Comment on He was no friend to the middle class
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Clearly their problem isn’t with good wages or quality healthcare, it’s the “universal” part they have a problem with. And I don’t think it’s necessarily because they want some people to go without (although that could be the case for at least some of them), it’s just that they realize that for everyone to have enough, they have to have less, and that’s unacceptable to them.
They believe everything is zero-sum, so they have to be getting less of others are getting more.
The reality is that they don’t actually have to have less of these things for everyone to have more. It just has to be done more efficiently, something the current system is terrible at by design so there can be 5 unnecessary middlemen taking their cut.
I think for a lot of those kinds of people it’s pathological. For example, I remember reading in Careless People (a memoir by a former Facebook/Meta employee) about some of the things the author witnessed about Mark Zuckerberg made it seem like he only wanted to do things because no one else could, not because he personally derived any enjoyment out of it. I’ve seen this personally with philanthropists too. They don’t actually like the disadvantaged kids they’re helping (I’m talking literal racists), but they like the idea that they’re the only ones that these kids can turn to. Basically I’m saying I don’t think they believe life is zero-sum, but they have a pathological need to create zero-sum circumstances where they are the “winners” and the rest of us losers.
They believe everything is zero-sum
Well, they’re right about that. The Earth, and all the resources on it, are finite. The more any one person owns, the less everyone else can own. Now, I would agree that the Earth’s resources are abundant, and that there’s more than enough for everyone on Earth (at our current population level, at least) to not only survive but thrive. But, because the Earth’s resources are finite, it’s not possible for any one person to own an infinite amount of resources, let alone for that person to own infinite resources and there still be resources leftover for everyone else.
That’s some flexibility with your boot kissing.
Even though if you didn't tell them about the part they're missing, they wouldn't realize because it's so little of the whole. But they have to have every damn cent they can grab.
SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 1 hour ago
They want to have healthcare tied to your job. It gives the owning class control. In other nations we can change jobs for whatever reason and still get healthcare. If they treat us like shit we can quit and not have to worry about medical bills. People label it as corporate feudalism for a reason.