Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "How Milton Friedman Broke The American Economy | The Class Room Ft. @FDSignifire" video.

  1. Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is the neoliberal lens that capitalism fuse humans through, they are simply chattel property to be rented and moved about wherever profitable. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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  2. I'm actually trying to share something rather novel with you. I'm dyslexic, if I could have made it shorter, I would have. It's hard to condense over a decade of studying political philosophy, sociology, economy, and finance into a small piece of text.
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  3. I call Milton Friedman Evil... Sometimes I even go as far as to say, he's a Real Jerk!
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  4.  @Pantsinabucket  "Human rental" is a novel term. The common leftist term "wage slave" always seemed hyperbolic, except in pure subsistence wage labor or child labor, so I felt like a better idea needed to be coined. The ideas are really actually a mixture of Benjamin Tucker's 'Trinity of Usury', John Locke's idea of 'self-ownership', Marx and Engels 'commodified labor', and nods to Austrian and neoliberal economics. I really had the idea of calling employment a 'human rental' while reading Benjamin Tucker's State Socialism and Anarchism, in which he extends the idea of usury not just to the leasing of money but of wages and rent as well, in what he calls the Trinity of Usury. I liked the idea and thought about the interchangeability of the terms of rent, wage, and interest as just time-based payments for different factors of production. I thought I could emphasize the moral aspect of capitalism's dehumanization by labeling employment as rent, especially, if neoliberals are going to come up with terms like human capital. So if you're going to blame me for parroting, at least get the text right, lmao.
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  5. ​ @Pomeray8  I would prefer not to read Bartleby, the Scrivener
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  6.  @Cakebattered  You literally just talked about skill... Which is a type of human capital that can be monetized on an hourly basis. That literally doesn't detract from the fact that humans are rented by the hour, in fact that proves my point. It doesn't matter the skill base; people are still being rented as human capital... People are being treated like capital goods... People are being treated like objects on a systematic basis of our whole society. The content of their abilities may increase but the format in which they are able to express them is oppressed by capital. Is that not a problem for you? Do you think people should be treated like objects in your everyday life? I do find it ironic, I see that you commented this 2 months ago... In which you expressly show that capitalism puts shareholders above creating value, which would also include valuing the labor that they exploit... Just so they can do more share buybacks. "@conchobar 2 months ago Even the pharmaceutical companies, who try to defend high drug prices, spend more on stock buybacks than actual R&D." Nice try, but, politely, you'll have to try again.
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  7. Sometimes it's not there when they first upload, try reloading in a couple minutes ✌️
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