It ain't going well for the little guy lately - the thread in my Lemmy right below this one is "Amazon, SpaceX and other companies are arguing the government agency that has protected labor rights since 1935 is actually unconstitutional".

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the working man that labor unions were gasp COMMUNIST

Government is our megazord. Got it.

Edit: added wiki link for the curious. In short, episodes of the Power Rangers often end with the rangers battling a monster that inevitably revives as a much larger, Godzilla-scale version.

As the rangers are suddenly too small to fight the larger foe that towers above them, they must instead organize their individual vehicles into one giant “megazord” — a large mech, like a gundam crossed with a transformer — in order to defeat the enemy.

That only works if it can be meaningfully said that the working class directs the state, rather than the owner class. In America, the Owner Class dominates the state via lobbying and being able to contribute to election campaigns.

One might argue that the government is there to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. James Madison certainly did

Sounds like your dad has fuck all for a grasp on what socialism is

There is no badge for not hiring people. Its better to hire someone and treat them better than another employer than pretend like you are virtuous and not "profiting from their labor".

I'm pretty sure I'm not because I don't profit from the labor of someone else, I do all the work and anyone who helps me isn't existentially tied to me.

Idk, I'm in a similar boat. I work at a state-run hospital, but I also own a company with my wife and friend and we do all the labour together. I think sometimes to deal with the work load I have a "home me" and a "work me".

Home me is chill, just wants to relax and have a good time.

Work me..... He's a scoundrel who doesn't work nearly hard enough to afford "home me" more leisure time. You can't trust him, gotta watch him like a hawk. I'm going to wring that guy dry until I can retire off his sweat.

So it makes an odd amount of sense to me, but I've constructed an odd coping mechanism i think.

Also the employees! Your employer and you split your taxes. If the company didn’t have to pay ~15%, they could theoretically increase your salary by that much. They wouldn’t, but they could.

And people don't pay taxes either, since they get money from companies to pay the taxes! Nobody actually pays taxes, it is the circle of money.

That is what you sound like.

Exactly. They just pass the cost onto consumers because there's no way they could reduce CEO pay.

But please ignore how stock buybacks and c-suite pay was way lower when corporate taxes were high. That's a silly correlation that has nothing to do with price inelasticity.

Yep. Remember, kids, don't talk to terrorist. That's how they get in your head. Always shoot on sight.

He had to catch a breath.

Mid-syllable hyphen >:(

Yeah, it's correct if by "self employed" you mean "subsistence farmer". The US was basically a third world country in 1900. We only won the Spanish American War in 1898 because Spain was a dying empire.

50% according to this article. They mention 80% in 1860.

I'm not 100% sure of the source there but I have heard similar numbers around 50%. Think of all the self-employed people doing jobs that just don't exist today in the US - delivering milk, fruit, fish, newspapers, door-to-door salesmen, and that's on top of jobs that still exist today with a lot of self-employed people like AC repair, plumbing, etc...

From 1860 to 1900 the average size of American farms had declined from 199 acres to 147 acres and the percentage of farmers in the labor force declined from 58 to 38 percent.

No, doesn't seem right.

...off.

"Okay, where?"

A club called Milk in Edinburgh posted it on their Facebook page. Presumably it was taken there.