The poor work in the factories, yet the owners of the factories get paid without having worked.

Smaug is a dragon from The Hobbit who sits on a pile of gold and plunder, not smog.

Hah didn’t even realize my comment could be read that way (yeah I do know who Smaug is)

It's based on the false premise that there is a specific amount of wealth and that's it (which also requires fixed productivity, which is a crazy premise if one knows anything about the past several hundred years or has ever read a single history textbook). So in order for someone to be rich, they had to steal it from someone else.

If you follow it to the logical conclusion, it's nothing more than repackaged original sin. All wealth, all income, is stolen from someone else with less, therefore you are all evil without exception to the extent you have anything. It's a liberal form of original sin (for humans to thrive we must alter our environment, we must save, to the extent you manage to accomplish that, you're evil, therefore you're evil for existing).

Keep in mind of course that China nicely disproved that premise in approximately the most dramatic way possible from ~1990-2020. If the pie were actually finite and had to be divided, swapped around, then China's extreme rise in wealth would have wiped out the equivalent of all of Western Europe's wealth combined.

> It's based on the false premise that there is a specific amount of wealth and that's it

Absolutely not. This is, in today's world, a perpetual cycle. Pay not keeping up with inflation, yet consumer costs across a wide range of vital services keeps increasing. This keeps the poor poor(er) and the rich rich(er).

The western financial system is based not on a finite amount of wealth, but definitely on the control of a finite amount of wealth vehicles. Consider, for example, the desperate measures that the US uses to try to curtail the access to technology by other countries such as China. Or, how the tech cartel uses their money to buy any new company that might become a competitor. In a perfect competitive system, each company and country would do their own work and not worry more than about fair competition. The modern financial system insists in controlling access to wealth across the world, while also avoiding competition.

No, it’s based on the fact that workers (often poor) generate all wealth, yet they don’t get to keep it.

In China they do get to keep more proportionally, as a class. That only happens because they form the ruling class.

And yet workers in those societies tend to end up poorer in the absolute sense. Funny how that works.

If you pay attention to history, they started out far poorer and improved quicker than in comparable countries.

Just because revolutions are more likely to happen in poor countries doesn't mean the revolutions caused the poverty.

That’s fair but I’d like to believe (and I know I’m speaking from emotion here and not any rationality) that the jury is still out on this one, and that improvement is not sustainable over the next few decades (in other words, this was a bubble). The alternative is just too hard to accept - it means we should just elect a dictator for life who knows best how to run a centrally planned economy for a low low price of not making fun of them too much and not asking inconvenient questions.

If you study further you will find out that socialist countries are and have been far more democratic than capitalist ones.

Of course, the ruling class of capitalist countries are incentivised to use their considerable power to lie about any socialist project and portray it as evil.

I grew up in a socialist country and saw how democratic it was first hand. No thanks.

I grew up in a post-socialist country. Most older people had some criticism, but overall missed socialism.

I always found it amazing to hear about workplace councils that could fire the boss or the very low rents.