this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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What is "enough"?
In many countries, your basic needs are already fully met no matter which job you do.
E.g. in Germany working minimum wage full time gets you way more money than you need.
Minimum wage full time gets you about 2160€ before tax, which will be about 1650€ after tax (and healthcare etc.).
You can easily pay for your basic needs for less than half of that (even when living alone). The rest you can use to buy upgrades, like a new phone etc.
Minimum wage workers in Germany are already wealthy.
But of course, if you'd ask the average German minimum wage worker, they'd claim to be poor.
They claim to be poor because they can not afford modern luxury. They can not afford to pay for expensive brands, they can not afford to eat in expensive restaurants.
They can not afford to be lavish.
Now imagine if every person in Germany could afford twice as much (something that happens multiple times in a lifetime). Would they stop considering themselves poor? No, their entitlement would simply rise accordingly (as we've seen again and again throughout the thousands of years of history).
You can not pay people "enough". People do not care about their individual wealth. They only care about how wealthy they are compared to others.
The majority of people can never be wealthy, because people only consider themselves wealthy if they have someone (or rather many) to look down upon.
You're demanding an exact boundary while offering nothing in return but an avalanche of vague imprecise claims with no sources cited.
Speak for yourself and only yourself. You don't speak for me. You don't speak for the people I call friends. You only speak for a narrow "keeping up with the Joneses" sort of American asshole that is actually getting a bit rarer as boomers slowly die off and not enough young people echo that ideology to sustain it.
Save your "all human beings are exactly the same way, therefore capitalism good" naturalistic bullshit claims for
and for that matter save your bootlicking apologia for there, too.
Lastly, what are you arguing for? That it's cool and good to underpay people that do the most unpleasant (and in many cases, most important for society's ongoing functioning) tasks because of some biotruthy sophistry about how no amount of pay would be enough therefore underpaying them is good? Or extending your argument to its conclusion, if it's just "how much compared to everyone else" that matters, you are seriously arguing for everyone to get paid less if they aren't in some exclusive very special secret club of very special elite people (that you probably include yourself into)? Fuck that.
As cited above, the GDP per capita in Germany doubles every few years.
How many times more do you think it has to be doubled until you and your friends deem themselves wealthy.
They never will. Because you, too, define wealth as being able to look down on others (in your social environment).
A large part of the world's population would consider themselves extremely wealthy if they had even near the income of a German worker earning minimum wage.
On a global scale, German minimum wage workers are very, very wealthy.
The only reason you'd ever consider German minimum wage to be too little is if you're used to extreme excess, if you've lived in a hyper wealthy environment all your life.
You're so used to extreme wealth, that you deem slightly less extreme wealth to be poverty. You consider it to be poverty, because the people surrounding you are even wealthier. You consider it poverty, because you can not look down on them.
Oh, so you're one of those smug (ethno)nationaist chuds that think that people in the United States that are one missed paycheck from homelessness, or are already homeless and are in physical decline from exposure and preventable illness are actually spoiled because some numbers on a screen say that that homeless person is actually a recipient of extreme wealth due to location while completely ignoring cost of living expenses because it doesn't fit the numbers you want.
You're way too far up your own ass to argue with, and you probably have goosestepping lessons to keep up with for the big plans you and yours have for your glorious fatherland in the future.
What is your glorious German superiority proposal for those "not fulfilling" jobs, then? Slavery? The US prison system might excite and thrill you if you look into it.
The current system.
I don't have detailed knowledge of the US economy, which is why I keep using Germany as an example.
In Germany you are never one paycheck away from being homeless unless you're actively wasting money. As said before, 800€ is more than enough to live alone in an apartment. And you make more than double that (in the worst case).
You only have arrogant presumptions about rich the United States ostensibly is, while ignoring that a tiny percentage of the population actually benefits from those riches and the rest experience staggeringly higher cost of living, especially for things like medical care and housing.
Again, you've admitted your ignorance about the United States there, and the situation of hundreds of millions of people that live in it that are not functionally wealthy in a material way that they actually experience.
And once again, "the current system" is failing those people and no amount of being smugly content with a status quo that is unsustainably bad for people in the United States that scrub toilets, drive ambulances, or provide CNA services to hospital patients does those people any good.
I am indeed ignorant about the United States. This may surprise you, but I don't know about every economy around the world. I'm sure you don't either.
But I do know that a capitalist system can work well without UBI, as proven by the German system.
(Yes, I will keep using the German system as an example.)
As long as we haven't fully automated it, people will have to scrub toilets and pick fruits in any econonic system. What you wish for is for them to not be poor. Which they aren't (in Germany).
Are you claiming that people's actual wealth has not gone up in the past 50 years? That we don't eat better regulated food, that we don't own very advanced devices, that we don't eat food shipped from across the world?
Normal people's wealth does keep growing. That is a very obvious fact. You may claim that it doesn't grow fast enough, but it does grow.
No shit. And you were making vast and bold status quo warrior declarations upon a foundation of that ignorance.
It only surprises me that you came here and made those claims with that much ignorance to begin with. I made no such claims about Germany, but you certainly did about the United States, again, in support of your enthusiasm for the status quo.
And according to your smug status quo advocacy, those people getting any more pay or being treated with any more dignity is bad because... Germany is so glorious to you. Which somehow justifies the status quo worldwide.
It is far from evenly distributed and is steeply tilted by the staggering increase of wealth in the billionaire class.
If you bent down and talked to someone sleeping in the street (as the rate of homelessness now rises here), told them how their wealth has gone up, actually, with a probably smug look on your face, you shouldn't be surprised if you get spat on.
Can you please quote where I did that? Because I never made any global claim. I always referred either to "many countries" or "Germany", neither of which explicitly include the USA.
They can get paid more. But they're already dignified and already well paid (in Germany).
Where is "here"? Some country which didn't manage to implement capitalism successfully? I never claimed that calitalism does work everywhere, I claimed that can work everywhere.
Maybe US capitalism is shit. But it can work well without UBI (as proven by, you guessed it, Germany).
Smug status quo liberals like you phrase their bad faith questions like that all the time, but just in case you will surprise me, here.
You are obnoxiously ignorant of living situations outside of your own to the point that you prescribe maintaining the status quo to people you don't know that don't live anywhere near you do. You made the extraordinary claims, not me.
Again, your ignorance is showing, paired once again with your arrogance. It is not working for most other people and no amount of being smug about you getting yours changes that for most other people.
Further, what about the status quo makes you so happy about people being paid less than a sustainable living to scrub toilets and pick fruit? Why is that so necessary to you? Well, besides you having a disgustingly privileged point of view where people toiling for almost nothing is cool and good because GLORIOUS GERMANY.
I'm sorry, I don't see where I explicitly mentioned the USA in those quotes.
Was it "A large part of the world's population"? (Note that it doesn't say "the entire world's population".)
okay
sure
Again, I never claimed that capitalism is well implemented everywhere. I only claimed that
You're not, but you should be.
I assumed bad faith questioning and goalpost moving, and that's exactly what I got from you because your arguments have nothing to stand on. You wanted to narrow in on some pedantic Reddit-tier bullshit because your failure to understand that GDP has massive blindspots as an actual measure of how most people live in any given country.
Again, your arrogance and ignorance (by your own admission) about how other nations are going, all to justify unlivable wages for people doing essential but underpaid and underappreciated jobs, is quite frankly monstrous and you've provided nothing to justify that status quo but your own arrogance and your own ignorance.
You got yours. Congratulations. The status quo isn't supported well by smug arrogant people like you stanning for it with nothing to offer but statements of "I got mine." That's a good thing, because the status quo is shit and is failing far more people in the world right now than it is benefiting.
I'm not sure whether you believe to be arguing without moving goalposts. Do you want me to tell you about some goalposts you moved? (E.g. asking me to apply my statements regarding Germany to all countries, including the USA.)
Oh, the people in Germany (whom I was talking about all along) are living just fine.
Perhaps. Good thing I never claimed the status quo to be successful in all countries.
You're dodging the consequences of your own claims so quickly that all I see is a blur of denial.
You started from a position of arrogance and ignorance. You cited GDP as if billionaires and their ever larger share of the total GDP take don't matter and that poverty in other countries than your own simply can not exist in a way you understand because that shiny GDP number says otherwise.
You said that both increasing wages and any sort of UBI are wrong. You gave no real justification except "you got yours."
Arguing with you further is like wrestling a pig in shit.
Enjoy rolling in the shit and oinking in it. Win a last word game if you must, because there is nothing to your argument but "you got yours" and blatant ignorance about the rest of the world.
can you two just fuck already