Henry Ford may have been a prick, but even he had the common sense to realize paying your workers enough to buy your products was mutually beneficial. All this wealth hoarding going on serves nobody but the ultra rich that are simply addicted to watching numbers go up.
Which is why I’m hesitant to actually call those greedy fucks “capitalists”, because they’re the very antithesis of capitalism. They literally break the system for their own benefit, and thanks to US politicians to being corrupt enough to allow themselves to be bought out for a few bucks from said greedy fucks, nobody in power is incentivized to actually do something.
Capitalism works with money flowing constantly, and it needs that to work well. When you have some Warren Buffet and Elongated Muskrat kind of people just hoarding wealth… well, you get the shitshow that is the the US today. $300B circulating in the system would be awesome, and I would think that is a good indicator of a healthy economy; but when $300B is pretty much tied to one person, then congrats, we missed the point of capitalism.
The only goal of capitalism is to raise capital. Any method that raises capital is as valid as any other. The working class people are essentially just a bank to draw capital from, nothing more. Not to them anyway.
Anything else they told you about capitalism in school was bullshit. It does one thing. Increase capital through any means.
There is a logical end point where the working class can keep no capital for themselves, and produce it until they die. And what happens when there's no more shareholder value to extract from the working class I wonder?
This gets repeated so much, but really makes no sense.
Why give someone money in the hope they give it back to you? At best you get your money back, minus the resources needed to make the product they buy. You'd be better off just keeping 100% of the money.
Ford's success was the assembly line, which allowed him to pay workers more.
It's a post hoc rationalization of why he paid more. He paid more because he literally couldn't staff his factory because the assembly line work was so dull.
If you pay your workers an extra $1000 to buy a car* and every single one of them spends it on a car you sold them, all you've done is essentially give away a bunch of cars for free; you're losing money on every sale, and that's the best case scenario. How many of them are gonna buy a car from you next year? There are plenty of good reasons to pay workers a decent wage, but hoping to make money by turning them into customers isn't one of them.
This chart shows the median wage has gone up since the pandemic, even if using 2023 dollars
So the wages in the US are better than they have ever been, even inflation adjusted. You can go back as long as you want, they were not higher in the 50s, contrary to popular belief
So the wages in the US are better than they have ever been, even inflation adjusted. You can go back as long as you want, they were not higher in the 50s, contrary to popular belief
That's just obviously false. Are you saying people who could pay for college by working summer jobs, and who could buy a car and house and raise a family on a single income were making less than people today who spend decades paying off student loans, and who can barely afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment?
Sure, but people pining for the lifestyle of the 50s forget they are looking at the top 10% of incomes. Life in the 50s wasn't that good compared to now for the AVERAGE person
Except they had things like the G.I. bill which gave them money to go to college or buy a house and improve their lives. Every man who was in the military in WWII had that as an option. Maybe some didn't utilize it, but that was by choice. If you include their spouses and children, that's way more than 10% of the population.
Wages were comparatively higher too.
But I don't know anyone on the left pining for the lifestyle of the 1950s, that's something conservatives want. I wouldn't mind the wages of the 1950s (adjusted for inflation) and I wouldn't mind taxing the rich at 90%, but I sure would mind the racism and the sexism.