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16 points

Am I having a stroke or does the first sentence make no sense? Shouldn’t it be more instead of less? If a company always sells for less than the cost to produce, it’ll go out of business rather quickly I’d think. Obviously there are temporary strategies like this that are used to beat competitors, but that’s not what this is talking about.

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8 points

I think you just have it misunderstood. The comic assumes that you are the laborer, not the capitalist. As the image at this part of the infographic shows, from the perspective of the laborer, you are paid $5 for an item that is sold on the market for $50

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12 points

Yes, the image is correct, but I think theUnlikely was refering to the text “Capitalism exists by selling the value you produce for less than your labor costs.”

It’s backwards, it should be the value you (the laborer) produce is sold for more than than your labor costs.

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-4 points

ok, yea now I can understand how that sentence could be confusing. It’s technically correct, but written kinda backwards as people would normally understand it

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4 points

So the labor costs (wages) are $5 and the value produced by the laborer is sold for $50? Yes this makes sense of course, but I can’t wrap my head around why it says it’s sold for less when $50 is more than $5. GPT4 can’t seem to make sense of it either.

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1 point

The comic assumes that you could ONLY be the laborer. It’s ignoring the fact that no one is stopping you from making/buying something and selling it for a profit.

I’m a bench jeweler and I know plenty of other craftspeople who make a whole-ass living off selling shit they made for more than labor/materials cost. The fact that an employer will take advantage of you isn’t a failing of capitalism, it’s a facet of human greed that will permeate any economic/political system.

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6 points

Making things or selling things is not capitalism. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production; things like factories, tools, intellectual property, etc.

On the point of greed, I disagree that it’s just simply “human nature”. However, even if it was, why should we have an economic system that prioritizes greed?

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4 points

yeah wtf, the first sentence and nobody picked up on this. We‘re completely fucked

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-1 points

We’re actually “fucked” at everyone’s (my own included) inability to draw inferences from context, and! Often disingenuous character of a lot of people using this unclear manner of speaking. The cartoon isn’t presenting this ambiguous statement ini bad faith, probably just oversight or perhaps that’s not the author’s/translator’s native language.

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