Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "YouTube Commenter Makes Great Point On John Oliver's Jill Stein Smear" video.

"Lazy people" = poor people. America became a super power after WWII because we converted to a war economy and the rest of the industrialized world was in shambles. No one in politics or other positions of power will condemn AT&T as "lazy," even though they're trying to merge with Time Warner to increase market share instead of innovating.
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Fred Hampton's Ghost To Fred's point, just look at the number one way to lower costs: it's to cut labor costs, whether through outsourcing, depressed wages, automation...Labor is the place where business can make the easiest, most consistent cuts.
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Love that Lincoln quote. He also believed that one should only work for a wage if some day he could be the owner of his own labor. Note that the term is "capitalism," not "wageism" or "laborism." That alone should tell you where the system places its priorities.
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Can everyone be a millionaire inventor? Or will there have to be people to sew clothes, pick up trash, pave roads, care for children? If so, should they be condemned to a life of long hours, low pay, and minimal if any benefits? Or should the promise of society be that everyone, especially in a wealthy country, can live a decent, productive life with time for leisure and personal growth? If the 50s were the Golden Age of the US economy, and we're producing roughly double of that now, why do we have to work the same hours for lower (adjusted) wages? It's because of the insane logic of growth that says we have to compete or perish, that we have to rush headlong to the edge of the cliff before everyone else. In a capitalist system, businesses and corporations hold power. Unless laborers unionize, their individual power is negligible compared to the corporation. It's the corporation who decides who to hire and the terms for hiring (when have you ever presented a company with a contract or list of demands?). Governments at their best can intercede on behalf of the working population, to whom they are accountable. If we've forgotten the usefulness of governments when it comes to curbing the private tyranny of (big) business, it's because we've grown accustomed to government protection, much as anti-vaccers take for granted the herd immunity they're intent on compromising. The question of "merit" is problematic, even though it is often appealed to as a conversation ender. Surely we can all agree that people should be judged, at least to an extent, on their merit. But it's clear that our capitalist system, in its many permutations, has rarely operated on merit. Does Mark Zuckerberg really merit his billions in wealth? He made Facebook. Does he really merit more than a doctor or civil rights lawyer or a physicist? Merit is not a substitute for value.
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HammerheadGuitar I think Fred is talking about what I mentioned in my post above. Maybe your point is that increases can serve human needs, but they don't necessarily? I'm skeptical that we should be so generous to the products of capitalism. Something like the computer certainly does contain liberating elements (I'm obviously using one right now), but they're also designed with the interests of power in mind. Computers are in some respects a way to further manage people's time and lives. That includes seemingly benign things like a Netflix algorithm or advertisements, to nefarious things like federal surveillance programs and image-recognition software. All of that is done for the good of the consumer, but is it really good for society? We can ask the further question of whether the increases are good for the workers in third world countries who make the computer for a pittance. Is it even "good" for the consumer of the computer if he has to work 8+ hours every day working a mindless, pointless job?
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HammerheadGuitar In theory, that's how it should work. Historically, business has been ruthlessly opposed to unionization. You mentioned Denmark, but what about the US? We have an extremely low percentage of unionization. The record is pretty clear. I think the failure of mass or even general unionization is complex, but it essentially boils down to business using its influence in government (which it will always do; if there is no government, it will create one) and business using tactics like strike-breaking, scab workers, armed thugs security (pistoleros), misinformation, and anything else it can to discourage collective action.
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HammerheadGuitar We're not talking communism. Or at least I'm not. Maybe hammer and sickle is. William Doyle in his book on the French Revolution talks about the role of charity during Louis XVI's reign. Charity often filled the gap left open by a lack of government programs. But in a country where 8-12 million people out of 27 million were too poor to afford necessities, church-operated charities couldn't keep up. Not only could they not keep up—they cut back on charitable giving: "Under Louis XVI [charities] were in fact becoming steadily less adequate, and not merely because of mounting claims on their services. Monasteries were cutting back on bread doles under criticism that indiscriminate charity fostered idleness." Because of the failure of religious and governmental charity, secular institutions sprang up, the Masons and others. The problem with charity is that it does nothing to rectify the institutional causes of poverty. If you give a homeless person ten dollars he'll still be homeless tomorrow. If you can make changes on the governmental or economic level, you have a better chance at diminishing poverty.
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HammerheadGuitar Sovereignty and ownership are different. For example, in a feudal relationship, the lord technically "owned" the land, but in reality and law he merely exacted a tribute from the peasant, who was the true owner. In fact, in the peasants typically formed a peasant commune and negotiated the distribution of tasks and products among themselves. Such was the case in Russia and perhaps part of the reason the peasants were eager to embrace the pseudo-communism of the Bolsheviks. To quote Doyle again, just because it's handy. "Over much of Brittany, under a system known as domaine congéable, tenants on nine-year leases [...] effectively enjoyed permanent tenure."
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Fred Hampton's Ghost While I think Fred is being a little fast and loose with facts (for one, wikipedia is not a credible source), he's essentially right. The problem with people is that we tend to naturalize our current circumstances and by so doing come to interpret all other ways of living through the terms of our existence. So it is that we in a capitalist system see hunter-gatherers as lithic proto-capitalists, and we in the Judeo-Christian world see religion as god-worship, but when you read the scientific or anthropological literature, religion and economics are much richer, more diverse and complex things. Interpreting the world from our own viewpoint can be a powerful tool, leading to novel insights, but it can also be an intellectual crutch that prevents us from seeing the novelty and contingency of our own circumstances. Division of land into parcels of private property is a relatively new idea. When Rousseau said "the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. [...] the idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen in successive stages, was not formed all at once in the human mind," he wasn't speaking about some bygone era; land inclosure was still a reality in his day, and one that many people felt was "unnatural." Moreover, capitalism did not only fail to reduce wealth inequality; in some sense it has accelerated it. Like the OP, I don't think it was ever the point of capitalism to reduce wealth inequality.
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Fred Hampton's Ghost Like I said, I essentially agree with you, but I think the power dynamics of early/traditional societies was a bit more complex than at least what that passage lets on. As lazy as I think "happy medium" arguments are, I think the reality is perhaps somewhere between egalitarian and authoritarian, leaning toward the former. Obviously the emergence of sedentary agricultural society played a significant role in establishing a stronger social hierarchy.
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Fred Hampton's Ghost "The problem is capitalism is inefficient. It is incapable of humanely distributing the goods and services produced by labor and planning's high productive capacity." Capitalism is good at making a lot of shit, but not so great at distributing it or even knowing what shit is the best to make. The pro-market argument (and it's worth remarking that capitalism isn't the only economic system with markets; even anarcho-syndicalists want free markets) is that the market will dictate the needs and desires of the consumer. People vote with their wallets. The problem with capitalist markets is that they are slow to respond. Take climate change. Any serious person knows that we needed a radical overhaul of our economy and energy five, ten, twenty years ago. But here we are, in 2016, still haggling over a degree here, a degree there. And what has the market done? Very little of its own volition. We're still fracking, still gas-guzzling, still exploiting tar sands. One reason they're slow to react is that it is in the interest of corporations to conceal their anti-social, unsavory behavior while it is in the consumer/public's interest to know as much as they can about that company, in theory. Those two interests are at constant odds. But I'm curious about why you think the inefficiency of the market contributes to mass poverty.
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Islam is cancer Does the United States flag stand for genocide? Since the US did nearly exterminate Native Americans. As a great philosopher said, "Sometimes words have two meanings." Everyone knows the swastika originally was a symbol of good fortune. It still means that in parts of the world.
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