> the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.
Bingo. I found the breakdown in terms of the owner/renter/maintainer classes [0] very useful.
When the owner/renter/maintainer of a business/service/etc are the same person/community, incentives are aligned and quality tends to ensue.
When those 3 roles are clearly delineated and separated, no one gives a shit and owners care about maximizing their profit, maintainers care about getting the job done asap regardless of whether the maintenance will hold in the long term or not, and renters are left out to dry.
[0]: I first encountered it here, not sure if he got it from somewhere else.
The worst hardware store in town is a little locally owned one where the owner is often not only in the store but working the checkout. They really push the locally owned angle, the place is neatly kept and folksey, but just try to return anything and they'll give you the third degree. And if you've lost the receipt absolutely forget it.
Who doesn't hassle customers about returning stuff? Lowes.
This is amusingly the main argument at the cornerstone of most leftist theory.
Capitalism works great as an improvement from feudalism and mercantilism however it starts to majorly break down as a system once the capital owning class cements itself as only needing to invest their capital and manage assets to maintain perpetual dominance. From there they slowly accrue capital and the rift between the working classes and the capital owning classes spreads further and further until the two are effectively completely divorced with the working classes providing 100% of the labor and the capital owning classes consuming 100% of the profits.
And the sign that this decay has reached the point of no return without major social upheaval is the death of the petit bourgeois/petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the end of the self employed shop owners and family businesses. This is one thing people famously get wrong about Marx. His view was that under capitalism the petite bourgeoisie will always eventually be cannibalised by the haute and grande bourgeoisie despite generally siding with them politically (ergo acting against their long term interests). This of course contrasts with the view popular with the state socialists (who misguidedly view the petite bourgeoisie as a threat to and toxic element of capitalism).
And so now we stand at the precipice with the widespread death of the canary in the coal mine that is the small business owner and the question that remains is where do we go from here?
But this divide is farcical. People like Musk/Bezos/etc don't make their money from literal profits, but from the stock price going up, which is driven by speculation. In particular the total valuation of the stock market is worth more than literally all money in existence. And neither Amazon nor Tesla pay dividends, so you can't even go that route. And the owners rarely just sit around letting the money come in, but quite often are obsessive work-a-holics.
I'm very antagonistic towards people like the Waltons who, themselves, have mostly contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever to society and are just coasting off daddy's success - being born to tens of billions of dollars and then dying with your biggest accomplishment being born to tens of billions of dollars is just so many degrees of pathetic. They fit quite closely to what you're describing (and WalMart does pay dividends), but they're a vanishingly small percent of the ultra-wealthy.
Musk had a video game system installed in his DOGE office. I've had that kind of 'workaholic' boss. It's that they have no life, so make work their life, not that they are so good at 'working'.
Here's a steelman for some brand of leftism (I don't ascribe to any label, though I'm an alleged market socialist)
You can buy votes, even if it's banned, by buying up and controlling the media.
Therefore money and political power can be exchanged.
The existence of billionaires - People who have as much money (and therefore, as much political power) as ten hundred millionaires - Therefore represents a dangerous accumulation of power.
When we look at the market and capitalism, we aren't seeing a fun little game where some speedrunner gets a high score and there are no consequences. We are seeing an incentive landscape trying to reform the aristocracy. We are seeing kings arise from first principles.
This should be stopped.
One nonviolent way to stop this is to fund just massive welfare programs, close all tax loopholes, all offshore tax havens, and give poor people money, which is the most American franchisement you can have.
Implementation is left as a simple exercise for the reader
This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.
I do not think your solutions are viable. Giving people money is going to simply drive mass inflation, because you end up massively increasing the amount of money in circulation, but keep the same amount of products. Okay, so then the typical response is well then we just add price controls. And now you end up in a scenario where you have empty shelves because supply no longer meets demand, but also you likely have declining production because the things producers are producing become worth less in real terms, often to the point of them being unable to continue profitably producing them.
I offered some solutions that I think are more viable here. [1]
> This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.
This is called "capitalist realism".
The problem of capitalism isn't that "some people are better at doing things". The problem of capitalism is that anything that exists or can be imagined can be designated as private property and any claim to this property is enforced with the full monopoly of violence of the state.
The problem of modern capitalism is that we've expanded the concept of private property to the point where the vast majority of profits generated are not tied to actual sales of products any more but come from the finance industry - essentially a system of speculative gambling multiple layers of abstraction removed from even the notion of actually "running a business".
And it's not just the "evil bankers" or investors. Even retirement is nowadays based on the finance market. We gradually replaced relying on the community to take care of its elders with relying on your own family to take care of you as an elder to having the government set some of your wages aside to pay for taking care of you as elder to having your company set some of your wages aside to having you invest money in the finance market.
And with everyone having to participate in the finance market despite only receiving a minute fraction of its profits, the interests of the finance industry also shape the nature of the real industry of service and production, driving up deregulation, encouraging short-term growth over long-term sustainability, pump and dump schemes, lobbying against labor protections, etc.
And as any of the Georgists here on HN will tell you: of course this also means that sales (i.e. transfer of property) have been displaced by rent-seeking because rent-seeking is more scalable.
None of this had to necessarily follow from "some people are better at doing some things than others". Of course a lot of this logically follows from the existence of a class of people who hold power over others continuously wanting to maintain and extend that power out of a persistent fear of losing it and ending up on the other side of the equation. But in order for this to work we had to have a culture that would enable this. And the myth of those at the top having gotten there (implying they all started wherever you did as a recipient of this myth) simply by being better at doing something rather than by having literally an entire society provide them a stepladder and handing them the reins, this myth has been reinforcing this culture of enablement for tens of centuries.
I mostly agree, but I'd argue that this is largely because of funny money. Check out this great site. [1] The event it's alluding to is the end of Bretton Woods, which is the point that the government completely unrestricted in their ability to 'print money'. In an economy it may or may not be true that money trickles down, but it's indisputable that it gushes upward. And so each time the government dumps trillions of dollars into the economy, that money makes its way straight to the top in very rapid fashion.
Next thing you know you have people and companies that literally have more money than they know what to do with. And then government and industry become increasingly incestuous as politicians filter money to various companies while in office, and then those companies not only stuff their election coffers full of money, but then have cushy 7+ figure 'advisory' roles for these politicians, or their inner circle, once they leave office - sometimes not even waiting for that. And then the government ends up printing endless amounts of money to keep this businesses afloat after they come crashing down to their own incompetence, completely wrecking the natural process of progression over time. All the while the stock market continues to reach record highs even in the midst of an economy destroying epidemic simply because it's all fake and driven on endless speculation, backed by endless injections of funny money.
And then on top of all of this you have various meta-effects. For instance when you live in an economy without much inflation or deflation, it's practically impossible to lower wages simply because people won't accept that. But in an inflationary economy? Somebody might even be happy about earning 25% more than they were in 2020, when in reality that means they've actually taken a pay cut thanks to inflation. And inflation is driven by the excesses of funny money.
And an inflationary society also strongly incentivizes the hoarding of things which, in turn, drives rent seeking behavior. Your things become worth more over time, but money becomes worth less over time. So you want to accumulate as many things as you can and rent access to them. Whereas in a stable or deflationary economy, things remain a comparable cost or even become worth less over time - so there's less motivation to hoard things and more motivation to hoard money.
He started from relatively little in spite of claims from his estranged and strange father, and has built up literally species-changing industries in both rocketry and electrical vehicles. The world is a million times different, and better, because of him. And he will certainly go down in history as the Thomas Edison of this era.
I’m the farthest thing from a Marxist but the reason they see the petty bourgeoisie as a threat is that they and the comfortable middle class in general are the main bulk of the opposition to revolution and very threatened by it (understandably, and if we’re being honest, rightly so) and thus are natural anti-communists.
Of course. The issue with the common leftist stance is that it takes the wrong thing away from that. That the petite bourgeoisie are toxic is not at the root of the issue, rather it is a symptom of capitalist rot.
Petite bourgeoisie are an important component of any non-state leftist economy as they are workers who directly own the results of their labor. The focus should not be in punishing or excising these petite bourgeoisie but rather in educating them, "converting them", and folding them into the cause. They are a key component of the struggle and any movement which wholly excludes them devolves into authoritarianism and in the process throws fuel into the fire for the rise of fascism.
To borrow a quote from Trotsky[1]:
> The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other. Its dissatisfaction, indignation, and despair are diverted by the fascists away from big capital and against the workers. It may be said that fascism is the act of placing the petty bourgeoisie at the disposal of its most bitter enemies. In this way, big capital ruins the middle classes and then, with the help of hired fascist demagogues, incites the despairing petty bourgeoisie against the worker.
The petite bourgeoisie at the end of their ropes inevitably turn to fascism in an attempt to survive with their status in tact. In doing so they tie the noose that the haute and grande bourgeoisie use to hang them with as they seize control of the state as a tool to reign in the worker and limit the capacity for upstarts to challenge their authority.
The alternative of course is to integrate the petite bourgeoisie and encourage them to embrace their place among the worker class rather than ostracise them for their adjacency to and overlap with the managerial class.
I don't think they can be "converted" for so the same reasons they regularly decide to side against their own long term interests. They don't want to see themselves as workers. They've been raised in a society that tells them "worker" is the lowest rung and no small part of them started a business in large part for the status of being an "owner"
Bingo. I found the breakdown in terms of the owner/renter/maintainer classes [0] very useful.
When the owner/renter/maintainer of a business/service/etc are the same person/community, incentives are aligned and quality tends to ensue.
When those 3 roles are clearly delineated and separated, no one gives a shit and owners care about maximizing their profit, maintainers care about getting the job done asap regardless of whether the maintenance will hold in the long term or not, and renters are left out to dry.
[0]: I first encountered it here, not sure if he got it from somewhere else.
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/getting-to-gnome-mod...