this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Yea the people with the capital have the power. Capitalism.
What power do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have over you?
Are you serious?
Jeff Bezos has spent millions of dollars on union busting to prevent his workers from collectively bargaining for better wages. This massive chunk of the workforce then continues to work for less than they are worth because of his illegal tactics. This creates a systemic downwards pressure on wages across the entire workforce. Investors in the capital class gave Amazon a blank check to crush retailers for decades while losing money, because they knew at some point he would have a grip on the market and could stop providing high quality goods and start pumping out cheap garbage from companies like KYZGURK and BULJCOW and reap in massive profits. The capital class destroyed the retail sector and now you get the “convenience” of every purchase making him profits while the items you buy consistently decrease in quality.
Musk admitted to pushing the hyper loop, knowing it was unworkable, to try to prevent California’s high speed rail project. There’s no bullet train I can hop on to get to LA right now because of the power he flexed.
Musk just said he would put $45m a month into a trump super pac, his wealth makes him think that he should get to decide the outcome of our election. He purchased twitter and now has control over the algorithmic feed consumed by millions of my countrymen, directly influencing their thoughts and feelings an any range of topics.
They both contribute to the government to write laws favorable to them, reducing their tax burden and increasing mine. They promote candidates that are aligned with their corporate interests and if those interests include eroding workers rights and moving negative externalities into the environment that has the water I drink, the air I breathe, and the food I eat, fuck me.
Bezos owns the Washington post and can move public opinion in whichever way he wants. If he wants people to think that net neutrality sucks, he can spend all day having the columnists churn that shit out, changing both politicians and the public’s sentiment on the topic by cherry picking data and presenting the most one sided arguments imaginable.
Jeff bezos has conflicts with his workers, and his system revolutionized how we buy things.
This is false, it was not going to happen.
How exactly did they harm you? "They both contribute to the government to write laws favorable to them, reducing their tax burden and increasing mine" - this would be the takeaway I would like you to have, not the propaganda about how they mistreat people. I get what you are saying, but the capital is not what harms you, its how they interact with the thing the can harm you, the government.
I hear your point it’s just wrong.
It’s clear that you believe the government is the bad thing here. I see you completely skipped over all my points about how their market manipulation harms the consumer and the worker. That manipulation is purely from them having a bunch of money and using it to their advantage and does not require a government boogie man.
It’s not that I can’t see the point you want to make, they corrupt the government and then the governments power is the thing that hurts me. First it’s wrong because if we were some sort of anarchy society, bezos using investor money to undersell and falsely outcompete the rest of the market until he has a stranglehold on the economy and can exact a tax on every item sold would still happen.
The fact that you don’t think high speed rail can be built, despite it existing all over the world, is just your opinion. The fact that musk has said he promoted the hyperloop in hopes of pulling funding and support from high speed rail is a thing that happened in reality
Let’s say that we took the power away from the government. Poof just like that they can’t regulate how much rat shit is in your Amazon prime food or if Elon can dump the toxic waste from his battery production in your drinking water. The harm of regulatory capture and lobbyist power just gets replaced with capitalists directly harming you. How is that better?
I didnt ignore what you said, I am trying to redirect it from the rhetoric to the solid. Its not that the government is all bad or corrupt or even bad, its that it is used to benefit the people that can get that power. The more government there is the better it is for big business and rich people. Its not that Jeff or Elon can typically harm you, its that they can make the government do things in their favor and against your interests.
I get your points, but you I think that you are mistaking no government for less government. Is the price of necessities being so high good for you, or would you like inflation not to destroy your earnings?
What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?
It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.
What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.
Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.
That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.
The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.
Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.
Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.
Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.
So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.
Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.
So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?
The main flaw that I think you are making is that you see similar circumstances to something in the past and think the same thing will happen again. Its kind of like with the Ukraine war, people see a country invading another country and think russia is nazi germany and will take over the continent, but in reality the material conditions are completely different. No, we would not start having company stores pop up and kids losing hands on sewing machines, things are drastically different from the industrial revolution.
There is a lot here, so I will directly answer your questions - what part? Because the government is huge I will talk about what I know best - housing. The government(s) add over $100k for every single family house new build, on average. These are things that are not necessary but are required. I can explain in detail because this is going to sound crazy but it is not, I would eliminate nearly all government involvement in everything two story and under. All the government should do is verify location and then verify appropriate utilities (which is both gov and private). We should do a lot of this on most things and make it so people can afford things.
The other big thing would be ending the fed.
I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.
Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.
Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”
You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.
I didnt stop reading, but comments get too long and it gets lots in the noise. But if you want it
"Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years?" Because they had vision that amazon would become one of the biggest companies in the world.
"What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government?" - Competition.
As a former engineer and current construction business owner that deals with actual codes, I can tell you that you dont understand what is happening. As someone who has been on both sides of regulations, I understand why they exist, but they either are ignored, are overkill, or have so low a probability of happening its not worth the cost. I can give you an example of each, but I absolutely promise you that you have a false understand of what is happening.
They both are spending tons of money to spread propaganda to influence public opinion and elections is the first and easiest to point out.
They also both own major news outlets that defend them publicly and are very influential of public opinion.
Both have through their businesses received government subsidies, in effect having us tax dollars go to their pockets. This cycle is repeated through the influence they buy by spreading propaganda, using lobbyists, using money as a tool within the government apparatus to generate more money for their companies and in turn for themselves.
Why does influencing public opinion and elections matter to you?
I like your last paragraph, I think it distills it nicely. Its not that they directly harm you, they influence the government which is allowed to harm you.
If you don't think that influencing public opinion matters in a democratic republic, I invite you to learn about Hitler's rise to power, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party in Germany, and the holocaust. Using the same propaganda techniques used by the Nazi party, misinformation is used to influence public opinion. This is especially true on Elon's Twitter, but Bezos has used the same techniques to attempt to union bust.
Millions of people died as a result of the propaganda campaigns of the Nazi party. I fear history is about to repeat itself in the usa.
So as you say influencing public opinion is bad because then that public opinion is used by a POWERFUL government to harm people. I agree that is what I am talking about, the government having the power over your life is the bad thing, not the opinions of rich people. They can have whatever opinion they want, and the only way they can make it count is if they can sway the people to vote your rights away or directly sway the current officials.
jeff bezos personally came to my apartment, punched me in the face, and stole the remote to my vibrating butt plug, and now he has power over my butt.