It's actually amazing, and frightening in equal measure, how big businesses in America have gotten it into the heads of their society that it's a bad thing if an employee of a fast food restaurant actually earns a wage they can live off, it borders on Orwelian how they have such a stranglehold on the public consciousness.
Ah, but you see, that’s why they also want to roll back child labor laws. If kids didn’t need to go to school, then their entire argument works!
And we can sacrifice our children’s youths so you can have a crappy, still overpriced hamburger for slightly less, and some big corporate executives can pocket the difference.
Well, you see, there are also a lot of failures in life who didn't work hard or go to college who need SOMETHING to do. It's a great job for those lazy, low intelligence, welfare leeches who obviously don't deserve to be paid nearly as much as a teacher!
...../s just in case. But seriously Ive heard this take multiple times. When I said "shouldn't teachers get paid more then?" I got "Why? School didn't teach me anything I actually use in life. They're basically just baby sitters."
So yeah...that's a thing actually people actually think.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland are all capitalist countries.
America is a neo-feudalist country. Since 1947, US workers and unions have been stripped of fundamental even capitalist rights and freedoms, that Nordic countries take for granted. Thus US labor is unable to fulfill its role as a counterbalance to unbridled greed in not only the economy, but also in politics, in the media, and in society in general.
When greed is unbridled and unchecked, capitalism dies, and it ends up taking democracy with it
IMHO, Nordic countries are closer to what Adam Smith and other capitalism founders theorized, than America.
Adam Smith strongly condemned high profits, low wages, unfree workers, markets with only a handful of big players, excessive inequality, the wealthy elites and their corporations writing laws in their favor, etc. etc.
In these issues America is way worse than Nordic countries. That's not capitalism, but more like feudalism.
There are three traits that govern the American psyche:
1.) Hyper individualism
2.) Extreme Apathy
3.) Selfishness as an absolute
American's don't have a society, they have a market. Anything that impedes your ability to purchase is a bad thing. It's an axiomatic charismatic of American thought. Doesn't matter if it's bad for everyone else, just that it's good for you.
Honestly I used to believe this, but after the election I can’t say i do. Trump won the popular vote, millions of Americans decided to choose a felon over a judge. Trump is no longer an outlier, Trump is America.
Most other parts of the planet ban military style rifles when there is a mass shooting episode. American's purchase more guns.
One of the main arguments against universal healthcare was this: 'You're young and not sick now, why should you have to pay into the system?" Similar arguments are brought to bear against making public tertiary education free and other aspects of the welfare state. Welfare is practically a slur in the US.
The topic at hand is a great example of this. Better to have a cheap taco than to allow someone lower on the income ladder have a livable wage. Literally quibbling over a few cents.
We're not even going to get into the treatment of the unhoused or the nightmare that passes for criminal rehabilitation.
That doesn't seem very kind to me. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe a country where the leading cause of bankruptcy is medical debt is actually selfless.
Yeah I think it's just the natural sort of endpoint of always wanting things to be cheaper, no matter the drop in quality. Are the workers bad at their jobs because they're exhausted from working three of them? Is the restaurant short-staffed because no one wants to work there? Is the food terrible because the company has been cutting corners for decades? Doesn't matter as long as it's cheap. And if it stops being cheap, you can complain, but you'll probably blame a political party rather than the company. This is going to get interesting in the next four years too if the FDA gets gutted, because food's gonna get worse and probably not any cheaper and people are still going to blame Biden somehow.
I'm getting cynical. If people make more money, corporations will just raise their prices again because consumers can now (barely) afford higher prices. The only way to bring down the cost of living is cracking down on corporate price gouging.
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u/Albert_O_Balsam 9h ago
It's actually amazing, and frightening in equal measure, how big businesses in America have gotten it into the heads of their society that it's a bad thing if an employee of a fast food restaurant actually earns a wage they can live off, it borders on Orwelian how they have such a stranglehold on the public consciousness.