Hatred often makes you want to hurt people, but people hurt peope in the name of greed more often, and not only with less potential for guilt, but is often the cause of delusional accolades and reassurance both from within oneself and from others.
Hypothetical:
A CEO lays off 10,000 employees that helped that company succeed, solely to increase earnings and not because the company is hurting, not only seriously hurting 9,997 people, but causing 3 to commit suicide.
A bumpkin gets in a fight with someone he hates the melanin of because he’s a moron and kills them.
Who did more damage to humanity that day? They’re both, I want to say evil but evil is subjective, they’re both highly antisocial, knowingly harmful behaviors, yet one correctly sends you to prison for a long time if not forever, while the other, far more premeditated and quite literally calculated act, is literally rewarded and partied about. Jim Kramer gives you a shout out on tv, good fucking times amirite!
Edit: and this felt relevant to post after someone tried to lecture me about equating layoffs to murder.
“Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don’t care if they kill people — as long as it’s profitable.”
https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing
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.”
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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
I don’t think the “good” of letting 20k people not starve eventually, is outweighed by making 10k starve. This is of course hyperbole, but I hope I get my point across. Besides this strikes me as very similar to effective altruism and long-termism, which are slippery slopes by themselves, but that is besides the point.
Also:
No. CEOs most often receive bonuses for making the company more profit, so the CEO is most likely not doing this to get good to more people, but for their own pocket.
You don’t starve when you get laid off lol. You get another job. I got laid off 6 months ago and have an awesome new gig.
I stated as such. Being laid off can, but not always is, a source of insecurity and stress. Over half of Americans, cannot afford to loose their job, as it means loosing the roof over their heads. And again, as I stated, my original statement was hyperbole and I stand by the point I wanted to make:
Making 10 000k potentially loose their home, savings, life, is not outweighed by keeping 20 000k just above poverty.
You know how I know you and no one you love has ever been anywhere close to an “average worker?” It’s because you think things like this.
People get laid off all the time and yet it is very rarely something shattering to their lives.
Also your belief that most people are “just above poverty” is absurdly offensive. Maybe consider leaving your ivory tower and interacting with people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuabecker/2023/08/18/61-of-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-heres-the-simple-solution-were-overlooking/
Living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean what you think it means.
You’re talking to someone who has lived paycheck to paycheck for most of his life.
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.
The human population is not doubling in size every three years. For profits to increase at this rate, at some point human consumption needs to increase, which is then inherently unsustainable, no matter what you are using to produce packages.
Besides, you are hired explicitly because you produce more value than you are paid, via wages and benefits. Though I admit, an argument can be made that this is not an inherently bad thing.
I am aware of why I am hired. It is not a bad thing whatsoever.
You’re thinking growth=consumption of resources and that is false. Growth of the service industry, for instance, is not tied to physical resources at all. My industry actually reduces net consumption when it grows.
Even if consumption does not increase, chasing after infinite growth, on a finite planet, is not sustainable, which is my point.
I just showed you how this is a stupid argument.
It’s one of those things that sounds reasonable, but is nonsense. It’s like saying “we’re not a democracy, we’re a Republic” or some other “gotcha.”
Don’t build your worldview off of memes.
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
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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If leftists were not gullible people with fundamental misunderstandings of the world, they wouldn’t be leftists.
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.
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.
Copy pasting my own comment:
FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.
Tribes may work togeather in a crisis, but there is always a hierarchy. Looking at primates, we alway see a alpha male leader role who is fighting for more resource control in the group.
I don’t have the will nor energy to argue with you, especially as another person gave a quite good rebutal of your main point. I will point to the countless acts of kindness one does to those in their surroundings and community, especially in times of crisis, like the fires and hurricanes that storm parts of the US.