The US is a hellhole for workers, and it’s getting worse

I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say that other developed countries are “better” than the United States, but it is very much a hellhole for workers. It’s especially the case for the younger generations. There are a few key issues, and they’re all intertwined. <br><br>First is that capital is very effectively internationalized. When money is invested abroad, it has access to a much better environment. Part of that is because it is operated by robots and AI, but the other part is that the laws are better. They’re more committed to the idea of a corporation having a social purpose, and they are better set up to deal with things like taxes, labor, and regulation. <br><br>Because of this, capital has left the United States to go abroad. And the way that capital exerts its power is through prices, which are the most fundamental thing you can control as an owner of capital. If you have access to better laws and technology, you can produce at a lower cost than an American. So you can charge Americans whatever they have to accept, and still be profitable. This is why many things are so cheap today, but why some things are so expensive. Other countries are able to produce goods and services at a lower cost, so those can be afforded, but because of medical monopolism, education is highly expensive. And that’s the two biggest costs in American budgets. <br><br>This is what the 1% and corporations have always wanted. They hate paying wages, and they want all of the wealth to be able to be hoarded by their owners. They’re not interested in paying Americans $25 an hour to drive, because they’d rather pay $10 an hour to drive abroad. They don’t want to pay Americans $200,000 to be a doctor, because they can pay $100,000 to be a doctor in another country. They don’t want to pay Americans $100,000 to be an engineer, because they can pay $50,000 to be one abroad. <br><br>They have achieved their dream, which was to live in a society where everything is privatized and nothing has to be shared with workers. And they’re not committed to providing any services to American citizens, whether that’s fire departments or grocery stores. Their goal is to only provide what they can profitably sell, and to not have to pay taxes on those sales because they’ve set up offshore accounts and loopholes to keep their money safe. They don’t care if Americans die from a house fire or hunger and exposure, because their owners only care about profit. <br><br>We’re living in an extreme capitalist regime, and we’re seeing extreme outcomes. There’s nothing that politicians can do, because politicians are funded by corporations. And corporations have set up systems so that they have no incentive to do anything other than pursue profit, and they have no ability to do anything else because all their assets are overseas and their owners are assholes who don’t care about humans. It’s not like they can invest in their employees and communities, because their owners wouldn’t let them, and their owners are only interested in profit, not in people. <br><br>There’s nothing that can be done, so things are going to get worse.