Comment by spaceman_2020
8 days ago
Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs
When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game
8 days ago
Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs
When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game
When the powers that be decided labor didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was capital.
One will never get rich on wages. The only way to get rich is through asset manipulation and rent-seeking.
If you're in a market where a competitor can cut their costs to produce the same quality product, end customers don't know (and if they knew, 95+% of them don't give a crap) how rich you've helped your employees get.
If someone else can make it more efficiently, there's a powerful force for you to also have to improve to match that efficiency.
"Why is the airline experience so much worse than 50 years ago?" "It's massively cheaper per seat-mile, and consumers in aggregate reveal that they prefer the cheapest price that online travel searches, so airlines deliver to that preference."
It's always been this way. America has just been able to coast on being the only remaining major economy after WW2, and exploited the rest of the world instead. That exploitation of the rest of the globe has been mostly optimized now, so those shareholder returns are now coming at the expense of the 90% of Americans who aren't sitting at the table.
I think this is quite reductive. America certainly benefited from being one of 2 major powers after ww2. But unlike the USSR it invested in the world heavily. It rebuilt Allied and Axies manufacturing, and do a lot to revitalize the world economy. They got rich in the process but its not like they did nothing. They invented the internet and cure a ton of diseases. Setup a global order of trade that generates real prosperity.
I guess while I agree that American shareholders do reap incredibly benefits coasting is not really something america does. America is more than just shareholders too. You dont grow the world economy by coasting and you dont make up 25% of the world nominal GDP while only making up ~1/25 its population by coasting its inconsistent with reality.
And pretty much everything you mentioned that made the USA the leading world power has been atrophied over the past decades
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Can you think of a point in history when it wasn't.
Despite all of the problems that exist were still the best off.