this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Just over half of Canadians say they are $200 away or less from not being able to pay all of their bills at the end of the month amid higher interest rates and inflation.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

... excuse me? Because my wages are surpressed, I deserve to live in poverty and don't deserve access to opportunities like home ownership or entrepreneurship and to work for social stratification and to live a good life, am I reading you right here?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

am I reading you right here?

No. Not even close. Can you break down my comment to explain where you found applicability to anything you wrote? I am genuinely interested to see where I failed to effectively communicate.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to be under the impression people are complacent as workers and don't want to own their own business. I offered my own anecdote as a counterpoint and an example of the barriers that drive people away from entrepreneurship in Canada today- you don't see the direct relevance, really? Your response is to handwave it away as irrelevant and say these are not opportunities that are meant for someone in my position, when your complaint in the first place was that people lack ambition and drive and that is very much not true, for so many Canadians. "You have to start somewhere" were your exact words, and that is not a reflection of the reality for most people, at all.

What exactly are you trying to communicate, if it's not the implication that the working class is lazy and complacent? If people have to be homeowners for you to be willing to consider their experience, why aren't you willing to recognize that just a few decades ago, the proximity of the working class to the middle class was quite close and had an appreciable level of overlap that no longer exists as a direct result of wage suppression?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You seem to be under the impression people are complacent as workers and donโ€™t want to own their own business.

I said that people don't want to spend their money on starting businesses, rather they would prefer to spend it on buying houses. If you don't have money at all, you don't fit the conversation.

What exactly are you trying to communicate, if itโ€™s not the implication that the working class is lazy and complacent?

The question was: Does the middle class want to return?

Being middle class brings the worst of being upper class and the worst of being working class all rolled into one. You have to work all day for "the man" and work all night for yourself. You are in a terrible position where you don't (yet) have an overly successful business, else you could give up your day job and become upper class.

Living that life myself, I totally get there is also some joy. We wouldn't do it at all without that. Being able to see something new come to life that other people love is an amazing feeling. But it takes an insane amount if grit to want to put up with the bad parts โ€“ and there are a lot of them! I don't think the masses are into it. The working class is a great place to be for most people. There is good reason why the middle class is forever shrinking.

As I said in another comment,

Iโ€™m not sure middle class was ever much of an ideal. It was the outcome of us moving away from the time when most owned farms, with many of them starting to fail as we moved into the industrialization era, and their owners having to pick up jobs off the farm to stay afloat.

I do hope you get to live out your dream someday. But if we are being honest, it is not what most people are into. Maybe you think that makes them lazy or complacent. I think it makes them rational. You have to be a bit crazy to want to be middle class.