/liberty/ - Liberty

Only if by capitalism you mean keynesian faggotry.

Why would the left claim that? That would mean they'd all get jobs in capitalism and wouldn't even have to work anything meaningful.

>>66470

Doing meaningless shit all day for five days a week is what makes people massacre their coworkers.

>>66467

No, not on any appreciable scale. Inefficiencies can always happen, but if they become widespread, the inefficient companies will lose out to the efficient ones.

Leftists claim otherwise because they don't understand how the market works. To them, the capitalists and entrepreneurs are a class desperately clinging to their power and that apparently requires giving people soulcrushing, yet unprofitable jobs. It also keeps the lower classes in poverty because it squanders resources. Try asking a leftist how that is supposed to be profitable if you want something to laugh at. It's really not just a stereotype that these people live in a fantasy world.

>>66467

It's true that most jobs aren't in 'essential' lines of work, but most people wouldn't be happy living just with the essentials. Or at least, they are willing to work more to be able to afford them.

Capitalism pays you for doing what others pay you for, i.e. what other people want, i.e. meaningful things or at least things that some people find meaningful.

Communism pays you for what the government decides is meaningful.

Capitalism is free voluntary exchanges, equality of opportunity and a strong middle class.

Communism is the state taking away your property and killing the incentive to work, thus everyone lives miserably and equally poor.

>>66534

That's not true, in almost all cases you have to do before you can get paid and nothing guarantees that somebody will actually pay for it.

>>66491

More or less this.

The government creates inefficiencies and "make-work" positions via diversity quotas, public works like the DMV, etc. but on average, a company with too many inefficiencies ceases to exist. There is a reason for virtually every job, and for a job to exist, it must bring in more money/prevent the loss of more money than it costs to have the job. Whether it's the safety manager or the accountant, their presence is saving more profits/creating more profits than their lack of presence. Even HR serves the purpose of freeing up time that a manager would otherwise spend hiring people/dealing with employee complaints.

While it's true that only about 3% of the US population is involved with agriculture today, and only about 11% or less of the population is involved in utilities last I checked, these are typically positions that you can't automate away much more, and that pay really fucking well for the work done in a capitalist society. I always like to tell people that under socialism there would be such a lack of technicians that the NEET plebs would have to hold me at gunpoint because of my skillsets. Tradesmen don't typically do it out of passion (there's some passion there, but not enough to work for scraps) but for money, and you need tradesmen to have a functional infrastructure. Socialists don't have tradesmen because the tradesmen would rather study for free at the university than do back-breaking work for the same pay as the faggots sitting up in their office, so you eventually end up with a bunch of armchair intellectuals and someone holding the tradesmen/former tradesmen at gunpoint to keep society from falling apart.

tl;dr-Tradesmen/Agricultural workers only exist when there's money involved or they're held at gunpoint, so under socialism you end up with a lack of infrastructure personnel, thus the "small percentage of total workforce" point is irrelevant.

>>66467

>meaningless make work

Who has the authority to decide what is meaningful and what not?

>>66581

>Tradesmen/Agricultural workers only exist when there's money involved or they're held at gunpoint, so under socialism you end up with a lack of infrastructure personnel, thus the "small percentage of total workforce" point is irrelevant.

But so many tradesmen and agricultural workers these days work for scraps because of illegal immigration, agricultural workers especially, and tradesmen can only make an acceptable living these days if they are lucky enough to get into a union. If not then they're making $10/hr with Pablo.

>>66467

if someone pays these ppl to do that work it is beneficial i think

>>66467

No, that's the complete opposite of capitalism; if someone isn't pulling their weight, you cut them loose.

<I'll take "questions only someone who has never had a job" could ask, for a thousand, Alex

>>66614

>Tradesmen/Farmers work for scraps

I'm not sure which dystopian world you live in, but generally farmers are intergenerational families that make pretty damn good money on their product thanks to subsidies, and as for tradesmen, Mexicans have only really infected two groups: Construction/Repair as a whole because no one will do it, and entry-level positions in the other trades. Entry-level workers work for scraps, but the moment you get experience in the field or them there military tax credits the Mexicans can't compete and you begin making decent cash (if not a shit ton depending on trade) for very little in the way of academic investment. Honestly the pacific islanders and Central Americans are more of a threat to CAD/CNC/Electronics than the Mexicans are right now. The trick is just getting around the swarms of foreigners in order to get that basic training/skillsets.

if a job was useless, why would someone pay you for it?

because they think it isnt

in a state controlled job the state will pay salaries for useless work and never have a reason to stop

in a free market job a company or somesuch will under perform amongst its more efficient peers and will either reform or fail, thus eliminating useless jobs

>>66724

Multigenerational families may own the farms and cash subsidies but the actual field hands are practically slaves. Most blue collar workers are directly competing with illegal immigrant wages if they are not in a union.

Essential wage work in this country pays almost nothing. The only essential sector that has been immune to illegal immigration, freight and trucking, has also been circling the drain for a very long time and workers have to put in marathon hours for very little return.

It is typically the more left/diverse focused societies that create make-work jobs.

Was in South Africa and they have people cutting grass (public spaces) using weed-wackers and collecting the grass with garbage bags. Not just small spaces either, some large plots of grass to boot.

>>66771

Everyone nowadays can own a notebook or a tv with a little saving and a very modest "slave wage". What this means is that real wages are far above anything even a higher official would've been paid just a few hundred years ago. Wages that you just cannot humanly live on are a thing, but not in any country that has some decades of capitalism accumulation behind it.

>>66792

Wages aren't high. Electronic trinkets are simply super cheap.

>>66793

that's what real wages means

>>66795

Sales for big ticket items like houses and cars are in an all time slump and rents are exceeding 50% of people's incomes people are working for peanuts no matter how many laptops or plastic garbage they can buy from China.

>>66793

Aaaaand where's the practical difference? Bottom line is, everyone is richer, and everyone is super rich by the standards of two-hundred years ago. It's not just about electronics, food and other necessities are also cheaper. Virtually no one in the western world is starving these days, no one has to shit on the streets, almost everyone has access to heated buildings, and so on. The rich have it better, the poor have it better, everyone has it better, all because of capitalism. This may not sound romantic, but it's true.

>>66797

>at least you're better off than the people in the slums of Hyderabad

>at least you're slightly better off than dirt farmers of 150 years because of your Netflix account

>meanwhile wages haven't risen since the 70s, union participation is an all time low, Pablo continues to flood the border to work for $4/hr, and the rich are the richest they have ever been in human history

kek

How much longer do you think people will continue to fall for this?

>>66796

>Sales for big ticket items like houses and cars are in an all time slump

What I said below applies to houses too, mutatis mutandis, but I answered it below first before I engaged this part. Oh well.

Cars haven't gotten cheaper, not when you take the features into account. People pay more for cars because they want them with six airbags, safe for crashes, with ten USB-ports and HDMI (somehow), and heated seats. And new cars last about twice as long as they did thirty years ago, too. So once more, you get more for your money.

>and rents are exceeding 50% of people's incomes

Zoning laws. Price controls. No wonder rents are high when you can walk down a street and see five foreclosed businesses that someone could've rented out, all the while rents are too high. Problem is, you cannot just rent something in a business zone, instead you gotta move two meters to where the resident zone begins. And add to that the fact that the population has risen fivefold since the early days. And the thousands of square miles of vacant government property.

>>66798

Alright, I tried. You don't know what real wages are, do you? You feel bitter about the fact that some people are richer than you while your wage "only" gives you access to a smart tv, a car with heated seats, antibiotics, affordable food, a gym membership, and a global communications network with the equivalent of a thousand libraries stored on them? Nigger, git gud. Stop being an entitled, envious shit. I'm out.

>>66802

I feel bitter because i want an economy that revolves around people doing meaningful work (construction, resource extraction, infrastructure, renovation/beautification of cities) being meaningfully recompensed instead of an economy that revolves around financial speculation and h1b pajeets being imported to code the latest shitty social media nobody is going to use while all the meaningful work is done by wage slave Mexicans at five dollars an hour.

>>66804

construction has a ton of state enforced barriers and always will so the industry will always be shitty outside of a free market

resource extraction is the same

infrastructure is a racket used almost solely to give people inflated govt contracts to do nothing instead of an actual industry, if their wasnt a monopoly on it it would be a lot better

>renovation/beautification of cities

cities will never be beautiful im sorry, that is beyond the powers of man

basically all the things you listed as useful work are fucked over by government monopolies or govt placed barriers and I see no reason why they wouldn't thrive in the free market

>>66796

>Sales for big ticket items like houses and cars are in an all time slump

I can get two virtually new 2016 cars for about $20,000 at a dealership with no interest for the first two years if I can show I make less than $100k/year. That aside, housing and auto markets are possibly the most government-infested markets of all time when it comes to consumer goods. Houses are gonna crash again and come down real nice, but the whole point of buying a house in the first place is that you plan to make it a semi-permanent residence. You aren't supposed to "flip homes" every two or three years. You're supposed to buy a house and live in it for a decade or more, or at least half a decade before selling it. As for renting, shelter in the first place is expensive. It should be where the largest portion of your income goes towards. If your rent exceeds about 60-75% of your income you're probably getting screwed (unless you live in a major metropolitan area), but if you're willing to settle for a higher travelling bill and less access to grocery stores and such, you can get houses further from "working" sectors that cost about 1/3rd of your income on a skilled worker's wages.

In 1970 a worker had to work about 1.5-3 hours for a gallon of milk. Today a worker has to work an average of 10-30 minutes for a gallon of milk, despite inflation. Real wages are increasing across the spectrum everywhere government hasn't dug their claws in as deep as they can.

>>66467

Most of those "meaningless make work positions" would not exist without lobbying and subsidies.

>>66580

But it's true for things that others pay you for.

A large part of the economy not being devoted to producing the necessities of life is one of the advantages of a modern economy. Throughout most of human history the vast majority of the economy was devoted to just supplying people with the basic necessities of life and there are still parts of the world where that still is the case, just look at the less developed parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where there are large amounts of people doing subsistence farming. Because most people aren't having to worry about producing their own food, clothing, and heating, they can devote themselves to satisfying other desires, like creating anonymous message boards.

Whether you think something is meaningless is basically a philosophical question and if you start to question what work does and does not have meaning you will eventually start to question whether life has meaning or not, whether you chop logs or write computer programs you're just going to die and eventually be forgotten.

>>66800

You also have to take into account cars haven't gotten cheaper because most governments put a lot of restrictions on the types and kinds of automobiles that can be produced. Rising safety standards force the amount of materials to go into cars to rise and therefor the price. However, I think what you also said has an appreciable effect on the price of cars.

>>66804

I work in construction and there's a lot of hiring going on in the industry if you want a 'meaningful' job. Godspeed.

>>66467

Yes, what you said is pretty much true. In addition, there is also the argument of the meaning and happiness derived from these jobs being very low.