Talk to your kids about capitalism, before someone else does
Signs that your teen might be involved with capitalism:
- Wears suits and/or khakis
- Blames poor people for being poor
- Pays their employees less than they are worth
- Receives bonuses after laying off workers
- Says that charity is the solution to income inequality
A couple people got mad at this lol I’m not even being inflammatory people this is literally how it works
I don’t really care if you think capitalism is great or not. But at least know how it works
You’ve got a couple options when it comes to turning a profit:
- Underpay workers
- Overvalue the product
- Both
Modern capitalism does both (alongside a subset of the middle class that gets dramatically overpaid, such as programmers, and gratuitous expenditures such as salary bonuses). Whichever way you slice it, though, you get inflation and increasing inequality.
If you consider yourself a capitalist, but think rising inequality is a bug rather than a feature, you don’t actually understand capitalism (or are pretending not to, for PR).
Yep! Once “everyone can code,” owners can finally do what they’ve always wanted to do: underpay programmers. https://switter.at/web/statuses/101868999452217767
In my view, a healthy economy should look more like ecology: a complex, circular web of mutually-beneficial relationships and transferral of resources. Rather than the pyramid of exploitation we have now.
Capitalism, by the numbers, creates an economy of parasites. (Sorry Ayn Rand, you got it backwards, as usual.) There’s a reason you don’t see (literal, actual) ecosystems that are 99% parasites: they aren’t sustainable.
My preference for an, uh, ecosystemic economy is also why I don’t consider myself a socialist. Like I’ve said before, I think “the answer” is something we haven’t yet seen.
@amydentata
I wonder what it will look like.
I think it will have to start at large scale, instead of a small scale system shoddily scaled up.
@diffractie I dunno, I think a truly “ecosystemic” economy could quite readily start small and scale up. We just haven’t figured it out yet, and/or capitalism keeps squashing it. Maybe we just need to weaken capitalism first
@amydentata
I just worry that as you scale up, problems appear.
Like how some game systems are okay at first and then late game you end up with things being broken. :P
Weaken capitalism first tho ofc.
My feeling is: universal income kicks the stranglehold capitalism has on people's lives.
But also I am incredibly nieve
@diffractie I’m slowly beginning to see UBI as a population wide poverty trap. I used to be all for it but I am increasingly skeptical.
@diffractie I think what we might have to do is, starting small, create alternate systems that make capitalism irrelevant. So people can like, wean themselves off of a capitalist-produced lifestyle.