[positron6000]

> It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a better one.

Sure! I live in a small rural town with a poor public education system and no professional opportunities outside of manual labor. I had to leave high school to work to support my family. The most I can make is minimum wage, which means that I cannot afford basic necessities. What "better" jobs am I able to choose from? Or do I have to wait for "the government" to step in so my family doesn't starve?

[stale2002]

> What "better" jobs am I able to choose from?

Ones that are in a different city, of course.

[positron6000]

Great! Where am I going to get money to move from a small town to a city with a higher cost of living, and how will I - a high-school dropout - acquire the skills necessary to get one of these better jobs? How long will it take? Where will I live? How will my family survive without my income?

[HDThoreaun]

You know the vast majority of history is nothing but death and despair right? You can’t expect other people to solve your problems for you. At some point you have to accept that waiting for life to come to you will result in poverty, that is true of the 99.99999999% of people in every society ever. I get that it’s not fun to confront the harshness of reality, but your comments really do make it seem like you’re expecting people who don’t take initiative to just have things handed to them(to be clear I have no problem just handing people basic necessities such as food and healthcare, but good jobs are a privilege, not a right).

Acting like being in small town America is an economic tragedy is a gigantic insult to the millions of people who sacrificed everything to migrate to the developed world, and those people are largely extremely good at lifting themselves out of poverty when they arrive. Why are locals less economically mobile?

There has never been a more prosperous time to be alive than right now in western countries, we need to continue to work to make life better for everyone society, but there is no magic solution other than hard work.

[runarberg]

This is a bit rude don’t you think?

There are many tings in here that should be addressed, including simple respect for other people, and recognition of varying economic status, and the reality of impoverishment.

However I want to address the migration question. As an immigrant my self I take offense that you suggest that people migrate to “the developed world” (ugh!) in search of prosperity. This is a great simplification, and kind of a regurgitation of a popular belief which isn’t true. Most people—including my self—migrate because of family, second is jobs and education, these are people that already have a job or have been admitted to school and come on a special worker or school visas. Majority of immigrants don’t sacrifice everything, just proximity to family and friends, and most use their existing wealth to make the migration as easy as possible. In fact demonstrating financial viability is a precondition for permanent residency, meaning by far majority immigrants who can’t afford to migrate, or don’t have a job or a scholarship awaiting them, are forbidden by law from staying.

Immigrants who sacrifice everything off course exists, and refugees in particular take great risks while migrating, but they are a minority, and there is not exactly prosperity awaiting them, rather, a hope for a safer place to live. Many refugees have decades of poverty awaiting them in their host country, the more social services they get, the easier it is for them to actually escape poverty.

[HDThoreaun]

The United States has millions of illegal immigrants who did sacrifice everything to walk thousands of miles to get here. I’ve talked to many, they have all been extremely grateful for the opportunities the free market here has provided them. And obviously I agree we should people be successful. But complaining that there aren’t any jobs in your shit hole town isn’t a mindset that will get you anywhere. If the only job available to you is Walmart you should move, and finish high school too tbh. It really is that simple, and I’m kind of over the entitlement I see from these small town people expecting the world he handed to them. Because the reality is this country has plenty of decent, if not great, jobs that are certainly better than almost any person ever has had access too.

[runarberg]

DHS—a very biased institution that has benefits of inflating the number—estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the USA in 2018 (the most recent number I could find), the foreign born population that same year was estimated at 36 million, meaning undocumented were at most one third of all immigrants. By far majority of the 11 million undocumented came from Mexico or central America. The path to legal status is extremely difficult from those countries and it is reasonable to assume majority of them would had taken the legal route if possible and had indeed family and/or jobs awaiting them across the border. While some may indeed have sacrificed everything, I very much doubt that figure is much higher than in the hundreds of thousands.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra...

But than again, listen to what you are saying. Do you honestly want to live in a society where people are asked to “sacrificed everything” just because they happened to be born and raised a poor part of the country? Would you honestly prefer people struggle all of their childhood and most of their lives as young adults, only to than be forced to abandon their entire family, just to have maybe a shot at a better life? It may just be me, but I honestly would prefer there to be regulations and social services in place such that these lives are made easier.

[HDThoreaun]

Rural economies being fucked isn't capitalism's fault. If you don't create valuable things you won't get valuable things, that's true in all economic systems. If you want valuable things you should probably move somewhere where they are being created and get a job there. Forcing rural people to move to urban areas and work in factories is a classic communism move because it turns out people are more productive when near each other. Capitalism just gives people the choice of doing that or staying where they are and being poorer.

Allowing poverty to exist really has nothing to do with capitalism the economic system and everything to do with the political climate in society. Capitalism is just free markets and property rights, it doesn't say anything about government redistribution. Getting rid of markets would not help poor people at all.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You seem to conveniently ignore the externalities that most people who have investigated them agree are a major component in a corporation like Walmart existing at all.

I would agree with most of what you've written if the price of goods at Walmart actually represented their true cost. But instead, Walmart relies on externalities (the most obvious one is their reliance on their staff being able to collect various forms of public assistance, but there are plenty more) in order to maintain their prices.

[runarberg]

Just for the record, the article in which thread spun from is about the socialist question. It is asking whether there is a reason to your mentality. That is, is it worth it to regulate economies and set up social services such that people don’t have to live at the whims of free market capitalism.

Unsurprisingly for an alumni of the Chicago school the author believes this is still an open question, however this article is kind of well written and everything up to the conclusion—that is the historical breakdown of this question—seems to indicate that socialism is good actually, and Laissez-faire capitalism is bad.