We can't. Labor and capital need each other, but they are forever at odds. Good wages and working conditions can only be won through negotiating from strength. Modern America favors capital. Elections have consequences.
That's not a disagreement with your politics; we just know from long experience what these tangents turn into, and they're all the same.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851723 and marked it off-topic.
The main problem is the extreme unbalance in the world. Highly develepoed robotic societys meet hungry, poor masses who cam only offer their physical labour. Mst of them in countrys far away, bu also a lot in the industrilized states.
Demand and supply. The demand for unskilled labour goes down, yet the supply of it goes up.
Most politic "solutions" only work by favoring the current residents and walling yourself in. So some better conditions for those in the country. I doubt that this is a longterm solution, when we want to live in an open global world.
So the solution I see is rather ... educating the unskilled masses, instead of fighting for better conditions for the unskilled.
It seems you could have the opposite case from today, with Labor concentrated into large unions which lobby for and win things like overly (but not disastrously) high Basic Income or slightly too relaxed intellectual property law, strong-arming a capital class made of small mom-and-pop firms and individual retiree-investors, avoiding providing the returns that would be seen in a more efficient and balanced market.
A capitalist who contributes capital should expect investment returns, and a laborer who contributes labor should expect the agreed-upon compensation. Beyond that, the details of who should expect how much come down to supply and demand, of both labor and capital.
The work a capitalist does, their contribution, isn't just writing checks, it's writing the right checks.
The universe favors capital because capital is more mobile than labor.
Software gives "labor" more scalability and leverage than ever before.
Can’t edit my earlier comment but felt I should clarify.
It's actually the opposite. The more workers there are the more likely some of them will defect for whatever capital offers.
Naturally capital and labor collaborate and both produce wealth. That doesn't mean their interests are 100% aligned.
It does. Capital evaporates in risky endeavors all the time. It rusts by itself as well.
Sure interests arent perfectly aligned, but fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance. Meanwhile, landowners see all that from afar, evict people into the streets, and those same people go pay taxes to get their food.
Capital is not the opressive.
How seductive capital is, that even lawful violents follow they every will! We must surely give those lawful violents more and more power to resist the allure of capital!
Fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance when your brother won the lottery, you are on welfare cause of a disability, and your brother decides to sue you for the family heirlooms because they feel they deserve it more. Yea it'd be better if we all worked together but labor wasn't the one that kicked people off the clearances, sent pinkertons to shoot people instead of negotiate, destroyed the environment, or any other of the great many ills that are happening on a daily basis.
Look at the article your even commenting on! The workers had to pee in bottles because they couldn't even take care of biology. What did the workers do to the capital owners in this case? Deprive them of a few more dollars in profit because they had the gall to not be perfectly efficient machines?
Depends on what you consider social expenditures in the us like food stamps, social programs, medicaid , medicare and social security.
> Fighting capital is like fighting your brother for inheritance when your brother won the lottery, you are on welfare cause of a disability, and your brother decides to sue you for the family heirlooms because they feel they deserve it more
Who is paying welfare in this analogy. And who is the court that makes the rules for sueing.
> Look at the article your even commenting on! The workers had to pee in bottles because they couldn't even take care of biology. What did the workers do to the capital owners in this case? Deprive them of a few more dollars in profit because they had the gall to not be perfectly efficient machines?
The workers, as bad as they have it, would have it worse without this option. The best guarantee to improve the conditions of workers is to get more competition going, not to put some rules that can be skirted or worse, will do damage if they are followed. While amazon treats its workers like this, Seattle has expanded is expenditures two-fold, raised taxes and increase the salaries of all its public officials. Why doesnt the washington state, in all its taxing glory help workers directly instead? Because they will make more money if people ask for regulation instead of relief.
You're argument that "they would have had it worse" assumes that that Amazon wouldn't have employees these people if they were only making billionaires instead of people worth 100s of billions. How is western society making more money and goods than ever but the average worker is doing worse while the richest are getting richer than ever?
Unfettered capitalism doesn't lead to all boats rising because eventually you run against hard limits like how many ISPs can run wires on telephone polls, or how many tons of freight can be physically moved from point a to point b. Someone will eventually take control of one of these natural monoplies and extract as much rent as possible from both employees and consumers unless they are forced to do otherwise.
To state that, in an era of less regulation than in America's golden age where we see the average citizen's life stagnating or even getting worse, we need even less regulation so that the people who are worth more than entire countries can compete better is at best putting your head in the sand and at worst being actively against your fellow man.
Not everyone deserves a fucking Lamborghini and steak every night with our current technology but they certainly don't deserve to have to choose between food and medicine or to have to piss in a fucking bottle to save their bosses a few dollars in exchange for not being made homeless
Edit:your point about the government in Seattle not helping out because they make more money from people asking for regulations is not something I am arguing against, as you certainly have a point there. I think the main problem is that most humans on an instinctual level would value a 1% gain in their resources infinitely higher than preventing a 50% loss in all of societys resources and so we end up with assholes everywhere trying their best to be the quoted example on Wikipedia about the tragedy of the commons
95% extreme poverty to 5%, much higher life expectancy, exponential wealth growth and low unemployement. Your first sentence plainly contradicts reality 100%.
> You're argument that "they would have had it worse" assumes that that Amazon wouldn't have employees these people if they were only making billionaires instead of people worth 100s of billions. How is western society making more money and goods than ever but the average worker is doing worse while the richest are getting richer than ever?
Because thats not whats happening. Wages stagnated while half of the population entered the workforce worldwide-> if women went back to the employement levelts of the 70's you would find wages would grow quite a bit! An that is only one of the causes: another is that such propaganda always talks about the US, but doesnt see that wages of poorest countries in south east asia, or china, have grown enormously since the 70s by basically providing cheap clothes and goods to the US.
> Unfettered capitalism doesn't lead to all boats rising
That has been the reality since its inception. This is what the people that repeat that "trickle down doesnt work" end up believing. The unnuanced opinion that if someone has money, he has wealth (which is wrong) and if someone has wealth he has stolen (wrong again) and if wealth were distributed it would be better for all (wrong again).
> To state that, in an era of less regulation than in America's golden age where we see the average citizen's life stagnating or even getting worse, we need even less regulation so that the people who are worth more than entire countries can compete better is at best putting your head in the sand and at worst being actively against your fellow man
The us is not in an era of low regulation. The Us is super regulated both federally and state level. You need to train 1500 hours in an apprenticeship to be a hair stylist in california. You cant import drugs from abroad without extreme FDA regulatory costs. Doctors from outside the US need to do a residency again to be able to get a medical license in the US. Cities indulge in nymbism to be rentist about land. Taxes have regressive implementations the state economists recognize but they cant subsistitute with simpler and fairer taxes due to legal, political and tax regulations. The us has immigration quotas, for christ sake.
The US government spends 37% of gdp. 37%! The government consumes all the wealth of billionaires together every year. You would wipe out all the billionaires in the world in one year of tax breaks for everyone in the us. The next year there are no more billionaires and you still have to pay the same taxes.
To your point about "trickle down doesn't work". Where is your evidence that it does work? The trickle down theories have been going on for at least a hundred years when it was horse and sparrow and we haven't seen improvements to the average person from it. The largest improvements have come from labor rights having to physically fight companies for it ~100 years ago, and the post war boom when tax rates on the top income levels were at their historical highs. Since trickle down economics started getting pushed into the economy and tax rates have been continually lowered for the richest, we've seen conditions for everyone not in tech or finance stagnate or go down.
Additionally the US government expenditures are not a black hope that wealth and goods are tossed into. They stimulate the economy as well, although I will agree that much of it is comically inefficient
For your point about regulations I'm not sure how explain my feelings on it eloquently, but yes those massive regulations exist and end up squeezing out the smaller players. What they have become though is just another tool for large corporations to keep competition out while not changing their behavior much. We end up having regulations to keep the environment clean that make it impossible for small manufactories to run profitably but still don't keep pollution gone. Those regulations are bad and I can't point to the government as a good solution on how to get good regulations, but I do believe that they get it right sometimes where if it's left up to corporations there will always be a race to the bottom and we will get no protections
Lets remember trickle down is an originally demeaning term that has like a 100 years old, and was i think promoted by a comedian. It contains in itself an inconsistency with the general stance of lowering taxes, because the purported argument that its supposed to mock is that its better to tax poor people over rich people because rich know better to do with the money. But in general, the main reason to lower taxes is because anyone is better to do with money than the state. Its just that the state is just nominally more effective by taking money from those on top. I say nominally because in the end the state does know how to really tax poor people, which have less resources to fight it.
Progressive taxation in itself brings lots of problems and in its glory of simplification it commits many injustices as well. But above all, the idea of a tax to punish wealthy is envious and petty: they have more so they should pay more. Its not economics, its not morality, its a tantrum. It has been said in the past (i dont know if the math is current) that if you eliminated all exemptions of taxes and put a flat 15% tax on income, you would actually increase tax revenue. And you would do so without requirement nearly as much accounting work as it is today. One of the reasons that is politically hard to sell is because its not progressive enough. So I do see progressive taxation as an obstacle to simpler and more effective tax systems.
Inequality is a real problem, when libertarians say it doesnt matter I think they are wrong. But when liberals say that the way to manage that is a bigger state and bigger taxes they are "wronger". How to solve inequality is still an open problem: its growing even in europe where the tax rate is much higher and the state is much higher. So increasing taxes or state benefits are not the way to reduce inequality.
Now regarding labor laws: I dissent entirely with the premise. Labor laws were and are economically useful as long as they keep the state out of trampling their rights, but they are not useful to improve their working conditions. What lifts the workers labor conditions are not laws but competition for their labor. Lets take argentina as an example: it has strict labor laws and a "in dubis pro operario" legal system where any lawsuit against the employer rules in favor of the employee. Unions have constitutional protections, like their leaders cant be arrested. The result is that the strongest unions have high wages. Success? Hell no. Argentina has had growing poverty and stagnant GDP/capita growth since unions were given this power. The unions protect their workers at everybody elses expense. Because the only way to increase a workers wage is to increase his productivity (which unions dont do) or to reduce the number of workers. They plainly reduce supply, which means they push people to not have jobs.
You will find Argentina, Spain and France, countries with strong unions, to have higher unemployment.
Neither labor nor capital independently produce wealth, generally, it's produced by the application of labor to capital; the suppliers of labor and capital are on opposing sides of the fight to capture the wealth the two are used together to create.
“Capitalism” was named for the side it specifically favors in that fight, by people who found that a fundamental problem.
Opposing sides or collaborators? Like the sun and the soil working together..
Think of those that provide no labor and no capital yet capture great value. Those are the truly destructive.
The only difference is that the modern slave owners are smarter and so they use a form of coercion that is more efficient. That is the only advance they have made past the plantation.
You also do NOT need to work for a capitalist to survive. You need to work for the state or you will starve, thats our modern world.