The owning class has interests directly opposed to the working class, which makes that “natural” trait toxic to the working class.
In addition, the owning class has a lot more power.
Your landlord wants to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. (fair enough right?)
The problem is that for that to happen
demand needs to stay high or go higher which means that
supply needs to stay low which means that (at the level of class interests, not personal belief)
Your landlord doesn’t want new affordable housing to be built in your area. They want you to never own a house, never have any cheaper rent options.
They don’t want to have to keep renting to you at the price you are paying now.
They don’t want to have to invest money in making your apartment/house safe or comfortable.
The problem is not that people will put their own wellbeing above yours, it’s that their wellbeing is in conflict with yours. A conflict of interests between classes… class conflict… class warfare. And they have all the guns.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The toxic thing I see here is dividing everyone up into classes and painting everyone in the designated class with a broad brush to turn them into a hero or a villain.
The “villain” in this situation is a system that allows a minority of people to attain huge amounts of wealth and power and incentivizes them to keep increasing both as much as possible without regards for others. It’s not the people that follow the incentives.
Unfortunately one of the incentives when you’re part of the owning class is wanting to perpetuate the system: it’s working pretty well for you.
Individual members of the owning class can be great people. But as the original comment stated: most people will usually put their own interests above yours. The problem isn’t that they do so, the problem is that their interests are in opposition to yours.
The analysis isn’t (as you seem to think) at the level of “you’re part of the owning class, therefore you’re evil and we hate you”, but “there should be no owning class, its existence leads to needless conflict and suffering”.
Let’s not get it twisted though: while the real villain is capitalism, it’s always one class that does all the stealing, and the lying, and the gaslighting, and the manipulating, and the cheating.
Power corrupts.
“there should be no owning class, its existence leads to needless conflict and suffering”
How does this work in something that it’s a magical utopia? Most of what I see people say just trades a “owning class” for government. Government is well known for being corrupt as well. Same shit, but even more difficult for people to rise up out of. At least in capitalism people can have an idea, do some work, and have some upward mobility. Even if they are simply workers, they can control their spending, save, invest, and end up in a pretty decent spot… especially over a couple generations. If the government has all the money and all the power, you’re left with rations and it sucks. Look at Cuba, there’s a black market that runs on capitalism, which is the only way some people can get by… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mUZRP-fpo
I don’t know why anyone would want to willingly give control to a government, which will become corrupt (or more corrupt), and be under the thumb of that government with no way out other than war. With capitalism, I can learn a skill to get paid more, I can start my own business and work for myself, I can choose to live below my means to save and invest… there’s options. Government control of everything removes a lot of options.
I want to first point out that the government being corruptible is not a problem that capitalism just solves. Almost all countries today are capitalist, and that doesn’t prevent their governments from being totalitarian or corrupt or mismanaging their resources (Russia as an example).
The government still has all the power. But now there’s a small group of people who can influence that power (let’s not kid ourselves - mainly through corruption) to the detriment of everyone else.
A centrally managed economy is not the only alternative.
Workers of an organization can be the owners of that organization, rather than a few wealthy elites or the government. That way, they see the fruits of their labor rather than it being syphoned off. They have a say in how the organization is run, they can vote on who manages it and replace them when the way it’s managed is bad for the workers.
Let’s say ownership of a company automatically goes from its founders to all workers (this might well include the founders) when it reaches a certain size.
What would incentivize anyone to try to start a company in such an environment? Why not guarantee the founders a certain percentage of the profits even if they decide to stop working when the company changes ownership?
Where does the capital come from to build a company in the first place? Government - hear me out. Taxes still exist, and continue to pay for things like infrastructure and healthcare and education and housing (these things are probably better managed by government than markets). And part of the tax revenue goes into an investment fund that is managed locally (think city, and/or county level). Citizens have direct voting power over what projects get financed with their taxes.
More pragmatically, a first (I would say reasonable) step would be to limit the amount of power an individual can get. Nobody needs a billion dollars to live, much less hundreds. Change the incentives: implement aggressive progressive taxes.
Heavily tax vacant houses and invest in affordable housing.
Stop subsidizing the aviation industry and the fossil fuel industry and the meat industry and instead invest in healthcare and education and public transport and farmers.
Capitalism is a nightmare without regulation. Simply start by adding more (good) regulation and enforcing it consistently.
I’d be curious to know what the total compensation, and overall happiness, of employees and some of these companies are vs traditional public/private companies in the same industry. At the end of the day, is there a real meaningful difference, or is this more of an ideal that doesn’t result in any real shift in quality of life?
I agree that capitalism needs regulation to work. I think every system does. Any economic system in its pure form is a nightmare. That said, capitalism with proper regulation seems to work better than pretty much all the other alternatives on the table, which have ended very poorly in the past, which is probably why capitalism is so widely used as an economic base.
While I still think rental options need to exist for people, the number of homes which have been bought up be investors, especially on the low end of the market, has become a problem. I had a house I was trying to buy bought out from under me by an investor, and had to raise the price of home I was looking at to have it stop happening, which really hurts people trying to get their first starter home, as the market has artificially shrunk. I think if two offers are on the table, someone looking to live in the home should always win, if the offer is at least at asking price. Homes that aren’t owner occupied, are taxed at a higher rate (at least where I am), but that doesn’t deter many people. The main subsidy I want to see die is the one for growing corn and soybeans, redirect that to farmers growing real food the right way. Maybe then the affordable food options will be real fresh food, instead of incentivizing processed garbage.
My main hope around universal healthcare would be that it would finally incentivize the government to incentivize the health of the people, as it would save the government money to have a healthy population. A lot of the issues the US has with health are a result of bad government advice (the food pyramid), poorly structured farming incentives, and car-centric infrastructure, compounded over decades. Universal healthcare could incentivize the government to work on fixing all of that, if they’re smart. Of course, we’d need a functional government that is working to serve the people, instead of one that just fights and serves their party’s talking points.
A cursory read suggests that ownership increases job satisfaction and commitment, though the correlation with job satisfaction is less strong.
Overall a positive, perhaps mild effect on employee happiness and potentially positive effect on firm performance.
So your suspicion that ownership doesn’t have a strong effect on employee happiness seems to bear out.
My main argument wasn’t about individual employee satisfaction though. The point was that worker ownership of organizations gets rid of the owning class (effectively: if everyone is an owner, the class conflict dissolves) while keeping markets and competition, making central planning less relevant.
I was trying to suggest approaches that are neither radical nor utopian, and like you pointed out yourself, that we already employ effectively. The main proposed difference is scale: past a certain size, all companies would be worker owned.
I don’t think markets are bad. Uncontrolled concentration of wealth is.
I’m skeptical of the claim that well-regulated capitalism is the best option, but depending on just how well-regulated it is, I agree that it can be a good option.
Though one might argue at that point whether you’re really still talking about capitalism. For instance, the main characteristic I have an issue with is capital accumulation. If we regulate that one out I think we’re going to get much better outcomes. Would the result still be considered capitalism?
The problem with just regulating capitalism while keeping the core mechanisms is that if wealth accumulation is still allowed to happen, resources will tend to concentrate in the hands of a few. This is not only inequitable and wasteful but more importantly it gives them power, which they will inevitably try to use to chip away at the regulations.
I mostly agree with your points on housing.
On health I’ll say that many of the issues you mention are either the result of or at least exacerbated by the influence of capital on government.
I tried looking into the compensation side of things.
There are different types of employee ownership plans. Trying to sort them all out is more work than I want to do right now, so I picked WinCo Foods, which is the biggest from my first link that is listed as 100% ESOP/worker-owned. Looking into it, it’s an ESOP, this page has some information, but not a lot of details in terms of how much. They give a $5,000 example from 1986, but that doesn’t really mean anything without context.
Looking at just base pay, I looked at WinCo (employee owned) vs Kroger (union) vs Walmart. There are some interesting things here I didn’t really expect. Walmart as the highest salary satisfaction, while Kroger has the lowest. This runs counter to what I often hear from the pro-union folks. i will say, management at Walmart seems to be paid very well, but I’d image the volume of lower level retail workers would bury that if there was a big problem. It’s hard to get exact apples to apples comparisons, due to the job titles and available data being different. But it does seem salary goes WinCo > Walmart > Kroger. That does speak well for the employee owned option, at least WinCo. My thought was that some of these may say employee owned, but at the end of the day, the employees would be in the same spot, so it’s a lot of hoopla for nothing. I do still have some questions about some of the other models, especially those you have to buy into. With the ESOP it’s fairly easy to see the upside, but I would like to see details on if there are selling restrictions. I get restricted stock as part of my compensation today, which I’m not going to turn down, but it’s not as good as having that same amount as part of my base salary. It vests over 3 years, so I don’t get access to it right away, and if I leave, I need to forfeit all of it that hasn’t vested. I’m not very happy with the way certain things are right now, but looking at the stock and thinking about essentially setting fire to it… it’s hard and makes me put up with more than I probably should (golden handcuffs).
On capitalism, in the US when people talk about changing things, they are generally using the Scandinavian countries as a reference point. They seem to be doing pretty well and are some of the happiest people on earth (although from what I’ve read that has something to do with expectations (culture) and not simply everything being amazing all the time). Those countries still have their roots in capitalism, they just layer on a bunch of social programs. The US does that too. People talk about military spending, but US spending on the military looks tiny compared to their spending on social programs… 20% of GDP on social programs vs 3% on the military. I think a lot of the funds around the social programs are likely being poorly managed, which is why a lot of people are against throwing even more money at it. At it’s core, capitalism a simple barter system using cash as means to facilitate trade. I make thing X, I sell it to people who need thing X, I use the profit from thing X to buy thing Y from someone else. It seems like the most natural system, that if not managed and regulated, would exist as a black market. This happened in Cuba, for example.
I do think we need to do a better job breaking up companies when they get too big. I think Google using their money from Adsense to fund all these “free” products, which basically serve as data collection for their ad engine, has been horrible for the technology startups. Everyone trying to come up with a new idea is required to complete with free. It’s hard enough to get a new business going without dealing with that completely unrealistic expectation. That might sound good for the consumer, but it means every new startup has one goal… to get acquired by one of the giants before their VC funding runs out. That led to a lot of consolidation in the tech space, or good ideas simply dying. Pretty much all the big tech companies use their cash cows to box everyone else out by providing free options. You could argue free products are great for the consumers, but is it? What’s the real cost?
I think conflating capitalism with trade is wrong.
Trade (and markets) existed long before modern capitalism. So did the concept of money.
I agree that the way you described it, it sounds very natural (not that that really is an argument, but whatever).
But the reality of capitalism is that the Y I’m buying from my profits is not some other commodity (as your example implies).
Y is someone else’s business that also sells X. Or some completely unrelated business that sells Z. Or Y is a bribe to the mayor so that the city buys all its X from me, even though I don’t have the best quality or price. Or it’s a “donation” to the new mayor’s campaign, leading him to remove the rule that one person can not own more than 3 homes in the city, so I can buy more houses and rent them out and make more profit.
It’s capital I use to open X businesses in other cities. Maybe someone already sells X there and the local citizens quite like their service. They don’t care for my X. But I have enough capital to start aggressively underselling, at a loss to myself. Now it doesn’t matter that my service is worse, or that the people had some loyalty to the local X seller. I’m selling at half the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy from me. I wait a few months and the local X seller is now out of business. I can raise my prices back up, nice. This works quite well, I’ll repeat it in other cities. If someone catches on and complains, I’ll just bribe the mayor to look the other way. Or I’ll buy the local newspaper and have them paint me in a positive light.
I agree that blindly throwing money at a problem is not a good solution. Unfortunately this basic insight is often abused into an argument that spending on social programs shouldn’t be increased at all, or worse should be decreased.
Well targeted social spending is actually profitable for the government. Healthy, housed, educated citizens produce a lot of value.
You make some good points, but I’m confused by your statement that they have all the guns. Do you mean they control the police? I’m not sure where you live, but in the USA there are literally hundreds of millions of guns owned by the lower and middle class. In 2017, there was estimated to be near 400 million guns in the United States between police, the military, and American civilians. Over 393 Million (Over 98%) of those guns are in civilian hands, the equivalent of 120 firearms per 100 citizens.
“They have all the guns” is a metaphor in the context of class warfare.
I mean that they have the means to employ force (usually through police, but not exclusively) in their interest as well as having the entire power of the state behind them (disproportionate wealth means they have disproportionate political influence which means they can lobby for laws to be adjusted in their favor. Even when the law seems just, it is rarely applied in the same way to wealthy people in practice).
Not to mention that they can and do buy influence over the media apparatus, controlling narratives and tricking the working class into acting against their own interests.
Within the framework of class conflict, those are the “guns”.
That’s true. However.
The owning class has interests directly opposed to the working class, which makes that “natural” trait toxic to the working class. In addition, the owning class has a lot more power.
Your landlord wants to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. (fair enough right?) The problem is that for that to happen
Your landlord doesn’t want new affordable housing to be built in your area. They want you to never own a house, never have any cheaper rent options. They don’t want to have to keep renting to you at the price you are paying now.
They don’t want to have to invest money in making your apartment/house safe or comfortable.
The problem is not that people will put their own wellbeing above yours, it’s that their wellbeing is in conflict with yours. A conflict of interests between classes… class conflict… class warfare. And they have all the guns.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The toxic thing I see here is dividing everyone up into classes and painting everyone in the designated class with a broad brush to turn them into a hero or a villain.
You’re missing the point.
The “villain” in this situation is a system that allows a minority of people to attain huge amounts of wealth and power and incentivizes them to keep increasing both as much as possible without regards for others. It’s not the people that follow the incentives.
Unfortunately one of the incentives when you’re part of the owning class is wanting to perpetuate the system: it’s working pretty well for you.
Individual members of the owning class can be great people. But as the original comment stated: most people will usually put their own interests above yours. The problem isn’t that they do so, the problem is that their interests are in opposition to yours.
The analysis isn’t (as you seem to think) at the level of “you’re part of the owning class, therefore you’re evil and we hate you”, but “there should be no owning class, its existence leads to needless conflict and suffering”.
Let’s not get it twisted though: while the real villain is capitalism, it’s always one class that does all the stealing, and the lying, and the gaslighting, and the manipulating, and the cheating.
Power corrupts.
How does this work in something that it’s a magical utopia? Most of what I see people say just trades a “owning class” for government. Government is well known for being corrupt as well. Same shit, but even more difficult for people to rise up out of. At least in capitalism people can have an idea, do some work, and have some upward mobility. Even if they are simply workers, they can control their spending, save, invest, and end up in a pretty decent spot… especially over a couple generations. If the government has all the money and all the power, you’re left with rations and it sucks. Look at Cuba, there’s a black market that runs on capitalism, which is the only way some people can get by… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mUZRP-fpo
I don’t know why anyone would want to willingly give control to a government, which will become corrupt (or more corrupt), and be under the thumb of that government with no way out other than war. With capitalism, I can learn a skill to get paid more, I can start my own business and work for myself, I can choose to live below my means to save and invest… there’s options. Government control of everything removes a lot of options.
I want to first point out that the government being corruptible is not a problem that capitalism just solves. Almost all countries today are capitalist, and that doesn’t prevent their governments from being totalitarian or corrupt or mismanaging their resources (Russia as an example).
The government still has all the power. But now there’s a small group of people who can influence that power (let’s not kid ourselves - mainly through corruption) to the detriment of everyone else.
A centrally managed economy is not the only alternative.
Workers of an organization can be the owners of that organization, rather than a few wealthy elites or the government. That way, they see the fruits of their labor rather than it being syphoned off. They have a say in how the organization is run, they can vote on who manages it and replace them when the way it’s managed is bad for the workers.
Let’s say ownership of a company automatically goes from its founders to all workers (this might well include the founders) when it reaches a certain size.
What would incentivize anyone to try to start a company in such an environment? Why not guarantee the founders a certain percentage of the profits even if they decide to stop working when the company changes ownership? Where does the capital come from to build a company in the first place? Government - hear me out. Taxes still exist, and continue to pay for things like infrastructure and healthcare and education and housing (these things are probably better managed by government than markets). And part of the tax revenue goes into an investment fund that is managed locally (think city, and/or county level). Citizens have direct voting power over what projects get financed with their taxes.
More pragmatically, a first (I would say reasonable) step would be to limit the amount of power an individual can get. Nobody needs a billion dollars to live, much less hundreds. Change the incentives: implement aggressive progressive taxes.
Heavily tax vacant houses and invest in affordable housing. Stop subsidizing the aviation industry and the fossil fuel industry and the meat industry and instead invest in healthcare and education and public transport and farmers.
Capitalism is a nightmare without regulation. Simply start by adding more (good) regulation and enforcing it consistently.
There is nothing in the US stopping companies from being employee owned.
Here is a list of 100 companies with at least 50% employee ownership (most are 100% employee owned).
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
Wikipedia has a list as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
I’d be curious to know what the total compensation, and overall happiness, of employees and some of these companies are vs traditional public/private companies in the same industry. At the end of the day, is there a real meaningful difference, or is this more of an ideal that doesn’t result in any real shift in quality of life?
I agree that capitalism needs regulation to work. I think every system does. Any economic system in its pure form is a nightmare. That said, capitalism with proper regulation seems to work better than pretty much all the other alternatives on the table, which have ended very poorly in the past, which is probably why capitalism is so widely used as an economic base.
While I still think rental options need to exist for people, the number of homes which have been bought up be investors, especially on the low end of the market, has become a problem. I had a house I was trying to buy bought out from under me by an investor, and had to raise the price of home I was looking at to have it stop happening, which really hurts people trying to get their first starter home, as the market has artificially shrunk. I think if two offers are on the table, someone looking to live in the home should always win, if the offer is at least at asking price. Homes that aren’t owner occupied, are taxed at a higher rate (at least where I am), but that doesn’t deter many people. The main subsidy I want to see die is the one for growing corn and soybeans, redirect that to farmers growing real food the right way. Maybe then the affordable food options will be real fresh food, instead of incentivizing processed garbage.
My main hope around universal healthcare would be that it would finally incentivize the government to incentivize the health of the people, as it would save the government money to have a healthy population. A lot of the issues the US has with health are a result of bad government advice (the food pyramid), poorly structured farming incentives, and car-centric infrastructure, compounded over decades. Universal healthcare could incentivize the government to work on fixing all of that, if they’re smart. Of course, we’d need a functional government that is working to serve the people, instead of one that just fights and serves their party’s talking points.
I was curious too so I did a quick search. Here’s what I found:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publication/229592641_The_effects_of_employee_ownership_on_employee_attitudes_An_integrated_causal_model_and_path_analysis/links/5fc6ea9245851568d132333d/The-effects-of-employee-ownership-on-employee-attitudes-An-integrated-causal-model-and-path-analysis.pdf.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5277/w5277.pdf
A cursory read suggests that ownership increases job satisfaction and commitment, though the correlation with job satisfaction is less strong. Overall a positive, perhaps mild effect on employee happiness and potentially positive effect on firm performance.
So your suspicion that ownership doesn’t have a strong effect on employee happiness seems to bear out.
My main argument wasn’t about individual employee satisfaction though. The point was that worker ownership of organizations gets rid of the owning class (effectively: if everyone is an owner, the class conflict dissolves) while keeping markets and competition, making central planning less relevant.
I was trying to suggest approaches that are neither radical nor utopian, and like you pointed out yourself, that we already employ effectively. The main proposed difference is scale: past a certain size, all companies would be worker owned.
I don’t think markets are bad. Uncontrolled concentration of wealth is.
I’m skeptical of the claim that well-regulated capitalism is the best option, but depending on just how well-regulated it is, I agree that it can be a good option.
Though one might argue at that point whether you’re really still talking about capitalism. For instance, the main characteristic I have an issue with is capital accumulation. If we regulate that one out I think we’re going to get much better outcomes. Would the result still be considered capitalism?
The problem with just regulating capitalism while keeping the core mechanisms is that if wealth accumulation is still allowed to happen, resources will tend to concentrate in the hands of a few. This is not only inequitable and wasteful but more importantly it gives them power, which they will inevitably try to use to chip away at the regulations.
I mostly agree with your points on housing. On health I’ll say that many of the issues you mention are either the result of or at least exacerbated by the influence of capital on government.
I tried looking into the compensation side of things.
There are different types of employee ownership plans. Trying to sort them all out is more work than I want to do right now, so I picked WinCo Foods, which is the biggest from my first link that is listed as 100% ESOP/worker-owned. Looking into it, it’s an ESOP, this page has some information, but not a lot of details in terms of how much. They give a $5,000 example from 1986, but that doesn’t really mean anything without context.
Looking at just base pay, I looked at WinCo (employee owned) vs Kroger (union) vs Walmart. There are some interesting things here I didn’t really expect. Walmart as the highest salary satisfaction, while Kroger has the lowest. This runs counter to what I often hear from the pro-union folks. i will say, management at Walmart seems to be paid very well, but I’d image the volume of lower level retail workers would bury that if there was a big problem. It’s hard to get exact apples to apples comparisons, due to the job titles and available data being different. But it does seem salary goes WinCo > Walmart > Kroger. That does speak well for the employee owned option, at least WinCo. My thought was that some of these may say employee owned, but at the end of the day, the employees would be in the same spot, so it’s a lot of hoopla for nothing. I do still have some questions about some of the other models, especially those you have to buy into. With the ESOP it’s fairly easy to see the upside, but I would like to see details on if there are selling restrictions. I get restricted stock as part of my compensation today, which I’m not going to turn down, but it’s not as good as having that same amount as part of my base salary. It vests over 3 years, so I don’t get access to it right away, and if I leave, I need to forfeit all of it that hasn’t vested. I’m not very happy with the way certain things are right now, but looking at the stock and thinking about essentially setting fire to it… it’s hard and makes me put up with more than I probably should (golden handcuffs).
On capitalism, in the US when people talk about changing things, they are generally using the Scandinavian countries as a reference point. They seem to be doing pretty well and are some of the happiest people on earth (although from what I’ve read that has something to do with expectations (culture) and not simply everything being amazing all the time). Those countries still have their roots in capitalism, they just layer on a bunch of social programs. The US does that too. People talk about military spending, but US spending on the military looks tiny compared to their spending on social programs… 20% of GDP on social programs vs 3% on the military. I think a lot of the funds around the social programs are likely being poorly managed, which is why a lot of people are against throwing even more money at it. At it’s core, capitalism a simple barter system using cash as means to facilitate trade. I make thing X, I sell it to people who need thing X, I use the profit from thing X to buy thing Y from someone else. It seems like the most natural system, that if not managed and regulated, would exist as a black market. This happened in Cuba, for example.
I do think we need to do a better job breaking up companies when they get too big. I think Google using their money from Adsense to fund all these “free” products, which basically serve as data collection for their ad engine, has been horrible for the technology startups. Everyone trying to come up with a new idea is required to complete with free. It’s hard enough to get a new business going without dealing with that completely unrealistic expectation. That might sound good for the consumer, but it means every new startup has one goal… to get acquired by one of the giants before their VC funding runs out. That led to a lot of consolidation in the tech space, or good ideas simply dying. Pretty much all the big tech companies use their cash cows to box everyone else out by providing free options. You could argue free products are great for the consumers, but is it? What’s the real cost?
I think conflating capitalism with trade is wrong. Trade (and markets) existed long before modern capitalism. So did the concept of money.
I agree that the way you described it, it sounds very natural (not that that really is an argument, but whatever).
But the reality of capitalism is that the Y I’m buying from my profits is not some other commodity (as your example implies).
Y is someone else’s business that also sells X. Or some completely unrelated business that sells Z. Or Y is a bribe to the mayor so that the city buys all its X from me, even though I don’t have the best quality or price. Or it’s a “donation” to the new mayor’s campaign, leading him to remove the rule that one person can not own more than 3 homes in the city, so I can buy more houses and rent them out and make more profit.
It’s capital I use to open X businesses in other cities. Maybe someone already sells X there and the local citizens quite like their service. They don’t care for my X. But I have enough capital to start aggressively underselling, at a loss to myself. Now it doesn’t matter that my service is worse, or that the people had some loyalty to the local X seller. I’m selling at half the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy from me. I wait a few months and the local X seller is now out of business. I can raise my prices back up, nice. This works quite well, I’ll repeat it in other cities. If someone catches on and complains, I’ll just bribe the mayor to look the other way. Or I’ll buy the local newspaper and have them paint me in a positive light.
I agree that blindly throwing money at a problem is not a good solution. Unfortunately this basic insight is often abused into an argument that spending on social programs shouldn’t be increased at all, or worse should be decreased.
Well targeted social spending is actually profitable for the government. Healthy, housed, educated citizens produce a lot of value.
You make some good points, but I’m confused by your statement that they have all the guns. Do you mean they control the police? I’m not sure where you live, but in the USA there are literally hundreds of millions of guns owned by the lower and middle class. In 2017, there was estimated to be near 400 million guns in the United States between police, the military, and American civilians. Over 393 Million (Over 98%) of those guns are in civilian hands, the equivalent of 120 firearms per 100 citizens.
“They have all the guns” is a metaphor in the context of class warfare.
I mean that they have the means to employ force (usually through police, but not exclusively) in their interest as well as having the entire power of the state behind them (disproportionate wealth means they have disproportionate political influence which means they can lobby for laws to be adjusted in their favor. Even when the law seems just, it is rarely applied in the same way to wealthy people in practice).
Not to mention that they can and do buy influence over the media apparatus, controlling narratives and tricking the working class into acting against their own interests.
Within the framework of class conflict, those are the “guns”.
Lol appreciate the sentiment but that was a huge woosh