Unskilled does not mean un needed.

[u/Justthisdudeyaknow]

[u/b3nsn0w]

one of the weirder thing i've seen, especially among americans (as a european), is that a lot of them don't want to just have a nice life. they want a nicer life than their neighbor. they don't want to feel good, they want to feel superior, and if anyone can have something, that something is worthless to them. it's definitely not all americans, there are a lot of sane people and a lot of stupid people in every society, but it's an idea that for some reason seems particularly widespread in the us.

over here, we rarely have people complain why "their" taxes are helping people other than them. people don't consider taxation theft (which, if you think about it, is fucking weird, we had a nobility and kings ruling most of us for a century or so when the yanks already had their democracy, if anyone should have that residual cultural effect it's us), we consider it a contribution to make society nice. because we want nice things for ourselves, and if our neighbor gets something nice out of it too, that just makes it better. life is not a competition -- and it seems like the yanks consider it as such, and that's why they're raging at social programs that would use "their hard-earned money" to prop someone else up and make it difficult to gain that much of an advantage compared to them.

when you talk to people who want to have a working class who can't afford to live, and actually listen to what they're saying and just explore the topic instead of telling them why they're wrong, that's usually where the rabbit hole leads. they want to make sure others are not earning too much because if they are, that diminishes their salary in their eyes. if a starbucks barista could earn $100k then earning $100k wouldn't be special, and if whatever they earn is not special, if it doesn't put them above the barista, then it's worthless.

america is a society of haves and have nots and it seems many yanks are afraid that if things got better for the have nots, it would mean they would also become have nots. it seems they have a hard time imagining a society where everyone can have a nice time. why that is is probably way too deep of a topic, but if you wanna convince them that yes, working class people do in fact deserve to live comfortably, you probably also need to convince them that it's not the end of the world if it actually happens, and that their lifestyle is not predicated on everyone else having a bad time. (like for some people, sure, that's a thing, but if you don't have a seven figure salary or above, you could still live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you.)

[u/donaldhobson → u/b3nsn0w]

>America is a society of haves and have nots and it seems many yanks are afraid that if things got better for the have nots, it would mean they would also become have nots.

Imagine an extreme case, a president decides to make every american a billionaire, and prints the $350 quadrillion dollars needed.

There just isn't the manufacturing capability, nor the pilots, for 350 million private jets.

If the economy is still using US dollars, not gold or bitcoin, then some large groups of friends will pool their money to buy a private jet.

So the price of private jets goes way up. And so people who were already private jet rich find they aren't much richer than anyone else any more.

Making everyone better off is hard. You need to increase production.

> if you don't have a seven figure salary or above, you could still live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you.

Suppose the poor people are stuck eating the cheap bread. And the middle class people are eating nice steak. The rich people also eat steak. But they can only eat so much, and there aren't that many rich people anyway.

There is just not enough steak currently being produced for all the poor exploited people to consume it.

So in order to "live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you", you need more cows. Is there room for those cows? Maybe. Maybe not.

And it's like that for loads and loads of things, not just steak. Most of the little luxuries that the middle class buy are not things a billionaire would buy 1000x as much of.

[u/sonicboom5058 → u/donaldhobson]

Except most necessities aren't really in scarcity these days. Like private jets sure but food and housing? We have more than enough to go around, it's just being hoarded and wasted to the point that it becomes unaffordable for many people. Minimum wage going up to reflect a livable wage isn't going to suddenly mean that the middle class is going to starve.

[u/donaldhobson → u/sonicboom5058]

> Like private jets sure but food and housing? We have more than enough to go around

Yes and no.

If by food you mean enough calories to live on, then yes.

If your talking about just the USA, basically 0 americans die of starvation.

But you do have Americans buying cheap bread over tastier and healtier options. And there are plenty of people where things seem "unaffordable" because they have to think and worry about money a lot, it costs more than it used to and maybe they are going into debt.

Housing is similar. But there is an extra factor of "we could build houses here, but zoning rules make it illegal".

There are a lot of laws that make it hard to build low quality high quantity housing. Anti-slum laws.

It wouldn't be hard to provide everyone with a house, if a garden shed in the middle of nowhere counts as a house.

> Minimum wage going up to reflect a livable wage isn't going to suddenly mean that the middle class is going to starve.

No. But minimum wage going up (and employers paying that wage, not firing people) is going to cause some amount of general inflation, as everyone raises their prices a bit due to higher staffing costs and their customers having more money.

There isn't some vast pile of food/housing going to waste by being hoarded.

Sure, there are some piles of waste that look big, but it's fairly small on a national scale.

[u/jimbowesterby → u/donaldhobson]

Do you have any idea how much food gets wasted every year? The planet as a whole produces enough food to feed about 10 billion people annually, but, at least in the states, about half the total food ends up in the garbage. There is absolutely enough to go around. Ditto things like housing, sure it’d take a while to get it all built but we have the capability. Remember all those graphs showing just how much money the 1% have, or just how big Jeff Bezos’ fortune is? There’s enough money there to fund damn near whatever you want. Sure we’ll never each have our own private jet, but something like an ultralight should be on the table at least

[u/donaldhobson → u/jimbowesterby]

> The planet as a whole produces enough food to feed about 10 billion people annually,

And it has about 8 billion people on it.

Also. Your conflating 2 different things. Suppose a farmer grows a lot of potatoes, and then stores them for 6 months. Some of the potatoes go rotten, and get binned.

That's food waste in a sense, but there is no simple way to make potatoes that just never go rotten.

If some nutter goes spraying bug poison at the fresh veg, then there is a whole lot of contaminated food that needs thrown out.

So the "just don't waste food" means either "live in a magic fantasy land where nothing ever goes off" or "no matter how rotten it is, eat it anyway".

And in the modern world, the cost of food in the fields is a surprisingly small fraction of the value of food on the plate.

Suppose a farmer has a field full of carrots, and their harvester is broken so they let you harvest them for free. You can give free food to those poor needy people, right?

No. They still need harvested, washed, sorted. Transported. Packed. Then, if sold in a supermarket there are all the costs of running a supermarket, from paying people to stack shelves to buying the tills. Add all that up, and your carrots aren't going to be much cheaper at the till, despite the carrots in the field being free.

> Remember all those graphs showing just how much money the 1% have, or just how big Jeff Bezos’ fortune is? There’s enough money there to fund damn near whatever you want.

That vast fortune is mostly money on paper. To build more houses, you need more concrete and bricks.

And the amount of money isn't an "anything you want" level. For besos, that works out to roughly $1000 per american. Not house building money. Maybe a garden shed?