Here’s one of the best traders talking about the same issue:
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=bMK8ct6ybjQ&t=1918
It’s eloquent and funny at the same time.
I included a timestamp to jump (almost) directly to the most relevant bit (also 33m, but 31m sets up a better context for an extra 2min of time compared to going directly to the 33m mark). But the whole video is worth watching.
Yes, Krugman is a hack.
Rights always exist. They come from God or Nature. Our fellow men either respect or ignore those rights. But even ignoring a right or disrespecting it doesn’t make the right just vanish.
It is not our fellows who give us rights. Nor can our fellows take them away.
No, don’t challenge the state. The state is too weak as is.
Challenge the billionaires who buy our government instead.
Decouple billionaires from politics.
Give the government teeth and an appetite to regularly and often target billionaires.
Selective enforcement.
I would maybe demand management first install my spy cameras in every room of their domicile including bathrooms and bedrooms and closets.
I would collect the data and sell it or give it away for free.
But what if I run into a weird masochist or exhibitionist who actually agrees? I wouldn’t want that kind of gamble in the end.
But they will kick back to me 30% of a fat contract. And when things go south I will blame Deloitte. So why would I change my highly lucrative for me behavior?
I won’t.
I think these consulting firms exist to help the upper/top management to embezzle money and to shield them from personal responsibility (“Deloitte said so, I could only follow this industry standard guidance, don’t ask me why every project has crashed, lol”).
Who said “have to?”
Can.
We can just acquiesce. That’s always an option.
As for coercion, it’s a spectrum. Killing the bags of bones is only one small slice of that spectrum.
Regardless. Conflicts of interests exist. Coercion exists. We can just try to sleep through it all and hope for the best hopium. Or we can do the adult thing. Admit reality. Prosecute our interests vigorously and sophisticatedly.
We have some thinking to do. I prefer there aren’t any simpleminded and naive folks around me. Being honest about what’s happening is better than our usual game of hopium, copium, fig leaves, whitewashing, and sleeping.
Imagine if every muscle cell in my biceps wanted to self-actualize. I want to grab a cup of coffee, but every muscle cell in my arms has their own ideas. Something that normally takes a second, now takes 10 years of negotiations. It would not do me a lick of good if I had the strongest muscle cells in existence if I could not control them.
Of course people should not be regarded as mere muscle cells, but the point here is to show how obviously valuable and vital control can be when you want to serve some ambition.
Should workers be controlled like they are soldiers?
Whose interests does the business prioritize? And how heavily?
In a worker cooperative workers are the owners. Workers hire and fire their managers at every level of management. All power flows are bottom up. The workers are the entourage. In this case workers are better positioned to self-actualize, because there is no capricious, lazy, ignorant, spoiled silky pants tyrant at the top.
But what about a more typical business? Well, there is either one owner or a tiny cabal of owners, and everyone else is just a resource, a means to an end. And you have to exert control over the means of labor to benefit the entourage at the top. If the entourage can figure out how to produce things without workers, they will get rid of them immedeately, why? Because the workers are just a means, they are incidental, they exist because slavery was deemed too toxic, and because no one figured out a way to get rid of the workers yet. That’s the only reason workers exist in capitalism.
Managers want to give orders and see those orders followed immediately. They don’t want debates, challenges, counter proposals, etc. If workers want to self-actualize, that’s a huge problem for a top down power flow. That’s why it is essential to beat the desire to self-actualize out of workers early. That way mindless servility is assured, which is good for control.
Also, if your workers work 80 hour weeks, they won’t start competing ventures in their spare time. Again, control.
I kinda feel sorry for all the workers out there, because self-actualization is a heavenly mandate for every sentient being, and yet they are plugged into and slotted into a structure where worker (out group) self-actualization is a huge obstacle for the (in group) entourage.
Getting everyone happy can be a slow and messy process. What if you make weapons and your workers decide it is unethical to make weapons? You are a manager of youtube and you order workers to censor channels for entourage’s benefit, but they have their own ideas, and they pretend to be censoring while actually not censoring? There is no end to such possibilities. Hence why the soul of many people MUST be crushed if the top down power flow is to be served in full measure.
Every so often there is an oddball manager like Ricardo Semler. But Ricardo Semler is the exception.
Please watch this video, and think about everything.
Don’t do anything stupid and treasure your own life. Thinking has to come first, or there will be regrets later.
Slaves got no pay. They still worked.
You can’t get cash rewards for consuming less. Spending is the least important variable in the accumulation game. All else being equal, spending less means you can spend more at other times. So if I penny pinch all year, I can splurge on New Year’s eve, that sort of thing. That doesn’t make you rich. That doesn’t elevate your status in societies where all the needed and useful resources are paywalled.
Income and time is what matters. And if you can get income while keeping all your time to yourself, that’s what elevates status. In other words you don’t trade your own time for income. That means there must be some slaves or extremely poor people that are constantly exploited to enable the elite living conditions.
A society doesn’t need parasitic elites. But if you want a better society you will have to pry it from the elites’ cold hands, because they won’t go along with a scheme that makes the world a happy and healthy place at their expense.
If I have 400 billion, but in a happy and healthy world I can only have 100mil max, which is 3 orders of magnitude less, I would rather burn down the whole planet than lose 1 cent. My interests are everything to me. My personal condition is what I experience first hand, while the rest of the world is just a theory, a story on a newspaper page, an image on TV, etc. I won’t accept tangible personally felt losses for gains which to me are theoretical.
Of course if I inhabit a worker instead of a billionaire, things are different, the calculus is different, but crumbs are always crumbs. Whether I am a worker or billionaire, man or woman, I refuse to crumb myself. I want a 10 course dinner, with hookers and blow to boot, with every trimming. Always. I’d rather have food I can’t eat than not have enough. No matter who I inhabit, the previous statement is true.
If what you want is in a tree, you have to shake that fucking tree. If you want fish you have to catch it.
Some assholes wanted to exploit people, so they killed, threatened, organized and propagandized and accomplished it. We need to understand this and take notes. Know yourself and know your enemy and you will always win.
If we want something else, if we want a different system, there will always be people that are super happy with how things are now. These folks have done very well under the present system. These folks will block our way. They are the tree, the fish, they are the soil that we have to plow and sometimes pave, to get to where we need to go. It will be ugly. It will not be without struggle.
If we just remain passive, and modestly undemanding, and we just politely wave our slogans on street corners, we know exactly what happens next.
Control your boss before they control you.
The priviledged class will trade among themselves.
You can have a society with 7.5 billion people that are fed, clothed, sheltered enough to stave off early death, and 500 mil people with property rights trading among themselves.
Nothing says economies must collapse if not everyone is enfranchised. There is no such law.
Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
Because job difficulty and job pay aren’t correlated under capitalism.
The easiest job is to own assets. Not manage assets. Own them. Which is to say get your name on a title of a sufficiently large asset, and the money just rolls in while you sleep in bed. You sleep, your asset works. For a large enough asset this also provides the largest pay.
Owners need lieutenants to look after their assets. That’s what a CEO is.
So why are CEOs so highly paid? Because if you do not, they will embezzle (steal) money from your asset since they control every aspect of your asset’s daily functioning! So you need to cut the CEO in on the grift of being a big asset owner.
That’s how meritocracies actually work.
Being responsive and responsible is the merit accumulation stage.
Once you accumulate enough merit, you enter the reward stage.
And what’s the reward?
The reward is that you no longer need to be responsive or responsible.
Lots of companies feel the need to serve their users on their way up.
Once they feel they got much or most of the market on lock, they no longer need to justify themselves to their users, and a cycle of pure valueless exploitation begins, aka enshittification.
You didn’t read my message.
Let the unregulated “free” (for some!) market ruled by the winners decide.
The billionaires are the winners and the deciders that our wonderful free market system has given us.
/s