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Two very different ways to get ahead
Source: National Action Network website
In a society based on centralized control (leftist, socialist, communist, whatever), there is really only one way to get ahead. You must figure out who has political power, befriend them, and do favors for them. There is no reason for you to help the common man, so you focus on those in power. Everything is in one pie, and if you want a piece of that pie, you must serve those above you.
In a free society, you get ahead by serving those below you. Figure out what people want, then figure out how to give it to them. Lots of people. If you can serve more people, and serve them better, then you’ll gain more wealth and influence. It’s the opposite of leftist societies – political leaders can hurt your business through regulation & taxes, etc., but they really can’t help you. Not much. So you serve everybody except them. Your only interest is in improving the life of the common man, because that’s how you get rich.
There are a lot of reasons that leftist governments make life worse for everybody in their country except for the politically well-connected. But this is a big one. The smartest and most ambitious people spend all their time trying to figure out how to make life better for political leaders, instead of spending all their time trying to figure out how to make life better for everybody else. And guess what happens? Life gets better for political leaders, but life gets worse for everybody else. Imagine that.
Source: CA.gov.com
When Democrats talk about using government to make people rich, most people just sort of roll their eyes. But it gives me the creeps.
What if Democrats really believe in that sort of thing? Perhaps they’re stupid or ignorant. But what if they’re not? What if they really want a world where the population suffers so the politically connected can live well?
That’s simply evil. I don’t use that word much. But I can’t think of another way to describe leftist government systems.
About half of the voters in the last election voted Democrat. I hope they’re stupid or ignorant.
I really do.
Published in General
It is possible to get ahead by exploiting those below you, you know. You can be a slumlord. You can sell booze. You can extend usurious and even extortionate credit.
You can buy businesses, leverage them with excess debt, then declare bankruptcy when there’s a downturn and cancel pension and health care obligations. There are many other possibilities.
That’s if you’re rich.
If you’re not, then you probably have to suck up to your boss. It’s probably been a long time since you’ve been in such a position, Doc, if ever. Me too. But I think that it is the reality of the lives of most people.
By suck up to your boss, do you mean do the things that your boss requires of you for your job?
No, I also mean live in fear of your boss, having to put up with a boss who is a jerk or a petty tyrant. This is quite common, I think. I don’t suffer it myself, for which I am thankful.
I think that the Ayn Randian glorification of capitalism is quite inaccurate.
I’m going to make a more generic comment.
I’m a civil litigation lawyer. I’ve been doing it for 26 years now. I’ve seen a lot.
What I see, day in and day out, is how people mistreat each other. They lie, cheat, steal, exploit, and manipulate. It’s very common.
A major purpose of the legal system is to regulate that sort of behavior. I think that it is essential to the preservation of civilization.
This is the purpose of the government regulation that is criticized in the OP. Left to their own devices, we know what capitalists will do. They will rape the land, clear-cut the forests, pollute the waters, pump poisonous fumes into the air. They will exploit their workers. They will hire thugs to beat up their workers when those workers organize for decent treatment. They will create company towns in which people will live a life similar to indentured servitude. They will sell adulterated food and fake medicine.
All of this happened in our country. These are the reasons that we have many of the laws and regulatory agencies against which Republicans love to rail.
Laws and regulations are not perfect. Government does create some problems. It solves other problems.
Another follow-up to this one. It is outside of my experience.
One of the reasons for the sexual harassment laws was that for some bosses, sex with their female employees was one of the things required for her job. It happens. It’s evil.
Actually, it’s not common at all. But you have a skewed view of the world because every case you see has one side alleging that that is the case. The vast majority of interactions don’t result in litigation.
Don’t assume that your small corner of the world represents reality as a whole. It doesn’t. You are overgeneralising.
I can think of another phrase besides simply evil to describe leftist psychology immediately. Naive fantasy.
Leftism is primarily naive fantasy and not evil.
Naive comes from the same etymology as the word native. In Old French naive means someone so natural that the are unsophisticated and ignorant. Fantasy comes from the Greek word phantasia which means to make visible. However, in modern times it has a more German context meaning, power of imagination.
At the heart of big-government leftism is the idea that there is a thing called a caring state. Deep down, the state embodies compassion and love. Increasing taxes on the rich to move money to government programs is more compassionate because the state has more compassion than rich people.
You see government taxing the rich as corrupt government people striving for power against less corrupt rich people.
Now suppose you are naive and don’t believe that nearly all humans are at least a little corrupt and they are naturally that way. Then imagine someone gives you a wonderful and powerful dream of some people not being corrupt.
That fantasy would overwhelm many naive people. That is the majority of the Democratic voter base.
But I distrust you more than capitalists and I distrust the government slightly more than I distrust capitalists.
That’s because capitalists are rational.
For the most part.
Rationality imparts a measure of predictability. The government and Jerry don’t have that going for them.
Yet we can compare capitalism to all the bad isms to see which system works best to elevate all living under those systems. Without a doubt, capitalism has done more to elevate the quality of life for all. Even our “poor” liver better lives than most. Sure you can find dysfunctional people, but they are in every system and usually are victims of their own personal choices or mental issues, not of the economic system in which they live.
When bureaucratic totalitarian rule runs an economy, advancement is conditional on skills negotiating the politics of a bureaucracy. The ability to deflect blame for failure may be a more highly valued skill than actually succeeding.
In theory, in a market-based economy, actual success as measured by profit, achieving set goals, increasing market share etc would drive advancement. This would apply in any enterprise that was not a family business nor was itself a large inertial bureaucracy (looking at you, GM). And why free market countries outperform unfree ones.
If you are a hammer, everything you see is a nail.
And you’re far more likely to only see nails in your presence.
This is an excellent post that puts Capitalism in a unique perspective that had not occurred to me before. The only part that did occur to me is that most of the rich people in our capitalistic Society got there by providing the most services or products to other people. As much as we like to hate Bill Gates, he enabled hundreds of millions of people to have inexpensive and reliable computers in their homes.
I don’t think you have seen as much as you think you have. There is far more lying, cheating, stealing, and exploiting of people on the bottom rungs of our society than at the top. If you’ve ever worked at menial jobs or lived in crime-ridden neighborhoods, you will see low-wage workers or neighbors lying to people, cheating on their time cards, stealing from their company or neighbors, exploiting the less fortunate to gain advantage, and manipulating people.
These are not phenomena that only occur at the top of our socio-economic system. Greed and arrogance occur at all levels of society, and probably more on the bottom than on the top. I’ve seen people who are below the poverty level express more contempt and racism toward other people than I’ve seen it from CEO’s of large companies. It doesn’t matter where you are on the food chain, bad human values express themselves at all levels. Feeling superior to others is only a relative thing. It doesn’t matter if you are the richest man in the world or have nothing to brag about, you can always find somebody lower than you.
I can see how that would give one a jaded view of humanity . . .
Everybody that is smart and / or honest, gets the hell out of Africa.
That can he said of all the “robber barons.” Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt got rich pleasing “their fellow man” as Walter E Williams used to say. Cheap energy did more to lift people out of poverty than anything government could ever do. They enjoyed their riches when alive then used them to continue that work…Vanderbilt University, Carnegie Hall, Rockefeller Center, Biltmore Estates, development in Florida, railroads, etc. Modern examples include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Walmart. Compare what these men have done for the common man as opposed to the likes of the Soros clan and even the sad endings of those good men like Gates who entered politics and then hurt the same common folks with bad ideas.
This is the same thing with Puerto Rico. The smart and honest ones get out of Puerto Rico to the U.S. and vote Democrat.
My experience confirms your experience Steven Seaward. Amazingly, if you watch t.v. or movies, they never show this reality.
Adam Carolla does talk about it. Please ignore the commentary afterword.
I have had bosses that I like and those that I didn’t. I would even go so far to say a couple that I didn’t like could be classified as jerks. That isn’t the same as living in fear or being impelled to suck up to them which I believe is much less common than you might given your job.
Same with Mexicans. We Republican types need to advertise to them as hard possible to get them to vote Republican but trumpeting the values of honesty and hard work.
Thankfully, Californians leaving California lean Republican. Even some of the homosexual ones. I live in Idaho and I take great comfort in that.
You consistently conflate capitalism with exploitation. It’s like shorthand for you. Let me tee something up.
When you go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, at a price you think is fair (and you have approximately 1,000 options under the header “bread”), you buy your loaf and whistle your way out the door. Now here’s the question:
Who lost in that transaction? Was someone beaten up, exploited, forced to live in a company town, were thugs in the aisles forcing you to buy ONLY this one loaf of bread?
A mutual benefitting transaction is capitalism, both sides gain. We tend to think of things as zero-sum, vs. net increase in benefit.
The people you described above weren’t capitalists, they were exploiting the fact that a) laws and regulations were not yet in place to eliminate these practices, b) politicians, by whose loving grace we are allowed to graze upon the planet, were still bought out by these exploiters, and not living up to their oaths. In fact, doing the opposite of the oath, and practicing self-enrichment at the expense of others.
So, you see, Jerry, the evils can be spread around here quite liberally. Including a thick, gluten-enhanced spread over those institutions you want to bow in abject fealty to, and casually toss a nod at them that “government does create some problems”.
You live in Arizona. As an example of “some” of the problems, I invite you to visit a reservation. Or dive deeply into the 18 trillion that’s been spent on Great Society programs, to help with problems, in fact to eliminate them, and instead it’s only gotten worse.
The examples we could all contribute to, here, are legion. The excesses of government are rampant and all around you, and us, together. Recognizing that as an evil is the first step in creating the change that every one of us needs.
Let’s not confuse capitalists with marketing.
It’s why slavery is found consistently across the human existence, its history, and current state.
Sounds like law school.
Except Toto.
We could take the advice of the university of Chicago cross-dressing homosexual economist Deirdre McCloskey and teach everybody bourgeoisie values. Supposedly she proved that is the reason so much prosperity spread so widely starting around 1830 or something.
I just remembered something. I was going to post this months ago and I forgot. I heard an interview with Deirdre McCloskey when her last book came out. She made a great big deal about at least partly how society is organized. Families are communist and then when you turn 18 it’s better if you get it in your head that you are a libertarian. Very tricky to teach that, but it seems like good advice. I think that’s pretty close to what she said.
The guy doing meta-commentary on a partial snip of an interview, calling him an idiot, is the idiot. Carolla’s worked as a day laborer, framing houses, he didn’t just casually walk past a poor guy and derive his entire worldview looking at a poor guy over a cup of coffee, sauntering past him.
Carolla’s been talking about this stuff for a long, long time, and he’s correct. There’s a million ways to get ahead, staying in the same gig without working toward a future, and spending time in that gig complaining about it and that rich people are evil never once, and never will, change the individual situation.