• Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 days ago

    I’m reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.

    As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We’re being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.

    Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.

    And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump’s instant army.

    The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn’t come out of a vacuum. We shouldn’t be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.

    Ideally, we’d all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it’s not anyone’s fault they were born frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcome without the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.

    But I’d settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.

    We don’t even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.