Some Thoughts on Capitalism, While Shoveling Manure

Let’s make rich people work for their money

Ok. I was talking to a friend while we shoveled composted manure today, and I noted that researchers have found that traditional hunter-gatherer societies have/had a significant amount of leisure time.

I mused that in the U.S.A. 86% of the wealth is concentrated in the top 20% of the people (and I use the word “top” loosely). If that is the case, then for working and middle-class people, most of the value produced by our labor is shuttled to these other people who hold the wealth and is not used for the basic needs of people like us.

If we didn’t have to sustain this class of people who accumulate the wealth generated by the labor of others, then maybe we could work only 14% of the time? Then I thought about how so much of that wealth is unrelated to current day labor. Much of it is inherited wealth from prior exploitation of labor (including slavery) or wealth from stolen natural resources.

So maybe if we didn’t have to shuttle wealth to the owning class, we would only have to work something like 40% of the current amount we do. I would settle for half. That would leave the rest of us a lot of leisure time and also we wouldn’t have to devastate the planet just so the owning class could hoard wealth. Just saying. I also agree with the concept of reparations and I have some good ideas about who should pay for it.