[Emitt Evan Baker]

I am in the lower middle class. Not that it matters much. Hard-ish labor mostly, not exclusively. Family.

Ok. So you work for 10 dollars an hour and find it justified I am assuming. Well, if we get a living wage passed you give back as much as you wish. BTW, ever research who fought for the idea of a minimum wage. I give you a hint. It wasn't an Austrian economist or the newscaster from the video you just posted (who can't find any coherent agenda being voiced from the Left despite the national movement for a living wage).

Kind rich people, wicked poor people and everything in between seem largely irrelevant to whether you accept that idea that someone making 35 times what the single mother watching their children or cleaning their floors is working 35 times harder or smarter or what have you. It also doesn't have anything to do with whether you believe that the market forces can be trusted to spread things fairly or even with a tinge of human decency without outside confrontation. The species has the resources to give everyone a reasonable sense of security and shelter. It is completely doable. You words seem to me to be sustaining the illusion that poverty is some kind of natural outcome that occurs only where folks are lazy or ill-suited for creativity rather than the actively chosen moral stance that it is. People actively choose to allow a treatable suffering to remain present because they lack the political will and vision to address it. As far as I can see the Democratic Socialist party in the US is the most committed to a vision and the necessary institutions that would address those issues. It is a compromise for me because I find certain human-centered and State-centered tenets of their platform a bit awkward but I think they are the obvious choice (here and now) for anyone willing to vote based on a combination of basic decency and historical reality.

No one this even touches on the systemic tilting of the table and the control of that tilt by moneyed interest all leveraged by the capitalism you seem to be defending. Are there plenty of well-off people who aren't about that? Yeah. Does there abstinence make it any harder for the active wealth to accumulate? Doesn't seem so.

The video you posted is propaganda. Maybe its funny to you, like it is funny to me when the Daily Show interviews Republican protesters and they can barely spell or have any idea what the policies they are fighting for will do to their own lives. But I realize this is a comedy show that was selecting the funniest responses for their purposes. I don't treat it as data analysis. I attend many rallies and protests. They can be grab bag of confusion. I don't look at most protests as that big a part of the actual movement. Often times they are ineffectual at best. Resistance is a fledgling-barely-winged-Something right now. But there is a growing movement of sorts cohering around a core sense of injustice. Despite the somewhat disappointing outtakes available from occupy or other spots they are making very clear demands on every front being attacked right now (water rights, autonomy for the First Nations on their land and redress of the past, human oversight over environmental adjustments made for profit, a living wage, single payer health care, equal rights for women, and on and on). On each of these points you can find very articulate and well-researched individuals who can lay out very clear steps forward. There often at these same protests. Your girl could find them if she wanted but of course that isn't what the video is for. It is to feed your mindset and make you concerned for the ten Nazis, Trumpsters, and paid stumps for status quo that will get hit by a bike lock this year. You can then offset those images against the thousands of colored peoples who will be violently accosted in their own neighborhoods, the millions in prison for non-violent offenses, the tens of millions who not have adequate healthcare or access to safe food and shelter, and the hundreds of millions who will be squeezed so that the top few percents can live like French monarchs in an age with no guillotines. The thing is though that when a human rights protester talks about killing the white house it is hypocritical. When a social Darwinist Me-firster talks murder it is not. Which side do you want to be on here? One where murder, accumulation, and toxicity are directly opposed to your orthodoxies or one where they sorta fit in just fine?

Ludwig von Mises? I find most libertarian thought to be like a strange adhesive that will stick ferociously only its own conclusions to its desires and yet strangely to have the ability to let any contrary realities slip off without even a moment of self-criticism. Among the entire spectrum of ideas I find that subset to be the most overwhelmingly certain for the most underwhelming reasons. And I confess to a general suspicion about Economics to begin with. It seems the prerequisite of a degree in Economics is to swallow as much ideological poison as possible and then, with your last bits of consciousness, to try to read your own entrails in order to predict the future. In the most majestic souls I am sure some good stuff comes through but mostly its the poison doing the talking. But maybe that is not fair. So, no, not my go to on the complexities of socialism. But forget socialism. Isn't really just a matter of loving others enough to want them to have life instead of just survival? And loving them enough to not allow bullshit economics or philosophy to smuggle in a defense of wage disparity and parasitism that any child can see is a deep shame on the species.