LogFAQs > #975470147

Guns_of_Verdun posted...

The argument is that by having competition to be the best and most initivative, you get rewarded for success.

This causes a society that is constantly advancing and improving and "the poor" are a victim of their own bad actions and lazy choices/work ethic

Meanwhile the "the Rich" are deseved for their hard work and good choices.

As such rich and poor are required for the sake of the best society

The problen is that's not how it works at all in reality. Most wealth is inherited, rich people have safeguards and control laws to keep themselves rich and the poor downtrodden, society stagnates.

That's not actually how it works at all in general. Yes the rich are applauded for 'working hard' and they likely shouldn't, as you mentioned, since most wealth is simply inherited, but you need poor people to keep prices down. You need an army of people making 7.25 an hour, to ensure that goods are affordable for everyone, except the poor working for minimum wage.

"Why should they make more than 7.25 an hour? It's not a job for adults, it's a job for kids" people love to say, ignoring the fact that those same jobs are open during school hours. So kids should be skipping school to work at Starbucks from 6 AM to 4PM so you can get a $8 coffee in the morning?

There's also the tipping concept too, where employers put the onus on the customer to pay their employees. Normally this is done by simply purchasing goods from the employer, but now it's simply the customer adding on an additional payment to subsidize the business, something they're likely already doing through taxes and so forth.

If you give an employee a $1 raise and they work full time, that business is now losing over $2k a year in profits. Throw in 5+ employees, that's $10k+ and so on. To simply not lose that money, they just raise the prices, of their retail goods, food, clothing, and so on.

It's essentially a vicious cycle. It's why the system is broken. Now we have an issue where people are allegedly getting paid too much money, causing a shortage of goods (I call bullshit, it's flat out price gouging and corporate greed, sparked by the concept that they simply can right now, because they have the built in excuse of higher wages = higher prices) that in turn raises the prices of things, and leading to inflation. More people spending more money in theory means fewer goods, but if you've ever been to a grocery store, you know outside of a dire circumstance, covid, hurricanes or other disasters, or other panic spending, they're always stocked with goods. When it comes to basic essentials, if people are only just now buying those goods and they otherwise couldn't before, we should be taking a long look at why we are where we are in society.

Then there's things like the stock market, where record profits are good for a quarter, but if you aren't beating those record profits, your value drops, and if value drops, your company is at risk, so you're forced to constantly cut as many corners as you can, increase profits by any means necessary, and fuck over anyone in your wake for the shareholders, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to do what's best for them, and yet not your work force.

A few years back, two major airlines were in the news, one for giving across the board raises to their entire work force, which caused their stocks to plummet, and another for like a dozen viral videos releasing within a week or two of each other, where the airline was just absolutely putrid to dozens of customers, treating them like shit, in various and separate circumstances. Their stock rose, (unsure why), but both of these happened in the same week or month, and the juxtaposition of companies was in full view, one was rewarded for having the absolute worst customer service in a customer service related industry and another punished for giving employees a raise for doing their job.

Now both airlines probably are shit tier, but the fact this happened really opened my eyes to how fucked up the entire market system is. The only people who are legally required to be appeased are shareholders. Employees have no guarantee like that. There's no law that forces companies to have their employees best interests in mind. Why is that? Why is this country so anti labor force and so pro corporation and wall street?

If greed is your only motivation, then nothing good can come from it.

There's far more when it comes to the economy, this topic died so I just moved on, was surprised it got responses days later, but I'll absolutely chime back in with more, and not just stuff that's rattling around in my head.