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That you need a credit score to function in society as a whole should be illegal.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. I'm very well aware of how and why credit score functions. I get it.
I was still very well put out when I had to go purchase a new car unexpectedly, only to have the guy who went to check my finances come out and stare at me like I was some lost crytpid and blurt out 'You have no credit score.'
Yes, because I grew up around adults who abused credit cards and paid the consequences and who had no desire to go down that road, thank you very much. Only to find out late that, gee whillickers, if you want to function as an adult in society for some things, you actually need a credit score, and for that, you need a credit card.
Why, yes, I'm still salty about that. How could you tell?
(And before you ask, all my previous vehicles were old, used, family hand-me-downs.)
Credit cards are truly evil. I mean, I use them. I've used them for 20+ years and never had a single finance charge or fee ever, while accruing thousands of dollars in cash back rewards. They paid for my Switch 2 in fact.
But they're still evil. The yawning gaping pit they represent, which I have to balance on the edge of every time I run up their balance each month (within my budget) and then pay off in full is nightmarish. Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
I watch some of these Financial Audits, and people's minimums on all their cards is over the amount I manage to save each month. I'll watch someone my same age, my same income, and they are looking at 5-10 years of aggressively budgeting and paying off debt to get back to zero. Meanwhile my assets appreciated more than my annual salary the last few years. But in another timeline, with only slightly different choices early on, I could have been them.
Half these people, when asked about a specific credit account, just go "I don't know, they just gave me that card when I bought X". X could be a car, a new roof, a large plumbing job, etc, etc. Like in my driveway story below, fucking everything is trying to get you to sign up for a new credit card now. People unthinkingly just take them. "Yeah, more free money" they think.
As I've gotten older, my arrogance at being part of the Credit Card Master Race has waned. Fuck them.
Once in a while The Motte ditches culture war and sounds admirably left populist...
As one of the ostensible leftists on here this just makes sense. Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again. Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies and the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues. The usual consensus here on a lot of issues, like whether we should import an infinite amount of indians to drive programming/IT wages as close to zero as possible, is actually isomorphic to the left populist position (i.e. infinity indians is not a good idea).
This is straightforwardly not true. State owned businesses perform poorly. Europe which has much more left populist crap is a decaying retirement home. Like most populism leftwing populism is very specifically selected for what scratches the grievance hindbrain of the most people listening to just so stories about how homelessness is really caused by the fact that Bezos has a really big yatch.
I'm talking about Labour movements and politics (i.e. how the modern day Anglosphere Labour parties got started). Left wing populism gave us the 8 hour workday and 5 day workweek, and I'm personally glad that I don't work the 12-hour shifts and 6-7 day alternating workweek that private industry would prefer. As for state owned businesses I don't think that you can really say they all perform poorly - there are plenty of them that do incredibly well. Singtel has done so well that it has actually bought and acquired a decent portion of the private cell companies in other countries, for instance. And as for Bezos, isn't a large portion of his workforce reliant on welfare to survive anyway? Amazon is the worst of all worlds - the public purse is subsidising all their expenses in exchange for no return at all.
I don't really buy this framing. I know unions love to claim credit for it and maybe they have some path dependent reason for why compensation grew in that particular shape rather than 9 hours and higher pay, but firms were always going to have to compete for labor as capital built up and this necessarily leads to higher compensation one way or the other.
And no one ever seems to talk about the other end of the ledger for these special interest lobby groups we call unions. They don't represent the interests of everyone, only their members and do so almost always at the cost of everyone else. They hollowed out the competitiveness of our auto industry and after doing so simply banned outside competition so they could collect rents from everyone who wants a car. Through the Jones act they've killed our ability to ship things between our ports effectively so despite having an incredible gift of natural waterways we send things over land inefficiently. They've prevented port automation raising the cost of all import and exports. The unions are one of several big factors in retarding out ability to build the housing and infrastructure we need as they lobby to pork up bills with guarantees to use over priced union labor in contracts.
Behold Europe and it's pathetic nongrowth for a vision of what a union dominated society looks like.
I looked into this because I'm always curious for these examples and Singtel is just simply not a state run company. The government does own a lot of it's shares but this isn't really what people mean when they talk about state owned companies. This is literally just a publicly traded company that the state owns a lot of shares in and doesn't have any real impact on whether it would succeed or fail.
There is no support the state can give to the people that can't be categorized indirectly as subsidizing employers. If you want to redistribute income to people who's labor isn't very valuable, and I do support doing this, then you're inescapably subsidizing the firms they are employed by, no way out of it. Hell same for the higher paid employees.
you mean besides the tax revenue of course.
And all of this is just distribution blame for the past, take a look at Mamdani for a vision of what leftist populism actually looks like with Charlie brown lining up for the 80th attempt at kicking the football of rent control and subsidized housing in the hopes that this time they'll prove the economists wrong.
I live in Australia where this framing is unambiguously true. They were directly involved in getting this turned into law, and the big businesses/firms you talk about here were fighting them every step of the way. This isn't really a topic for debate so much as a settled question in my home country, but I feel like pointing out that those firms fought against these changes every step of the way even when it turned out to be against their own self interest.
How is any of this less socially destructive than the mass immigration and outsourcing that big business and capital has wrought using their outsized influence? American unions, from what I can see, have behaved pretty badly in the past - but you don't get to pin the blame for this on unions specifically when the other side of the ledger has done far worse. It wasn't unions who sold your country's industrial base to the third world, and that was a far more destructive change to society than demanding higher wages for workers and safe working environment laws (as in no mandatory carcinogen exposure or dangerous equipment with no safety precautions).
It wasn't unions that blew up Nordstream and cut off Europe from cheap energy, and it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants to help devalue their bargaining ability compared to capital. To claim that unions are responsible for the EU's current ills I think you would need to bring a lot more evidence to bear - it seems transparently obvious that the PMC is in charge of the EU. Can you honestly look at EU policies and say they were implemented to help out workers and labour movements as opposed to capital or existing elites?
Singtel's majority owner is Temasek Holdings, which requires the direct approval of the President of Singapore to do anything which could involve drawing down on cash reserves, and the entire board can be fired or replaced at the President's whim as well. The current chairperson is a former trade unionist and politician, and his incoming replacement is also a former politician. If the government having the ability to fire or appoint members of the board and decide whether or not cash reserves can be used doesn't count as "real impact" I have trouble imagining what would.
Incorrect - welfare to someone who is unemployed is very different to welfare provided because people work terrible jobs that cannot support their own existence. I personally think that any corporation whose employees are on welfare and receiving government benefits should receive an additional tax burden equal to 1.5x the cost of paying for their employees. Otherwise you're essentially just paying for Jeff Bezos' workforce to help him make private profits.
Large corporations are far more successful at avoiding and minimising tax obligations than workers are. Shifting the balance of power such that workers get less and large corporations get more means that you're going to get less in tax because you're going after more sophisticated and powerful targets.
I actually like some of Mamdani's ideas (haven't done too much research on him) and think that they're pretty good. Why is there an expensive licensing scheme for food carts that essentially doubles the price of street food in exchange for letting a few people make large profits selling licenses and adding no value? Cutting out expensive middlemen who produce nothing is actually a pretty good idea in my opinion. As for economists, I don't think I've ever seen them be correct on anything in my entire life, so proving them wrong isn't a particularly high bar.
They were in many places proximal causes of course. I don't dispute what legislation was passed on behalf of which lobbies. My point is in the counterfactual world without unions we don't know that things wouldn't have shaken out the same or even better. It's not obvious to me that the stickiness of 40 hours a week being imposed by some laws is a good thing. I really don't think that if there were never unions we'd be working 11 hours a day 7 days a week right now.
I really don't think you can lay this down at the feet of capital like there wasn't, often left wing, ideological justification. The economic class lens can be useful and I don't totally reject it but you're just blind if you think this is primarily a capital vs labor interest thing.
Unions didn't have a choice outside of autarkic fantasies where we're all much poorer but at least we're wallowing in American made poverty. The advantage of being the only power not demolished by ww2 was always going to wear off.
It doesn't seem like it's worked out well for the capital involved either. But you're dodging here, EU members are undeniably more unionized and populist left influenced. Where is the prosperity for the european? Why are their nation arguably handling mass immigration even worse? This was voted for, was it false conciousness?
This is both not true and irrelevant. Any income tax paid by an employee is indistinguishable from a tax on the company for its labor costs. Most employers even withhold the taxes making it even more obvious what's going on.
Funny you would ask. restaurant and supermarket unions (e.g., UNITE HERE, UFCW, RWDSU) lobbied to keep the cap tight, arguing unregulated street vendors steal sales from unionized workers with benefits, pensions, and higher wages. In 2021 comments on expanding permits, union reps explicitly opposed increases, claiming it would "hurt workers" by shifting business to non-union carts. No evidence they directly set fees, but their influence helped maintain the scarcity driving those costs. Recent reforms (e.g., 2021 law adding 4,000 permits over 10 years) faced pushback from them.
They've been right repeatedly on rent control
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