First we need to know what you mean by rich.do you mean the people who inherited their wealth? The capitalists which exploited labor? Or the small success stories of the lucky?
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The Rich Earned Their Wealth
Anyone who has read my posts since I joined this site (or on other sites I've been on) obviously knows this isn't my belief but I hear it a lot from Libertarians and Right-wingers. I say for the most part the people they exploited by paying next to nothing earned it for them. Saying the owners earned it is like saying slave-owners "earned" their wealth. They often say people don't have to work for them if they don't like it - as if homelessness and maybe even starvation is a real choice.
[FONT=Arial Narrow]Economic Left/Right: -9.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.67 [/FONT]
First we need to know what you mean by rich.do you mean the people who inherited their wealth? The capitalists which exploited labor? Or the small success stories of the lucky?
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I was going to say that the rich earned their wealth about as much as a bank robber or a common thief, but that isn't really true because robbery can be a lot of work
Last edited by CommunityBeliever; 4th October 2011 at 14:33.
All depends on what you meaned by "earned." All in all--some do and some don't. It really doesn't matter (at least to me) what other people do. All I care about is what I do for myself.
And FWIW, what wealth I have: I earned myself.
I've noticed.Originally Posted by Bud Struggle
The rich are parasites of the workers' wealth.
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
So long as there is private property, the propertied class will be able to accumulate wealth without creating it (and thus without earning it).
"All immediatists [. . .] want to get rid of society and put in its place a particular group of workers. This group they choose from the confines of one of the various prisons which constitute the bourgeois society of 'free men' i.e. the factory, the trade, the territorial or legal patch. Their entire miserable effort consists in telling the non-free, the non-citizens, the non-individuals [. . .] to envy and imitate their oppressors: be independent! free! be citizens! people! In a word: be bourgeois!" -Amadeo Bordiga, "Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism"
Smooth!
And if you read my posts--that's not the case. Not that it matters.
Next to nothing? You know what the median wage (not the minimum) is in the USA? Take a guess before you hit the link. Sorry, it's from 2006. you can prolly find 2011.
http://bigthreeauto.procon.org/view....esourceID=2050
Now compare it to the minimum wage.
Slave owners paid wages?
No need to over-do it, Klaattu.
No, but they certainly paid to feed clothe and house their slaves. Plus paying to buy the slave in the first place.
[FONT=Arial Narrow]Economic Left/Right: -9.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.67 [/FONT]
Autoworkers are among the highest paid of workers - thanks to unions. And I wouldn't believe what the right wingers put on the net anyway. The poor make minimum wage or nearly so which is little if any better than slavery.
[FONT=Arial Narrow]Economic Left/Right: -9.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.67 [/FONT]
Did you know that half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day?
They call it wage-slavery for a reason.
"[People] act like its some kind of rock solid homogeneous body of masculine oiled men with big hammers and flat caps standing outside factory gates chewing tobacco and muttering 'those damn petit-bourgeois students and their alienating camera-smashing, I sure love me some CCTV! Don't you, comrade stakhnov?'." - Ravachol
A counter-argument in a cartoon critique of capitalism:
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.-Leon Trotsky
A revolution without dancing is not worth having.-Emma Goldman
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. -Che Guevara
The wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. -Teddy Roosevelt
The OP is from Pennsylvania, not Guatemala or Zimbabwe, and he's making pretty sweeping generalizations. I assumed they included "wage slavery" in the USA.Did you know that half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day?
Somewhere around half of wealth is inherited, and possibly more, depending on what study you look at. Also, wealthy benefactors often give start-up capital to family members, so the number is even higher if you include that.
And of course none of that wealth would be possible without a lot of spadework from the state, which provides (or tries to provide, at least) a stable business environment for the rich to exist in. There's plenty of ways that the wealthy manipulate the state in order to further increase their wealth, too, and we all know how much conservatives/libertarians dislike "statism".There are a lot of mitigating factors that subtract from how much independent agency one used in order to accumulate wealth. Although of course there are wealthy individuals who achieved that position by being legitimately shrewd business operators, and exploiting their own little economic niche, to a certain extent.
you may find this thread helpful:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-most-ri...886/index.html
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
Labor creates wealth. Unless you create it, it isn't yours, you don't earn it. The capitalist exploits the worker for this wealth.
sing me to sleep then leave me alone
Please don't do that.
IMO simply saying that "labor creates value, rich people got rich by stealing it" isn't the best way to argue against libertarians. Hit them where it hurts and illustrate how the wealthy and corporations in general have succeeded because of how interlocked they are with the state. Trust me, there's a TON of info available on this subject.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
nobody "earns" anything. an unemployed man on welfare that cons the system by using his food stamps for cigs and booze with the local sketchy corner store guy deserves cigs as much as charlie sheen. the premise that "u work on it therefore you deserve it" is unacceptable for me. of course, i am going to defend my shit against motherfuckers who want to steal it, but has nothing to do with whether i deserve it or not.
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
