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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing. In good times the stock gets so high you can get away with super high salaries, over staffing and perks. But in worse times the stock starts to get a hit, the multiples don't look good and to retain earnings you have to cut costs. The biggest cost is wages...

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> Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing

It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.

How so? They've been offshoring and automizing everything they can and this will only increase. Yes there's still a high demand for workers but it doesn't mean they're not trying to eliminate us slowly but surely. Us techies still have a few good years left but we're in no way immune to what's coming.

Well, no. You can have capitalist economies supported by slave labour. Capitalism on its own does not guarantee individuals freedom.

That is not the definition of capitalism.

This is just what we have in the USA today. Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. Workers should have more power and leverage but that has been eroded over time.

The volatility you describe is part of economic systems in general and hard to get away from. While it seems like a lot, it is actually far, far less than we had in the 1800s and prior to that.

Capitalism can work and has worked well for the last few decades but I personally think we are in "late stage" capitalism or whatever you wanna call a system that starts to crush the middle class and younger generations, create unsustainable debt and wreak havoc on the environment. We'll see how it all plays out, will be interesting for sure...

> Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance.

This is incoherent. Capitalism is the assigning of power and capital to those who have power over capital. It is fundamentally opposed to a balance of power.

Assigning power to the collective or to workers is definitionally not capitalist. Mixed systems can work fine, but they are just that. A mixture of capitalist and other systems of organization.

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