Friday, July 26, 2013

First World Problems and Being Human

Most of us feel resentment when we see a rich person behaving badly, a spoiled celebrity angry because someone forgot to pick out the green M&Ms, or some other tinyy, ridiculous thing.

When it comes to celebrities or other wealthy people who (we see) living such a priviliged lifestyle, the problem is that the millions and luxury lifestyle have been part of your life for so long that they become invisible, and then the only things that are visible are the little annoyances.

To be like this is not being an asshole, it's only being human.

Consider most people who become petulant and annoyed over such little things; whether the new amazing console coming out will allow them to share games, or that the new super-hero film didn't match their precise expectations, or any other first world problem.

The vast majority of these people don't have to worry about whether there will be a roof over their heads today, if they will be able to feed themselves, will they be able to save their child's life from a preventable disease.

To a significant portion of the human population these are still genuine problems.

From our point of view, the difference between us and someone very wealthy is significant. Someone rich should should know how lucky he is and never ever complain or behave with petulance. We (from our point of view) are nowhere near the level of wealth and success where we should consider ourselves so lucky that we should never complain about anything.

However, from the point of view of many people on earth, the difference between us and someone we see as rich might as well be imperceptible. By that logic, we should never ever complain about anything either.

Which is impossible, because we are all human.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Capitalism and Opportunity

The difference is, nobody is exerting power over anybody else in a consensual sexual experience.

When you have a finite amount of resources and they're all privately owned, the wealthy begin to incur natural advantages (at its most basic; "economies of scale"). Those with money have much more freedom than those without; that includes freedom to make money. If there are one hundred people under capitalism, the one with the most amount of money is going to come out on top so long as he doesn't do anything stupid. When everything has a dollar value, those with more dollars are able to take more opportunities for themselves than those with no dollars. Because this includes opportunities to make more dollars, the process is a type of positive feedback loop. Wealth continues to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands and inequality gets worse. This, too, is a positive feedback loop. As inequality worsens, the laboring class becomes more and more desperate and are more and more at the mercy of the capitalist class just to find a way to procure bread and a shirt and a roof.

It's like picturing economies of scale for a business... except for an individual person. Oh... you have enough money to make a downpayment on a house? Now your monthly expenses are cheaper and you get to save some of your house payment as equity in your home. Don't have money? Pay out the ass to a landlord and accept that in this economy, you'll probably never be capable of saving up enough for a downpayment.

Have money? Go see the doctor when your insides are hurting you and straighten everything out right away.

Don't have money? Hope it goes away, and if it sticks around for several months, maybe try and pinch on the groceries for a month to save up enough to ask a doctor a few questions and then get a bill for an unknown amount sent to you in the mail at an unknown point in the future when you hope no other emergencies have arisen to clear the little bit of a rainy day fund you have.

Have money? Pay for your child's education so they can focus on their studies completely, perform well in school, and land one of the few good jobs.

Don't have money? Tell your kid to go terribly into debt and to work his ass off while also trying to do his best to attend to his studies. Tell your kid it's okay and that he tried his hardest when one of the privileged children who never had to work a day in their lives graduates with honors and gets that cushy job and your kid graduates with an acceptable GPA, thousands of hours flushed down some shitty wage job, and an assload of debt left on top of him, which severely limits his options for the future and leads him in his desperation to start serving tables at a restaurant because there is nothing more productive for society that he could be doing, since the ONLY way anything gets done under capitalism is if a wealthy person stands to make a good amount of money off of others by doing it.

The women that manufactured the clothes you're probably wearing right now live like slaves. Cramming into garment factories for long days and grueling hours, and in many places for less than $100/month. That isn't freedom. That isn't anything but exploitation rooted in prior exploitation. That is what the natural coercion of market forces has done to her.

Being forced to sell your time, energies, and (in a service job) yourself for barely enough to scrape by while the man who owns your time, energies, and yourself makes much more off of you than what he pays you isn't like a consensual sexual relationship between equal partners. If you want to use a parallel, it's like being forced into prostitution.

A further note on the positive feedback loop nature of capitalism: How is it possible for a human being born into this society to make money to try and escape that trap?

A] Work for wages -- which means do labor that has some level of value, and then have your boss take as much of that value for himself as he can get away with based on how desperate the other possible laborers in the economy are at present. It is fundamentally impossible for one laborer to move up in the economic food chain without further enriching a very wealthy individual already ahead of him.

B] Have a great idea and want to start your own company? Great! Go take out a massive loan from a bank and whether you succeed or fail, pay the bank more money than they gave you. You cannot create wealth for yourself without necessarily paying a portion of it up the ladder. Thus, social mobility for a few of the many poor entails further enrichment of the few wealthy, which means a smaller proportion remaining for the rest of the impoverished. The growth of inequality is absolutely inevitable (when it gets so bad we're forced to either intervene or simply let the wealthy come in like vultures and pick everything off the desperate workers at discounted prices during the recession).

What happens when you mix the necessity of property ownership in? What does a man do who is born into this society? He needs access to land in order to provide for himself -- either by growing food, building a shelter, or having a space to perform some skill/trade/craft. What happens when all of that land has already been stolen from those who originally used it and dwelt upon it and scooped up by the Boomers and those who came before them?

The poor in this country are fucked. The young in this country are poor. The assets of this country are firmly in the hands of the older and wealthier generations who got theirs when America had access to half the world's resources and then kicked out the ladder from beneath them, began privatizing everything, and began pumping out all of this neo-liberalism horseshit about "free markets."

Pro-tip: America likes free markets because America has the most money and influence, which means in any "free" trade, America is going to come out on top. That's how the coercive power of money works. If you have a lot and other people don't, but they desperately need it to survive, grow, and thrive, then they are going to be in a position where they are willing to work for much less or pay much higher prices, simply because they are desperate.

Adam Smith outlined this clearly; while two nations can each trade in their comparative advantage to their mutual benefit (i.e. one is better at making textiles, one is better at making wine), if one nation is better at making both textiles and wine, then the other nation can do nothing to compete. The only thing it can do is be exploited. Especially if we can cheaply pay to transport goods across the world so that we can abuse perpetually existing desperate pockets of the globe by forcing them to "compete" the only way they can: BY BEING WILLING TO WORK FOR SLAVE WAGES. This willingness then deflates the cost of their labor, even though the value of the labor is identical to what it would have been if the factories were located somewhere where the human beings doing the labor were required to be paid human living wages rather than treated like animals in cages.

From this place of exploitation, the nations become trapped. Workers in places like Cambodia can protest their >$100/month pay [EDIT: LESS THAN $100 PAY] and ask for an extra $14 and then be harassed by the state for going on strike and have a company like Nike (which profits immensely off the exploitation of these women) simply wash their hands of the blood and say, "Sorry; we don't set the prices, that's the job of the factory owner." As though the supply chain isn't one, continuous process that Nike is actively benefiting from. The factory owner is caught in the middle. The major corporations and banks, posting massive profits, are the ones who ultimately have all of the "slack" in the system. That's the only node in the chain where anybody has true "freedom" to do as they choose, and they wash their hands, go on luxury vacations, live sinfully wealthy lives, and stomp their boots in the faces of the slaves that made them, all while boldly declaring that they are improving the quality of those slave's lives, because the slaves "voluntarily" chose to enter the garment factory and work for whatever impossibly small rate "market forces" have decided the factory owner is required to let her keep.

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