This is a tweet from a democratic economist and professor
- Thread starter Smallcock
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I take it you're attempting to express your different understanding by your question marks. But if you really don't get his simple logic, start with the dictionary definition. The only one of the many meanings of 'to make' that applies to money is "to gain, or to earn". It's quite reasonable to suggest that gaining your money from the labour of your workers making products and sales that you had no hand in amounts to taking. As does gaining from the work done to strip and sell minerals, trees, or crops (not to mention gaining by whatever should have been spent on restoring the land rather than gaining fropm leaving the waste and pollution for others to clean up). You can ponder the taking part of patents yourself, but we wouldn't have today's internet and its media without a whole lotta taking from the unwilling, but powerless.
You may disagree — who can say what
means — but the quote you provided was quite clear and coherent.
Or was that your dog-whistle?
There is some basis to that. An example of the subversion of capitalism, not an indictment of it.
She is not indicting captalism, she is saying it being subverted more frequently and with increasing impunity by the rich and powerful, slowing returning us to the days of the robber barons.
OK. So tell me how the Waltons subverted capitalism? How about Bezos? She's tarring several billionaires. Wonder why she didn't mention Buffett or Steyer?
Pretty much agree... There is a big difference between earning your pay as a worker or small proprietor and those that use leverage, market power and the legal system to really roll in the dough. You don't earn billions by doing a a lifetime of honest work.
The waltons created monopolies in smaller local markets across the USA and engaged in predatory capitalism. What they did was exactly what Rockefeller did driving local competitors out of business. Bezos is doing a similar thing, undercutting local competition leveraging govt subsidize services to transport goods. His sins are not as agregious as Amazon is also a platform for entepreneurs
Didn't Sam Walton, Rockefeller, Bezos, Gates and many others start out as small entrepreneurs? (In my own family, we were so poor when I was little that my mom took in boarders. We weren't always billionaires like we are to-day.)
I think the biggest threat to our society and economy are the Marxists and monopoly unions.
At least someone saw where her plant was rooted.
Certainly typified by this mornings's America where almost a million workers with supposedly secure jobs haven't been paid for a month, and the millions work at 'progressive' minimum wages that cant get them above the poverty line while the 1% sit in luxury reaping much of the county's income and owning the vast majority of of it's wealth in return for … ? Well not in return for their labour anyway.
You have the weirdest, 'I can't give a meaning up riposte so let me make meaningless quips', responses. All of which seem to be tinged with some sort of 'lefty boogey man' fear.
Certainly wouldn't expect any such thing from the righty ones, who make comfy livings 'splaining that mess, now would we?
Just another wacko leftist professor who has not fucking idea how you get a billion dollars.
I can’t wait until the Dems settle for Bloomberg and all these idiots will be locked out of the MSM during the election.
I can’t wait until the Dems settle for Bloomberg and all these idiots will be locked out of the MSM during the election.
What is it you're disagreeing with? It's a standard part of the Marxist economic thinking that for some to prosper others have to suffer. A zero sum outlook. This is not any kind of secret. The solution, supposedly, is to introduce and maintain an egalitarian system. Something that the economists who built their models on that philosophy were spectacularly unsuccessful in achieving. Every kind of economic model produces hierarchy that results in inequality of one sort or another.
Wal Mart is a classic capitalism success story. They focused on smaller markets which were largely ignored. They had a vision of leveraging economies of scale. People thought they were nuts operating on smaller margins and larger volumes. They obviously proved them wrong. They were innovative and expertly employed supply chain management before any other retailer.
But of course the left loves to trash them because they oppose unionized workplaces and 'exploit' their workers.
