients from the competitors and since productivity is stretched out, this option doesn’t work.
Option 2 is stupid as well. You would want to increase prices on the customers (thus risk losing customers) just so that you can pay your workers higher wages. Most of the time the customers are your workers since if it’s in the same neighborhood, most of them shop from there too, plus it’s not like the community is much richer either. So this is a zero sum game as well. Nobody benefits in the end.
Option 3 is the most retarded. The business is stretched out, yet with these stupid minimum wage increase proposals you are risking the business going bankrupt, since the State enforces a minimum standard, thus anyone who falls below that becomes unemployed and the business going bankrupt since for example they can only hire people on 10$/hour instead of 11$. There is nothing that can be done here and a bankrupt business is much worse than workers working for low wages, it takes away their ability to feed their family.
CAVEAT 1) I agree that in most cases minimum wages increases are just in order to cover the inflation
, to re-index your salary to previous levels before the inflation. But this is a stupid workaround the problem as well. Why not address the problem directly? The cause of inflation! Fractional Reserve Banking? Central Banks? Those are the root of the problem, trying to dance around the problem with minimum wages is retarded. The banking system is at fault there.
CAVEAT 2) There are businesses that operate at huge profit margins like 100-200%, so in those cases it’s understandable that workers are enraged that they are earning crap while the business takes huge profits. But guess what kind of businesses earn that amount? Big oligarchic businesses with near monopoly. So think of oil, banking, pharmaceuticals and things like that. All heavily regulated with big lobbies forcing out competition. I mean literally people get arrested for blogging about vitamins, while big pharma which had Nazi ties continues to operate at shameless levels. Yes those are horrible businesses and legislation keeps out competition, both workers and customers are abused, it’s a monopoly. So the only way to fix this is not through more legislation but though liberating the market from regulations that keep out honest competition from shaking things up.
Taxes
So stop focusing on trivial issues and stop blaming businesses that are stretched out and efficient and let’s focus on the real big dirty elephant in the room: TAXES.
So there is no way the competitive business owner can raise wages. But guess what, in a free market he barely earns like a 2-5% commission from your labor, which is mostly used to keep the business floating and debt-free, so focusing on that is retarded.
Why not focus on the elephant in the room, you know the 85% taxes that are levied in Europe…
I mean we are talking about:
- Income Tax (either payroll or some sort capital gains)
- Corporate/ Business Tax
- Commodity Tax (oil,gold, etc…)
- Unhealthy Hazard Tax (alcohol,tobacco, toxic waste, etc…)
- Inheritance Tax
- Green Tax (usually locally levied for recycling and stuff like that)
- V.A.T. / Sales Tax
- Social Security (pension & disability)
- Healthcare
- Property Taxes
- Unemployment Insurance
- Mandatory Work Accident Insurance
- Mandatory Property & Car Insurance
- Stamp Tax (when signing legal documents / requesting a permit)
- Permit Fees
- Import Tax
- Currency Inflation
- Union Fees
...
And the list goes on and on, it’s as long as my penis. I can’t even keep up with all the taxes, most of it is levied automatically via some sort of utility bill or bundled and paid together in the local tax bill or levied automatically from your salary.
TAXES ARE THEFT!
You must be a special kind of moron to focus on the 2-5% that maybe your employer pockets but totally ignoring the up to 85% guaranteed taxes that are stolen out of your pocket every single month.
Your GROSS SALARY pretty much matches the value of your labor, with that 2-5% deviation that your employer pockets. In a free market it would.
But your NET SALARY is 85% smaller than your GROSS SALARY. So who is the biggest thief then?
The State
So think of the corporation that you hate the most. Let’s name this corporation X. So corporation X has a near-monopoly, it has shady business practices and it’s hated both by it’s consumers who are forced to use it due to lack of alternative and by it’s workers that are treated really badly.
Well Corporation X still doesn’t come near close to the abuse and evil that a Government does.
- If Corporation X steals 5% of your Labor, the Government steals 85%.
- If Corporation X has a near-monopoly on a product or service, the Government has a monopoly on on all force in the region.
- If Corporation X is abusing it’s customers and workers, guess how much more the Government does it with it’s surveillance, police brutality, civil asset forfeiture, taxes , wars, jailing people for using herbs and things like that.
So you can’t even compare the abuse done by Governments to the abuse of Corporations. It’s in a different dimension in terms of scale and brutality, or had we forgot already the atrocities committed in the 20th century by Governments against their own citizens: Democide.
- The Holocaust: 6-11 million people brutally murdered in the most inhumane ways imaginable just for being the “wrong” ethnicity.
- The Holodomor: a combination of (collectivist) incompetence and malice that resulted in 2.4-12 million people being starved to death including children.
- Gulags: ranging from political prisoners to all other kind of victims being murdered and enslaved over decades.
And various other atrocities, genocides, and political oppression across the globe resulting in more than 300,000,000 casualties in the 20th century alone.
Now if you think your Corporation X is a menace, think again, nothing comes close to the viciousness of the State.
Sources:
https://pixabay.com
good article. I agree with everyone out there who believes the State is evil. I dont want no fuckin state.... id rather have private police forces and shit too! private police forces can have wages cut off if they start fucking around and being thugs, people just stop paying them and hire someone else to patrol teh fuckin city ... God I am sick of the humans running around believeing government is even a real concepot other than an imagnery symbol in their heads... badges and uniforms and official titles and big buildingsin washington DC don't make thinsg any lessfantasy but they have this big media machine that enforces the buillshit in our minds
but yeah the governments AND banks that go hand in ahnd will be fading away as the old peopel wh run them die out and refuse to actually pass on the torch bevause they know gen X is super cynical and they dont trust them ... so millenials might get the torch passed directly to them... millenials nmight find themselves in charge of a lotr moe than they bargained for!
The power struicture has to be passed on to the younger generationand its what we see right now,w e see the worl dis being passed on to younger people as the older eople get ready to pass on their inheritances... like John D Rockefeller passing on his majority shares of Standard Oil to his son before his death as a symbolic passing of the torch
It is the Bitcoin revolution look , trillions now being poured into bitcoin soon
http://fiatleak.com/
that website tracks and vosualzied bitcoin being bought by fiat in real time
Bitcoin is not the be all and end all unfortunately. Its 256 bit encryption will be broken by the quantum computers in no time flat. Bitcoin is only as secure as the computing power is slow
Yes and it's also getting slowly co-opted by the elites which has questionable intentions.
Hard to distinguish between an elite investing in bitcoin just for profit, or actually buying it up to "quell the rebellion". It remains to be seen.
That being said, Bitcoin is very inefficient and it's full of holes, both technical and conceptual. Lack of privacy is one, big TX fees is other, the quantum vulnerability is just the tip of the iceberg.
Hmm.. you can't dismiss the fact that the corporation in itself is wrong. Where the corporation previously had to demonstrate their aims were for the public good, in order to get their ' license'. Now the corporation is the proverbial frankenstien who has taken over its master.
A corporation claims to be a legal person, who funnily enough cannot be jailed. If there is no risk of jail, this also leads them to doing immoral and illegal things.
Democide is certainly an issue, however you only need to look at Blackwater the private mercenary firm, also a corporation who is engaged in wars for profit. Or the arms manufacturers, making deadly weapons with increasing amounts of casualties per dollar spent. So its not only the governments waging war. Increasingly private corporations are engaged the in same area.
Theres a great documentary on the corrupt nature of the corporation here. Well worth the watch
Yes I agree, in a free market there would be no Corporation because guess what, a Corporation is a State entity.
Sort of like the 4th branch of the State: judiciary, legislative, government, corporate.
It is a state entity, and it is protected by the state and also used for law enforcement.
I oppose the concept of corporation too, and most anarchists, free market capitalists, voluntarists too.
In a free market, business is done through reputation, so the owners of the business are responsible for both profits (no taxes) and both the liabilities (no bailouts, legal shield ,etc..).
That is how a honest capitalist system would work.
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
Relevance:A little dose of "Economics for People who Hate Capitalism" which is also the title of a good book.
The state is not moral. I feel like a free range tax slave every so often. I'd be willing to try something new. Thank you for sharing.