Quick primer on modern economics, and the reason why the vast majority of people work exceptionally hard, but get almost nowhere in terms of financial security:
- The rich use assets to make their money.
- The working class use their labor and time to make money.
Let me explain:
- A working class person trades their valuable time and labor for dollars.
- This is almost always in the form of an hourly wage, but can be capped using salaries for added benefit to the business (get more labor for less money).
- Now, the worker is paid their wage, must spend a good deal of it on necessities and artificially expensive housing, and is left with almost nothing to save or invest, so they naturally spend what little they have on convenience and entertainment to get some of their precious time back, and to enjoy what they can where possible.
- The average worker in the US makes roughly $53,000 per year. For many, that's as much as they will ever see in terms of compensation.
- COLAs do not offset inflation and price gouging.
- Rent and prices only go up.
- This is by design.
– Meanwhile –
- A rich person owns $5 million dollars of large cap companies through the index fund SCHD.
- That fund has growth, which is “unrealized” until the time of selling so there's no tax on that yet.
- However that fund also has something called a dividend yield.
- This dividend yield is paid to investors for lending the fund their money. Think of it like interest.
- Now, with $5 million dollars, at roughly 3.6% dividend yield, the rich person makes $180,000 per year, for doing…nothing.
- They own their home, so no rent. Depreciation can be written off, and the amount they make in dividends per year is automatically adjusted by the market, and corrects for inflation via asset inflation.
- Dividend income is taxed at a lower rate, and losses can be written off.
This is only one example, not taking into account rentier capitalism, wage theft, government subsidy of underpayment of employees, and other mechanisms that are designed to keep people poor.
The whole reason why antiwork exists is because if work actually worked, and the system actually worked, I wouldn't be here writing this post, and you wouldn't be here reading it.