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Who knew that slavery by asset bubbles is a lot more efficient than wage stagnation?
I don't think I’ve ever seen a better summation of class war.
So I’ve been away from writing for a while. I've been consumed with a few projects, and they involve running or forming businesses. I have a feeling that until we see serious changes to a public policy regime that promotes asset bubbles over work, America will become a nation of independent contractors.
No commitment, no future.
I see employers becoming less and less committed to the people who do the work. I see workers reflecting that lack of commitment when they demand remote work as a rule, not just a benefit. An employee who works remote and is “quiet quitting” can easily pull off one or two side gigs while working full time from home. If you know that a promotion is a remote probability, then the gig economy beckons.
All it takes besides the talent and effort is a reliable internet connection at a few hundred megabits per second, at minimum. Gigabit is becoming the norm all over America. With symmetrical gigabit, it’s easy to connect, meet and greet. That’s a side gig.
And I wonder how we got here. Why are employers so much at odds with the people who do the work? Why are employers so insistent on showing up when employers can hardly see the outcome of their decisions?
I believe it’s a combination of things, really. Someone decided that people would be motivated by money. Then as a few lucky people began to multiply their wealth, they used that wealth to influence the representatives of the people who do the work. The wealthy captured the regulators instead of doing the work. Once captured, wealthy patrons wrote laws for themselves, not the rest of us.
But we’ve been played. We’ve been led to believe that we’re in a generational war over wealth. If the boomers would just let go, the Millennials, GenX and GenZ could have their piece of the pie for all their hard work. In a sentence, I’ve seen the entire problem of class struggle in America encapsulated:
In particular, the shift away from growth and prosperity based on rising wages to based on asset growth and more consumer access to credit as a…
