Capitalism is not perfect but it matches with basic human psychology. On average, we are lazy and most would gladly do the minimal amount of work to survive. Most need external sources of motivation to do most anything. Why spend the time learning skills and gaining experience if it does not lead to better pay? If an unskilled factory worker earns the same as a doctor, who wants to spend the 10 plus years it takes to become a doctor. The easier path would be to work in a factory.
A corollary is people rarely take care of things that are free. There is no cost to destroying something that is free if you can replace it with another that is free.
I have seen this in my career as a teacher. When my grandparents and parents were in school, students had to buy their books. If their family was too poor to afford it, the students could earn the money to exchange for books by working various jobs at the school. At the end of the year, they could sell the books back to the school for as much as 80% of what they paid if they kept them in good condition. Often, families would get together to trade books and many churches had textbook libraries that one could borrow from by giving a deposit on the book that they would get back in full if the book was returned in good condition.
Court rulings and Federal and State laws put an end to that. Public education had to be 100% free. During my teaching career, it became common for students to be given a brand new book at the start of the year and by the end, it was totally destroyed. The student's account would be charged for the book, but there was no real way to collect it. The only sway the district had was to not allow students who owed money to walk at graduation. That was a privilege, not a right. They still earned their diploma.
Tbe way around this was to change school districts. Students who had racked up huge fines could simply move to a different district. The district they came from had to forward their academic records so the students had no incentive to pay the debt and they could walk at their graduation.
The only time this did not work is when a student transferred from a private to a public school. If they owed a debt to the private school, the private school could withhold all academic records until the debt was paid off. I had one student who transferred to my school for their senior year. The student was kicked out of the private school for cheating. Because the student owed money, the school refused to forward the academic records until the debt was paid off. That student had no credits towards graduation at that point and faced the prospect of starting their senior year in all freshman classes. It only took a month for the family to find the money to pay off the debt to get the transcripts released.
During my career, we went from students having to provide their own paper, pens, and pencils to the state mandating that the schools provide these free of charge. My last 4 years of teaching, about a fourth of my students had no problem picking up a new pencil at the start of class and then breaking it by the end of class or simply tossing it on the floor or the garbage on the way out because they would get a new one at the start of the next class.
A few years ago the district thought it would be a good idea to issue every student a Chromebook. The problem is students have no incentive to take care of them. If they forget to bring theirs to school, they, by law, have to be given a loaner for the day. If a student destroys their Chromebook, their is no way to enforce the rule that they have to pay for the damage and by law they have to be given another one so we do not interfere with their education.
Translate that to housing. Why are most public housing projects destroyed within a few years? The people housed in those projects have no incentive to care for their apartment. If they destroy something, it is fixed for free, if there is the money available. If the apartment becomes uninhabitable, they are simply moved to a different one when it becomes available.
My generation had to work to buy our first car or were given a cheap, beater car by their parents who made their kid pay for everything required to use the car. This meant getting a job and learning to do your own repairs.
I was given my mom's 1965 Mustang that was on its last legs in 1977. The engine needed replacing. I had use my money to buy a good running engine from a junkyard out of a wrecked 1974 Maverick then swap the engine myself. As most boys of my generation did, we helped each other with these projects on the weekends. I was fortunate, my step-father was a mechanic and auto body person, so he helped me also. He then helped me repaint it on a weekend in his shop that he had recently purchased. It was not free. I had to spend time at his shop after school or on weekends to work it off. I got lots of experience in repair cars. I learned the value of work and taking care of my possessions. I also got to spend a lot of time with my step-father who listened to me about my problems and gave good advice when needed. He helped me through a very difficult period of my life.
That is why I still find it to be therapeutic to do physical labor when I am troubled about something. It works off my anxiety and gives me time to think.
This experience also is the reason why I drive a 1993 4Runner today that I bought used in 1998. I take care of it and it serves my purpose as a daily driver and for weekend fishing trips. I taught my son to drive with that 4Runner. It is a stick shift. For awhile, when I was off of work recovering from a stroke, he drove it to high school. He was the envy of his friends because he could drive a manual transmission.
I still have it because I learned a long time ago it is cheaper to fix than to buy another, even if the cost of fixing is more than the value of the vehicle. I avoid the depreciation associated with a newer vehicle, my insurance is very cheap, and the registration is also cheap. I just moved to a state that allows permanent registration for vehicles older than 11 years, so I will never pay registration on it again. I recently had the engine and transmission replaced for less than the cost of an average used vehicle. I have 300,000 miles on it and it will go another 300,000 easily. What I pay in annual repair costs is less than I would spend on car payments for 3 months.
Contrast that with my brother who buys a new vehicle every few years because he never does the basic maintenance and repairs on them. He can buy a brand new vehicle and in three years it is ready for the junkyard. He has destroyed many an engine by not changing the oil regularly or running out of oil because he never checks it. I have had a total of 4 cars in 50 years. He has gone through well over 20 in 45 years. He has been making car payments for over 40 years. I have not had one since 1995, when I realized that it is better to save the money to purchase for cash. The last vehicle we purchased was for a vehicle for my wife and we paid cash for it 15 years ago and it is still running strong even though it is 17 years old.
I will take capitalism without safety net over socialism or communism any day. I have had a few financial set backs along the way, but capitalism has provided the best way for me to recover. Government intervention would have gotten in my way and likely doomed me to being financially dependent on the government. No thank you! I do not want to be a slave to the government.
There’s a reason the “tragedy of the commons” is a thing. It’s like Milton Friedman said, "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So, if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
All those examples are reasons why I loathe socialism. I believe with all my reason that capitalism and working to a higher level is the only way to progress, in anything. There have been many, many commenters who love to fall back on the old "the-system-is-rigged" excuse for failure, yet how many times does it turn out to be true, versus yet another hoax and a weak excuse? I am not rich, but after many years of saving, investing and yes, sacrifice, I was finally able to buy a classic musclecar from the 60's that I've always wanted. Did I want it when I was 20? Desperately. But there was college to pay for. Did I want it in my 30's, of course, more than ever, but I needed the money to buy into an appartment building and to renovate and remodel it. My 40's, yep, but I fell in love, dated, married and we bought a house. Through my 50's I worked overtime, weekends and holidays to pay off the mortgage and invest for retirement. Finally in my 60's, after 40 years of wishing for that car, I finally could afford to buy one. Is it perfect? Nope, lots of work to be done on it- new suspension, engine, transmission, interior, wheels and tires, which cost me lots more money and lots of garage time as the mechanic in me kicks back into high gear. I don't want to have what everybody else does; I want what I want, and have rolled up my sleeves for decades to get it. As far as I'm concerned. these idiotic socialists had better stay the hell out of my way or there will be trouble, cuz I've worked too hard and too long to give up what I've earned without a fight. And I know that most people could do the same thing if they use patience, determination and ambition; instead of scheming to steal from others.
Capitalism is the only way to build generational wealth that is passed on to the next generation so they can use it to build even more wealth.
You look back at American history and you will see that even 100 years ago, the average person lived on a farm and barely eked out a living. Most worked themselves to death. If you did not work, you starved. 62 was selected as the retirement age under Roosevelt's new deal because on average, men died at 60 because they had to do physically demanding labor to just make it. Their bodies wore out. The average 60 year old in 1930 had the body of the average 80 year old today. Social Security was the big hoax democrats used to get into power by promising free stuff. At that time, half the workforce died before 62, so the government never had to pay out the money they collected from those who paid into the system. Even those that made it to 62 often died by 65, so they only had to pay out a couple of years. So the Ponzi scheme worked, 6 or 7 people were paying into a system than provided support for one person who only collected for an average of 3 years.
My father-in-law knew early in his life that social security was a scam. He was the youngest of 9 children born in 1933. They eked out a living by farming and through the occasional odd jobs that his mother, father, or older siblings could find. He did not have a pair of shoes until he started high school.
Once he married and had his first child, my now wife, he realized that he was confined to low paying jobs for the rest of his life unless he did something. That something was to go to the local community college at night to go through their firefighting program. He worked during the day pumping gas, and went to school at night. After graduation, he hired onto the city fire department. Whenever he could, he would work extra shifts and save that money. He then started investing that money. His wife always complained that he did not earn enough money for her. When his daughter and I started dating at 16, his base salary was similar to that of my mother who was an RN. My mother raised 5 children alone on that salary. Money was tight but we managed. When, I was a teen, I had a part time job during the school year and a full time job in the summer to help out.
My FIL had two children, a house that he bought as a fixer upper and by the time I was dating his daughter, had a mortgage of $96 a month. My mother’s mortgage was about $500 a month. He was solidly in the middle class and rich by my standards.
By the time he retired, he had the firefighter’s pension, social security, and a very large investment portfolio. He did not start using the investments for income. He found another job that he worked until the age of 85. He only used the investment income to take a month off for traveling once a year. He kept rolling over the profits back into the investments and his portfolio continued to grow until his second retirement at 85. He only lived two more years because the leukemia that had been in remission for over 30 years returned with a vengeance after he was infected with COVID-19.
His wife now enjoys a very large paycheck once a month and lives very well.
During the time I knew him, he often remarked that most of the guys he worked with spent their money on big game hunting trips and expensive toys. They never saved or invested money because they had the firefighter’s pension.
Upon retirement, most learned they could not live on the retirement. They had large mortgages because every few years they would buy a bigger house. They had payments to make on their RVs and other expensive toys. Many had to sell their homes and toys and lived in poverty. When they passed, they had nothing left for their wife to live on.
What you understood that many do not is the concept of delayed gratification. You put aside your wants and live below your means while setting aside money that eventually you can start to use for investments. Over time, that money grows, but rather than use it immediately, you are patient and let it grow while you continue to live below your means.
Eventually, your kids are grown and on their own. Now you have a large pot of money that you can start using some of the interest for things you want to do.
I had to learn this the hard way. I was in the first group that was told that we could go to college, follow our dream, and upon graduation, get a fantastic job.
I worked my way through college as did my wife. We married while in college. My passion was biology. Hers was Botany. Upon graduation we learned that our degrees were a dime a dozen and every open job had a hundred applicants. Pay was low. So my wife went to school to become a high school teacher and I went to graduate school, because a graduate degree would lead to a great job. I did my master’s and my Ph.D and then learned that the job that I had been training for was eliminated due to budget cuts. All of a sudden, I was competing with many recently laid of Ph.Ds for university teaching jobs and if I were to land one, I would have to work 80 or more hours a week to keep up with my research and teaching responsibilities. With so much competition, universities were not handing out tenure like they had in the past. You could work your whole and never make tenure. You still had to put in the long hours for low pay. If we were going to have a family, I wanted a job that allowed me time to spend with my family.
So I took the fast path to employment, I became a high school teacher. It was not what I had expected but my wife and I could earn a comfortable living and have time to raise children and actually be there when they got home from school. We always worked it out so one of us was dropping our son off at school and picking him up after school.
Now summer breaks are not what they used to be. Rather than 3 months, it is about 6 or 7 weeks. We refused to work summer school because that is when we took a long vacation. We did a lot of camping, but we had a blast with our son. Money was tight, but we had the life we wanted. Unfortunately, we have witnessed first-hand the destruction of our educational system. This last year was extremely stressful. Our district made some bad decisions that our union was behind that ended up greatly increasing the workload with a cut in pay because it was for the students. I had the highest failure rate ever in my career and faced daily pressure to just give all the students who were earning Fs Cs instead. We had to get our graduation rate to over 98%. We had to let students retake tests as many times as they wanted. The problem with test retakes, the majority do worse than the first time around. So, I retired a couple of years before I really wanted to. But I can now leave CA and go to a better run state. At the closing of our new house, I told the title officer that after the move is completed and our CA home is sold, I plan to find a job so I could be productive and have some extra money to spoil grandchildren. He said I would have no problem because I am from the last generation that had a real work ethic. He has had to let over half of new hires go because they cannot get to work on time and when at work they are constantly on their phones.
In every democratic socialist country in the western world, I would not be able to work because I am past retirement age and taking a job away from a younger person.
Borrow from a well know conservative that is no longer with us (I am not sure which one because I followed two) the mistake people make is thinking there is only one pie and those that are most successful are the ones that have learned to cheat others out of their fair share. Under capitalism, innovation comes from people who figure out how to make a new pie that can be shared with others. They add to the available wealth and allow even more to prosper.
I am not a big fan of Elon Musk because of things that he has said and done. It is an open secret that he is on the Autism spectrum and so has a tendency to think that he is right and everyone else is wrong. With that said, commend him for creating more than one very successful pie that has created more new high paying jobs than probably anyone else in history. That was not possible in his homeland of South Africa. He could only do that here in America and he has created so many new jobs that had not existed before. We have become the wealthiest country ever because people are free to participate in our economy to the degree they chose to. If they want to work very long hours and take the big risks, they can. Some do fail but the ones that are successful bring many others along with them.
Capitalism is not perfect but it matches with basic human psychology. On average, we are lazy and most would gladly do the minimal amount of work to survive. Most need external sources of motivation to do most anything. Why spend the time learning skills and gaining experience if it does not lead to better pay? If an unskilled factory worker earns the same as a doctor, who wants to spend the 10 plus years it takes to become a doctor. The easier path would be to work in a factory.
A corollary is people rarely take care of things that are free. There is no cost to destroying something that is free if you can replace it with another that is free.
I have seen this in my career as a teacher. When my grandparents and parents were in school, students had to buy their books. If their family was too poor to afford it, the students could earn the money to exchange for books by working various jobs at the school. At the end of the year, they could sell the books back to the school for as much as 80% of what they paid if they kept them in good condition. Often, families would get together to trade books and many churches had textbook libraries that one could borrow from by giving a deposit on the book that they would get back in full if the book was returned in good condition.
Court rulings and Federal and State laws put an end to that. Public education had to be 100% free. During my teaching career, it became common for students to be given a brand new book at the start of the year and by the end, it was totally destroyed. The student's account would be charged for the book, but there was no real way to collect it. The only sway the district had was to not allow students who owed money to walk at graduation. That was a privilege, not a right. They still earned their diploma.
Tbe way around this was to change school districts. Students who had racked up huge fines could simply move to a different district. The district they came from had to forward their academic records so the students had no incentive to pay the debt and they could walk at their graduation.
The only time this did not work is when a student transferred from a private to a public school. If they owed a debt to the private school, the private school could withhold all academic records until the debt was paid off. I had one student who transferred to my school for their senior year. The student was kicked out of the private school for cheating. Because the student owed money, the school refused to forward the academic records until the debt was paid off. That student had no credits towards graduation at that point and faced the prospect of starting their senior year in all freshman classes. It only took a month for the family to find the money to pay off the debt to get the transcripts released.
During my career, we went from students having to provide their own paper, pens, and pencils to the state mandating that the schools provide these free of charge. My last 4 years of teaching, about a fourth of my students had no problem picking up a new pencil at the start of class and then breaking it by the end of class or simply tossing it on the floor or the garbage on the way out because they would get a new one at the start of the next class.
A few years ago the district thought it would be a good idea to issue every student a Chromebook. The problem is students have no incentive to take care of them. If they forget to bring theirs to school, they, by law, have to be given a loaner for the day. If a student destroys their Chromebook, their is no way to enforce the rule that they have to pay for the damage and by law they have to be given another one so we do not interfere with their education.
Translate that to housing. Why are most public housing projects destroyed within a few years? The people housed in those projects have no incentive to care for their apartment. If they destroy something, it is fixed for free, if there is the money available. If the apartment becomes uninhabitable, they are simply moved to a different one when it becomes available.
My generation had to work to buy our first car or were given a cheap, beater car by their parents who made their kid pay for everything required to use the car. This meant getting a job and learning to do your own repairs.
I was given my mom's 1965 Mustang that was on its last legs in 1977. The engine needed replacing. I had use my money to buy a good running engine from a junkyard out of a wrecked 1974 Maverick then swap the engine myself. As most boys of my generation did, we helped each other with these projects on the weekends. I was fortunate, my step-father was a mechanic and auto body person, so he helped me also. He then helped me repaint it on a weekend in his shop that he had recently purchased. It was not free. I had to spend time at his shop after school or on weekends to work it off. I got lots of experience in repair cars. I learned the value of work and taking care of my possessions. I also got to spend a lot of time with my step-father who listened to me about my problems and gave good advice when needed. He helped me through a very difficult period of my life.
That is why I still find it to be therapeutic to do physical labor when I am troubled about something. It works off my anxiety and gives me time to think.
This experience also is the reason why I drive a 1993 4Runner today that I bought used in 1998. I take care of it and it serves my purpose as a daily driver and for weekend fishing trips. I taught my son to drive with that 4Runner. It is a stick shift. For awhile, when I was off of work recovering from a stroke, he drove it to high school. He was the envy of his friends because he could drive a manual transmission.
I still have it because I learned a long time ago it is cheaper to fix than to buy another, even if the cost of fixing is more than the value of the vehicle. I avoid the depreciation associated with a newer vehicle, my insurance is very cheap, and the registration is also cheap. I just moved to a state that allows permanent registration for vehicles older than 11 years, so I will never pay registration on it again. I recently had the engine and transmission replaced for less than the cost of an average used vehicle. I have 300,000 miles on it and it will go another 300,000 easily. What I pay in annual repair costs is less than I would spend on car payments for 3 months.
Contrast that with my brother who buys a new vehicle every few years because he never does the basic maintenance and repairs on them. He can buy a brand new vehicle and in three years it is ready for the junkyard. He has destroyed many an engine by not changing the oil regularly or running out of oil because he never checks it. I have had a total of 4 cars in 50 years. He has gone through well over 20 in 45 years. He has been making car payments for over 40 years. I have not had one since 1995, when I realized that it is better to save the money to purchase for cash. The last vehicle we purchased was for a vehicle for my wife and we paid cash for it 15 years ago and it is still running strong even though it is 17 years old.
I will take capitalism without safety net over socialism or communism any day. I have had a few financial set backs along the way, but capitalism has provided the best way for me to recover. Government intervention would have gotten in my way and likely doomed me to being financially dependent on the government. No thank you! I do not want to be a slave to the government.
There’s a reason the “tragedy of the commons” is a thing. It’s like Milton Friedman said, "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So, if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
So true. We have raised a couple of generations that believe money is free. The government can just print more and hand it out.
All those examples are reasons why I loathe socialism. I believe with all my reason that capitalism and working to a higher level is the only way to progress, in anything. There have been many, many commenters who love to fall back on the old "the-system-is-rigged" excuse for failure, yet how many times does it turn out to be true, versus yet another hoax and a weak excuse? I am not rich, but after many years of saving, investing and yes, sacrifice, I was finally able to buy a classic musclecar from the 60's that I've always wanted. Did I want it when I was 20? Desperately. But there was college to pay for. Did I want it in my 30's, of course, more than ever, but I needed the money to buy into an appartment building and to renovate and remodel it. My 40's, yep, but I fell in love, dated, married and we bought a house. Through my 50's I worked overtime, weekends and holidays to pay off the mortgage and invest for retirement. Finally in my 60's, after 40 years of wishing for that car, I finally could afford to buy one. Is it perfect? Nope, lots of work to be done on it- new suspension, engine, transmission, interior, wheels and tires, which cost me lots more money and lots of garage time as the mechanic in me kicks back into high gear. I don't want to have what everybody else does; I want what I want, and have rolled up my sleeves for decades to get it. As far as I'm concerned. these idiotic socialists had better stay the hell out of my way or there will be trouble, cuz I've worked too hard and too long to give up what I've earned without a fight. And I know that most people could do the same thing if they use patience, determination and ambition; instead of scheming to steal from others.
Capitalism is the only way to build generational wealth that is passed on to the next generation so they can use it to build even more wealth.
You look back at American history and you will see that even 100 years ago, the average person lived on a farm and barely eked out a living. Most worked themselves to death. If you did not work, you starved. 62 was selected as the retirement age under Roosevelt's new deal because on average, men died at 60 because they had to do physically demanding labor to just make it. Their bodies wore out. The average 60 year old in 1930 had the body of the average 80 year old today. Social Security was the big hoax democrats used to get into power by promising free stuff. At that time, half the workforce died before 62, so the government never had to pay out the money they collected from those who paid into the system. Even those that made it to 62 often died by 65, so they only had to pay out a couple of years. So the Ponzi scheme worked, 6 or 7 people were paying into a system than provided support for one person who only collected for an average of 3 years.
My father-in-law knew early in his life that social security was a scam. He was the youngest of 9 children born in 1933. They eked out a living by farming and through the occasional odd jobs that his mother, father, or older siblings could find. He did not have a pair of shoes until he started high school.
Once he married and had his first child, my now wife, he realized that he was confined to low paying jobs for the rest of his life unless he did something. That something was to go to the local community college at night to go through their firefighting program. He worked during the day pumping gas, and went to school at night. After graduation, he hired onto the city fire department. Whenever he could, he would work extra shifts and save that money. He then started investing that money. His wife always complained that he did not earn enough money for her. When his daughter and I started dating at 16, his base salary was similar to that of my mother who was an RN. My mother raised 5 children alone on that salary. Money was tight but we managed. When, I was a teen, I had a part time job during the school year and a full time job in the summer to help out.
My FIL had two children, a house that he bought as a fixer upper and by the time I was dating his daughter, had a mortgage of $96 a month. My mother’s mortgage was about $500 a month. He was solidly in the middle class and rich by my standards.
By the time he retired, he had the firefighter’s pension, social security, and a very large investment portfolio. He did not start using the investments for income. He found another job that he worked until the age of 85. He only used the investment income to take a month off for traveling once a year. He kept rolling over the profits back into the investments and his portfolio continued to grow until his second retirement at 85. He only lived two more years because the leukemia that had been in remission for over 30 years returned with a vengeance after he was infected with COVID-19.
His wife now enjoys a very large paycheck once a month and lives very well.
During the time I knew him, he often remarked that most of the guys he worked with spent their money on big game hunting trips and expensive toys. They never saved or invested money because they had the firefighter’s pension.
Upon retirement, most learned they could not live on the retirement. They had large mortgages because every few years they would buy a bigger house. They had payments to make on their RVs and other expensive toys. Many had to sell their homes and toys and lived in poverty. When they passed, they had nothing left for their wife to live on.
What you understood that many do not is the concept of delayed gratification. You put aside your wants and live below your means while setting aside money that eventually you can start to use for investments. Over time, that money grows, but rather than use it immediately, you are patient and let it grow while you continue to live below your means.
Eventually, your kids are grown and on their own. Now you have a large pot of money that you can start using some of the interest for things you want to do.
I had to learn this the hard way. I was in the first group that was told that we could go to college, follow our dream, and upon graduation, get a fantastic job.
I worked my way through college as did my wife. We married while in college. My passion was biology. Hers was Botany. Upon graduation we learned that our degrees were a dime a dozen and every open job had a hundred applicants. Pay was low. So my wife went to school to become a high school teacher and I went to graduate school, because a graduate degree would lead to a great job. I did my master’s and my Ph.D and then learned that the job that I had been training for was eliminated due to budget cuts. All of a sudden, I was competing with many recently laid of Ph.Ds for university teaching jobs and if I were to land one, I would have to work 80 or more hours a week to keep up with my research and teaching responsibilities. With so much competition, universities were not handing out tenure like they had in the past. You could work your whole and never make tenure. You still had to put in the long hours for low pay. If we were going to have a family, I wanted a job that allowed me time to spend with my family.
So I took the fast path to employment, I became a high school teacher. It was not what I had expected but my wife and I could earn a comfortable living and have time to raise children and actually be there when they got home from school. We always worked it out so one of us was dropping our son off at school and picking him up after school.
Now summer breaks are not what they used to be. Rather than 3 months, it is about 6 or 7 weeks. We refused to work summer school because that is when we took a long vacation. We did a lot of camping, but we had a blast with our son. Money was tight, but we had the life we wanted. Unfortunately, we have witnessed first-hand the destruction of our educational system. This last year was extremely stressful. Our district made some bad decisions that our union was behind that ended up greatly increasing the workload with a cut in pay because it was for the students. I had the highest failure rate ever in my career and faced daily pressure to just give all the students who were earning Fs Cs instead. We had to get our graduation rate to over 98%. We had to let students retake tests as many times as they wanted. The problem with test retakes, the majority do worse than the first time around. So, I retired a couple of years before I really wanted to. But I can now leave CA and go to a better run state. At the closing of our new house, I told the title officer that after the move is completed and our CA home is sold, I plan to find a job so I could be productive and have some extra money to spoil grandchildren. He said I would have no problem because I am from the last generation that had a real work ethic. He has had to let over half of new hires go because they cannot get to work on time and when at work they are constantly on their phones.
In every democratic socialist country in the western world, I would not be able to work because I am past retirement age and taking a job away from a younger person.
Borrow from a well know conservative that is no longer with us (I am not sure which one because I followed two) the mistake people make is thinking there is only one pie and those that are most successful are the ones that have learned to cheat others out of their fair share. Under capitalism, innovation comes from people who figure out how to make a new pie that can be shared with others. They add to the available wealth and allow even more to prosper.
I am not a big fan of Elon Musk because of things that he has said and done. It is an open secret that he is on the Autism spectrum and so has a tendency to think that he is right and everyone else is wrong. With that said, commend him for creating more than one very successful pie that has created more new high paying jobs than probably anyone else in history. That was not possible in his homeland of South Africa. He could only do that here in America and he has created so many new jobs that had not existed before. We have become the wealthiest country ever because people are free to participate in our economy to the degree they chose to. If they want to work very long hours and take the big risks, they can. Some do fail but the ones that are successful bring many others along with them.
Amen, John.