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.”
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.
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 . . .
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:
make it impossible to prove said person laid people off for their own benefit.
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.
greed is part of human nature
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.
The alpha male always
What makes you think that “alpha males” were the norm in the paleolithic?
always had more resources
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.
This was a thing before civilization.
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 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.
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.
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.
That’s actually a fantastic way to word what I’ve been thinking about for years. Greed crimes.
I don’t know where you’re from, but as an American, I’d rally for that to be an amendment.
Not to blow out your flame, but I doubt you will be able to succeed through a “democratic” system, especially in the US, as politicians need corporate backers to get a seat. Besides, even if you get one independent representative, their voice, so your voice as well, will be snuffed out by several politicians using the hot topic of the day to rally support from masses, while passing bills which benefit their corporate backers.
I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.
Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.
Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.
“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
You’re funny.
What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.
Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?
When I switched from a small company’s insurance plan to Amazon’s insurance plan (not warehouse and delivery but on the development side), one of my monthly medications went from $0 per month to over $400 per month, and that’s with assistance. It was over $900 a month before I got the assistance plan.
Another one of my prescriptions, I used to get in 3 month increments. On the Amazon plan, I can get it in 3 week increments. I opted to pay for it out of pocket so I can continue to get 3 month increments.
If I can’t afford all that, maybe Amazon should be partly liable for not having decent prescription coverage. Of course, the problem isn’t Amazon. The problem is that it’s legal to offer such shitty prescription plans and that insurance is based on employment. So maybe the government is liable if I can’t afford prescriptions.
Unpopular opinion?
Bro if you run on that I’ll campaign for you.
I’m flattered, sincerely.
That said, if someone as likeable as Bernie couldn’t get any traction, my abrasive ass wouldn’t help matters.
When I hoard it’s a mental illness.
When billionaire hoards he’s just successful.
Bullshit
Hoards newspapers
People harmed: themselves
Society’s Verdict: Mentally ill
Hoards capital
People harmed: innumerable exploited employees deprived of receiving most of the value they produce.
Society’s Verdict: virtuous job creator, titan of industry, esteemed member of the business community, role model
Capital cannot be hoarded, or it loses value. The entire existence of capital is tied to its use.
Jeff Bezos does not have a vault full of money
What he actually has are stocks in his company and other companies that are worth billions, that’s all. And rich people like him simply take out loans against their stocks and live off of the loan money. Part of the reason why they do everything to raise stock prices regardless of cost: they need more collateral to roll the loans over year after year.
Rich people are not actually rich. They don’t actually have cash on hand like that.
Actually most businesses aren’t really profitable like that either.
The U.S. isn’t even as wealthy as it claims to be, not by a long shot.
