Unpopular Opinion
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Interesting thought. However greed is part of human nature, since we humans like to get as much resources as possible.
Hatred is too, yet we recognize that flaw/failing/deficit/defect in ourselves and attempt to minimize it's effects by educating children that it is bad and not socially acceptable and with punishment if practiced to a harmful degree.
I argue practiced greed should be treated similarly. Greed is a vice and a personal failing. Modern society seems to have complety abandoned this fact. It's part of our darker nature right next to hatred. It's one of the most prominent devils on our shoulders, not angels. We should be teaching kids that harming someone else, even if allowed, if it gives them the opportunity to get more or "succeed" is deeply wrong, and even wanting a lot more than others no less deserving than you is wrong, not "rational self-interest."
Here is the logic issue with your post:
person lays off 10k employees to help the bottom line
capital responds positively and investment in the company grows
company eventually expands to 20k more hires
goods reach more people
Every decision the CEO (or whatever officer) made has knockoff effects that make it impossible to prove said person laid people off for their own benefit.
Your example and proposed moral challenges do not align with reality
True, hatred and greed is embed in human nature. However making laws against greed will likely not solve much but discentivise productivity. Or as libertarians will say "cause atlas to shrug".
"discentivise productivity."
This right here. The jargon they use to rationalize cruelty. "growth or die" capitalism says, yet that same growth/metastasis capitalism demands is ironically choking the human race right now.
Growth is destroying our habitat. What we need is equilibrium.
Is the sustainable packaging company I work for, which is doubling in size every 3 years, "choking the human race?"
This is a silly mindset, man.
Im not on the "I hate capitalism train". However yeah I understand workplace relations between employee and employer overall is in the toilet.
As of now, the best solution I can come up with is refusing to work for morons. The more that do this, the harder it will be for morons to find staff and run their operations.
Refusing to work for morons will have you choosing between the "good" corporations that just get by with a little tax evasion, wage theft, and waste.
And the "effective" corporations that will do anything to corner the market. Including suffocating / buying the "good companies".
It's a race to the bottom.
I am sure there are other options out there than just those two.
Even if that is the case, quit working for someone and start your own business.
I'm sure your mom and pop outfit will compete very effectively against megacorps that own the marketplaces, advertising outlets, and regulatory framework, hell I'm sure it's a walk in the park to operate at a loss for decades while their lawyers peel back every transaction you process to find the smallest irregularities.
And that's just assuming they don't send a goonsquad to burn you and your place.
Stay poor then. No one will force you to join society. Go start a commune
Lol it would be difficult for me to stay poor. But great argument, very stirring, really refuted my points and added a lot to think about.
Even if your parents fund the commune, you can still live as a poor person.
Aww that's precious.
Hey maybe develop a personality?
It will make you less reactionary when people threaten the status qoe, or at least give you some more interesting sentences to repeat to strangers.
My personality is like 80% of why I have been so wildly successful in life.
No one here threatens the status quo because there are insufficient numbers of people who believe this silly shit.
Personally I find it weird you feel so threatened by me being fine with you living a Walden-esque life of pretend-poverty. Idc what you do man. Knock yourself out.
Is the other 20% your willingness to dig through 3 day old threads, or your incredible prose? Or is it just assuming everyone who holds a different opinion than you is poor? Oh wait those are all aspects of your personality.
Btw the people that made this website believe that silly shit.
It's mostly my incredible prose coupled with my ability to find years-old threads on the internet, but that's because the e-learning community has always done a baller job of documenting solutions.
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Also I don't care what the original devs believed. They made a passable forum but their world views are meaningless.
Finally, I didn't assume you're poor. I assumed you wanted to pretend you're poor. That's so much worse.
"Finally, I didn’t assume you’re poor. I assumed you wanted to pretend you’re poor. That’s so much worse."
"Stay poor then"
I think you need some more e-learning, preferably somewhere the content is locked so you can't pollute it.
Lmao it's really gonna piss you off to know that I literally develop training programs for major corporations.
But yeah go be poor if you want. It's your life man. Be a vegan on a commune.
Good thing most users will just click through the drivel you write. I'll follow suit.
Do it from your commune! Best of both worlds.
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Yes I have heard of the dunning-kreuger effect. If your employer is a moron, go find another employer to work with that is a capitable at being an employer.
Disincentivizing productivity sounds helpful for the environment
A key facet of productivity is achieving the same or higher output with fewer resources, so it's exactly the opposite.
Okay. Between a company hyper focused on productivity and one that’s in maintenance mode, the former is going to have a worse impact on the environment, imo.
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Not necessarily are they. Many are acts of need and desperation.
You make a fair point, however when you work for someone, that is your choice. To shop at a business is your choice. If you do not like a business, do not work for it and do not shop there.
Stealing from someone is stealing from a person who took time to produce that item. In the case of s store, the store had to buy the product from a distributor.
So theft is still inmoral. Is theft greed? Yeah it could be and in most cases its greed and selfishness. However the thief in most cases can buy the item but chooses not to.
So, I get where you're coming from, and it might make sense for an Aussie, who's consumer protections are very strict. However, most of what is being discussed exists in a completely different environment.
That being said, when you work for someone, it is your choice. However, for the sake of understanding the situation, let's say that companies in the local area all pay very little. Perhaps enough to pay rent, food, and utilities, but not much else. Now, you might be aware that the products you sell are being sold for much more than you make. This isn't a fair pay, and you know that. According to your other statements, you should go find a job that pays well and treats you with respect, right?
But that's based on a premise that that job and company exists. If the current jobs that aren't paying you fairly are all that exist around you, that idea falls on its head. So what do you do then? Not work? You can't afford to save with your current income, and you will starve without it (I cannot stress this point). Move? This article should be telling (https://myelisting.com/commercial-real-estate-news/1334/most-and-least-expensive-cities-states-to-rent-compared-to-income/). No place in the US is going to change your situation, as you're more than likely going to end in a worse spot, if you move without any savings, even with another job lined up. If your next argument is to move out of the country, once again, how would you do so without any savings? Sure, there are people who manage to do it, but immigration in any country is not a quick process, and employment isn't always guaranteed for unstable citizens like immigrants.
So, left in this situation, we are left to ponder the initial question; are crimes of greed (I haven't even gotten to discussing what exactly this might entail) actually worth codifying into law, and having criminal penalties attached to them? I say yes, for many reasons. Crimes of greed are typically what we perceive as immoral or damaging actions due to either unchecked, rampant white collar crime, or the actions of companies that previously would have been unthinkable, but due to eroding regulations and dulling the fangs of the enforcement of surviving regulations, the risk is mitigated enough to justify the profit of these 'greed crimes'.
One can complain about their situation, or one can do something about it. Stsrt your own business, expand your compass. Yeah you might have to try out five or ten jobs until you find one that does not have a moron as a boss and has good pay. Sitting around and whining about it and demanding "laws should be made" is really just a form of communism. Communism did not work.
I get it, there are lots of employers who are morons and pay very little. And yes, stop working for them at all cost. Do not feed the beast, starve them out of workers. I know of places locally that had poor working conditions and offered little pay that went under because they could not find any staff.
If leftists were not gullible people with fundamental misunderstandings of the world, they wouldn't be leftists.
It's just meme leftism. Actual leftists who are like, activists and shit, at least can acknowledge reality.
This is more like "The Donald" than like a local Republican office, as an example. Might have the same ideology, but people are considerably less informed and more unhinged.
haha, you mean the impact on the marginal return to labour?
i mean most econonics rhetoric is fucking garbage, but the stuff from the ones who studied economics before learning calculus properly . . .
mmmm. . . bliss point . . .
Properly? Most people in the USA probably never learned algebra, let alone properly.
???
Austrian economics is real economics man.
There are no "schools" of economic thought any more
probably better to describe them as 'memes of economic shitposting', but i think it may have been that way for a while now.
probably sine quite a while before the word meme and shitpost..
Bullshit. For a couple hundred thousand years humans kept only what they could carry on their backs. And that only counts homo sapiens sapiens. We only started staying in one place and amassing surplus in the last fifteen thousand years and yet there are people saying "greed is part of human nature."
It's the greedy who somehow managed to sell us that propaganda. Greed is a mental illness.
I don't agree with OP. I don't think more punishments are the way to fix things. But neither is gestures broadly the best we can do.
When homo sapians were nomadic, we were quite a tribal social group. The alpha male always had more resources in the group which you can call greed. This was a thing before civilization. And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
What makes you think that "alpha males" were the norm in the paleolithic?
I could probably be convinced that some individuals had more social capital than others.
What do you even mean by "had"? It seems extremely unlikely that in the paleolithic they had a concept of ownership even roughly like what modern capitalist systems employ. I'm quite certain they didn't think of land ownership the same way we do today. I'd doubt they thought of ownership of tools or food or clothing the same way we do either.
I'd imagine anyone who carried more stuff on their backs than they needed would have significant disadvantages (encumberance) compared to other folks.
How do you know?
Just from looking at Wikipedia, I found a paragraph that starts "some sources claim that most Middle and Upper Paleolithic societies were possibly fundamentally egalitarian." (And that sentence has 4 citations.) It seems like the jury is still out at best on that topic.
And what if that has a lot more to do with our modern world than with human nature?
Indigenous peoples in what is now the pacific northwest of the U.S. and Canada had rituals called "potlatch" in which the most wealthy would give away lots of their resources to those with less. Don't get me wrong, those folks were not paleolithic hunter gatherers, but they're a counterexample to your implication that humans with more never give things away to humans with less. And it was done regularly. (On occasions of births, deaths, adoptions, weddings, and other such events.)
Another example of this is the Moka ritualized exchange by indigenous peoples in in Papua New Guinea.
Looking at how primates behave today, there is an alpha male in the group who has access to more resources. "Human nature" or in this case the nature of primates does not change over a short period of time. This behavior is embedded in us from million of years ago. Sure some tribes may have work togeather, but most indigenous tribes did not document their history, so for all we know there was more of an hierarchy in indigenous groups than we know of.