[ ID: The irony of accusing socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that capitalism lives on free stuff: labour, nature, the work of social reproduction.

Capital exists because something is unpaid: if capital ever paid a worker the whole value of their work, it would cease to exist.

@bentarnoff

/end ID ]

ALT

-via @phantomrose96

This exactly.

Even if you currently have 0 savings. You have much more in common with an old man who is 1 health emergency away from wiping his retirement funds, than he does with any billionaire.

I mean what's not clicking?

UBI IS PROVEN TO INCREASE AUTONOMY.

leaving aside all of the hollow "freedom" rhetoric, the us is largely a nation that does not value increasing its members' autonomy.

(unless of course they happen to be christian straight cis perisex old hot tall white rich men. in that rare case we'll literally fucking kill people to protect their autonomy.)

as long as usian leaders are permitted to keep lying about autonomy, ubi will never get any traction here whatsoever.

This is the big unstated reason why UBI keeps getting sabotaged. Business leaders know that as soon as workers will realize they have options besides show up to the 9-5 because We AlL hAvE tO Be In ThE OfFiCe (or because it’s unremote-able like fast food), they’ll experience such a crisis of labor that even temporary foreign workers can’t and won’t plug the gap.

They’ll have to actually adjust working conditions to be beneficial to workers and CEOs all hate this simple trick.

Almost a decade later, I think this can be fairly said to be true for Generation Z as well. Keep up the good work and be wise anti-consumers.

Hello I am crawling out of the woodwork again to explain an American political thing in too much detail.

So. Basics. What is a tariff? In short it’s a tax that people pay when they import things.

In long, imagine you want a thing. Say, a really nice baseball bat. You want to buy it from a company that makes them in, let’s say, Japan. You’d likely buy them from a store in the US that bought that baseball bat from the Japanese manufacturer.

Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that the store bought it for $50 and they charge you $100 for it. This margin is enough for the baseball supply store to pay their employees, pay their rent, buy more stock, buy some advertising, etc.

Now imagine the government decides that Americans aren’t buying enough baseball bats locally. Or perhaps they have some sort of issue with Japanese baseball. I dunno. For whatever reason though they put a 20% import tax, known as a tariff, on Japanese baseball products.

Now that store in the US in addition to paying $50 to the manufacturer in Japan is also paying $10 in tax to the US government. That baseball bat now essentially costs them $60. And since they need more money to buy stock now and they needed that markup to run their business anyways your $100 Japanese baseball bat will now cost you $120.

In an ideal world (if you like tariffs) this would cause only the targeted product to cost more while locally manufactured goods cost the same. So maybe you’d be encouraged to buy an American made baseball bat because those still only cost $100 while imported ones now cost $20 more.

In the past and in our modern day Congress, and in some circumstances where Congress has allowed it, the president have put tariffs on specific products do discourage people from importing them or buying them. For example, during the Biden administration they determined that Chinese electric cars, with their incredibly cheap cost, could become a real threat to the American automotive industry so a 100% tariff was put on Chinese made electric vehicles which made them way more expensive. This tariff has worked. People don’t really import Chinese electric vehicles and generally buy American or European ones instead.

So in short again, it’s a tax that a business pays on imported goods to discourage people from buying those goods because the business will be forced to charge their customers more to buy it in order to cover their own costs.

So what’s going on with tariffs right now?

Well, most people don’t know what tariffs are exactly. A lot of people are also rightfully pissed that the US doesn’t have a lot of good jobs right now. I mean there’s jobs, but not very good ones. Not ones that’ll give you a nice quality of life and a comfortable retirement.

During the time when there were a lot of jobs like this in the 40s-60s, the US was a manufacturing hub. After the labor movement, working in a factory could give you a stable working class job with benefits. It might not have been a high paying job, but it was enough for a family to live on one income in a small house or apartment and to have healthcare and an okay retirement.

After the 1970s however, manufacturing started moving overseas to countries where the cost of living is lower and/or they have less workers rights like in China or Vietnam. Right after this was also the era of Reagan. Deregulation of banks and the media, cutting government services, anti-union activism. This set the stage for the 2008 recession and the current economy we have now in the US where more people are contractors, there’s less unions, more service jobs, and in many cases it’s nearly impossible to have a decent living and retirement on one income.

Many people in the US, especially in areas where manufacturing used to be huge, have a cultural memory of when life was better but instead of contributing this to government policy and corporate anti-union efforts, they contribute this to the loss of manufacturing jobs.

In fact, unemployment is fairly low right now. The problem is that jobs that are available don’t pay people enough or aren’t full time. I’m technically not unemployed for example because I occasionally get contracted by disabled relatives to do chores and errands for them through a state agency that provides those services but I still make less than $400 a month doing that. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not enough to pay rent and a lot of people in this country are in similar situations.

A lot of people don’t know all that though. They think that the problem is manufacturing leaving the US for foreign countries they don’t know much about and might not have a very good opinion of.

So, enter Donald Trump. Again.

What Donald Trump has been doing is blaming other countries for our economic problems. He points out that the US imports more than it exports. Which is true, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t have every natural resource in the world. Our climate means we can’t grow certain things. Our manufacturing capacity is lower than it used to be. We produce oil but not every part of the country is in a convenient spot to get that oil to so in some regions it makes more sense to import it by sea. Also, international trade isn’t supposed to be a 1:1 exchange. It’s business. It’s an ecosystem. Not some sort of debt based system.

However, again, most people don’t know all that. So some of them hear Donald Trump say that these countries owe us for having a trade deficit. They stole our manufacturing jobs. The kind of jobs we had when living was easier. If we could bring manufacturing back to the US we could be prosperous again.

He also calls tariffs “taxing the other countries” which is just… a lie. That’s not what tariffs are. Tariffs are a tax on local businesses importing things, not foreign businesses making those things. Again though, most people don’t know this.

So the general idea with his tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the US. Which isn’t going to happen.

Here’s the thing. Let’s return to that baseball bat. Okay, your imported baseball bat from Japan is $120 now. Will that American made baseball bat actually be cheaper? No, actually. Because we live in a globalized economy. That baseball bat factory in the US buys its wood from Canada. It buys its beeswax wood polish from a manufacturer in the UK. It buys the stamps for its logo from a factory in Vietnam and the paint used on that stamp was made in Germany. The machines themselves that they use to shape their baseball bats have parts that were made in several countries from materials imported from other countries. The manufacturer has to pay a tariff on all of those things. So, your American baseball bat also ends up costing $120.

Not to mention that we simply don’t have the manufacturing capacity that we used to and it takes years to set up the supply chains and build the facilities necessary to build things at scale.

And even with tariffs in place, it’s still cheaper to manufacture a lot of things overseas because of the low cost of living in those countries. So those jobs just aren’t coming back. Also, a lot of those jobs that used to exist have been automated. A massive large scale brewery and canning facility for example no longer requires you to have people to manually stir the vats and count things and stamp labels. You might only need three guys monitoring data on screens and a manager to run an entire factory these days because of automation.

So, Trump has started putting tariffs in place hoping it’ll bring back manufacturing (it won’t) and it’s bringing up prices which he also said he’d bring down.

Here’s the other thing though. Some manufacturing and resource mining could potentially come back to the US. Not most, but some. If these tariffs were a sure thing it would still ruin us for no reason but people could adjust to the new terrible normal over time and some investors could bring back some manufacturing and resource processing and over time a few things would get a bit less expensive.

However, these tariffs have proved to be WILDLY unpopular once people actually realized what they were. Especially since he decided to tariff Canada and Mexico which… makes no goddamn sense. They’re our neighbors, a couple of our closest friends, the countries we trade with the most, where we get a lot of our food and natural resources, and there’s a trade deal that Trump himself negotiated in his last term that says there can’t be tariffs between our three countries.

So he keeps taking them away, putting them back, putting them on pause, putting them back. Saying they’ll be 10%, saying they’ll be 20%, putting a 125% tariff on China, lowering it, raising it again. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on so why would investors put all that time and money in to setting up factories and processing plants in the US if they don’t know what tariffs might or might not be in place tomorrow?

Also. The president legally can’t do that. Congress hasn’t officially given him the authority to do that. In fact, they’ve already blocked him from putting tariffs on Canada and various people are taking him to court over it.

Also also, most economists agree that tariffs are generally a bad thing and they usually don’t work anyways unless they’re specific and targeted like the Chinese electric car thing I mentioned earlier.

So tariffs don’t bring back manufacturing jobs, they bring prices up, the way they’re being implemented is really unstable in a way that makes them hard to recover from, and Trump legally can’t be doing that anyways.

So in short, your coffee and baseball bats and everything else is gonna be more expensive if they end up sticking around or maybe not if they don’t go into effect but either way this has done some mega damage to the economy.

And this is also why boomers in the USA who idealize the 1950s and 1960s have no idea why the era (at least for white middle class people, which was expanding at the time) was so beneficial. It wasn’t because of individualistic Protestant hard work as a virtue.

It was because, at root, the government’s fiscal and monetary policies favored labor over capital, and this showed in the plunging of economic inequality through those years, which helped middle-class (and even working-class) Americans begin building meaningful generational wealth in mass numbers.

Other factors arguably played a role, such as the overall worldwide postwar expansion from a very deep trough (which was why GDP growth of 4% per year or more became thought of as the norm rather than an accelerated reversion to the mean of 2% per year) and the general Western solidarity against Soviet communism, as well as the societal consensus of ignoring inconvenient counternarratives such as women whose lives were made to revolve around their husbands, or people of color, whose lives weren’t considered important enough to meaningfully portray in popular media.

But one of the major factors was the visible hand of the welfare state which became so effective that those ssme boomers forgot why it was necessary by the 1970s - and it did not help that right-wing politicians, who had never liked the welfare state anyway, explicitly called on racist narratives to make white voters complicit in worsening their own quality of life, because the same lack of strong workplace protections or social benefits hurt them too, not just the black people they gleefully intended to hurt.

And here's that investment calculator so you can play around with numbers yourself.

Here's a debt repayment calculator you can check out if you want to see the flip side of this equation.

Also here's what happens if you were able to put all those contributions in at the start and never added to it after the fact:

That's why you want to throw as much money as you can in as early as you can. It's unfortunate that young people tend to A) not know much about investment and B) not have much money to throw at it because if you can start with a lot young, you can end up with a LOT more in the end; this is why if you end up with a windfall you want to make sure that it ends up working for you instead of getting stuck in a checking or savings account; if you happen to fall into a lot of money you should either use it to pay off debts with high interest rates or put it in a relatively stable investment with a high yield.

The terms you want to learn more about are 401K, Roth IRA, High Yield Savings Account, and Index Fund.

The thing about these kinds of investments is that even if you can't keep adding to them, they keep growing. Retirement investment accounts are generally extremely stable investments, and in an HYSA there is extremely minimal risk of losing money. Put in money when you can and it will keep growing even when you can't add more to the pot.

A lot of young broke people think that they can only start saving or investing if they've got a chunk of money to start an investment account, but there are options out there that will let you start a high yield savings account with no minimum balance.

Have politicians and oligarchs always been this fucking pathetic, or is this new? It's hard to take evil people seriously when they act like this, and I'm 99% sure that's why they do it. It's performative, it gives them plausible deniability, "they're not evil, they're just stupid." They're underestimated and downplayed, just another distraction.

You know? Maybe they're not innately evil and are "just" stupid, but there comes a point at which willful refusal to learn and active choices to cling to decisions and mindsets that hurt and exploit and kill people for personal gain becomes indistinguishable. You can be stupid AND evil, even if there's no such thing as a magical gene that makes people automatically invariably evil.

Obscene wealth, on the other hand, doesn't 100% invariably guarantee being heartlessly cruel but the odds are extremely high.

And the odds of any person who continues to live ever finally having something get through to them enough to start learning better and improving on any issue are never technically zero... but the odds for the richest tyrants are astronomically slim for every individual issue and inconceivably near-zero to come around on every big thing. The cost in lives and livelihood is of far bigger and more immediate concern than the fact that any one tyrant "could" theoretically learn better someday.

There are hypothetical timelines where any of these bastards never became evil, but we don't live in those timelines. There are hypothetical futures where any of them have such profoundly life-changing experiences that they turn around and start pouring out the hoarded wealth to try to make amends, but we can worry about those futures if we ever see one.

"No one is inherently immutably evil" and "there are people who by all metrics are still evil right here and now" are coexisting statements. And when faced with people who want you or your friends and neighbors dead, whether or not they have the technical capacity to not want people dead is frankly fucking irrelevant.

This is a really good post, but I just want to add that, economically speaking, exploitation is not about a specific number.

it's an important observation that someone making $200k a year is still far and away from the actual ultrawealthy. But where's the line, who gets to draw the line, and what does the distinction represent? Especially across countries and cultures, where that line will tend to vary wildly! That's a really reasonable question, and there's a good answer.

This was Karl Marx's central work, basically. He wrote Das Kapital setting out to explain some recurring features of capitalism as the system was growing, developing, and taking over the world: that it tended to accumulate wealth at the very top, that it tended to have a major crash every ten or so years, and some other features.

What he was able to show - and that was pretty definitively accepted by other even pro-capitalist economists at the time - is that capitalism is exploitative in an economic sense, meaning that an 'owner' of a business made money off of someone else doing work.

For example, I worked for a guy named Gary who owned a pizza shop. I was paid $14 an hour, but each pizza cost $8 plus tax. I would make between 20 and 50 pizzas in an hour, depending on the time of day, so across my four-hour shift I made $56 (before tax lol), but I made the business $160-$400. Some of that money after I'm paid goes to buying more ingredients, some of it goes to pay off the building's rent, but everything else went to Gary, who did nothing except steal from our tip jar.

Gary probably made somewhere to the tune of $150-$200k a year, off of me and my high school coworkers slinging pizzas all day next to an 800-degree oven.

In contrast, a dude I knew named Nick made between $150-200k every year as an ironworker and dockworker. He was paid well, but he wasn't taking from anyone else's livelihood - in fact, he still made more money for the construction company than he took home.

Gary was, in an economic sense, exploitive. Nick wasn't. And Gary is who socialists have a problem with. This is the distinction between "working class" and "owning class", not a number. And it's an issue not just because it's frankly an antisocial, cruel way to organize society, but because it actually causes crises.

This was another thing Marx figured out. The reason that capitalism tended to crash, over and over, was because of the accumulation of wealth. With successful businesses under capitalism, Gary keeps making more and more money -- I and my coworkers keep making $14/hour or only marginally more. Eventually, that means I cannot buy a pizza at the place I work, or much of anything else for that matter. When that happens, people stop buying what they used to, profits crash, and capitalism has a crisis.

Understanding this is what class consciousness is. Your class is not the number on your paycheck, it's whether or not someone is taking part of your paycheck from you, or you're taking from someone else's labor. It's applicable in America where you're talking about median incomes in the tens of thousands of dollars versus billionaires, it's applicable in countries where people are living on just a few dollars a day; the system that oppresses us is international and revolutions have to target the real exploiters, or risk failing to transform society into something better.

I’ve heard truckers can still make good money, but it tends to be a lot more luck of the draw these days. I’ve watched some Youtube videos by truckers and one of them has vlogged semi regularly about the issues facing the industry; one of them is the semi-endemic presence of organized crime of which a component is insurance fraud relating to “disappearing” loads. (and yes, there is more to it than just that but ANYWAY)

Due to this and a host of other reasons, there’s a tendency for trucking companies to find lots of ways to cheat and chisel their drivers. One common method is to take advantage of the fact that drivers are usually independent contractors, or if they’re paid employees, certain terms in their employment agreements.

As just one example, suppose you’re fed up and you want to quit your job. You park your truck at a Love’s somewhere, take the keys, call in and say “bye I’m done, I’ll drop the keys at head office”. (Or, if you own the truck, you drop the trailer and drive off with the truck)

Well, that usually means kissing your last paycheck goodbye, because they’ll confiscate it and apply it to the charges they’ll (semi legitimately) rack up dealing with the aftermath. Yes, that is probably illegal. No, you probably will not get the money until a year or two later after dealing with at least one State Dept of Labor - assuming you were a paid employee and not a contractor. And good luck if you’re a contractor - are you gonna sue for what amounts to around $2000 most of which will get eaten up in lawyer fees and court costs?

And things like this go on throughout the industry: truckers get shorted on the miles they drive or the hours they log, they get promised high value loads and then somehow get ‘accidentally switched’ at the last minute to hauling a bottom-dollar trailer in a congested part of the state/city, or … well, you can paint the picture yourself if you watch a few trucker videos on YouTube.

(The moral of the story is people telling you to watch out for yourself and be loyal to yourself are not wrong, as depressing as that is; if you’re a trucker and you’re thinking about quitting, do it the smart way: dead-head back to the head office, clean out your truck (if you don’t own it) and your locker (if there is one at head office) and then resign. That way they can’t try to pin the cost of getting a driver out to pick up your truck - if you don’t own it - at whereever you left i - or ditto for the trailer.)

(Disclaimer: I am not a trucker, but I dived down a rabbit hole of trucker vlogs a while back and got an interesting insight into the industry, especially from younger people breaking into the field)

I was fully on board with this post until the last word, which makes me want to add an observation.

The language of economics and the insistence that that be what is used first and foremost to define, describe, predict, and assess most elements of public and societal life is a major part of how the idea that this is the only way for things to be is propagated and enforced.

For that reason, while I generally agree with the point, I do think there is some value to be found in refusing to understand economics.

Being able to talk like an economist is valuable, though.

As a basic primer, I suggest reading books by Paul Krugman and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Start out with The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Krugman and then go to the Affluent Society and A Short History of Financial Euphoria by Galbraith.

Pick and choose from there.

As an aside, it is also useful to consider that if a system delivers repeatable results that are contrary to its stated intention, its true intention is different.