Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "More Perfect Union" channel.

Who is going to buy it? Consider the wages each of the people in the process would expect. Consider the overheads for the business. Now the mark-up to have some profit to make the whole exercise worthwhile. Then the distributor mark-up. Then the retail mark-up. How much do you genuinely think a locally produced quality T-shirt would cost today? Who is buying that, especially in a world where you are competing again Shein and Inditex? Come on, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Everyone wants to pretend they live a kardashian lifestyle on a burger flipper wage at 30 these days. You have to fix consumer behaviour first, and that starts by convincing millennials and zoomers to live inside their meger means.
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Sorry to hear you will soon be owned. Very sad. This is the natural progression of free market capitalism back to feudalism.
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No one gives more money to the government than billionaires either...
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@lady_draguliana784 Did he only live and make money those two years? 🤣
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@lady_draguliana784 And how much tax did he pay in all the other years he made money? How much tax do his businesses pay? How much tax do the tens of thousands of people he employs pay? We need to remember that it's the wealthy that fund all the things in society that we like. The problem isn't that we have wealthy people. The problem is economic mobility is too low so you get wealthy people able to cement multigenerational power with no context for that power to later generations, and zero accountability.. So the elites lose all detachment from the reality of the common man, and decide they should be our gods. Or, to put it another way, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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There is no such thing as "a living wage" and frankly the concept is ridiculous. Particularly when you take living costs from a developed country and try to apply them to a developing country. If you paid all the workers in India based on yankvillian standards of living, you would be creating the highest paid people in india by far. The AVERAGE salary across India is 30K rupee per month. That's $358USD a month. You couldn't live on that in a developed country, but in a developing country like India things don't cost as much so they can. But you wouldn't just be completely destablising the social fabric of developing countries like India. You would also make clothing unaffordable. If that previously $30 T shirt suddenly cost $120, we aren't just talking about your individual lifestyle being impacted at that point. We're talking about the erasure of the middle class and the expansion of mass poverty. You already have people having to choose between rent and food, you want to turn that into a trifecta where they have to choose between rent, food and clothing instead? It might be an uncomfortable reality for you, but ALL civilisations since the dawn of humanity were predicated on the exploitation of another group. There is no utopia where everyone can sing and dance under rainbows. That's not reality, not under any economic system or real-world social conditions. Humans aren't built that way. If you had the option to live in a luxury mansion with Butler service or live in abject poverty which would you choose? Be honest with yourself. That's why utopia isn't real. The problem isn't fast fashions goals. The problem isn't even their labour solutions to meet a price point. The problems are 1. Value proposition 2. Consumer behaviour. The latter I didn't hear mentioned even once in the video. It was danced around talking about the number of garments purchased per year, and the thrown away garments in Chile. But it was never directly addressed despite being the most important. Do you know why fast fashion do the things they do? Because it makes money. But that money doesn't magically appear out of the ground by doing some ritual. No, they make a product consumers en masse want to consume and gladly part with their money for. If you want higher quality clothing, put your money where your mouth is. Only buy high quality products. If that became the trend of the masses, the companies would have no choice but to adapt and comply. That's how this works. All the problems in western society ultimately come back to the support of those things by the masses. Oh, and you can still buy the 2000s quality jeans. They just cost the price of inflation, so they're now $750.
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@No-one3649 You are out of your mind and ignorant of reality if you genuinely believe government tax revenues that keep cities, states or countries ticking come from the middle and lower socio-economic tax brackets. It's all built on the wealthy. If you make $79K pa and pay 37% tax, that's less than $29K in tax after threshold adjustments. If you made $10M and paid just 1% in tax you're still paying $100K, plus the plethora of other taxes on your wealth. It's $2M in taxes at 20% which is where most wealthy people land on income tax. It's not an accident that wealthy areas of a city look nice even in the public areas, and have more resources. Those neighbourhoods pay 75% of the city budget and quite literally pay the wages of city employees/emergency services.
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I find 100% clothing in wool, linen and silk in stores regularly. Also 100% cotton. No plastic. You just need to be willing to pay for it. Now if you mean in clothing under $100, sure. You won't find that because the cost of those materials means it isn't viable. Your problem isn't that the products aren't available, it's that you apparently don't shop in stores that stock these garments.
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"They're up against people who care, and we hope that matters more than their billions." It doesn't. It won't. You're going up against people who are friends with the governor. Friends with the state legislators. friends with the judiciary. People who have the resources and connections to remake existing legal infrastructure in their interests, and the experience and will to execute it because they've collectively done it hundreds if not thousands of times. I predict this will be a lesson in, our voices don't actually matrer and they haven't in many decades now.
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@trapfethen 🤣🤣 Tells me that consumer behaviour is a cop out and not the problem. Then proceeds to list ways to FORCE consumer behaviour to change, instead of allowing it to be a choice. You are an elitist and a fool, contradicting your own narrative. Consumer behaviour is the problem, the cop out is when you try to blame shit to some other entity. The elitist part is when you act as if you know what's best for strangers and seek to force their behaviour because it suits you. Grow up
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@FreePigeon The prices would drop? 🤣🤣🤣🤣 What have you been smoking? A business has fixed costs, like labour and materials. To lower consumer prices they either need more productivity (that is more product units per unit of time produced) or they need to reduce costs. Bringing manufacturing back into western countries with labour laws and minimum wages/employee benefits costs for business skyrocket. Now to offset this they could lower the quality, with cheaper materials but that's going to damage their brand and shift more consumers to cheaper fast fashion alternatives instead because quality is gone. So instead they'll INCREASE prices. Competition isn't an issue, because the ONLY reason anyone would increase their labour costs by bringing manufacturing back onshore is because there is a market demand at the relevant price point for such made garments. The reason you can't find work in textiles anymore is simple. You cost too much. You've priced yourself out of the labour market. Be willing to work for $2/day at high volume and without benefits and you might get somewhere. Get mad at this sentimejt all you like, it won't change reality. You're selling something in your labour, and you cost too much for your perspective clients (employers) so they went with cheaper options that allowed them to achieve their outcomes inside budget.
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@EnhancedNightmare There's plenty of high-end fashion brands that deliver quality. I know first hand, because it's all the clothing in my wardrobe. You just have to be willing to pay what it costs to make, distribute, and retail, plus profit for each of those steps. That's $120+ (mostly $200) for a t-shirt and $500+ (mostly $900) for a pair of pants. If you're willing to pay it, do so. There are still onshore textiles in small numbers, stop making empty comments on the internet and support them with your wallet. Your "shut up" at reality, though, tells me you won't. Because you claim to be "willing" but that implies you currently don't. Put your money where your mouth is or take your own advice and be quiet. You don't have to like reality, but you do have to live in it and we have more than enough stupid ideas/opinions and empty virtue signalling already.
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@EnhancedNightmare "I have not encountered" is not evidence of "it does not exist". You didn't even read what I wrote. Try again 🤣 That you got the price wrong, then proceeded to tell me it's a ripoff is evidence that you have no intention of paying what onshore manufacturing costs. So sit down and be quiet. You have nothing of value to say.
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You don't appear to have followed the video.
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Dear game players and consumers in general, the ONLY reason anyone ever gets into business is to make money. As much as they can. If they weren't in it to make money they'd be registered as a non-profi, games would be something like the open source/MIT model and studios would collapse pretty quickly due to lack of funding. Or they'd stay just a couple friends making games in their spare time while they work a day job somewhere else, and next to no one would play the resulting game. There's a lot of marketing nonsense that's been spilled into consumerism over the decades, and based on the way consumers talk now it appears many have taken BS as truth. The consumer does not, and never has, come first. A business can be motivated to create wonderful consumer experiences, to listen to the wants of consumers, to try to make consumers special. But the motivation for doing those things is ultimately the desire to acquire money. The employees are in it for the same motivation. They might really enjoy making games, but they aren't volunteering their time. They're there to make money. $117K per year on average according to glass door. To pay those kinds of wages, a company needs to, you guessed it, make more money. Whether it's a small independent game studio, or a heavily invested IPO, profit is the goal, it's the bottom line and the driving force. There is no magic world were that isn't the case.
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This is completely false and fails to understand what any of these videos are really talking about. Let's talk about this video for example. Zara is wholly owned by its founding parent company Inditex. Whilst Inditex is publicly traded, it's founder Amancio Ortega still owns 59%. Shein is wholly owned by its founder Yangtian "Chris" Xu. In both cases they remain owned and run by their founders. Forever 21 was purchased in 2020 by ABG, a partnership founded specifically for that purchase by Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners, two mall operators. They didn't just randomly purchase Forever 21 however. The retailer was bankrupt and in receivership. If ABG didn't buy them Forever 21 wouldn't exist and all those employees would have been out of work. If Forever 21 was so great before the buy out why was it bankrupt? Let's talk about another area where products are worse. Household white goods. Fridges, washers/dryers, etc. The two largest manufacturers of these products and biggest contributors to worsening quality are Samsung and LG. But they're both owned by their respective founding families. Throw whatever product you like, you'll find the major players remain owned by their founders. The problem isn't private equity funds and none of these kinds of videos claim otherwise. The problem, that all of these videos are trying to express, is YOU. The end consumer. You want luxury products you shouldn't be able to afford at ever lower prices. How do you think that happens without cutting quality? When you cut quality for long enough, the skills to make something well are lost. You can still buy jeans the same quality as the 2000s pair in this video. They just cost what they're worth. $750. If you want quality YOU have to be willing and able to pay for it. Most people won't be able. So you get what you can afford.
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Web 2.0 isn't user content. The internet was once ALL user generated content. The entire thing. Web 2.0 was the consolidation of the internet behind corporate interests.
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@gfride1 Tells me that you don't understand hpw percentages work.
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@bwenluck9812 lol. What?
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It's almost as if when you have a two party preferred system made up of the rich and their employees, where an electoral college made up of the rich and their employees decide the outcome, and the people don't pay attention to politics or hold politicians to account, is ripe for corruption. Gee. Who would have thought. It's almost as if the concept of parties is itself ripe for corruption.
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In Australia, the cost of a ventolin inhaler is $9. $21 if you get the ventolin brand. They have been as long as I can remember. People in yankville get ripped off. Even after the cap. That $35USD cap, that's $50 Australian. You're bejng capped at 5x the price we pay. 😂
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This video just parrots talking points we've all heard many times but never make much sense. Your narrative essentially goes like this. "Amazon is bad because some small businesses are in to make a quick buck and don't want to go through all the hassle and expense of building their own brand, own digital presence and market those things. So they go to Amazon where lots of shoppers are and pay to appear in search results to make sales overnight with very little capital investment beyond product if they're FLA and not even that if they're just drop shipping. This somehow prevents those businesses choosing a different platform to sell on instead and makes them victims." 😂😂 This ever repeated narrative constantly ignores reality, treating amazon as if they're the only party in town. Your comments section is filled with people who claim to never shop at amazon, directly contradicting this video. It ignores the popularity of chinese online market places like AliExpress, Shein and Temu. It ignores Etsy, eBay and the massive success of Shopifty. It ignores completely the success of hundreds of thousands of small businesses online who run rudimentary digital marketing campaigns to sell product en masse through social media. And it ignores big retailers like Walmart, Costco, Kmart and Target. You start this narrative off with an anecdote about mistakenly getting scorpion venom from a few years ago and use it as a segway to convince the viewer your years old anecdote says something about amazon today being "chaotic". But never provide any evidence for this outside your anecdote and your repeated insistence that it just is. Amazon Prime isn't even special. Many stores have free unlimited shipping. Walmart will even have a staff member from your local store drive it over to you within 2 hours, for $99/yr which is less than Prime.
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