Billionaires should pay everyone for stolen time, potential contributions to better world living. They currently pay only toxicity, diminish quality of life on Earth.
Billionaires should not exist at all. I saw a post saying that once you earn $999.999.999 dollars you get a trophy saying "I won capitalism" and everything else you earn goes to taxes. We should absolutely do that
Absolutely agree. I don't have any urge to stop working. But 40 h / 5 days a week is too much. Life is too fucking short especially given how productivity has skyrocketed yet wages have barely kept up.
Obligatory fuck Ronald Reagan and the Republican party.
It's not time stolen from you as the work needs to be done either way, but it's money stolen from you as you're either underpaid or paying too much for what you're buying.
Very often the work does not need to get done, the work uses up a poorly paid employee's entire work day to squeeze out an extra fraction of a percent of profit.
You're right about money, and employers are often stealing time as well.
I believe it was Marx who first observed that superfluous jobs, as well as unemployment, are inextricably linked to capitalism.
EDIT: Found a relevant Marx quote in Grundrisse:
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.
See also Marcuse, 1969:
The absorption [i.e. disappearance] of unemployment and the maintenance of an adequate rate of profit would [...] require the stimulation of demand on an ever larger scale, thereby stimulating the rat race of the competitive struggle for existence through the multiplication of waste, planned obsolescence, parasitic and stupid jobs and services.
It is time stolen from you as well. You only need to work a fraction of the time you do in order to cover your wages, the rest of the day is free profit for the Capitalist.
You're ignoring that what you output from your work needs to be... Outputted? So the issue is that you make less than you deserve for the amount of work that you do... If you make 25$/h and it wealth got redistributed so you would make 100$/h it doesn't mean you could work 10h instead of 40h, your employer would still need you to 40h (or close to it, maybe you would be motivated by the increase in salary and work faster but that's speculations) to achieve the same result.
If unemployment was at 75% and wealth redistribution happened to quadruple salaries then we could say "Instead of having 25% of the population working 40h/week at 25$/h, we'll have 100% of the population working 10h/week at 100$/h so in the end the people that are working already will be making the same annual salary" but that's not the case.
You are not only working to mentain a functional society, you are also working to constantly grow it (each year more stuff must be made, more money must be earned, more of everything) it and also to create a very big surplus for the rich. We also burn perfectly edible food, ruin perfectly wearable clothing and make electronic devices that intentionally break in a few years to get you to buy another one sooner just to get the 1% more money. If we didn't do all that and they lived normal, non-luxury lives, everyone would have a lot more free time. If everyone worked only 20 hours a week, we'd make enough to sustain our society.
Also, most workers are so deeply alienated because they know that they aren't working for themselves, they are working for someone else. Which is why most people simply stop giving a fuck at some point.
There is so much inefficiency because most who do the actual work don't have much motivation to do a decent job, yet alone think about what they are doing because you simply get punished, or at least don't get any reward, for thinking. And they people who (should) do the thinking often don't have a clue as they live in a bubble.
And of course there is all the bullshit about shipping stuff across the world to do different stuff when it is completely unnecessesary..
it impairs the economy. More folks could hire people to do things. Remember there were milkmen and tv repair men at one point in time. You could hire someone to clean your house and they could hire someone to do their taxes. its amazing how an economy works when people have money to spend rather than hoard.
There were also icemen at one point. Then we invented refrigerators. Nobody seems to miss having a giant block of ice delivered to their house to keep the food we buy at the stores cold. But one thing I think a lot of people miss is appliances that didn't need to be thrown away.
Fam, at my last job they had roughly 23h of activity for me per week. 17h of nothing to do and still having to stick around because i needed every penny to be able to pay my bills.
I'm not opposed to being rich, or really even being filthy rich, I think the fair chance of being able to live lavishly is a great motivator for folks to shoot for their best ideas.
What I am opposed to is being so obscenely rich that it would take several generations of chronic mismanagement for your descendants to manage to blow through the funds within a time limit of "by the end of the 22nd century."
Most generational wealth has reduced to being a small supplement for the recipient to supplement still having to work for their living with by the time the original person who built it up's grandkids have had their turn with it, maybe the great grandkids if the family makes it a point of staying grounded and using the wealth wisely.
That's not even from blowing through it like madmen, it's from how many people it's getting divided among by then and how likely any one of those individuals are to just decide they don't need to work anymore on getting access to it.
Agreed, but just saying "you can only have this much money" will get fought tooth and nail, IMO the way to do it is through basing the rates in tax brackets on the percentage of wealth controlled by people in those brackets.
It's not a "hard" cap, but it does pit the rich against each other to have more than the other rich assholes while not having so much that they're all paying an above 100% tax rate.
Might not be as delicious as frying them for ourselves, but watching the rich eat each other will be far more entertaining, and is shown to be far more effective. Take it from the once Shah of the Sasanian Empire Kavad, if any one noble is getting too powerful, the best tools to use in bringing them down is other nobles jealous of their ascendency.
Forget not working. It's not even that I want to not work. I just want to not struggle to survive. I don't want to have to work a gruelling 40 hours every goddamn week. I want to have the time to pursue other means of work, to contribute to society as a whole, not just to one, single company! Yeah, being able to have more time off would be great, but I don't want to not work, I want to be able to contribute in my own ways too. And I can't do that when I'm working 40 hours and still living fucking paycheck to paycheck.
I don't mind working when it's either something I enjoy doing and would do without it being a job, or if I can see it tangibly improving something or someone by providing something other people (or myself) need.
If all I see is the boss getting richer while I am doing something I literally would only do because I am being paid to do it,, fuck that job.
Employers steal the entire fruits of your labor as well. The fruits of workers' labor consist of the liabilities for the used-up inputs combined with the property rights to the produced output. Both of these are entirely held by the employer. This assignment violates the ethical principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. You and your fellow workers are jointly de facto responsible for producing the product, but the employer has sole legal responsibility for it @lemmyshitpost
I am just against what they are allowed to do with this money. How many airplanes full with fules can they blow up just for fun? Want to find fastest way to blow it up.
Is it fair that they can ignore the climate impact completely? Just do what ever bad stuff they want to.
I am just saying that they are allowed make very heavy impact to the climate compared a normal person. Just take their jet plan or helicopter wherever they go is allowed.
No they aren't. The number that's increasing is a price tag, not cash. That's why no one's wallet or bank account gets bigger when that same number goes down.
Who do you think the profit of increasing the price tag goes to? The workers in the factory to help them deal with inflation, or the rich shareholders?
You see how that would be bad for the economy, right? Good for individual workers, but bad for consumers since there's no longer a person doing some service, like I don't know, medical care. I fell off the bike in Canada and spent 7 hours covered in blood before a nurse saw me and bandaged me up.
As an American I also had to pay $1000 USD for this (insurance will eventually refund this to me, hopefully)
It's not about paying, my insurance will get me back. It's about the wait time in the emergency room. If you're not dying they never see you until early in the morning
Money is not finite. Quit acting like it is gold bullion. It's not. Whatever amount someone aquires has zero effect on your pile. This argument reeks of grade 2 math.