I work with special needs kids. They aren’t unable to contribute, only no one has accommodated the ways they are able too.
This was something I was thinking should be memified / rendered into an infographic.
Meritocracies tend to have blind-spots regarding certain folks:
- People who do useful stuff not recognized by the merit assessment system, and allotted no reward or compensation; also merits under-valued and underpaid (e.g. parenting, teaching)
- People who subvert the system, often playing to the measures of merit rather than the spirit (e.g. private equity schemes, MLMs, cults, lobbyists, trillion-dollar far-right hate-based propaganda machines)
- People who have characteristics favored by the assessment system that aren’t really meritous (white, male, related to wealthy families), and people who are devalued for characteristics that don’t affect their merits (nonwhites, women, queer, poor, fat, unattractive, strange cultures and religions, outside the mainstream ideology)
- The personhood of those people who genuinely have little or no merit at this time (disabled folk), some of whom have served (enlisted veterans suffering from TBI or PTSD, or were just blackballed by a superior officer with a grudge) or have the potential to serve (children of the wrong color, children who are below average in physical prowess, children with unusual learning styles, weird children, poor children)
Probably not a complete list. Early draft.
Agreed. How do we organize the economy to reflect this. 2024 our gdp was close to $30 trillion. In 2025 there was around 165 million workers and let’s say a population of 350 million people. Each worker produces on average $181k of productivity. Each citizen has about $85k worth of productivity each year attributed to them. Even in today’s American every citizen can afford some luxuries if productivity was more equitably shared across the country. How can we enforce this more
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Limit C-suite wages to their bottom line workers including the sub contracted janitors.
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All boards must have labor interests in the company represented.
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Higher tax on money so it can go into subsidies for the disabled and poor.
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Cancel restrictions on savings/resources money for disabled people. Have a more progressive subsidy system for the poor.
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Destroy redundancy in the economy. Health care insurance, pharmaceutical companies, military spending, and education. We spend money as a society on these endeavors they should be owned and controlled by the people. We shouldn’t be paying for the profit of military contractors, pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, and education. There should be budgets and it costs what it costs. Our military should also be brought back to America if we want to keep the jobs program we can defend ourselves from our own soil and excess military people can do public service work like bridges and roads. If the government spends money it should go to employing people directly not private corporate hands
Essential infrastructure including transport, housing and groceries should be handled by the community, either by workers coop or by municipality.
Agreed on that but I do think at least with the tax infrastructure/enforcement nowadays the money has to come from the fed budget as the economy is national/global.
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Just one more way capitalism destroys the fabric of compassion and community in our world.
Just one more way it depersonalizes everyone and commodifies everything.
Such evil.
I feel the need to point out that disdain for the disabled long predates capitalism.
Without indignity we wouldn’t be able to elevate the owning class above the rest.
The suffering and cruelty is the point.
It’s honestly something I still struggle with. Issues of capitalism aside, I, from an objective standpoint, consume far more resources and services than I produce due to my disabilities. It often feels like I deserve less than I have, and I don’t have a lot.
It’s one of those confusing points in-between feeling blessed and feeling like a burden.
You’re not a burden. It’s the people we have to fight against who opposed you having a nice life, regardless of your abilities or disabilities who are the burden. They fight against supporting people with disabilities, old people, kids, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+, other religions, no religion, etc., etc., etc.
We have to fight for the right thing so much and on so many fronts. They are terrible people. If they didn’t fight against us so much, you wouldn’t have to doubt your worth. It’s a them problem, not a you problem, but they like to make it your problem.
Billionaires don’t want to pay their fair share. If no one was allowed to have more than $999,999,999.99 (which no one even needs), we could have UBI, free medical, free tuition, reasonable housing costs, food for everyone, on and on. They make it our problem, but it’s not a problem with us.
I live by the golden rule. Not about laws, religion, or any other bullshit. Just a simple do unto others as I would like others do unto me.
If I were disabled, I’d like to be taken care of, so I’m copasetic with disabled people being taken care of.
One extravagant trip to Paris by oligarchs burns more resources than you do in your entire lifetime.
In my eyes, the whole reason we live in a society is to take care of one another. We overcame survival of the fittest and are ideally able to provide more resources than we collectively need so that everyone should be able to live a fulfilling life regardless of their personal circumstances. That’s the society I want to live in anyway. I would never see you as a burden.
I don’t know if this helps, but your posts and comments always make my day just a bit better whenever I see them. Whatever else, you’re contributing to myself feeling less of a burden from gestures broadly at everything
Thank you. Unironically it’s one of the main reasons I post - I like to give people a little entertainment (the other reason being that I want the Fediverse to survive and thrive, and it needs activity for that).
I’m always happy to see you upvote and comment, by the way! Stay safe!
This. Pls take this to heart @PugJesus @PugJesus@lemmy.world especially your NCD posts really brighten my day
Thank you!
I was reading about a team of bankruptcy lawyers. They were talking to a client’s wife about budgeting. They asked her what her minimum expenses for a month were. She said the absolute least she could survive on was $40,000 a month.
I have no idea what your condition is, but I’d bet everything that you aren’t asking for $40,000 a month.
Well, I’d certainly ask for 40k a month, but I’ve yet to receive it XD
I too can only survive on 40 large a month. Courts you hear me? This I declare. Give me 40 large.
You don’t pick your disabilities, and it could just as easily have been me instead. That’s why I have zero problems with my tax money helping people who can’t contribute as much. Hope you’re doing alright!
Hope you’re doing alright!
Mostly I am. It’s just a underlying current in my thoughts that’s hard to shake. It doesn’t rule my life or anything, it just… comes by intermittently.
I want to second the other commenter and also tell you directly that I love your posts and comments too. It’s always a good day when I see PugJesus
Thank you! It does genuinely brighten my day to hear these comments
Tell me about it. SSDI is not enough to even survive on.
Just because you’re unable to contribute to capitalism doesn’t mean you should suffer.
Depends on who you ask. But i agree.
“I suffered therefore you must suffer too even if it doesn’t have to be that way”
The cry of the selfish and mean everywhere. Doesn’t matter if it’s student loans, pay, lousy schedule, whatever. If someone had it tough they’ll want you to have it shitty too. Republicans in particular love this one, right along with “there is no solution we consider perfect therefore there is no good enough solution at all.”
The rich have ingrained in the lower classes a weird sense of superiority over anyone that they deem lowest.
Which is why they fight so hard against making civilization better. Because they must feel superior to those beneath them, and all actions done to improve society result in elevating people up to a higher position.
Its also why minorities, immigrants, and disabled are always the targets… Cause they are the easiest to other and catagorize as “lowest” to feel above.
“He’s rich, do he must be smart.”
That one passes me off the most, especially in regards to President Tiny Dick.
“I suffered therefore you must suffer too even if it doesn’t have to be that way”
I see this sentiment a lot whenever the subject of increasing the minimum wage comes up. A lot of people think it’s unfair that a teenager should be making
$15$20 an hour when they only made$5$8 when they were a teen. And they are currently only making around $20 an hour themselves. I have literally seen this exact statement on discussions of increasing the minimum wage:“No teenager should be making close to the same amount that I am. They don’t need that kind of money.”
You are 100% correct that it’s selfishness and I would add that it’s also a complete lack of empathy as well.
Not really a Capitalism specific problem unless somebody someday implements a system that doesn’t have this problem.
Isn’t “buying things” in general, a contribution to capitalism?
Not strictly speaking - market economies, even under predominantly capitalist systems, still include a large number of workers’ coops and sole-proprietor firms. Markets predate capitalism, and markets will likely post-date it too.
Capitalism is in reference to systems of limited-liability stock corporations which allow extremely fluid (and divided) ownership of capital by an investor class.
Nobody should suffer due to their ability. At the same time lacking luxuries like coffee, nice dinners, and fun trips is not suffering. I agree, everyone deserves some luxury in their life but to equate lack of luxury to suffering tells me you are totally out of touch.
Disabled person here. Thank you for letting us know that watching other people find joy in things like coffee, eating out, and going on vacations while we sit at home in pain and depression isn’t a form of suffering.
I’m reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.
As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We’re being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.
Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.
And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump’s instant army.
The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn’t come out of a vacuum. We shouldn’t be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.
Ideally, we’d all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it’s not anyone’s fault they were born
frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcomewithout the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.But I’d settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.
We don’t even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.
They’re also implying that employed, not disabled people somehow magically get those luxuries just for participating in capitalism
True. Plenty of able-bodied hard working people are going without while others lounge about spending their trust fund checks. System is broken. System is also working as designed. :(
So disabled people should just eat gruel and have the minimum sufficient to survive?
Like, you need to think through what you’re saying here
That is an incredibly ignorant and arrogant position to take.
People need more than just 4 walls and a meal. They need enrichment. They need laughter, They Need Joy, and new experiences.
and I have a sneaking suspicion that you’d suddenly stop thinking its out of touch ,and start demanding it as a necessity for your pursuit of happiness, when you’re the one down and out, having smarmy cunts make denigrating comments every time you did some small personal act of self-care.
When you take a plane to your fun trip, you’re polluting the planet for everybody else - so either we all have the right to have a fun trip, or nobody does.
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Coffee as a luxury is uh, pretty fucking far. Do you know how cheap store-brand coffee is? The only way you’re dropping below that for the price of drinking is literal tap water - which, even in places where it’s safe, often has a distinct taste (source: grew up in a town where the tap water tasted of iron - city said it was fine, but it instilled a reluctance to drink from the tap).
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Lacking goods and services regarded as ordinary is a form of suffering - running water in a home is not a necessity either, but most would regard being without it as a form of suffering. Running water is a luxury - and one which we can easily provide.
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Disabled folk are often receiving benefits on the basis of being disabled, ie that they cannot reasonably and consistently earn more than that in their lifetime. If your view is that disabled folk should lack luxuries entirely because they dared to be born disabled, that’s fucked up.
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