No matter what the economic system, somehow you need to convince someone to work in the sewer and operate complex orgs of thousands of people.
One option is to use a gun - you point it at people you don’t like and make them sewer workers.
Another is to arbitrarily hire and have no consequences. This leads to incompetence and mismanagement, as often happens in government everywhere and in socialist / communist nations that nationalize industries and staff them with political hires.
In capitalist societies we give more stuff to people who do hard jobs and / or are highly effective. This is the carrot - work a high stress or shitty job and get more stuff. The stick for failure is you get less stuff, but at least you aren’t shot in the head as they do in other systems.
You can argue until you’re blue in the face about neolibs / the rich / whatever. Doesn’t change the fact that inequality is a requirement for society to function if you expect someone to work in shit-filled holes underground all day while others pontificate about philosophy.
I think you realized that you were on shaky ground and stuck "effective" in there, but I'm going to call you on that one: please, explain to me how the strong correlation between shitty jobs and shitty pay is entirely about leveraged value creation and not at all about social status and Rules for Rulers?
Please, if you don’t like America then don’t come here, or if you are here just leave. However a lot of supposed socialist utopias in Europe have effectively zero immigration that allows you to be a full citizen on their pension rolls. Just see how hard it is to immigrate to the Netherlands or Norway.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-wealth-carbon-emissi...
It's not about how they spend money, it's about how they "make" money. It's about their passive income.
The economy is a machine that squeezes workers: it pays as little as possible while extracting as much value as possible. The juice that results from the squeeze then gets distributed according to who owns the financial assets. One person's passive income is another person's obligation to pay up while receiving no actual work in return. The true excess of the rich is the juice from the squeeze -- getting paid for being rich -- not in the particulars of how they spend it.
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Ok, so that framing was hyper aggressive, more than I think is fair, because there is another side to this story: as a consumer, you get to put the squeeze on producers and make them compete, investment carries risk, consumer excess exists too, etc etc. You know the story, you've heard it a hundred times before. However, I'd wager you have heard the "how capitalism works for you" side at least 10x as often as the "how capitalism works against you" side, which should be suspicious, because both are true and both are highly relevant to your life. Also, if you felt that the paragraph above was hyper aggressive, you should also feel that the traditional narrative is hyper aggressive, because they are mirror copies of each other.
This hints at the real issue which is that our policies and culture have been hijacked to aggressively favor capital at every turn. The inevitable result is "the wedge" graph, US economy expands 5x while 80% of people see a regression in wealth. The rising tide does not float all boats. Actually, it sinks most of them. Even the meager promises of the "rising tide" social contract have been broken. It's time to push back.
That won't stop me from trying.
This is certainly what traditional economics says (they consume, rather than invest) because it's what rich people want us to think, but it doesn't hold out.
For one thing, their private jets and charter flights eat up a lot of fuel. Their lifestyles aren't free.
Second, attribution is a hard problem. When all the poor people drive to work in offices in places chosen by rich people, to create surplus value for the rich, who is consuming all that gasoline? Is it the rich, who benefit from this economic system and the poor being forced to participate? Or is the poor, who are the ones directly buying and using the fuel? Hard to say; at the individual level, attribution is probably impossible.
Third, the whole notion of "poors consume; the rich invest" is only true in proportionate terms. Sure, the billionaires don't directly consume 100,000 times as much as average people--simply because that would be ridiculous. No one can eat 100,000 hamburgers for lunch. But they do consume 100-1000 times more than average people--fuel is a big one, and those 20,000-SF houses aren't cheap to maintain--and this adds up. Their footprint on resources is bad enough; their overuse of land is destructive--this kind of private wealth is a catastrophic misallocation of resources.
Finally, what tends to happen with the rich is that they don't put their money into direct consumption (because, again, there's no hedonic payoff to having 100,000 hamburgers for lunch; 99,995+ will go to waste) so much as they use what they have to further secure personal and familial advantages, both economic and political. That's what this investment is: the configuration of society by the last round's winners to ensure they'll win the next round. This has resulted in an economic system that benefits them and keeps the middle classes comfortable enough to survive but--you're right on this--is unsustainable.
You're absolutely correct to say that "hit the rich" is far from sufficient here. We in the middle class are going to need to sacrifice. Thing is, no one's going to sacrifice anything with the current upper class in charge. Would you give up anything for these people and the society they've built? I sure wouldn't. You can't ask people in the middle classes to eat less meat and fly less often if you're taking a private jet to Davos. Neoliberalism has a lot of problems, but a big one is that these WEF people have literally none of the moral authority on which they seem to believe they operate.