Behind every dividend received, there are underpaid workers and prices being raised for consumers

The problem is that on the other end of every wealthy guy receiving a passive rental income, there is a tenant working hard to afford the rent.

On the other end of every wealthy guy growing his wealth through compound interest, there are people with growing mountains of debt, struggling to pay that interest.

Behind every dividend received, there are underpaid workers and prices being raised for consumers.

When lifesaving drugs like insulin are sold at insane prices to make easy money, or doctors are paid to push opioids, there are people who have to ration insulin they can't afford, or whose lives are destroyed by opioid addiction. In the US, a vial of insulin was listed at about $275 while it costs only $2-6 to make. It doesn't have to be this way: in India, more than 20,000 Jan Aushadhi Kendras sell generic medicines at 50-80% lower prices than branded ones.

Behind every fortune made in the private prison industry, there is a mountain of human suffering. For people to make easy money off prison labor, there needs to be a large supply of modern-day slaves.

When someone uses insider knowledge to bet on the next missile strike, others get ripped off, people are taxed to fund the missile, and people die because of it.

Every war that brings easy money to the military-industrial complex is paid for in human lives. That's the cost of these profits for those who don't work.

When the wealthy bring in robots, they tell themselves it can't possibly hurt anyone. Meanwhile they ignore the workers they just fired, the communities destroyed by unemployment, and the environmental damage of their new robotized factory.

The idea that they self-print their billions and trillions, that their giant passive incomes fall out of the sky and nobody else is affected, is ridiculous.

Workers are told to work extra hard, then they get a pizza party while the owners roll around in dough and celebrate their increased profits by lobbying for tax cuts. The workers are told, "Ah, but you have as little as you had before, plus a pizza! So we're not taking from you, it's win-win!" Then prices go up, and workers are told to work harder or be fired.

It's a grotesque joke.

There are people who haven't had a raise in years, who struggle to make ends meet as groceries, gas and everything else get more expensive, who suspect they'll soon be replaced by a robot or a chatbot, who stockpile guns because they're terrified of the ambient misery and the fearmongering on TV. And they've been sold a story that a society built to benefit a few ruling elites costs them nothing.

They work hard to earn a little money, then have to pay a lot, and they defend the people who receive that money and spend it on private jets to private islands and on space tourism.

It's like a medieval peasant who grows tons of wheat but struggles to afford a loaf of bread, looking at the nobles' palaces and telling himself the nobles probably built them on their own, without it affecting anyone else.

It's not that people are stupid. They've been told all their lives that the rich earned every rupee on their own, so it's hard to see who is really paying. And whenever anger builds, it gets pointed sideways at other struggling people instead of up the ladder.

Trust fund kids partying on yachts, and retired billionaires who earn more now than they ever did while working, are applauded as heroes, while regular workers are spat on and called lazy. That's the real contradiction: an ideology that claims to glorify hard work while rewarding ownership and treating workers like crap.

I know you're against welfare, all for hard work and against freeloading. But have you ever asked yourself why a person who works 9 to 12 hours a day can't afford fresh air, clean water, a hygienic place to live and nutritious food? Why they have to live in a slum and use an unclean washroom, or go outside? They're working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Decent housing doesn't have to be a luxury. In Canada, non-profit housing co-ops charge only what it costs to run the building, and a study of five cities found their rents ended up about a third below market.

Raising the minimum wage is a band-aid. If wages go up for everyone, landlords will raise rent, schools and colleges will raise fees, healthcare will cost more than ever, and we'll be back to square one. The real solution is to stop rent-seeking and give people healthcare, education and housing at or near cost. Singapore already does this for schooling: government primary school is free for citizens, and secondary school costs just S$5 a month.

And if you say government should stay out and let the free market handle it, then by the same logic government should not grant drug companies monopolies either. Insulin's discoverers sold the patent for just $1 more than 100 years ago so everyone could have it, yet companies keep making small tweaks to the formula or the pen to get new patents and block competition. You cannot call it a free market when the government protects the seller from competition. India's patent law doesn't allow new patents for small tweaks to old drugs, which is one reason generic medicines here are so much cheaper.

People can't opt out of housing, healthcare or insulin, so sellers have unusual pricing power. That's why profit on essentials like healthcare, education and housing should be capped at 10–20%, not 1000–2000% markups. That's not an exaggeration: India's drug price regulator found private hospitals in Delhi-NCR charging margins of up to 1,737%, billing Rs 106 for an item they bought for Rs 5.77.

We could use AI, Robots and Automation to lessen the workload of all people and have enough resources for everyone to have good life or we could use them to make the billionaires more rich. 

This system is modern feudalism, sucking the blood of 90% of people. Change it, because if you don't stand up now, tech-bro billionaires will replace you with robots and AI, there will be no work for humans and you won't be able to afford even the basic necessities of life.

Post Scarcity Possible ?

GDP and Economy of this Age

The conservative case for Socialism

We could start off from the idea that it’s important to preserve moral values, and community and good things. 

Which means that when we see things getting corrupted by money, a conservative who wants to preserve good things, would want to fix that, to conserve things and stop society from falling into moral decay and corruption.

Now obviously, a conservative won’t want to just jump right ahead into some kind of anarchy, they’ll want to advance cautiously, and to have some kind of order, so naturally, they’d want to have things planned out. Not just one central plan, but backup plans and failsafes too. Can’t be too careful.

Obviously, as the conservative likes the idea of people having families, they’d want to ensure that everyone is paid a decent living wage, enough to afford a family and kids that are not starving.

They have a strong sense of personal responsibility, so it only makes sense that they’d want to avoid delegating power to some owner, and to instead have workers own the means of production.
If they saw a starving kid, they’d feel personally responsible for feeding the child, just like how they’d feel personally responsible for being a good Samaritan and helping the homeless.

As they often have a free market mentality, they’d probably be horrified by the idea of government granted monopolies over insulin and things like that, or by privately controlled supermarkets, they’d want to have public marketplaces where small stands can compete against each other. But as they can be quite strict, and sometimes get a bit of a “law and order” mindset, they’d want the markets to be regulated to ensure that everything is fair, that there is no fraud, no cheating, no scamming, no tainted product, and that it’s all only ever win-win.

They’d probably talk about the tragedy of the commons, and how bad it is when people are simply allowed to simply drain aquifers or pollute the air, and demand that these type of resources be well managed and conserved, treated as a common good.

As they are in favor of freedom, they’d be totally opposed to any violent repression, threats of eviction, mass incarceration or things like that, they be horrified at the idea of putting masses of people behind bars. They’d want healthcare, rehabilitation, integration, education, humane policies that liberate people from addictions and ignorance.

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Overall, a lot of what socialism is about, is perfectly compatible with the values that conservatives claim to hold, in fact, in most cases, socialism is much better adapted to such conservative values than capitalism.

Can Humans solve Poverty ?

Is Post Scarcity Possible ?

The War on Drugs

25 years ago, Portugal had an opioid epidemic.

Instead of an ineffective, costly, cruel war on drug users, they treated addiction as an illness.

Selling heroin stayed illegal. Owning a small amount for personal use didn't.

Instead of hunting addicts down and punishing them — prison, forcing them into hiding, criminalizing them — they told people: ok, we see you have a problem, we want to help. Come get medical services.

Clean needles if needed. Safe spaces to inject if needed. Psychological support. Methadone to manage withdrawal.

Addicts weren't threatened into stopping. They were helped. Given options.

It didn't fix everything overnight — not every addict was ready to quit. But every time one was ready, the help was there. And the ones who weren't ready yet got to watch their friends get better.

It worked. Overdoses down. HIV cases down. People locked up for drug possession, down. Money spent on enforcement, down. The dealers who were getting rich off heroin lost their customers.

Portugal sees a few dozen overdose deaths a year. The US sees 70,000–80,000. The US has 30 times Portugal's population — and somewhere around a thousand to two thousand times the overdose deaths.

The US approach — "I'll lock you up with people doing hard time for years, that'll teach you a lesson" — works exceptionally badly. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and among the highest drug death rates too. Also among the highest homicide rates in the wealthy world — some states run 10x what you'd see in Europe.

Not much has changed. The war on drug users is a bad idea. You can't solve a problem by criminalizing the symptom. Reality has disproven that.

Some people genuinely believe the war on drugs can work. But plenty of the people pushing it already know it doesn't reduce drug use. That's not actually what they care about.

Some have said outright that it functioned as a way to go after political opponents — criminalize people, and it disrupts their communities, vilifies them, keeps the cycle going.

Nearly 2 million people are behind bars in the US. The 13th Amendment still allows forced labor for anyone convicted of a crime, and private companies profit from it.

Get a felony — for something like drug possession, or falling behind on court debt — and in a lot of states you can lose your right to vote too. Nobody tracks the full national number. Millions of people, disproportionately Black men.

Cocaine used by someone in finance gets treated leniently. Crack, more common in poor Black neighborhoods, gets you years. Police don't do stop-and-frisk on executives who are high all day. They target poor neighborhoods — drug charges are just a convenient excuse to harass people.

That it destroys communities isn't a side effect. For a lot of people behind this, it's the point.

A lot of people are happy to spend unlimited money on incarceration and enforcement, but not on healthcare — because the people who'd benefit are poor and mostly minorities. It's the same instinct behind ICE detention and migrant camps: money appears fast when the goal is locking people up, not helping them.

One senator has openly said the US has an "under-incarceration problem." He represents a Southern state whose prison system grew directly out of the plantation economy — forced labor included.

Calling it a war on drugs is a bit dishonest. It's closer to a war on Black men.

Meanwhile — a veteran can sleep on the street and there's no money to help. Get charged with something nonviolent, like drug possession or an unpaid debt, and suddenly the state can find $50,000–$100,000 a year to keep you locked up.

Stay a struggling, law-abiding citizen: $0 in support. Get convicted of something nonviolent: six figures a year, spent on you — just not to help you.

If that much money can be found every year to "teach people a lesson," why does anyone need to go into debt for college?

It's a rigged system. Not really designed to solve the problems it claims to solve — designed to sustain them, and to keep a specific group of people down while doing it. Prohibition 2.0, aimed at whoever's convenient this time.

Is Post Scarcity Possible ?

 I’m a millionaire. Scarcity is no longer an issue for me.

Look at this factory, where robots are building stuff, with minimal need for human intervention.

And look at this beautiful warmed greenhouse, that enables salad production even in winter.

All this technological improvement will improve our lives!

Surely, we cannot be far away from a world in which scarcity no longer exists, right?

Actually, I’m a millionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.

Which is kind of meaningless.

I cant buy anything with it.

How can I still be poor, even though I’m a millionaire? It makes no sense, right?

But look at this:

Having a million dollars is completely useless if everyone also has a million dollars. It’s even more useless when others have trillions of dollars.

Or when they have even more than that.

In a market economy, scarcity is what makes things valuable. Having a lot of money is meaningless if money is not scarce.

Even something that is inherently useful, like air, which every human requires to survive, is not considered valuable, because it is not scarce.

But if there is a lot of pollution? And fresh air becomes scarce?

Then it becomes valuable!

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To live a good life, you need things that are actually useful.

You need air to breath, water to drink, you need food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.

Ideally, it means that those things should not be scarce.

But to get rich in a market economy, you need to have things that others dont have. You need scarcity. Capitalism, and the market economy rely on scarcity.

If you want to use something directly, it doesn’t matter at all how much others have.

If I have a pizza, and I’m going to eat it, well you can have a pizza too. Or twenty. Or a hundred. What do I care. My pizza is not going to be any less tasty because of it.

I’m still going to enjoy it, it’s going to be delicious, and it will feed me all the same.

I have 0 reason to try and prevent you from making your own pizza. I can actually teach you how to make pizza if you want, it’s really easy.

But in a market economy? When things are intended not for use, but for trade?

Then scarcity is important. Then preventing others from having the same stuff you have is what makes it valuable.

Why do you think counterfeiting money is illegal?

Why do you think inflation happens?

Because when there is more money, then money becomes less valuable.

We could all be billionaires, and we would not have taken a single step towards resolving scarcity.

Scarcity is a social issue.

This is how we end up with the current dystopian society.

Where automation is not actually improving our lives, but is seen as taking away people’s jobs. Making the remaining jobs more valuable.

Where automation does not lead to everyone working less, but instead leads to some people being unemployed, and desperate to have a chance to work.

Where it does not lead to everyone having more, but instead drives wages down.

Where people having more money just makes prices go up.

We end up in a situation where there are warm houses to grow salads, but where human beings freeze to death on the streets without being able to access housing.

Not because we dont have the technical capacity to provide everyone with housing, but because making sure that some dont have access to housing is how rents are kept so damn high.

If everyone had a home of their own, or access to government provided housing, then the property owners would not be able to force everyone to pay insane rents.

Housing would still be very valuable. Because it protects us from harsh weather, because we need it for survival.

But it would not have such a high price, it would not have a high exchange value, billionaires would not be able to force people to work so much just for a roof over their head.

In a market system, based on supply and demand, having more demand than supply is what keeps prices high.

A post scarcity society is attainable. It just means a post capitalist society.

Did you ever notice that there are tons of ads trying to make people want useless stuff?

That’s another way to create scarcity. Instead of restricting supply, increase demand.

Advertising would have you believe that there is no limit to how much material stuff people can desire. And puts a lot of effort into making that happen.

Trillions of dollars go towards advertising, towards convincing people that they want or even that they NEED whatever product it is that they are trying to make a profit on.

But in fact, there are a lot of studies showing that past a certain level where you no longer need to worry about survival, extra money does not actually make people happier.

Contrary to what ads pretend, being stressed your whole life running after money and trying to buy ever more stuff is not going to make you happy.

There are however a lot of things, like friendships, which are completely free, and will bring a lot of happiness to your life.

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A post scarcity society is not a society where everyone has infinite stuff.

A post scarcity society is one where everyone has enough to cover their needs for survival, and has the ability to have free time, to have friends, to engage in arts, in sports, games, etc.

Where people can focus on being happy and healthy.

This stressful, depression inducing rat-race focused on just increasing GDP, creating more stuff, making people work more, pay more, increasing profits, destroying the environment, etc, this is leading us nowhere.

We have the technical capacity for a post scarcity society.

What we need is social change.

A different type of economy. One which focuses on maximizing health and happiness. Not one that focuses on creating more junk.

f

Financial wealth disappears when........

Starting BTech Read This ?

Current GDP and Economy

The first thing to understand is that economic activity is just activity, and that just looking busy, doing more stuff, isn’t a useful goal in and of itself.

More people doing more stuff, moving things around, moving money around, stressing out, sending emails back and forth, hurrying from one place to another, having meetings, … Well yes, ok, it’s economic growth, sure. But… Is it achieving anything useful?

Sometimes. 
But often, a lot of that energy is wasted.

Imagine some people who don’t smoke. 
And they want to grow their economy. So they start working more, to plant tobacco, and to harvest and process it, and to transport it, and to advertise it, and to sell it. 
They end up with a growing consumption, growing sales, jobs, etc. 
Then they hire propaganda specialists and think tanks to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer, and they hire more advertisers to push it even more aggressively, promoting smoking as something healthy. 
And they also have to hire more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals to treat all the sick people dying of cancer. 
And they can have some random grifter writing ineffective self help books on how to stop smoking. 
And pharmacies selling nicotine patches.

Now it’s very obvious that the tobacco industry grows the overall economy. 
People end up working more, more taxes are paid, more profits are made, more people are sick, more nicotine patches are sold, etc. 
There is a lot of economic activity going on, people are doing stuff, money is changing hands, surgeons get paid to help lung cancer victims.

But… it’s not actually improving society.

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Some economic activity is useful. 
For example, if you want a house, the house needs to be built, so what the workers are doing is useful.

If you want to eat food, farmers need to grow food. 
So you can’t really have no economic activity at all.

But at some point, you hit diminishing returns. 
Working one job, so that you can afford to put food on the table, sure, that makes sense.

But if you already have a second job, so that you can fund some kind of sugar/soda/junk food addiction, where the farmers grow extra corn syrup, more than needed, and there are teams of people working to advertise the junk food to you as dishonestly as possible, and you consume more than needed, and your waist size keeps growing along with your weight and your consumption, and you are struggling to afford the healthcare and the insulin costs linked to your sugar addiction, and people are employed to push misinformation blaming fat for obesity, and coca cola funds misinformation saying it’s actually just about exercise and sugar isn’t to blame, and there are a zillion people selling ineffective diets and so on…

Well, all of that extra economic activity is “doing stuff”, money is changing hands, stuff is happening. 
But again: Is it really improving society, is it improving your life?

You could get a third job and try to struggle to afford some gambling addiction or something like that, so that more stuff is done, and more money is changing hands.

But again, is that really all that helpful?

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Personally, I find that if I consume a moderate amount of food, I’m actually happier than when I’m consuming more and more, and growing more and more obese.

I’ve never hit the point where the growing consumption of food and growing weight caused me to need growing amounts of healthcare services to deal with a growing number of chronic health issues.

But honestly, I’m really not interested at all in that kind of growth just for the sake of growing.

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Growing pollution, growing global temperatures, growing CO2 levels… 
It’s going to lead to more economic activity. 
As more natural disasters happen, people will have to rebuild more, people will have to leave there homes behind, other people will be building fences and concentration camps, there will be growing wars, just more and more panic and frenzy and stuff that is done.

But again: Are we really that desperate for something to do, that we want to create that much more work for ourselves?

What if we had a growing amount of free time instead of growing obesity? Would that really be so bad?

Someone who is just spending time with friends or family is not increasing the GDP or growing the economy. 
Someone who stops smoking, stops drinking, stops gambling, stops compulsively stress eating, and stops having so many chronic health issues, and instead meditates, and does bodyweight exercises at home, and has human relations, is shrinking the economy, hurting the addiction industry.

Is that really so bad?

Do we really need to ramp up the production of bombs and stuff like that, to produce ever more wars? 
I’m not saying we need 0 production of anything, but this whole cult of production and consumption for the sake of doing stuff and being active all the time, seems rather toxic. 
Instead of just trying to look busy doing something, we should think about what the actual goal is, no?

If you are jobless, you don’t really have.....