No one is forcing you to work

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I like "just start your own business!" I had a small business that did well enough that I was able to run it for 10 years and only stopped out of choice. I now have a relatively low-paying job with someone else and I am more financially secure now than I was during any of those 10 years.
- depends on what bussiness, and what country, in developing countries the salary for white collar and blue collar jobs are insanely low that it is basically slavery and you will earn like triple or more income if you have even the smallest bussiness like selling street food or door dash kind of job
  
  I don't know where is that, but unless you don't play by the rules usually being a business owner is worse. Usually developing countries have a myriad of taxes and labour laws that make having a business very difficult. So for you to have a business you either don't go by the law (which is how successful "business owners" usually get there, by knowing someone or by cutting corners), you have to work an insane amount of hours (my dad used to work Monday to Monday, 10 hrs a day on a median), or you accept that you might need to declare bankruptcy in any given time.
- Nobody said it's easy to be independent. Stability is definitely not guaranteed when you have a small business
  
  When "just start your own business" is presented as a real viable alternative to a job with someone else, they are saying it's easy. There's nothing easy about it. And they don't tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don't file quarterly.
  
  Life is not naturally easy- it is only because of the labor of others that life is anywhere near as comfortable as it is now.
  
  We have the means to make a fair and equitable society with minimal crime and no hunger. We, as a society, choose not to. We choose the hard life for the sake of getting everything we worked for to ourselves at the risk of losing it all with one bad day. That's not comfortable. The labour of all should benefit all so that everyone can have an easy and comfortable life.
  
  What do you mean by "we chaosem the hard life"? What do you think should be done to achive easy life for everyone?
  
  We choose to continue to live in a pro-capitalist society, therefore we choose the hard life. Pure and true socialism is the easy way out my friend. Comfort for all.
  
  But how?
  
  More taxes ( mostly corporate) and not have the government misappropriate the funds, and giving a shit about other humans is a great start.
  
  life can be easy for everyone if we all chip in a little, it's the whole basis of society, we just can't afford the hoarding aristocracy
  
  Serious question: do you think the "aristocracy" has like, vaults full of money? Like you think Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars sitting in his bank account? Or a literal vault?
  Because that is definitely not how rich people actually live. As a rule, they have very little liquidity as a percent of their net worth.
  
  What does that have to do with anything? Just because the wealth is on paper doesn't make it any less real.
  
  It matters because people suggest that Bezos et al "hoard wealth" which is both untrue and impossible with the way their wealth is calculated.
  
  But they are totally hoarding their on paper wealth. It's impossible to end up with $200 billion without intentionally hoarding it.
  
  That's not true at all. Bezos, for instance, is worth so much solely because Amazon is worth so much. It has nothing to do with his personal spending habits whatsoever.
  
  Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, he can definitely take some of the credit/blame that it's worth so much and that he has such a large stake. He could cash out at any point, but he chooses not to, aka hoarding.
  
  Starting a business is very easy. Much easier than searching for a job. Sustaining your business is a different matter.
  
  And they don’t tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don’t file quarterly.
  Meh, you find out about that the first year and honestly in the US, it's not that much.
  
  I mean, it definitely is an alternative, but it's not easy at all
  
  Dude, stop. They don't want to run a business, they want a guarantee of security, and by rights they are entitled to that. If you don't agree, that's your problem, but don't come up on here thinking their complaints are a threat to your society thinking you have to change their way of thinking to quell it.
  We're abandoning you whether you like it or not :P
  
  Jesse wtf are you talking about?
  
  You're defending a shitty evil economic system by defending the notion of small business as a meaningful alternative to work while ignoring the motivations of who you're talking to. Doing that belies your motivations: you see him complaining as a threat to capitalism which you support, which is why you're trying to convince him in the first place.
  I am telling you we're going to abandon capitalism whether you like it or not, shutting down your primary goal of convincing people not to complain. I'm telling you emphatically we're going to do a lot more than complain.
  It's that simple
  
  No one is abandoning capitalism lol
  Shit, formerly-communist countries embraced capitalism to have any sort of economy at all.
  
  The western world starting with millennials is, and you can see it everywhere. The system is collapsing under its own weight due to regulatory capture, climate collapse, and the destabilization of the U.S. And if that isn't enough, I'll likely do it my own damn self with my own life plans and goals.
  No one wants your shitty dystopian hellscape. Take it and shove it.
  
  It really isn't.
  And I really doubt you will
  
  This is a false dichotomy where the only options are capitalism and communism. In reality, there are other alternatives such as economic democracy that preserve markets but change the property relations of work
  
  wym hes just trying to cook
  
  Go live in North Korea, no one is stopping you.
  
  Go back to Stalingrad with the rest of the right-wing traitors, nothing is stopping you
  
  Wut? You insane or something?
  
  It sounds great, but I forget the part where I asked for your opinion
  
  I forget the part where I need your permission to give it
  
  you did by publicly posting it on a fucking forum where people are meant to engage in each other dumb ass lol. No wonder it seems you aint too bright. Youre just like the fucking idiots on facebook who post inflammatory comments then get pissed when people respond to them.
  
  Dude is high on groupthink.
  
  Kind of ironic
  
  There is no financial security. Anyone of you, even higher paid people, could go homeless any second and there is nothing you can do about it.
- But the same people that think we can simple jack up no-skill job wages to $15, 20, 30/hr think that all business owners are bazillionaires who can easily afford the more expensive wages.
  That was also the running theme in subs (on Reddit) when it came to landlords - they were all evil billionaires just looking to screw over their tenants.
  
  Nope. I am one of those people. If you can't afford to pay employees a livable wage, you shouldn't be running a business. I had no employees, in part because I couldn't afford to pay an assistant a wage I felt they deserved. People don't deserve to suffer just so you can get The Burger Hole off the ground.
  
  No one is talking about "suffering" FFS. But a no-skill job is still a no-skill job. Get a marketable skill and there is plenty of money out there.
  
  Paying someone less money than they can afford to live on is allowing them to suffer at your business' expense.
  So yes, we are talking about suffering.
  And there is no such thing as a 'no-skill job.'
  
  no-skill job
  There are plenty of no-skill jobs. If someone off the street can be told what to do in an hour or so then the skill level is 0. If that is the level of work one does, there should be no expectation as to the level of money one deserves. Earn a skill and demand more money, society shouldn't be funding, let alone encouraging, lazy moochers.
  
  Then why do you need to hire someone else to do it? If anyone can do it, why don't you fucking do it? Is it because you're too lazy that you don't want to do it? Is it because you don't want to make so little money doing it?
  
  Maybe look up what the term "Opportunity Costs" means. As a high value employee, one should focus their time on - you guessed it - high value roles instead of wasting your limited time on something that can be done by just anyone off the street. But if you want to continue to not understand, then that's on you.
  
  Sounds like you justifying your own laziness on why you can't do a "no-skill" job. If it is as easy as you claim it to be, you should be able to do it at the same time as your "high-value" work. Otherwise, it's not easy.
  
  Congrats, you did exactly as I said you would in my last response... you continue to not understand and clearly seem to have zero Interest in ever learning.
  
  Good thing we'll get God-Emperor Trump in there and take care of all those "lazy moochers." You left out "welfare queens," by the way.
  I can't even imagine the "some people don't deserve to be paid enough to survive" mindset.
  
  Riiiiight... asking for people to stand on their own with marketable skills is apparently a huge ask these days from some. Just come out and say you are lazy and want hand-outs.
  
  People who work minimum wage jobs are lazy now? You're the type of person who demands to speak to the manager when your burger takes longer than 30 seconds to arrive at the drive-through window, aren't you?
  
  People who work in fast food do not make minimum wage
  
  Correct, they make around $1 above minimum—~$8.45 on average—which is around $2 above poverty wage…
  Even $15/h isn’t enough to survive in a non-rotting apartment, unless you walk to work, don’t eat any healthy nutritious foods, and give up on any and all hobbies/interests.
  
  Good jump in logic there! Your future is bright indeed!1!!
  
  Ah, so now I'm a no-skill worker who doesn't deserve to get paid enough to survive.
  Fascinating.
  
  yes, in the future, everyone will be a software developer, and no one will stock shelves, deliver mail, or any of those "no-Skill" jobs that seem to need doing lest our economy collapse
  
  I am entirely pro-handout, and I'm not lazy at all. I'm not even a socialist lol
  Giving poor people money, straight up, is the second best thing we could do to grow our economy, in general.
  
  All jobs are skilled jobs.
  
  "skilled" and "unskilled" labor have actual definitions. Unskilled labor is absolutely a thing
  
  You have to learn something to do the job. It literally doesn't matter what you do, it requires knowledge and effort, that is not no skill.
  
  We know what you mean and in a very literal sense you are right. However, there is both a legal and colloquial definition that basically means "low to very low skill job."
  
  Low-skilled/unskilled labor” is a term used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to categorize work that requires little or no experience or training to do or consists of routine tasks.
  
  Everything takes training, routine or not, I don't care what a capitalist government organization decides it is. You can't just walk on to a job and start doing it.
  
  This is eerily reminiscent of conservatives getting mad that gays can get married and instead wanting them to have "some other word"
  
  Post WW2 a lot of stock was put in scientism in industrial nad manufacturing jobs, which has led to the rise of new public management, cementing the dissolution of the bond between identity and job. The basic principle is that everything can be quantified and measured, and that every step carried out by a master craftsman can be exactly described and distributed. The replacement of actual manufacturing with the menial task of carrying out a single, repeatable step hour after hour after hour, day after day. Like a robot.
  That's the death of skilled jobs, and it's driving the collapse of the uneducated man, according to Richard Reeves among others. A shift towards cognitive work instead of labor has taken place, and a lot of the jobs that previously carried a large segment of the lower strata has simply moved to asia and lower wage countries.
  
  Even menial tasks required knowledge to accomplish
  
  Fortunately there's still the skilled trades. What can be automated is, but there're still a lot of tasks that require journeyman level tradespeople to be actively involved in the work. Get into a good union apprenticeship when you are young and you can make real money with good benefits and retire with a nice pension in addition to SSI. Unfortunately union membership is at around 10 percent of the US workforce.
  
  Most jobs are zero skill jobs.
  
  No, everything requires you to know how to do it and put effort into it. Therefore it is not a zero skill job. Unless you get paid to sit and literally do absolutely nothing all day long, it is not zero skill. Less skill, sure, but not zero
  
  Most jobs require life skills which every adult should have acquired during their childhood. Walking is also a skill which you must train, but no one expects a grown up not to know how to walk. Thus these jobs are zero skill.
  
  You can't just walk in to a job and start doing it. It all requires at least a bit of training. Therefore these jobs are not zero skill.
  
  That's completely wrong, but continue to think that.
  
  Regardless of whether the job is classified as a "skilled" job or not (and who's definition of "skilled" you choose to accept or not)... the work and time your employee puts into the labor is as important to your business as any work you may be doing. Without their labor your business is meaningless. That labor deserves, at minimum, the employee's ability to be able to live (food, shelter, medical, transportation, and some degree of entertainment). If, as a business owner, you cannot value your employees time and labor in your business with appropriate compensation to allow them to live, then you do not deserve your business.
  
  the work and time your employee puts into the labor is as important to your business as any work you may be doing.
  This is comically wrong. No, sorry.... a salesperson closing a $1M contract for the purchase of some equipment, and a janitor dumping out some trash is not equivalent. Those jobs are not "as important". Not even remotely in the same league. That's why those two aren't paid the same and why one position can be done by any jamoke off the street with 5 minutes worth of training versus someone who might have a decade of knowledge and training in the industry. Hell if something happened to the janitor for a day or three, work wouldn't stop. Things would still get done. Jim in accounting could dump his trash into the dumpster in back. It would be a mild inconvenience, but it can still be done. It isn't the end of the world if a no-skill job gets pushed back a bit. Not closing a deal that keeps the other employees working, the machines humming and the incoming coming in, is a whole different ball of wax.
  
  Actually, I used to be a janitor, and you're wrong.
  Janitors have free access to the building, including to rooms with sensitive equipment and papers, when no one is around, and have the ability to steal shit, perform industrial espionage, destroy equipment, and otherwise completely fuck over their employers if they so choose. That's why you have to have credit checks, background checks and sometimes even security clearances before you can get a lot of janitorial jobs.
  Plus if the janitor doesn't do their job and leaves the place a mess, the salesperson can't invite the client in and make that sale. They could go out to a restaurant, but that further drives up costs.
  So it's not in actual fact that simple.
  
  The whole role of a business owner is based on appropriating the positive and negative fruits of others' labor. This is a violation of the moral foundation of property rights (getting the fruits of your labor). The workers should get the positive and negative fruits of their labor without any employers and run their company as a worker cooperative.
  Landlords are privatizing the products of nature which everyone has an equal claim to. Thus, landlords similarly inherently violate rights
  
  How high are you right now?
  
  The point is that in, for example, a car factory the employer owns the cars (positive) and makes the relevant contracts with the input suppliers (negative). The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the cars. By the moral principle that legal responsibility should be assigned in accordance with de facto responsibility, the workers in the firm should jointly be assigned the legal claim to the produced cars and hold the liabilities to the input suppliers.

274 comments