myDeaconmyhand
First man to get a team of horses up Bear Mountain
I'd probably dispute what you consider "generational wealth" in this context. RE: "net loss to someone else". Wealth is always created by labor. You might consider that a fair trade, but your subjective view of fair trade accepts the existence of poverty....Many of us, myself included, didn’t start with generational wealth. Also, I definitely had some advantages. Wealth isn’t inherently evil. I’m working my ass off so that my children will one day have that wealth. My net gain in wealth didn’t equal a net loss to someone else...
The surplus value of goods goes to the person or people that incur 100% of the risk. If you’re doing non-skilled labor for a company and that company goes under, you’re out of a job. The owner is out of a job and is liable for all the debt.
Surely your argument will be, “BUT WITHOUT THE LABOR YOU DON’T HAVE THE PRODUCT!” Unskilled labor in infinitely replaceable. If you don’t want your skill to be replaceable, do what everyone on this board has done and learn one that isn’t as easily replaced.
Further, don’t come at me with the barrier to entry bullshit. If you have a smartphone and an instagram account, you can become an entrepreneur today (not that I suggest that, but it’s very possible.) You can monetize literally almost anything. I didn’t know this a decade ago either, but instead of allowing myself to drudge through life paycheck to paycheck, I read books and involved myself in organizations that let me meet and learn from people.
Now, where I differ potentially from the conservative though is that I don’t think people who aren’t successful are lazy. Learning how to start a business or how to learn a valuable skill isn’t something that happens to be gift wrapped for you on your pillow one night. It’s something that requires education. I would love to see and participate in programs to mentor teens and young adults on business ownership.
So many shitty, privileged points to address here. 1. Access to capital is very often a privilege. 2. "Unskilled labor" is an elitist misnomer. The vast majority of professional careers could be ably filled by high school grads with reasonable training - in large part, a college education just serves as a social credit to access professional opportunity. 3. Our society necessitates that most people serve a role other than entrepreneurship. The idea that people need to create wealth inorder to deserve material comfort is an arbitrary function of capitalism, not a natural development.
Ok then who is responsible for the debt? Yes, the owner, in most cases, won’t have his/her personal property seized as collateral, but who paid for the operating costs of business, the infrastructure, the equipment, the property? Hint: it wasn’t the guy working on the production line.
If you incur the risk and the costs, you reap the benefits. The best part about it is that the same woman or man on the production line can leave one day, start an LLC, and open their own shop. If you don’t like the trajectory of your career, you can make your own. Look at Instagram models, they make money being hot.
There’s no lack of opportunity in the United States, just a lack of knowledge on how to take advantage of those opportunities. These resources exist, we just need to make them more accessible.
What is your definition of "opportunity"? You keep circling back to this invented economic hierarchy where anyone with a grievance should simply seek more "opportunity", when that completely misses the point of addressing inequality. If "the world needs ditch diggers too" then act like it, and support the material conditions of ditch diggers. It's wildly illogical for any citizen to neglect the conditions of the people who make up the foundation of our society, and you defending that neglect by calling those human beings "replaceable" is more a credit to your lack of empathy, than it is to any understanding of economics. It's plainly obvious that our society functions much better when people aren't sick and starving.