Asklemmy

Capitalism is just diversified feudalism.

Instead of owning 100% of a district and everything the peasants on it produce, the aristos worked out that they could diversify their portfolios and thin out the risk.

So now they own a thousandth part of the product of a thousand districts instead.

Now if plague wipes out a village or six, you don't have to care, you're only losing a tiny chunk of your income. Now the welfare of the peasants isn't your problem, because they're not, like :douchebro sniff: exclusively your peasants.

The rich produce nothing, they add no value, they perform no labour. It's just predatory rent-seeking: the poor still do all the work, produce all the goods and provide all the services, but now somehow 99% of the value they generate goes to some smirking freeloader instead, who can just plough it into acquiring more and more peasants. They only thing they ever provided was a chunk of startup cash, which they got from exploiting other peasants in the first place.

And of course, none of that cash goes to the people whose income it supposedly buys. It's not a fair trade, it's not a trade at all, they aren't a party to it. Workers are just bought and sold over their heads, like dairy cattle. They get milked just the same, and some other fat bastard gets all the cream.

The whole system is rigged to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the super-rich, stripping it away from everyone else and leaving them struggling to survive - and keeping the ladder well and truly pulled up so nobody else gets into the treehouse.

Libertarian types like to claim that taxation is theft, but taxation is a spit in a hurricane compared to the industrial-scale looting that goes on every day. Take the profits of any corporation, and divide that by the total salaries of the workers that actually generate revenue. Theft? You don't know the meaning of the word. What percentage of the value you generate goes in shareholder pockets? How would you feel about taxation at that level, funding not roads and schools and hospitals, but yachts and mansions and private jets for a bunch of one-percenters?

How are you not angry?