There are basically two classes of people in this world:
Workers, who create something that has value, and
Grifters, who grift off of the wealth of workers because they claim ownership of the wealth that workers create.
That’s pretty much it. We can use pretty names for the grifter class, like “investors” or “venture capitalists” or “landlords” or “executives” or whatever, but in the end they make their money by claiming ownership of stuff that the worker class created, not by themselves actually creating anything. It’s basically a scam. A *useful* scam in some ways, but still a scam.
– Badtux the Classy Penguin
It’s a scam but, it’s one that’s backed by the threat of violence (State Sanctioned and State Enforced).
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Indeed. And because the majority of people have fallen for the scam, the State does this with the full consent and approval of the majority of the population, all of whom consider themselves temporarily disadvantaged rich people.
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I guess being retired, I am a grifter now. But I paid my way as a worker, raised 2 kids, and paid for 4. Went thru 3 different houses and I forgot how many cars, so I did produce for my share of time.
w3ski
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Your Social Security payments, if they’d been put into a stock index fund instead, would be more than adequate to fund your current retirement living. You’re not grifting, you just income-shifted some of your income made by working from earlier in your life to later in life.
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Back when I was a youngster, I started working in construction building houses. I was given advice from a older worker (the foreman) that I have never forgotten. He told me that the ‘purpose’ of my job wasn’t to build houses, it was to make money for the owner of the company.
He went on to explain: If I wasn’t there working, the owner would have to do the job I was doing. But by me being there working, it freed the owner to arrange for other jobs, in order for him to make more money. And when I was paid, it was only part of the value of the work I was doing.
When I said I should get paid more then, for my work, he told me another bit of wisdom. He said that no matter how much (little) I was making, there is ALWAYS someone else who would do the job for less. The only way to ensure that I would keep working and get paid was to do as good of a job that I possibly could. I have always thought about those words of advice.
As I got older, I started to get some side jobs of my own and had to hire temporary help. Some were decent workers that I could set out on a task and it would get done. Others I had to watch constantly to make sure they were doing something productive. So I kinda got to see both sides, management and labor.
I tried to be as fair as I could in paying my ’employees’. Those that were reliable, I tended to put a little more in their pockets. The ones that needed looking after, I rationalized that it was because I had to watch them, the difference in wages was what I paid myself for the time it took to manage them.
Granted, this was just a small time operation, nothing like the multi-billion dollar corporations that burn through employees. But in the end I made a bit more than triple what I was paying the highest wage earner. Nothing like the 4000% difference of todays CEOs.
Just my two cents.
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“Rentier” is a word that needs to be used a lot more to describe grifters like that. Someone who does not do actual work, but collects money that REAL workers earn, that they then pay the rentier because that grifter has gotten some sort of privileged position. Like a landlord, or ownership of a patent, or some kind of monopoly that’s enforced by government law. (“Law” being, ultimately, what Mao said about power coming from the barrel of a gun. If the people with guns who enforce the government’s diktats say that some activity is legal, no matter whether you and I think think it’s “justice,” that gun-backed activity is The Law.)
The trouble with rentier is that it’s derived from the French language. Therefore, it comes across as effete. Even the pronunciation lacks forcefulness. It comes through the nose, instead having a growling or spitting throat-based enunciation the way that Germanic-origin words do. The Saxon section of the English language is better for expressing angry concepts. Personally, I prefer “maggot” as a descriptor of the types you’re talking about here. “Bankmaggot” is a neologism I like when commenting on financial topics.
Although that might be an insult to actual maggots. From what I’ve read, they only eat dead tissue, not living flesh. I have never had to work using medical maggots in wound care, thank doG. It’s a rare thing for specialised units, not at my level of practice (which is now mostly crazyppl.) I’m not sure if I’d have the stomach for maggot applications (or medical leeches, either.) And I can deal with a lot of gross stuff — shit, puke, sputum gobs, bloody lacerations, etc. With them, I can disassociate and go into “professional” mode for the cleanup tasks. Couldn’t do that with ooky squirmys, tho. We all have our limitations.
Lotsa times the grift isn’t being done by a person. Corporations are the biggest grifters. Because we’re humans, our brains anthropomorphise things, though. We can easily imagine a Snidely Whiplash character twirling his waxed moustache ends as he rips us off. Harder to get angrily worked up about a faceless corpo.
They really are like an artificial life form, whose existence is created under “law” that is enforced by that power of the gun when it comes to crunch time. Corpos use humans as their functional appendages to do those grifty activities such as manipulating share prices and evicting flesh-n-blood folks from their homes. But I would say that the humans who go to court to file the eviction notice for the bank, and the sheriff’s deputies who throw the unfortunate debtor’s clothing onto the street, are just the cells that make up parts of the corporation’s body. BezoMuskZuck might be the initiators, but they need a structure of corpo-human interfaces to do their monopolistic dirtywork. Corpos are manmade monsters, golems that can destroy any of us pygmy people. But I’m drifting into weird conceptual territory here, and I’m not even stoned yet (it’s a day off work today.) So I’ll STFU.
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