This is a refreshing article and I wish that I had read it when it was written.

I did this math back in 2001 when I was moving furniture to support my side business making shareware games. The warehouse charged $34/hr and paid us $10/hr. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out where the other $24/hr was going, because that's more like $50/hr in today's money. Even though I was doing literally all of the work with the other lumpers, someone else was basically making $100k/yr for standing on my back. Especially considering that the warehouse and trucks had been paid off for decades so fuel was probably the next most expensive overhead!

I later realized that the profit went to the office staff and salespeople who landed the moving contracts. And the owner (who was a millionaire) skimmed the rest.

That experience shaped me into the antiestablishmenter I am today. Because that pattern repeats across all industries. Loosely the harder someone works, the less they keep of the gross vs the time and effort they put in. And digging into the history of that reveals how the concept of the corporation evolved during colonialism and slavery to extract as much capital as possible from workers and investors. Leaving us with the capitalist system we have today where one guy can extract most of the wealth from thousands of employees as majority shareholder or CEO.

We can get into the virtues of capitalism vs socialism and communism, but I feel that those are red herring arguments post-pandemic and with the return of labor unions. What this is really all about is whether workers, owners or society should keep the lion's share of the fruits of their labors. The US currently gives the most to owners. Europe arguably pays a large amount into its societies (its commons). No country has ever given the most to workers, although Central America and Southeast Asia tried it after WWII, so the West blew them up for trying to go "socialist".

In my own life, I've found it basically impossible to get ahead working a job and making side projects after trying for almost 25 years. And for every success story, we don't hear about the 9 out of 10 businesses that failed their first year. To a first order approximation, success is simply not attainable now outside of roughly the top 10% of income earners. The US is on the verge of losing its middle class.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. If the status quo can no longer provide the essential infrastructure and policies for the people to sustain themselves, then it becomes something to be challenged by the majority. When The Conservative Mind was written in the early 1950s, there was a fear that when the US middle class reached 50% of the population, pure democracy would kick in and voters would pass socialist policies (reparations) to reclaim the profit that had been stripped from them. Which could align them with communists in the East to form a dystopian New World Order.

To stop that, wealthy financiers installed Reagan in 1981 to dismantle unions and collapse the middle class back below 50%, which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams by the end of Bush Sr's administration. Clinton frayed the last of the social safety net to close the hatch and lock in the new normal. Post 9/11 has been an experiment in social engineering to see how long people will put up with living under a captured government that only passes legislation popular with a wide majority 10% of the time.

The fallout from that is that blue collar workers now blame liberal elites for their problems instead of white collar workers and company owners. Because conservative elites ARE white collar workers and company owners ("job creators"). This misdirected rage is so high that the next election is still very much in contention despite what everyone saw with their own eyes in the capitol deaths last time.

The really crazy thing is that the harder the wealthy and powerful close their grip on the rest of us, the more likely a violent revolution becomes. That's been proven time and again throughout history, even today with the two main proxy wars happening, which I won't get into because they're just too sad.

To me, the answer to all this is fairly obvious. If it takes such an enormous expenditure of time and effort over many years to maybe kinda sorta squeak by, even when charging $100/hr, then maybe we can justify trying anything else at all. My heart is with solarpunk and shifting the focus from capital to resource production. In literal terms, that looks like energy-positive solar homes and vehicles for everyone on the planet, along with hydroponic and community gardens creating an excess of food to collapse the price towards free. More self-sufficiency for individuals equals less leverage for corporate price gouging and inflation. With the eventual goal of automating all essential labor with AI and robots so that it can be taxed to pay for UBI. Returning leisure time to humanity so that it can explore human endeavors like art, philosophy and creating heaven on Earth as it ventures out into the stars.

For what it's worth, the wealthy and powerful can continue making huge profits alongside UBI. The only difference is that we'd have a healthy and happy populace instead of one endlessly struggling to survive. Which is why I think that this is something that red and blue can agree on, with the main barrier being the two entrenched political parties.