Comment on It's been downhill since 2020
hector@lemmy.today 6 days agoWhat we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it’s what they’re doing now). They’re not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
hector@lemmy.today 6 days ago
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It’s not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are ‘real’ and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. ‘Money’ and ‘inflation’ are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we’re being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn’t really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
hector@lemmy.today 6 days ago
You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.