What are you watching?

[Muddy]

@Adam Strange If you have time, please watch this and tell me your thoughts.

[Adam Strange]

@Adam Strange If you have time, please watch this and tell me your thoughts.

@Muddy, there are two parts to this video. One part is a criticism of capitalism, and the other is a description of what is required to start a business.

Regarding the second part, I didn't see anything that I disagreed with. If you have $50k in the bank and your burn rate is $3k/month, then you have 1.5 years to make it. Most people don't make it, because they have no idea about all the things that are involved in running a business, including regulations (which are actually there to protect you) and allowances for loss. I had a customer stiff me for $55k one year, which hurt, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had a business fail because the partners got control of the company and took it in a direction that bankrupted it. In that deal, I lost about six years of my continuous labor and a cash outlay equivalent to about $300k today. That also hurt.
You can mitigate your risk by working in an industry for ten years and learning every aspect of the business, but even that does not guarantee success.
I knew absolutely nothing about running a business and made just about every stupid mistake a person can make. Fortunately, my wife was working and we got by on her income and our savings for a few years when the business was not at all profitable.
There are some businesses which do not require a large investment to start or run, but you still basically need to have something to sell, like awesome skills, if you expect to make a living.
Most people have no idea how to run a business or the level of commitment that it takes to do so. I would actually only recommend it to people who are constitutionally unable to work for someone else, because the odds are that you will make more money and will actually have a life of your own if you work for someone else.

The second message in the video is that Capitalism is evil because it is rigged. Well, it certainly is rigged. For example, because I have money in the bank, I can get a car loan at a 2% interest rate. I don't actually need to have a car loan, I could have paid cash for the car, but I can get a better interest rate on that money by investing it and using part of the investment profits to pay the loan's interest.
It doesn't always go my way, though. I couldn't get a collateral loan on my house to fix it up because I began to tear it apart before the bank appraised it (stupid me), and they won't loan me a cent on a house that they can't take and sell in the case of a default. So I'm paying for the improvements out of cash flow.
You can be a shark one day and shark food the next in the present economy, at all levels.
I also have no credit card debt, but I do that by basically keeping my expenditures well under my income. If you expect to get ahead of the game, you should, too.

So you are probably asking yourself why you should support a system that channels money from the poor to the rich and is rigged to do so at almost every step. See https://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm.

Yes, Capitalism produces power imbalances, because it produces wealth imbalances. That's the way pure capitalism works, but we don't have anything like pure capitalism. If we did, you father could have sold you to buy beer. And social security would not exist. We have a very much moderated form of capitalism, in which the economy is basically divided into two halves.

There is the capitalist half where you can make (or lose) money by innovating and either advancing technology or by working harder (private enterprise), and there is the socialist half in which innovation is nearly impossible or where it is deemed bad for society to make a profit (the arts, education, police work, the social welfare net), and the dividing line between these halves is being pushed back and forth daily. You are free to choose which half you work in.

It is true that Capitalism in the US is worse (more competitive) today than it was before 1976 (when the Great Inequality began: https://www.cbpp.org/research/povert...ome-inequality), but the social welfare net is much better. In 1976, pay was high but costs were also high. There were three TV stations, four car companies, and you couldn't buy stuff on eBay or from China. It was a great time to be a worker or a producer, not so great to be a consumer. Today, you can buy stuff from anywhere on the Earth for pennies, but you are probably competing against slave labor for your wages. Now is a great time to be a consumer, but not a producer.

As to the fairness of this, it is not fair. It isn't even right, and it is important to keep in mind that we are where we are because of man-made laws which were passed, not because of Gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There are no free markets, there are only managed-by-human-law markets.

Now, you may choose to go with the system, or to fight the system, or to move to another country. But keep in mind that most people in the world (Europeans and Canadians excepted) would give their left nuts to immigrate to the US, because the systems that they have are so much worse.

Personally, I'm fighting the system. I vote.