[pjc50]

Not adjusting for inflation makes it look completely stupid.

There's one good effort - comparing a car to the salary of a car-worker. But it only has half the comparison (what are today's car workers earning?). That's the comparison that Marx would recognize: how long do the people making something have to work to buy the thing they made?

[syel]

Will review the numbers this week and see how I can update all numbers to adjust for inflation while keeping the satirical angle

[pjc50]

"The summer job" card gets this exactly right and is a good example.

I'd paste the text, but you've somehow disabled select/copy/paste, UX strike number two.

[alex43578]

Is the implicit expectation that people making something should have some correlation with their ability to buy that thing?

The assembly-worker making a Civic and a 7 Series BMW are doing effectively the same thing, but the BMW assembler shouldn’t be getting paid 3 to 4x.

[MarkusQ]

The reference to Marx and (implicitly) the labor theory of value renders the GP unserious. Just looking at the people doing the assembly (and not all the people in the supply chain), ignoring the time aspect (I doubt there's any product that costs more than one of the people assembling it would expect to make over the time it would take them to single-handedly create the product from scratch), and so on.

It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.

[ben_w]

> It's a nonsensical position, meant to invoke a certain sort of feels, and nothing more.

It may be so, but those feelings are part of the disconnect and they themselves cause all sorts of problems - or benefits, if directed appropriately, e.g. the IKEA effect is part of the same thing: we put in effort so we think the result is worth that effort.

Marx being wrong doesn't mean trade unions didn't rise for much of the 20th century on the basis of similar feelings, being in error didn't stop the USSR being one of the world's two superpowers for about half a century.

If the employees are satisfied their labours will bear fruits then they historically have not minded much that billionaires skim the cream; but when they are not satisfied, revolutions come. Those are messy and unpleasant, but they come anyway.

[MarkusQ]

Sure. Lying to people and telling them they're somehow oppressed just because other people are more successful than they are can be used to stir up a revolution and get a lot of the useful idiots killed.

That's why it's important to call the nonsense out.

[ben_w]

When someone's making billions and the goods and services they get you to pay are functionally mandatory even if theoretically avoidable, with costs going up because someone somewhere has apparently cornered the market, is it even a lie?

People asking "Why can't I afford a car from 9 months salary when my dad could? Why is a house 10x my salary not 3x like my dad's? Why can't my partner and I afford kids even on two incomes when our parents managed it on one?" don't want a series of ten hour-long degree-level lectures on economic theory to be able to understand the real answer, especially not when there's clearly a bunch of very rich people who keep loudly telling them that they ought to be happy because some stock index has gone up (when they don't own stocks) or that they've moved up the value chain (which if true doesn't answer why cars and houses are less affordable).

Give them an answer about Baumol's cost disease (easy to understand without much economics study), and suddenly you're back to Marxism but with different language, where Marx's "means of production" happen to be inalienable to the human form (or at least have been so far, plumbers are not yet quaking in terror at the videos of androids falling over while attempting to open a dishwasher).

[MarkusQ]

Being untrue is what makes these things lies[1][2].

Arguing that they are emotionally compelling is just confirming that they're manipulative lies.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-cars/price-inflation [2] https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-have-inflation-ad...