Now I need to do the math on space karen/ henery ford 2.0 aka Mr my autism makes me prone to outbursts of fascist apologia.
I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.
He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
he’s not liquid
Who gives a fuck? Wealth is wealth and his equity is his security for the low to zero interest loans from where all his spending money comes.
None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have
Again, yes they do. Illiquid wealth is still wealth and is the basis of rich people getting to spend as much as they want with little to no risk compared to people who DON’T have a dragon’s hoard in stock for the above infinite money exploit to work.
This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho
Nah, when people say that workers should own the means of production, they’re talking about ACTUAL ownership, not bonuses from the owner.
No, they’re saying they should own the means of production. Which in the modern context means equity in the company. All 876,000 employees could be given a 105,000 bonus in terms of stock and then they’d own Amazon equity, done
So THAT’S where you want the goal posts now?
Equity isn’t the means of production. The means of production are what produce the products and services, not what produces the capital. What you’re talking is the means of profiting.
If you were talking about a financial company where wealth for the sake of wealth IS the only product, you’d be right, but Amazon isn’t that.
Except that shareholders vote on the board of directors, who make decisions like hiring and firimg the CEO, executive compensation, and overruling executive decisions. It’s two levels of indirection, but in the end the shareholders DO control the means of production.
There are exceptions to this when thete are multiple classes of shares - one voting and one nonvoting for example. This doesn’t apply in Amazon’s case that I can see.
There are no goal posts here. The workers can’t own the machinery in modern times because American companies rarely manufacture anything so they they own stock. Instead of jeff bezos and a small handful of executives (plus uninvolved “shareholders”) owning the bulk of the amazon the workers own the company. I don’t get why this is hard for you to understand and why you are making strange semantics arguments to defend the right of billionaires owning an obscene amount of wealth.
I don’t get why this is hard for you to understand
I understand perfectly fine, I’m just pointing out the fact that you’re wrong when conflating the means of PRODUCTION with the methods of wealth accumulation in a company that actually produces nonfinancial goods and services.
to defend the right of billionaires owning an obscene amount of wealth.
I would never do any such thing. Billionaires shouldn’t exist and in fact neither should the stock market.
You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.
The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they’re the default web shopping platform.
Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026
Will that keep them from parking like assholes?
I like the energy, but you’re not going to sell 92 Billion dollars worth of stocks for 92 Billion dollars.
He could just hand over the stocks.
though they would drop in value very fast thereafter, no? My naive understanding is that a good share of people would sell them immediately, causing a price crash.
Around 25% would have to sell over 50% of their stocks for it to maybe start having an effect.
It could also raise the value of the stock to free up so much stock from a single person to many, as selling it would mean stronger belief in the stock going up.
Stock market is part math, part religion really.
Also companies do “stock options with limitations on selling for a certain period” all the time.
This is a good point. Ty
That level of sales sounds really realistic to me, most employees are not doing well and experiments in employee ownership generally see people selling that ownership fast without training (at least I’m told). I don’t follow your bit about sales -> stock go up, my best guess is you’re saying that this will crash the price artificially causing people to think now is a good time to buy?
But if you buy too much you’ll be in a position like bezos, likely to get redistributed? I think we’d need a lot of different people with the liquidity?
Yeah, it could end up in the hands of a couple rich again.
But it could also send up like the GameStop situation.
It could also increase demand by wealthy investors to buy they stock which would also raise the price.
Whenever you think the stock market follows logic, just remember how much Tesla is worth despite not selling nearly enough for that valuation.
Then the stocks shouldn’t be worth that much and the man shouldn’t be able to spend like he has $92 billion
Stocks aren’t the exception, if a massive amount of USD holdings were sold off it would also plummet in value.
Its basic Supply and Demand.
Usd has plummeted in value though and those in control of the economic system have manipulated it to hide this reality. For instance Inflation statistics are calculated by the world bank and IMF using Consumer price index which is extremely flawed mostly because CPI does not account for the 2 primary driving forces of inflation… the increase in circulating currency supply and leveraged national debt. So they are feeding us highly skewed inflation numbers to prevent the workers from rioting/ fomenting a revolution so their passive income faucet keeps flowing.
Saying that “It Doesn’t Work that way” is just highlighting the reality that the entire system is rigged and set up to benefit those in control over those doing the actual labor and creating the profit
This might seem like an odd question, but whats your opinion of NATO?
If the only way you can argue against their point is if they have a specific opinion about NATO then you’ve already conceded the point to anyone who doesn’t have that opinion on NATO.
If not, then it’s weird to ask a non sequiter about NATO without any other argument.
Thats why I said it might seem like an odd question, chill lol
Lol I understand why you might read it as unchill because of how it calls you out but it really isn’t.
And then the State Department starts flooding Amazon warehouses with drugs and guns to ruin the co-op and make people nostalgic for the good ol days when the Bezos junta was around to control the gangs.
Or we could just end the prohibition of drugs because it does nothing beneficial for society and destroy the black market instead of doing bullshit like “decriminalizing” which doesn’t do any good because the black market still flourishes
I’m sorry, do you think that would stop the State Department from giving all of their children fentanyl?
Besides, there’s always going to be a black market unless you want the drug trade totally unregulated. No drug standards, no age limits, no quality control, just a wild West free for all.
You’re talking about a gray market, like in legal cannabis states where prices are still high and there are ridiculous barriers preventing those who were growing cannabis illegaly before “legalization”(or rather prohibition 2.0) from entering the industry so they sell at a lower price and undercut the market. But these people are not multi million dollar cartels and in 97 cases out of 100 cartels have already moved out of the cannabis trade or they have taken steps to enter the legal trade. Im talking about a commercial environment where violence is not needed to protect the producer and their profits, the main idea behind prohibition is this enforcing of abstinence only moral Puritanism built on religious fundamentalism and racism/ white supremacy. There is definitely a way to undercut the entire black market but it is almost impossible within a capitalistic economy the leas regulated the more unfeasible it is.
Won’t the US just declare you a narco-state and sanctions you to death?
Some people who don’t know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he’s being justly rewarded by the free market.
But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it’s competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it’s prices, systematically targeting it’s rivals and taking them over.
Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.
So turn it into a co-op, let it’s workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it’s sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.
This particular case would be great! But yeah, but give out all the billionaire money and money wouldn’t be money.
Dad: “Money’s valuable because it’s hard to get. If everybody had it, it wouldn’t be money.”
Friend argued with me in the 90s about the feds shredding worn bills.
“They could give those millions to people like us!”
Well, yeah, and they could give every American a million bucks. Want that?
“Fuck yeah!”
I mow lawns for $20 a pop. If I had a million I’d want at least $20,000.
“Yeah, but a meal at McDonald’s would still be $5! We could eat like kings!”
Tax the fucking snot of out 'em, but these dreams of spreading the wealth like peanut butter are childish.
Your Dad in particular is a moron.
Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.
Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.
Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.
Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.
…
If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess…
Then the world’s last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type… would be immensely valuable, universally.
A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.
…
I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.
That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.
Your Dad on the other hand … seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.
…
Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies… and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.
We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.
What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.
The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.
They want to be better than everyone else.
Not just ‘better off’.
They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains… because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.
They want the power differential.
…
Billionaires do not need their excess money.
It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).
After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.
We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.
I love how hard this comment goes
I am, among other things, an econometrician.
Fucking with the money is one thing.
Fucking up the concept of what money is… is another thing.
Easily triggered? Yeah, dad’s point was, more to the point, “if everyone had a bunch of money”, which was kinda the theme of my post. And I gather you understand inflation quite well. Would have hoped you could tease the theme from a couple of sentences.
This fucking place. Everyone ready to go off on the “bad guys”. No wonder it’s the worst echo chamber I’ve ever participated in.
Easily triggered?
Yes, you apparently are.
Yeah, dad’s point was, more to the point, “if everyone had a bunch of money”
I mean, please refer to my comment that has triggered you to see an explanation as to how a far too lopsided distribution of wealth actually affects a society.
Inflation, price level rises, don’t just… happen perfectly evenly across all elements of the economy at exactly the same time, to exactly the same degree.
Broadly speaking, those closest to the recieving end of the proverbial money spigot, well they get to spend or invest that money first, and then the rising price levels slowly trickle down, spread out to other segments of the economy.
Basically, bubbles start to form in usually specific economic/market sectors or segments, and then those effects spread, complexify, compound through the whole system, if not well counteracted by very effective and hands on monetary and fiscal policy.
…
You don’t seem to get the idea of variable velocities of money, and how they work in a debt based, fractional reserve monetary system.
It is actually private banks that mechanistically do the vast amount of ‘inflation’, ie, multiplying of money.
Roughly, ever 1 dollar that gets deposited into a bank becomes 10 dollars, through being loaned out to other people and banks, which are then loaned out again, and again, etc.
But, different sectors of the economy have different multiplying factors, different velocities at which those multiplying factors occur.
You can say, print a fuckton of money and throw it at CDO holding banks to prop them up from going bankrupt.
(Basically the 06-08 GFC)
This is a huge amount of low velocity money, its not moving anywhere, its there to shore up failing assets.
Or, you could print the same amount of money, but distribute it in small amounts directly to the broad populace, who will then basically immediately spend it or deposit it, the velocity and multiplication factor of that money will be much, much greater than the former scenario.
(Roughly, Covid Era Stimulus Checks)
Or or, you can achieve something similar in terms of stimulate the ground level economy by taxing the wealthy and giving to the poor, which in net takes slow, low velocity money, and makes it fast, high velocity, without ‘printing’ any new money.
…
This is all actually a lot more complicated than you seem to think it is.
I don’t know that you are a ‘bad guy’, but I do know that you are an overconfident and misinformed guy, who is flailing when their innacurate, vague aphorism is actually fully explored.
Sorry you don’t like being held to an academic level of rigor and scrutiny?
That’s impossible. Because a bonus that much would mean there would be a lot of taxes paid, and that goes against Bezos his principles.
