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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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To prevent starving, establish UBI.
I believe UBI will never come to pass because the rich have too much to lose. Imagine a workforce not beholden to the capitalists?
"The rich" have names and addresses.
And never walk without a small army.
Their small army is a miniscule fraction of the size of the working class
Work smart, not hard.
You have to understand that the housing crisis, in Aus at least is no longer just affecting the most disadvantaged. It's also affecting middle-aged folks with with defence intelligence backgrounds, as an example.
Besides, I'm talking about civili disobedience that inconveniences them and reminds them that they share our streets and our infrastructure. And they rely on an army of union workers to keep it all going.
I'm not talking about rolling out guillotines yet.
(A lot of what I say should be taken in context, I am Australian, not American).
Im Australian as well and did a bit of number crunching the other day. I live in suburban sprawl 40 minutes from the middle of Brisbane and 40 minutes from the middle of the gold coast. Much worse if there's traffic. No particular natural beauty to speak of. It's an upper blue collar suburb, lots of qualified tradies, wives have a part time gig while the kids are at school.
The median house price is 750k. There is very little variance. All houses are pretty much the same. Right now the cheapest is $650k with 10 houses under 750k (maybe 100 houses on the market right now)
There are 3141 households in the suburb The weekly repayments on 750k is just over $1000/week on a 30 year loan
Of those households, only 2200 households earn enough money to pay the mortgage. That's not earn enough and live, literally earn enough just to pay it and then you cant eat, no electricity, rates etc.
https://profile.id.com.au/gold-coast/household-income?WebID=410
So that leaves 70% who can even just exist.
Affordable housing is considered as being 30% of your income, (https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/understanding-3040-indicator-housing-affordability-stress) that's supposed to cover rates and maintenance too, but let's just see who can afford to pay the mortgage:
270 homes. That's only 8.5%. 8.5% of homes in my suburb can afford to pay the MEDIAN mortgage and live without housing stress.
In that link above it considers that the bottom 40% of houses should not be paying more than 30% of their income. This suburb is great for that because I would suggest it's pretty low-average as far as income goes. It's the definition of what should be affordable housing.
That means we need to see the median house fall to 30% of the $1250-$1499 income bracket. IE repayments at $450/week - or a median house price of $315,000
Basically prices need to halve, or incomes need to double.
It doesn't make any sense how the economy hasn't collapsed yet. I would love someone to explain to me how it all adds up, because when I try to discuss it people just shrug and say "They are worth that much and it's not coming down" like how is anyone affording it?
Yeah thanks for taking the time to post this. So Americans and others can get an idea of just how bad it can get.
I know why it hasn't collapsed yet, it's because folks like me are hanging on. My wife and I moved to a rural location that will never be expensive to rent in. And vetted landlords as best we could.
So many folks are trying to adapt and kicking the can. But there's only so much we can stretch. People are already moving back in with their parents, building granny flats out back and so on.
I was making 90k, but with no generational wealth to back me, I was making just enough to pay rent in a major city, pay my bills and feed myself. Working 13hr days for the priveledge.
Changing careers and joining a union right now.
If enough people want it, they can overpower the relatively few rich. But most of the people have bought I to the lies of the rich; social media is probably a convenient tool for the rich and powerful to control the opinions of others.
It's changing. At least here in Australia, it feels like there has been a shift.
Please elaborate on what you have witnessed?
The election we had? Conservative seats flipping to Greens. Good ol' boy Nats voters acknowledging that young people are indeed fucked and something needs to change.
I live in the birthplace of Australian union organising. So attitudes here may not reflect the country at large.
But the last election was a pretty big step in the right direction. Even if it wasnt as big a shift as I would have liked. It was the renter voting block that delivered the W.
Hey at least Barcaldine has some pretty good water
Actually the capitalists have the most incentive to implement UBI. Better paid workers are more likely to turn around and buy the shit they were just making for themselves, and if the rich are not kept away from the megaphone, an improperly done UBI will be made an excuse to strip welfare benefits.
We can have UBI right now if we pledge 10% of our income and pay it voluntarily.
I would love to see regulations define "fair profit."
Material costs + labor costs + fair profit = retail price.
Fair profit cannot be more than X% of retail price.
I'd say that fair profit is a ratio of materials+labor costs. Basically a supply chain merchant's VAT. Find a rate at which a well run shop is able to turn a profit allowing it to hire more workers and expand if successful enough, and cap the "fair profit" at whatever that is as a ratio to labor and material costs.
Really the worst hit industries will be ones that are particularly prone to brand taxing, and it actually disincentivizes offshoring since cheaping out on labor and regulatory costs correspondingly limits your upper profit margins.
In the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, this more or less already exists in countries with socialized medicine. It's not as explicit as my formula, but the price of medications and devices are regulated. Industry needs to demonstrate the actual benefit of a new product over a prior product for the system to pay for it, and the price of the product is then set on the basis of the health economic value it brings.
Some say it stifles innovation, but honestly, it eliminates the bullshit minor changes that are only made to continue justifying high prices and exclusivity.
Anyway, I think the "Exodus of industry" argument is an empty threat the shareholder class makes when they feel threatened. A market is a market, and if they want to continue to sell in it, they have to follow the rules, even when they change.
It's always externalized exploitation because they're all multinational corporations.
It's true that many of the big players are based in the US, e.g. Pfizer, J&J, Merck, AbbVie, Abbott, EliLily, etc.
But there are plenty that aren't:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_companies_by_revenue
It's important to note that much of the R&D pharma relies on is publicly funded via academic grants in research carried out at universities. It's not to say that pharma doesn't also carry out clinical research, which of course does carry a cost, but a lot of the development dollars for a given drug are spent well before they make it into pharma's hands.
Companies just need to be kept small, if they can afford to expand then it means they are making too much money
I kinda agree but not too much. National scale industrial companies are a necessity for modern complex products. Keeping companies from going international (or at least beyond multinational bloc scale for places like the EU or Mercosur) is more than fair in my mind.
Fast food cartels seem to work ok. Maccas, KFC, Hungry Jacks, Subway, Red Rooster, Chicken Treat, Nandos, Grill'd etc (and I use these examples because the americans will recognize some, but not others which are Australian or Western Australian only) can all coexist while also being statewide, national and/or international franchise chains. None of them can really squash out the others because the customer demands choice, and no one store can reliably deliver all the possible options that consumers seem to want. Sure, they have plenty of other ethical concerns attached, but so far, monopoly seems not to be one of them.
You can have an international product without international stores but Windows for example can be an OS but be banned from expanding into software or a cloud company for example. Google can be search engine but not an ad platform. Etc
I guess that too, I was imagining more for the prevention of shady tax dodging shiz
Can't have corporations when suddenly everyone has freedom to choose what they do for work.
Co-ops already exist.
Studies have shown that, at least in the states, inflation is basically independent of wage growth.
Not to mention how being the guy who doesn't jack up prices will automatically hand you a significant market advantage. In non cartel organized markets every competitor has a prisoner's dilemma incentivizing them to betray the others if an unspoken price increasing agreement is put into effect.
You need competition. The milk surplus, you want that. Companies should compete and only demand what they need to keep going.
But if you do that, there is no real owning class. So you need other ways to finance innovation.
Which means only people with other motives own companies. That could be a good thing.
Lol so they can just raise food and rent prices?
Simp
Same point was made in a reply 13 hours before your comment. If you want an answer you can find it there.