memmcgee

What? How are you arriving at that conclusion?

Executive salaries aren't the same thing as the surplus value extracted from your labor. If that was spread equally, each employee would make considerably more.

Why would it though? In every other industry, union workers make much more than non-union workers. And unions don't seem to drag the salaries of other high earners (actors, screenwriters) down.

It seems no one has yet mentioned the potential illegality of this policy. The rights of employees to discuss their working conditions at work, a largely political discussion, is protected by the NLRA. Google got whacked by the NLRB for their ban on political discussion as well.

I wonder if this has a lot to do with the economic system we live under. Marx wrote a lot about the alienation of labor, and one form of alienation was alienation from fellow workers. I wonder if we surveyed company executives or small business owners whether you'd find a different breakdown.

>they might make it economically rational for Amazon to automate the jobs away

Any jobs that can be automated will be regardless.

People seem to think this is going to hurt workers, but it was gig economy workers who pushed for this law. Workers know their own conditions better than you do.

I'm autistic myself. Damore trying to deflect criticism by saying he's autistic is insulting.

This is true, but zoning laws are ultimately determined by who owns land. Landlords and landowners are incentivized to increase the value of their property at the expense of everyone else. They use zoning laws to do this, which they indirectly control by being active in political lobbying.

If Amazon the marketplace was solely responsible for the upkeep of the marketplace, they'd be more inclined to actually maintain it in a working manner. Not to mention it'd be easier for publishers to sue them to compel compliance.

Property crime is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Consider this: wage theft results in over double the losses of all other property crimes COMBINED, yet we don't throw bosses who rob their workers of earned pay in jail.

But anecdotes can be misleading too. The only thing left then is ideology.

That's not the same thing as coming down on landlords. We could criminalize slumlording and use civil forfeiture to turn slumlord's properties into public housing. We could put a hefty property tax on all rental properties. We could create a vacancy tax on all unoccupied units that would force prices down. The problem is landlords and land owners and their rent-seeking and speculative behavior. The solution is to stop enabling them by protecting their property rights over the well-being of the population.

Except the supply here is necessarily constrained by the amount of land available to build on. You're treating this like microeconomics 101, which is a fundamentally flawed way to look at the problem.

I disagree that slavery isn't something this generation can't make amends for. As the 1619 project has shown, the legacy of slavery on capitalism in America is broad and extreme.