this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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me_irl
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GOP: she's basically Stalin.
Politicians can't just pass laws to give us shorter workweeks. We actually get more free time when businesses & voluntary associations invest in better tools & technology. This increases efficiency, making goods and services cheaper to produce & allowing prices to drop.
However, big government programs drain the resources needed to develop an economy. When the government pays for massive spending by printing money & running up debt, it shrinks the value of your dollars and distorts the economy. Add in high taxes, government promises it can't afford (like public pensions with runaway obligations), & red tape that makes it hard to produce goods, and society ends up poorer.
Instead of making life more affordable, printing money & discouraging investment force you to work longer and harder just to stay where you are.
The problem we have in late-stage-capitalism is that instead of passing the time and money savings onto employees and consumers, the owning class passes these savings onto themselves instead and tell us to work twice as hard for half the pay.
I think your boogeyman, "the owning class," is very similar to my boogeyman, "the borrower class." Both are critiques of groups that benefit from particular economic structures. Although we think about economics in totally different ways, there is an interesting parallel between the two ideas.
I'm probably a handmaiden to the fascist class in your eyes, while I think you’re economically illiterate.
My borrower class - Refers to those who gain privileged access to newly created credit or monetary expansion.
Your owning class - Usually refers to capital owners (bourgeoisie) who own productive assets & employ labor.
This is the same stupid train of thought every second manager has. Your tool can be amazing, als long as your processes are shit nothing will improve.
I do believe that if there aren't artificial barriers to production or the supply of goods, humans will end up producing more. As more goods are produced and compete in the marketplace, prices will fall. Democratic socialists, however, tend to micromanage or take over production, which will slow the creation of goods and cause prices to rise.
An interesting digression/aside would be the Jevons paradox: when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource's use, this can lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. This is often used as a critique of capitalism by environmentalists.
P.S. I don't think I've talked to a single right-winger on this website yet. Maybe right-wingers are a dying breed, at least in the Fediverse. I don't know. I'm so alone.
Jevons paradox
When, WHEN did we actually see these efficiency gains translate in real life? They usually use it as leverage to force us to work MORE hours, not less.
They just take the difference as profit, then spend it lobbying anti-human laws again!
That just means we are getting less for more, which means the productivity gains are going somewhere...and I don't think it's just that we are making more different kinds of stuff, and that people are buying more.
I think it's a combination of wage stagnation, price gouging, and tax dollar missallocation, leading to someone wasting precuous resources out of tax money, to build a data center.
I mean if you look at inflation vs productivity gains, those gains are completely erased several fold in the US and have been since the 70's.
Erm, the US has 4 hour work days? I am not in the loop here.