Jon Stokes

Friendly heads up for anyone who followed me because I called out the BS from the opposite side of the aisle: I'll call it out from your side too when they do it. BS is BS no matter who's pushing it. Nothing personal, I just don't play the "my side good other side bad" game.

@Newer_Deal @DonnyApocalypse @EdbieLigerSmith If you had any idea what capitalism is, you wouldn't claim it "depends" on anything. It's an idea, an economic framework in which various private parties (rather than the state or "the people" or "the workers") control the means of production.

@DonnyApocalypse @JDStokes79 @EdbieLigerSmith I didn’t change anything. If capitalism depends on a free market, then it has never existed in practice.

Finished ✅

@RComunistul @RockChartrand But thanks for the screen shot. It's a great example of a point I've made elsewhere, that Marx's REAL genius is his ability to say something completely inane and phrase it pompously enough that economic illiterates can convince themselves it's profound wisdom.

@JDStokes79 @RockChartrand Marx, Capital volume 1 and 2, Wordsworth Editions, volume 2. Chapter 19, page 881

Marxists undercut their own labor theory of value. If a warehouse worker at one company should earn more than an identical worker elsewhere, then the value isn’t coming from the labor alone. It’s coming from the productivity of the enterprise. Management, capital, logistics, and scale. Same labor. Different output. Different pay. That’s an admission that value isn’t determined by labor in isolation, but by how effectively it’s organized and applied. Which is exactly what the theory tries to deny.

@RComunistul @RockChartrand So no, you don't understand Marx. In his fantasy, the value of the means of production is ALSO from labor, it's just labor that happened in the past. The first, and most obviously wrong, of your "facts" is unsupported by anything but "because Marx says so."

@lsferguson Pretty sure it has more to do with this: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Do you think grocery prices are artificially high because of the 42 million people on SNAP, many of whom get hundreds of dollars of free food every month?

@tryin2bgreenman @BiniIrl Congratulations on getting the Combo Bonus achievement: two separate straw man in one reply. No, I don't think that's all it takes to start a business. And "workers are lazy and capitalists are industrious" has nothing to do with anything I said.

@JDStokes79 @BiniIrl With what capital, exactly? Do you think that starting a business is actually just about determination and grit? In a way, I suppose the hoarding of wealth generated by labor is a sort of grim magic, convincing people that workers are lazy and capitalists are industrious.

This shit is so funny like yeah sure if you save tens of billions of dollars to buy half of the multinational conglomerate you work for then you can finally have some control over how your minimum wage labour job is run

@tryin2bgreenman @BiniIrl Making my point AGAIN. Somehow not having tens of billions to buy a fully mature, profitable business is the same thing as having no capital at all. The phrase "hoarding of wealth" is an announcement that you don't understand what businesses are and do.

@HereForBeerNuts @GunnelsWarren A credit card is unsecured debt, which is essentially the opposite of "protected." If what you say is true, Capital One was simply willing to take a risk to try to get your business while you rebuilt your credit.

@JDStokes79 @GunnelsWarren Credit card companies know they are protected. Within 1 month of me filing Chapter 7 during the recession, Capital One was already offering me a credit card.

If Bernie's bill to cap credit card interest rates at 10% were signed into law, working families would save $100 billion in interest payments ($899 for the average American) and big banks would still make a profit, per Vanderbilt University.

@Jamesmf66 @kurps84518 @mynamehear "Tax breaks" are laws deliberately written to encourage or discourage specific behavior. It is not by any sane logic the same thing as "give it to billionaires." "Ordinary citizens," on the other hand, DO get direct payments from the government funded by taxes. Irony:

@kurps84518 @mynamehear The billionaires obviously control the government and they make sure their tax breaks are paid by the rest of us. Yes, they are taking our money. They make sure legislators pass laws to benefit them that hurt citizens. Ordinary citizens can make no such demand.

Americans pay around $5 trillion in federal taxes each year and what do we get for it? Healthcare? State-of-the-art infrastructure? High-speed rail? Top-notch social services? Nope. We give it to billionaires and defense contractors and live in a broken down country.

@HereForBeerNuts @GunnelsWarren Then people who aren't a good risk at less than 30% simply won't have credit cards. If they want to borrow, it will be from payday loans or outright illegal lenders.

@GunnelsWarren While I typically don't agree with Bernie, 30% interest rates on credit cards should be outlawed.

@march4progress @GunnelsWarren "Violating the law. Totally illegal." Your personal opinion of the way things should be is not a law, and it's not illegal for other people to not treat it as objective truth.

@GunnelsWarren They’re charging 30% on credit cards and giving pennies per month on our savings and checking accounts because they want to challenge laws requiring them to pay us interest. Violating the law. Totally illegal.

@GunnelsWarren This is a great example of the "we can change the rules and people won't change their behavior" fantasy. If rates are capped at 10%, banks won't lend to people who are risky enough that a 10% rate is likely to make lending to them a money-losing proposition.

@tryin2bgreenman @BiniIrl "It's not my fault if I make no effort whatsoever to start my own business, it's THE CAPITALISTS keeping me from doing it by...um...some kind of evil capitalist magic."

@BiniIrl And if workers unite to increase their power in an attempt to bring capital back under their control capitalists lose their shit. Any way that workers actually could regain control of the means of production is anathema to the capitalist, it can only exist as a dream, a mirage

@BiniIrl The flat-earthers of economics LOVE this excuse. "I can't go from zero to a mature, profitability company with very little effort, expense, or risk, and therefore it's impossible to make myself better off by my own efforts and I'm being oppressed."

@GamerNate20 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren And same unshakeable conviction that anyone who says anything contrary to their programming is ipso facto either one of the bad guys or a stupid dum-dum who doesn't realize that their boogeymen/scapegoats really ARE unspeakably evil.

@GamerNate20 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren Awww, such a GOOD little propaganda parrot. Yes, the kulaks are "malignantly narcissistic parasite oligarchs" because your programmers said so. There's a reason I call your cult the flat-earthers of economics. Same utter ignorance, same eagerness to use hatred in place of facts.

A 5% wealth tax on billionaires IS the compromise. Elon Musk Wealth 2012: $2 billion 2026: $825.5 billion Jeff Bezos Wealth 2012: $18 billion 2026: $234 billion Mark Zuckerberg Wealth 2012: $44 billion 2026: $218 billion Minimum Wage 2009: $7.25 an hour 2026: $7.25 an hour

@GamerNate20 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren Yes, yes, I know, the people who programmed you with talking points and hatred told you that anyone who doesn't join the Two Minutes hate is a bootlicker. It's a great way to keep you from ever considering anything that might lead to your thinking for yourself.

@JDStokes79 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren You're very good at licking boot.

@GamerNate20 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren The useful idiots of economic authoritarianism absolutely LOVE their fantasies of violence against the people they've been trained to hate. In their imaginations it's a virtue, conveniently replacing the ones they lack and/or have been told are ACKSHUWELLY terrible evils.

@the707ms @JDStokes79 @GunnelsWarren There's no alternative.

@GamerNate20 @the707ms @GunnelsWarren You're very good at bleating the platitudes that aspiring economic authoritarians program their useful idiots to rely on as a substitute for actual thought, but that doesn't help you understand reality, and in fact hinders you from it. As intended.

@the707ms @JDStokes79 @GunnelsWarren It's not even that. Billionaires are incompatible with democracy. I don't care if we take their money and burn it, the important thing is that they don't have it. They use it exclusively to make society worse for every non-billionaire.

@Newer_Deal @DonnyApocalypse @EdbieLigerSmith "The ACTUAL definition is wrong and the definition fabricated by people who share my economically illiterate delusions is right, because I say so." The flat-earthers of economics are so embarrassingly predictable.

@JDStokes79 @DonnyApocalypse @EdbieLigerSmith My description is far more apt than your definition, which exists only in a dictionary.