« First « Previous Comments 60 - 60 of 60 Search these comments
The short of it (too late) is, I'd rather low entrepreneurial costs and high rentier costs, than the other way around. Encourages an ownership society of Middle Class individuals, balanced between socialism and capitalism.
That means you should be for the lowering of government tax rate. The government bureaucrats are the ultimate rentiers. Housing service providers and commercial space providers are not rentiers but service providers just like hotels and phone companies, and probably have far less economic rent than phone companies and cable companies; heck, probably enjoy less economic rent than most existing restaurants and supermarkets have in terms of local exclusivity and therefore price setting power. The government however is the ultimate monopoly, therefore the rentier class.
The comparisons should be quite obvious: the commercial space owners in the article are cutting their prices by 27% ($55 to $40) at the least. . . not even restaurants and supermarkets are reducing prices by 27% across board in this economy. The cable companies are raising rates slightly. The government is raising taxes big times! The relative economic rent those various players have in the economy should be quite obvious.
« First « Previous Comments 60 - 60 of 60 Search these comments
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr14/alienated-work4-14.html
"In Marx’s view, workers were alienated from the product of their work because they did not own the product or control the means of production. Marx argued that the absence of ownership and control was also an absence of agency (control of one’s destiny) and meaning. Workers were estranged from the product of their work, from other workers and from themselves, as the natural order of the product of work belonging to the one who produced it was upended by capitalism.
...Marx characterized this separation of work from ownership of the work and its output as social alienation from human nature. Capitalism, in his view, did not just reorder production into enterprises whose sole goal was profit and accumulating more capital; it destroyed the natural connection between the worker, the processes of work and the product of his work.
...The marketplace's commoditization of everyday life--both parents working all day for corporations so they could afford corporate childcare, for example--created two alienating dynamics: a narcissistic personality crippled by a fragile sense of self that sought solace in consumerist identifiers ( wearing the right brands, etc.) and a therapeutic mindset that saw alienation not as the consequence of large-scale, centralized commoditization and financialization but as individual issues to be addressed with self-help and pop psychology.
...It is important to understand that corporations exist to make a profit and accumulate capital, for if they do not make a profit and accumulate capital they will bleed capital and disappear. To believe that organizations dedicated to making a profit could magically organize society in ways that benefit every participant is nonsense. Corporations organize labor and capital to accumulate capital. It is absurd to expect that such organized self-interest magically optimizes the social order.
...Rather than rely on centralized states and corporations to organize labor and capital, collaborative networks can do so without alienating workers from their work and disrupting the sources of meaning."
For all the Worker Bees out there: Read this. This is NOT about Marxism, it is about a different way of thinking about what you are doing everyday. There are fundamental things that need to change structurally and why not start by looking at your own job? If enough people can open to the idea of moving into an economy that is not corporate and elitist based, things can shift into a new paradigm.