Undermining my own argument for social democracy by repeating the anti-communist myth that increased wages cause increased prices.
the myth is that increased wages cause inflationary spirals. marx argues in wages, price, and profit that increased wages will lead to increased prices, but with two important caveats.
it's a temporary increase caused by the increased demand for basic necessities and mass produced minor luxuries, but that comes from a decreased demand for high end luxuries and the expenses of the capitalist class due to reduced profit margins arising from the general increase in wages. which means capital will flow from production in high end goods and services into the mass production of consumer goods and services, increasing the supply to bring the price back down to long term equilibrium.
and the general wage increases are necessarily larger than the overall price increases, so even though prices are expected to increase under a marxist model, the workers still gain a net benefit from the wage increases. their overall purchasing power goes up.
so his comment is in line with that. a $0.19 increase in the burrito is trivial compared to the benefit workers received from the payouts.
And then the price of the cheesy bean burrito somehow kept going up after the safety net was taken away. 🤔
brandon himself ended the 'social democracy' phase using inflation as an excuse.
also could've stopped the war in Ukraine which would've given capitalists less excuses to price gouge.
also the unemployment insurance chart doesn't show that the other countries have much better welfare systems (even the shithole UK has the crumbling NHS).
A lot of these things seem obvious before you read theory and realize that you can actually pay workers their fair share without needing to increase surplus value and without needing surplus value at all
But what would happen with the people who feel entitled to steal that surplus value? All the honest builders of gaudy McMansions would starve!
cheesy bean and rice burrito is like the only fucking food product that has increased near the actual inflation rates, there's cherrypicking and then there's this, pissing on us from a cherrypicker
What is even is this chart? Lots of the countries had their own extra programmes and benefits in 2020 to the point where there was a growing body of "maybe we can just turn it into a UBI" discourse, even from many of our political masters. Well, until the billionaires and corporations who actually run our "democracies" said no. But this chart includes none of it. It's worth remembering that for a brief time across much of the world a quite different economic system was almost spontaneously born from the sudden shock of changes in global material conditions, until the established powerful structures in society wrenched us back to the zombified corpse of neoliberal capitalism.
i thought most countries besides the us paid benefits to the companies which then kept people employed even if they couldn't actually work.
This chart from the OECD (if you scroll down just a bit) lists out which countries paid companies ("job retention schemes") and which had various direct pay-outs to the general public:
https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/supporting-livelihoods-during-the-covid-19-crisis-closing-the-gaps-in-safety-nets-17cbb92d/
In the UK, half the country just like.. didn't work, for half the year, and the government paid them for it. We had a list of "key workers" (ie people who actually do useful stuff) and everyone else was recommended to stay at home. Unprecedented numbers of people stayed home, people went on walks in the woods with their family, all but the busiest roads were de-facto pedestrianised, etc.
And nothing broke. Nothing stopped working. No shortages of everyday goods. It turns out half the population can just stop working and driving for a month and it's fine. I don't know why people didn't take away more from that.
Nope, I still had to go to work every day and borrow gas money from myself throughout the whole pandemic
Thanks
