Those things were created by working people, most of whom are not wealthy.

Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up the salary of the leader of the company that made it.

Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

People of my opinion/disposition already know that CEOs make too much. You don’t have to indirectly tell me.

You wouldn't have those items without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

> You wouldn't have those items without that compensation.

Asserted without evidence.

Traumatic? What are you talking about?

And it’s easy to argue (EDIT: more like assert without evidence) that cherry-picked aspects of the status quo for the last forty years is the linchpin of everything.

CEO pay in America was forced to be made transparent by Congressional law.

Shortly thereafter CEO pay started to skyrocket. There's no evidence CEOs started doing a 10x better job running companies but their pay sure as heck increased, 10x then 100x!

Countless studies have shown that workers are not motivated by money beyond around low six figures.

There is no reason to suspect a CEO earning $100 million is 100 times more dedicated to the job than one earning $1 million dollars.

> You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr googles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

God, don't threaten me with a good time.

And yet, all of those examples are critically dependent on huge pieces of infrastructure created and distributed for free by people motivated simply by craftsmanship - Linux, the BSD kernels and many other similar things.

These two ideas are not in conflict. You can create something and give it away free, or you can ask money. Many SWEs do both - eg. open-source for fun, proprietary at work.

> You wouldn't have that item without that compensation.

You are swapping cause and effect. First comes the item, then the compensation.

You're giving a preposterous amount of credit to executives for the value that is mostly being created by the lower level workers. So, if every CxO-level leader in the world disappeared tomorrow (or if their compensations simply got capped arbitrarily), nothing would get built ever again?

Well, if every CxO-level leader disappeared how are decisions made? By popular vote?

Successful companies are mostly that due to having made the right business decisions, these come mostly top down. You can have a million workers, but if they don't have great leadership they'll produce basically nothing of great value.

What are you talking about? Let's have every worker stop doing their jobs. I'm sure those company leaders will continue to produce great products on their own.

Organized by an employer, capital, and management. The orchestration, decision making, done well, is the difference between a highly valuable well functioning company, and dysfunctional paralysis. There are now multiple examples in history (pre-1989 Poland, Soviet Union, DPRK, etc.) that show the communal ownership of industry by labor does not create a high standard of living, enabled by plentiful goods, services, and innovation.

At what point was labor communally owning industry in the Soviet Union or DPRK? Did Stalin or Kim ever ask a laborer for their opinion on how a factory should be run? Or give them a penny of the work they were doing?

The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show country despite being "democratic"?

The problem with collectivism is less with collectivism as platonic ideal (which has a lot of romantic appeal), and more with the inevitable concentration of power it requires and thereby enables.

The reason there has been no successful implementation of it is that the process of enacting it is inherently fragile. And some bastard is going to exploit that fragility.

Then you're screwed and we end up with the bountiful historical examples that people love to cite & then others refute as "that's not real xyz-ism".

You're absolutely correct that they're not "real" xyz-ism. And that should make you very worried about supporting something that has the same or similar end goals as those initiatives once had.

We have little to no idea if this is indeed inevitable. The same kind of arguments could have been made, and were in fact made, about democracy and capitalism before the American and French revolutions. And some attempts at democratic revolutions have indeed fallen into authoritarian rule - Cromwell's being one of the most well known.

Socialism is nothing more than extending democracy beyond the state to the workplace. It is no more collectivist than democracy is in any other economic system. And like any other form of democracy, it is naturally opposed to authoritarian rule, not conducive to it.

As such, the problem with socialism is not at all that it's easy for it to fall into dictatorship. The problem is that it is hard to convince the rich to allow it to form without aggression, since it necessitates them losing much of their power. The same problem that democracy faced: kings rarely step down, and bloody revolutions are typically worse than the status quo (and you can never be sure what will happen after one).

Establishing democracy is indeed also a fragile process, but one that has numerous successful implementations (~140 democracies in the world?).

Social democracy has numerous successful implementations (eg Scandinavia).

But the more “hardcore” collectivist -isms have from what I can recall basically zero successes, despite numerous attempts.

Exactly this

This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding

Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part.

That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death.

That’s what happens when both sides are spinning the same propaganda.

BTW I’m equally not a fan of Marxist material dialectic as I am the trotsy-lenin unholiness or the American oligopolies.

We need a true state-free attempt at anarcho socialism but that’s nearly impossible as such a concept fundamentally threatens the basic structure of the modern state.

While I am sympathetic to the idea that we need to burn e everything down, baby steps, first. If we're talking halfway realistic changes, let's get stuff like this wealth limit in place first, and once those been established for a while, we may have a better picture of the ideal state.

I can understand how you can assume catastrophic intent on my part however, that’s not the case.

In no revolution are the poorest and weakest persons ever benefited it’s only typically been to the benefit of some small group they just recycles hands so in fact, the last thing I want is some kind of hard break.

No, I’m an anarcho syndicalist. Which is a gradual reappropriation of the means to worker collectives slowly and peacefully.

Sorry for the mischaracterization. Your position sounds interesting. When it comes to how the means of production should be structured, I envision a microkernel kind of model: enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever, and let the dice fall where they may. If it's worker collectives that result as the optimum, so be it.

No worries, most people see “anarchist” and think violence because propaganda works unfortunately. Anyway…

“enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever“

This assumes a lot about the foundational structure of the environment these agents are operating within

Unless you address who reaps the benefits of commerce then its just the same situation with slightly different tyrants

What you describe is precisely the structure of what exists now - but you’re not satisfied with the rates

> Unless you address who reaps the benefits of commerce then its just the same situation with slightly different tyrants

That's something I hadn't thought of before. I suppose the part of the solution that addresses that would go hand-in-hand with TFA?

That’s the core conceit of anarcho syndicalism - to own the fruits of your own labor amd it not be intermediated or alienated by anything which reappropriates the capture of value.

So for example, if I own a table saw and my neighbor doesn’t and needed one for his labor, anarcho-syndicalism would suggest that if my saw was not planning to be used for a day, and he uses it for a day of creation, then the neighbor owns 100% of the resulting value. Much like if you rented a tool from Home Depot.

That makes sense and there’s no reason to believe that simply because I own a fallow tool, would benefit even equally from the labor.

Now look at how companies are created they are created in such a way that 100% of the value is retained by the organization and labor does not get to set its own rate. It Hass to simply be responsive to the rate offered by the organization decoupled from an alienated from, the labor that I’m inputting into it.

This isn’t accidental it’s a type of accounting that assumes labor inputs are not valued based on the productivity outcome they are simply, and only based on the relative bargaining power of the respective organizations.

This is why you see corporations, so aggressively fight the concept of collective bargaining because it creates the power dynamic that is actually appropriate for equitable relief, but reduces the amount that the more powerful organization can determine the relationship between the less powerful individual.

So anarcho-syndicalism is really about ensuring the individual worker cannot be put into a position of deprivation or suffering such that they have so little relative bargaining power in labor production that they can only choose between oppressive tyrants.

The key fallacy that people love here is that it’s all about relative deprivation so people have exceptionally varied views on what is considered oppressive or what a lifestyle would look like that is, let’s say inequitable.

Often times and you’ll see in many threads is the argument that “Actually we’re objectively more comfortable and well off that really, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything because you’re not starving to death”

The problem here is that it’s a completely separate argument than the argument for long term concentration of power, and who is actually controlling the economy, and has the ability to be flexible and create a life free of intermediaries that are confiscating your labor.

It all comes back to who has the power to set their own destiny in the economy, and the reality is, it’s always been small groups of exploiters who are able to do whatever they want to do because they’re taking advantage of the relative deprivation around them to not make things actively better for everybody. The people in situations like this, take no responsibility for their surroundings, their community their environment, they simply say how do I take advantage of this environment to my own best ends, and if that is the foundational conceit of a society, then you will not have a society that long and history tells us that society is built on this go through this political cycle, which so far has been basically every society in recorded history, unfortunately.

Anyway, there’s a lot of Intersectionality here with, for example, global finance, how this got really amplified after Bretton Woods two and the kind of fiatization, and then financialation of all possible value so there’s a giant kind of systematic thing here that is encoded in a lot of these as foundational assumptions in western capitalist economics.

East Germany, North Korea, and the USSR are wonderful examples of how this idiotic idea fares in real life.

Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.

I mean the value leeches are also present.

No, people don't know this. The degree of economic and historical naiveté has really skyrocketed in recent decades.

"Let's just try a planned society one more time, THIS time will be different, look how nice and kind we are!" is a perfectly reasonable statement to many educated people today.

It's really an indictment of the education system.

The reality is, we are planning our current society. It's just wrapped up in "markets are the natural order" rhetoric to obfuscate the fact that our current outcomes are intended.

Which outcomes in particular are you referring to? Wealth inequality? Because I don't think that's what the parent comment meant.

I'm aware; I just disagree with the premise.

In my Former Soviet Country, this is a fairly common thing that (sensible) older generation intellectuals remind to Gen Y/Gen Z lefties. There was a short period of "dude, communism is quite hip" in some circles roughly a decade ago, but this seemed more like an overblown, cynical nostalgic game, because we still have Soviet era artifacts lying around everywhere.

As of today, I think Russia's idiotic invasion to Ukraine has destroyed those mind-games of a functioning society with very strong central planning. Even if it might truly include thoughtful, interesting ideas in countries that by now have a long, unbroken tradition with democracy, I guess people of the former Soviet Bloc are extra careful these days. YMMV, of course.

You are mocking people using a false dichotomy. Complaining that some individuals shouldn't be able to control trillion in wealth don't imply a push for centrally planned economies.

… yes it does?

It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).

First of all, there's already much to be said on how encouraging private citizens to amass wealth at all costs is highly dangerous to society. Clearly, there are massive problems that our current model has. Second, we don't need to go for a utopia right now. Personally, I'm not a "communist" or whatever fan. I think that we can remove the negative impacts of capitalism without a crusade, through borrowing elements of those political theories. That doesn't sound half bad to me: likely feasible (if only the political will could be scrounged up), not hugely radical, and already a big boon.

No there isn't.

What practical difference is there in your life now that Musk is worth 200B versus when he had 100B or 0B? Probably your life is actually better because there is now Starlink and Tesla and you have more options.

Let's say we can push a button and grow the economy 10% in real terms, but some rich guy like Bill Gates gets his wealth not increased 10%, but 10x. Do we press it? Next time we press it, some other billionaire gets 10x-ed.

The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.

> No there isn't.

We simply don't know if a different system could produce the same, because the few attempts we had were either corrupted or actively sabotaged. I'd argue if we look at China we actually can see how something other than capitalism can improve people's lives: hundreds of millions raised out of poverty through basic planning.

Another aspect is that many of the issues with previous attempts at something other than capitalism happened without the technology we have today. This would change everything.

> The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.

Of course it would be if there were zero bad consequences from it. But every time you press that button more people starve, the planet dies faster, workers conditions deteriorate, more people go homeless and so on.

But the big issue with your entire premise is that growing the economy means we improve people's lives. That's exactly the issue with the wealth gap: it doesn't. The economy right now basically only grows for the rich, not for everyone else. It's always money being siphoned from the bottom into the top.

It's very easy to pretend that everything is alright when you are in a privileged position, but the main reason 1st world countries like the US "grow" is by exploiting the poorer countries. You get access to better living standards at the cost of child labor in another country, deforestation, workers without a living wage or all the other nastiness that we don't want to know about.

There's no free lunch. It's the same siphoning of wealth, at all levels.

There is no free lunch, but intelligence comes damn close.

Monkeys living in a cave could drastically improve their lives by banging rocks together and making simple tools. Another big improvement comes from fire. Again when the rocks are stacked into buildings. By having more rocks, and arranging them more intelligently, we can hugely improve life. This is economic growth.

Your arguments against growth fail: first you say “other systems” (they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned) can cause growth just as well as capitalism. Second you say growth is bad because the environment. Third you say that only rich people get the growth anyway. Fourth you say growth comes from siphoning wealth from the poor.

Well, I have news for you. The people who benefit most from growth are the poor. In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:

- the state left the farmer alone for five whole minutes and it turns out he managed to grow some actual food when he didn’t have to pay so many bribes, taxes, and obey 1000 regulations

- technology improved business and trade, so mom and dad can buy food now

- some guy named Bill Gates donated mosquito nets and medicine and genetically modified crops that have all the vitamins.

Your ideas are rooted in ancient, pre-growth economic models. Poor people simply aren’t a good source of wealth; otherwise why aren’t dictators who do seize their wealth from the poor indredibly rich & celebrated? Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.

I can't speak for GP, but I'm not shooting for communism or whatever, just whatever variant of capitalism doesn't have all the horrible effects. So no, deviating from capitalism doesn't mean we will have catastrophic consequences.

> In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:

And that's great! But it's not a given, and global climate change also has a huge impact on geographies. And clearly, Mr. Beast was actually doing something when he paid for a bunch of wells to be built in Africa. The wells don't just come out from economic growth magically, unless maybe if you wait fifty years and more people die in the meantime. Mr. Beast is rich, which is why he could have wells built.

Saying that capitalism promotes economic growth may be true, and saying that economic growth lifts everyone up may be true, but the timescales and proportions don't match up to what many would consider fair, and our current model of capitalism isn't necessary for economic growth. That economic growth has benefitted them is less a boon of capitalism than of economic growth in general, so don't conflate the two. Also, should we talk about all the people in Africa and elsewhere who are employed at a pittance to make clothes, harvest crops, and sift through AI training data?

> Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.

https://scribe.rip/bc-digest/the-xerox-thieves-steve-jobs-bi...

Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) profitting from the work of people at Xerox. Maybe not outright theft, but they're clearly not tech gods who somehow had everything planned out.

https://investinganswers.com/articles/how-did-bill-gates-bui...

Don't have a source for this right now, but Amazon has used many underhanded business practices involving driving other businesses out of town. It's also a thing Walmart was known for.

https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

The details emerald mine stuff seem hard to discern, so take that with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying that Bezos, Musk, or Gates have done nothing useful and they're just lucky all the way. At least Bezos and Gates, I acknowledge that they did had an entrepreneurial spirit and could grasp their opportunities well. But people who have a lot of money or are in a wealthier country have an outsized proportion to people who don't, there are numerous instances of unscrupulous business practices, blah blah. To say that they are producers is right, but they aren't the pinnacle of human excellence. People who were oppressed and live in squalor, people whose inventions are taken without due credit, people who are expendable laborers. Bezos, Musk, Gates aren't merely a product of themselves and their wit. They were already placed above most due to the circumstances of society, and as they succeeded more they gained disproportionately more power to continue climbing up.

> they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned

I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it.

Most people read somewhere that the USSR failed because of their planned economies, therefore it doesn't work. They had so much more going wrong that simplifying why they failed with "planned economy" is preposterous.

Not to mention capitalists conveniently forget all of the failed capitalist experiments. Perhaps because now the bigger capitalist countries benefit from exploiting those same countries.

From all the answers I've seen you give in this thread, it's clear you're very deep into the capitalist mindset. It really seems you don't even attempt to consider alternatives. You have your winner and everything is a confirmation of that. I would earnestly ask you to reconsider your position. Really read up on the subject.

There is no perfect solution, but the current one is absolutely unsustainable by definition. There is no infinite growth, and the pursuit of it has now reached the point where it only harms everyone that is not at the top. We could save the planet, we could house all the homeless, we could end famine, but we choose not to because it's not profitable. I personally can't look at that and think: that looks reasonable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...

If there was such a button that had no side effects, perhaps it would be best to press it infinitely, as you say. But clearly "economic growth" doesn't lift everyone up equally. Somehow, there are still many poor people even in the US. Or take the average person in the entire world. Are they better off because of Starlink. Can Starlink solve world hunger? Cancer? What world changing breakthrough does it accomplish that makes the likes of Elon Musk untouchable? On HN, the community is fairly insular to people who already have many means and opportunities.

> But clearly "economic growth" doesn't lift everyone up equally

That’s right there in my premise! So what? It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; and one or two get boosted to orbit for a generation or so.

Your arguments against Starlink are so silly I struggle to believe someone typed them into this site. Don’t you think one more internet option for most of the globe is a good thing? And yes, it directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors. It’sneven helping Ukraine defend itself against another totalitarian state right now.

None of which is relevant. It’s another internet option and therefore a good thing in and of itself. You don’t even have to like it or use it for it to make your life better.

> It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot;

No, it doesn't. It helps the people who are lucky enough to already have one foot in the race. But that's not remotely everyone.

> directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors.

Perhaps, although that's not really "directly". But then you're saying that we need to allow multi-billionaires in order to have things like Starlink. How about we stop ISPs from being stingy with their money and suddenly we don't need to rely on one rich person to save us from the other rich people? You seem to think that if the government takes some control/wealth out of the hands of these people, we're suddenly going to have stagnation. I don't see why it has to be all-or-nothing; we don't have to implement scary, spooky communism. You know what I think is even better than having Starlink? If we had Starlink and we didn't have exploitative, ruthless businesses that led to needing to have Starlink as it is now. It would just be the new technology that Comcast or Verizon made, without the weird "Elon Musk will save us all" fanfare.

Please go back to Reddit.

Apart from land, Inheritance and seizing power, individual and community wealth comes from what you create and invest in

As I understand it, very few entrepreneurs ever said “this is interesting but if I can’t be a billionaire what’s the point?”.

Which are the examples driven by extreme wealth (note: not just regular 1%er wealth and not people who became extremely wealthy - I mean people who expressed that the reason they created something was because they knew it would make them extremely top-0.01% wealthy)?

People start out to create something awesome. People continue when they have the motivation. When you hard cap them in any measurable way, they stop.

This sounds like guesswork around peoples motivation. Not saying you are wrong, but I'm making the argument that this is a pretty big claim (people being motivated not by wealth or status or curiosity but by extreme wealth). I just don't buy this claim. I don't think it's been a motivation of anyone who has made (say) a billion dollars, to only make another billion. Perhaps be the biggest company or invent the greatest product or have more money than the other billionaire who is an asshat, but just the money itself. Never heard of that. Every billionaire since the dawn of time has written memoirs. They might be lying, but I doubt any of them said "After 150M I just felt I had to make another 500M". They all say "after making successful product A and being set for life, I really wanted to make thing B". I have not read all the billionaire memoirs, and I'm sure memoirs usually claim you were in it for the thrill or the curiosity. But still.

If you pay someone to do X, and then stop paying them they will stop doing X even if they enjoyed it. The same will be true for these leaders, you can't just take all their future wealth and expect them to continue, they will stop the instant they stop making money, just like any other person.

> If you pay someone to do X, and then stop paying them they will stop doing X even if they enjoyed it

That's because for 99.999% of people, being paid money has utility. So the payment provides some benefit for them. But for someone with $2B, my argument is precisely this: whatever it is that drove them to make $2B (inveting the best product, or whatever) is NOT what drives them to make the NEXT $1B.

> you can't just take all their future wealth and expect them to continue > they will stop the instant they stop making money, just like any other person.

You cabsolutely can, and they absoluteluy will not.

That's the whole point again: assuming a high enough "cap", we are talking about people who will never not be extremely wealthy. Whether the cap is $100M; $1B or $10B can be argued, but the central point is that the utility of more wealth is diminishing. That's why me giving you $1B would make a massive difference, but then me giving you another $1B would make almost no difference to your lifestyle/happniess/whatever measure you choose.

> When you hard cap them in any measurable way, they stop.

No they don't.

Satya has a much lower cap earning money at Microsoft then Bill or Balmer did.

Does that make him a worse CEO? Does it mean he is less dedicated?

Very few people who are competitive are competitive because of money.

They want to be known as the best, have the most power, the most influence, run the largest company, their name the most number of history books.

Money is a rough proxy for power, but, to give an example, pharmaceutical companies have an outsized influence in American politics versus how much their CEOs are worth.

Heck for the vast majority of companies their leadership has 0% chance of becoming billionaires. Most industries are too low margin. That doesn't mean the leaders of those companies still don't want to win in their chosen market.

I had a lucky exit and no longer need to work. I now only consider working on something if it could increase my net worth by an order of magnitude or so — because if it won’t make me a billionaire why bother working?

I’d rather do art or open source or go fishing.

(That’s not quite what you asked but I don’t know how many actual billionaires will read your comment so figured I’d chime in — to me it doesn’t seem unreasonable that calling wealth would change what people work on and how much they produce.)

How do you figure? Its not like Edison was born hyper rich.

Are you suggesting Edison would have invented everything he did if he wasn't allowed to get rich? You chose an extremely funny example if that's what you're trying to say.

Edison was famous for caring about money more than other inventors. One of his most famous quotes was “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” The guy helped found some of the largest companies of his era and died as one of the richest men in the world.

> Are you suggesting Edison would have invented everything he did if he wasn't allowed to get rich?

Who said anything about not being allowed to get rich? 10s of millions of dollars is rich by any measure.

So he would have stopped after 10% (random ratio) of his inventions. Or probably not started at all if there was a cap he knows he would reach very quickly.

And even so his net worth was not near billions in today's dollars. Seems like being uber rich isn't necessary to achieve those things.

This system doesn't eliminate people. It eliminates the pointless and harmful hoarding of wealth.

This is the same mistake Lawrence Van Dough makes in Richie Rich. He assumes the massive vault must be full of gold bars and diamonds, the wealth of the family. But it's not. It's invested in banks and stocks etc. The money is not just sitting there, it's producing other activity in the economy.

Your usage of the word "hoarding" implies a Scrooge McDuck view of wealth where its just stashed away in some vault - never put to use. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

My mental image is one of unelected, untouchable oligarchs taking actions that they're accountable to nobody for. That's far worse than Scrooge McDuck.

So you're imagining President Xi and the House of Saud, I take it? As long as you aren't imagining someone like Elon Musk who is certainly accountable to his debtors and shareholders and Boards, then this can be viewed as a realistic take.

If you're talking about people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates who have giant wealth because of their investments in businesses, then arguing that they should have that wealth taken away would literally take money out of the coffers of businesses that are currently using that money for things like payroll.

The GP is correct -- these people are not sitting around on a vault of gold like McDuck. Their money is in the economy, doing stuff. That's what investments are. That's why investors exist, and why they get a cut of the profit for taking a risk and lending their money to industry.

That's not the same thing as hoarding. It's always the case that the wealth of even unelected untouchable oligarchs is comprised of productive assets, not hoarded in a secret pile.

It's put to use by making the other person go in debt. Happy?

The good news is banks continuously print money to make sure that there's more than enough cash to go around.

Of course they don't know it. They actually believe that the state is better at managing money than the people creating products and jobs.

They're actively destroying jobs at this very moment, not creating them. If I had a nickel for every "we're making record profits, oh and we're also laying off 10% of our employees" announcement, I'd be a billionaire.

Unemployment has never been lower, with jobs growing every month of the past year. January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/02/us-jobs-report-january-2024

> Unemployment has never been lower

That doesn't measure underemployment, nor does it measure people who've given up on finding work. That's why it needs to be considered alongside things like the labor force participation rate - which has been on a downward trend since 2000 - and alongside wage growth, which has lagged below inflation since the 70's.

> January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023.

Which jobs, specifically? At what pay? Destroying a $50k/year job to create two $25k/year jobs ain't progress.

Labor force participation rate has been rising since COVID. The long term trend is down but not so bad. A decade ago the rate among adult men was 72% while last month it was 70.2% and continuing to rise. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Wage growth beat inflation by almost double most months last year, rising around 5-6% YoY each month vs ~3-4% inflation. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

Well then I guess we'll see if the trend actually reverses or if it corrects back to how it's been since the 70's. Barring some significant systemic reforms I ain't exactly holding my breath.

Unfortunately unemployment numbers don't mean shit if you still can't even pay your rent with your salary.

This focus on unemployment is absurd. It has nothing to do with the wealth gap.

More people working, but always with less wealth, while companies keep getting richer.

We could as a society literally end unemployment at any time by redistributing some of the wealth. We don't because it's more profitable to have people worrying if they will be able to eat every month.

You are looking at a too short of a time frame. Expecting a system to be getting strictly better every second of every day is utopian. The real world has ups and downs, restructuring to accommodate change, shutting down legacy industries, making room for new ideas, etc

> You are looking at a too short of a time frame.

Wage growth has lagged behind inflation and cost of living since the 70's. There have been multiple job market crashes in my lifetime; I entered the workforce in the middle of the 2008 recession. There have been multiple layoff waves since COVID alone, during each of which companies would lay off significant fractions of their workforce despite making record profits for no discernible reason other than "well everyone else is doing it so we'll do it, too". How much longer of a time frame do you expect me to examine?

> Expecting a system to be getting strictly better every second of every day is utopian.

Employers have been increasingly shafting their employees for decades. I expect a system to not spend multiple decades getting worse.

> shutting down legacy industries

My last two jobs were as a cloud infrastructure engineer. If even cloud computing is a "legacy industry" then the vast majority of the users on this website are utterly screwed.

Can't wait to replace starlink with a new take on back yard furnaces. This is just a re-marketing of the same socialist ideas that have empirically failed every time.

People with positive inability to create wealth self-appoint to control the people that have demonstrable ability to create wealth. Doing so is the only way for the former to end up in control of wealth, again because they are incapable of generating it themselves.

It's a bit amusing that no one about the commie paradox - the group of people that profess the greatest ability to central plan and redistribute wealth is entirely devoid of individuals with a track record of creating wealth. A reasonable person would expect a strong correlation there.