There's a subset of people that anytime a comparison is made, where one situation is worse than the other, something happens where they become unable to understand the concept of a principle.
It's like you recognize "hey, chattel slavery is worse than wage slavery!" (which is correct), and therefore there can be no principle applicable to both situations (incorrect).
I assume it's that you're offended by the comparison, and the emotion gets the better of you, disallowing you from thinking clearly about it. I don't know what else it would be.
You identified yourself as an advocate for (regulated) capitalism
Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Yes there is more to this, welfare capitalism exists where in exceptional circumstances (e.g food, sometimes basic shelter, etc.) goods are distributed outside of the market system, but it's totally fair to infer that a capitalist would advocate that the market is setting the levels of compensation for the vast majority of professions.
Arguing that these levels of compensation should be agreed upon democratically is an entirely socialist position. This is an advocacy for central, democratic planning that flies in direct opposition to capitalism.
It seems like you're probably a capitalist-realistic (you believe no other economic system is viable), but you recognize the faults of capitalism and are trying to reform essentially every aspect of the economy to be socialist while still keeping some extremely small sliver of bourgeoise so you can call yourself a capitalist and feel like your position is a "realistic" one.
The irony is that keeping this however small and crippled parasitic class of capitalists around is always an existential threat to the working class. They're a group of people whose economic interests are in opposition to our own. We don't need people with different relationships to capital just by a happenstance of birth or luck.
There's a phenomenon in psychology called "crowding out", where extrinsic motivators (e.g money) can destroy intrinsic motivators (e.g passion), because they're more important (you need money to survive, you don't need passion).
The take that communism is bad for incentives and capitalism is good for incentives is far too naive. What capitalism can do effectively is make a large mass of people do a lot of work they don't want to do, and turn work they do want to do into a nightmare, where communism would instead focus on reducing the overall burden of unpleasant work, and find non-market solutions for distributing the unpleasant work.
Automating the bad away then becomes a positive instead of an existential threat to our existence. Many other contradictions of capitalism fall away when we look towards non-capitalists modes of production.
A lot of people frame non-market solutions as "compulsory", and market solutions as "free", even though again that's far too reductive, having the choice between starving and janitorial work isn't really a good faith choice, and yet these are the kinds of choices capitalism uses and calls the epitome of freedom.
Yeah I do, just on the principle that an environment that retaliates against worker solidarity is an oppressive environment.
It's similar to someone saying "can slaves be well taken care of by their owners?" Many people would say yes, but I would say no on principle. No matter how short the work day, no matter the benefits, months off every year, etc. I would say on principle that being owned means you're not well taken care of.
The principle here being that sometimes "one" negative can be enough to mean you're not "well-taken care of".
If you're in an environment that would retaliate against you for unionizing, you're not "well taken care of".
This is the idea of class action lawsuits, a bunch of people who normally can be kicked around by giant corporations, coming together and taking them to court because the corporation abused everyone in the same way.
So the answer here is a strong "maybe".
Do you actually hold this position in all situations? It was illegal to harbor Jewish fugitives in Nazi Germany, should those laws be respected?
When you say "no, of course not", maybe actually consider what your position is before posting. Because nobody's position is to just "respect laws" in all circumstances.
Reddit is an interest of mine, but I have no interest in going to reddit anymore. Is that an unimaginable position for you?
I actually convinced my boss to get us a ping pong table, all I had to do was forego my pay for a year!
Totally worth, since I'm not working for the money, I'm working for the culture (our culture is now a ping pong table). It's so awesome that I can use it during my state-mandated breaks 🙂
You can't tell someone they're being pseudo-scientific and then accuse them of being adversarial as if you're not.
I wasn't using circular reasoning, I was citing data. 90,000 rent controlled housing units in NYC are left vacant (this number has been rising). As we both understand, "individual" (either actually an individual or a corporation) capitalists act in their own best interests. They're not leaving these apartments vacant for years just because they want to fuck over poor people, they're doing it because they make more money off their other supply if these units are kept off the market.
If you don't want to feel like you're spouting alt-right talking points, stop using verbatim the talking points that capitalists use to defend housing scalpers. At best, your entire point is "housing scalpers aren't as big of a deal as this other problem", and at worst you're ignoring the real problem so capitalists can keep exploiting the housing market.
You haven't made a case in favor of housing scalpers, and for good reason, there's literally no case to be made for them. The capitalist position is that scalping houses isn't a big enough problem to have an effect on supply. Even if that were true (which would require 16 million housing units being vacant having no impact on housing supply), it doesn't mean that it couldnt be true in the future. What if the number rose to 30 million vacant units with the same population? Or 100 million? Or a billion? At some point it gets ridiculous. To me that's pretty clearly when you're at "we have 30x as many vacant houses as homeless people", but maybe your tolerance is much higher because homeless people aren't economically valuable to capitalists (except as a reserve army of labor).
@Nevoic
@lemmy.world