I always want people to realize the true difference in communism and capitalism is that capitalism replaces “the people” with “the 1%” and then they’re interchangeable in everything else. Unfortunately it’s more like 0.01% if we’re being realistic.
The big difference is whether you believe some people are born to be less than others or not, that’s literally the right vs left.
Capitalism is squarely a right wing economic system as there are people born with inherent advantages, more power, from the standpoint of capital simply better. The only reason capitalism affords some sort of upwards social mobility is because of leftist policies, laws, regulations.
Capitalism, like feudalism offers upward mobility by appeasing the established elite. Seriously, nobody is wealthy under capitalism by earning a wage, they’re wealthy by owning the means of production. You either die working class or your betray the class you were born into to use others.
Capitalism is full of contradictions!? No way!! /s
The common denominator is taxes. There is this unit circle visual that shows half of your work value taken from you directly by taxes, and prices are twice what they want to be (indirectly paying others taxes)… so an individual “feels” only 1/4 economic effectiveness, or 3/4 oppressed.
*Half of what is left after the CEO and shareholders take their cut. Taxes are a drop in the ocean compared to the excess labor value that is extracted before you even see a penny.
Yes, corporate overhead is quite real, but it is literally zero effect for the self-employed… so by your logic all would be or become so to be rich by avoiding a CEO altogether.
Are you seriously suggesting that all it should take to become rich is to do freelance work?
The way people actually get rich is by exploiting the labor of others. Freelance work is only practical in very specific niches, and even then you’ll be forced to compete with conglomerates that have far greater resources.
Cool, now how much of your work value is taken by people who did nothing but invest the generational wealth they got from their great great grandad laying claim to common natural resources? Surely that’s the bigger concern since it goes to rich peoples’ yachts instead of public services.
I would love to see the math behind that. Typically it’s a case where someone is effectively paying 25% of their income to taxes, but because they are too lazy to actually understand how taxes work they are easily convinced it’s well over 50%
I recall my first exposure to this idea was via L. Neal Smith, so I tried to coax a breakdown out of GPT. Keeping in mind it could be hallucinated (and not his actual position or sourced values and math), so minimally just for your entertainment…
Certainly! Here’s a more detailed breakdown of how L. Neil Smith might conceptualize the distribution of value:
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12.5% Retained by the Individual: The portion of value that individuals actually keep for themselves after all deductions.
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20% Income Taxes: The portion of value lost to federal, state, and local income taxes.
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15% Social Security and Medicare Taxes: Contributions to social security and healthcare systems.
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10% Sales Taxes: Taxes added to purchases of goods and services.
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10% Property Taxes: Taxes on real estate and other property.
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15% Regulatory Compliance Costs: Expenses related to meeting government regulations, such as environmental standards, labor laws, and safety requirements.
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10% Corporate and Business Taxes: Taxes on business profits, which can indirectly affect individual income through reduced wages or higher prices.
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7.5% Miscellaneous Fees and Other Taxes: Including tariffs, licensing fees, and other smaller taxes.
This breakdown illustrates how various forms of taxation and regulation can consume a large portion of the value generated by individual effort, aligning with Smith’s perspective on government intervention.
Do you have an example that uses real income? All those percentage are relative to something, and that something is the most important part.
What province are we talking about and what salary are we talking about.
To be honest though, this sounds like some pie in the sky libertarian point of view where they are suggesting multiple things that are repeatedly proved false. Some of which include:
- trickle down economics, the idea that business will pass on additional profits to employees.
- business will regulate themselves and ensure consumer safety.
- business will happily provide the same infrastructure and services that we current fund through taxes for free or cheaper than it’s costs us right now to provide those services.
Which at that point I think you’re argument is correct, if we stopped spending effectively around 40% of our income (thats on the high-end) on funding public services, then over 75% of our income would need to go towards paying to get those same services back.
Might of the middleman leads to the plight of the professionals.
My wife works in a higher-end memory care center as a caregiver, and I can confirm they don’t pay nearly enough.
