The real problem with socialism is that it offends the CIA, and bad things happen to people who offend the CIA.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Giving away 40% of your salary to the state for healthcare and welfare -> Crazy crime incredible inhumane and brutal theft
Giving away 75% of your salary to private companies who do the same things but worse and that don't even ensure you full coverage -> Amazing business Enterprise of freedom choice of Democratic democracy ๐
"Ask people what they hate about socialism/communism and they'll describe capitalism."
Man I hate it when socialism capitalisms.
For anyone interested, here' a short excerpt on this point from a socialism crash course:
Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker's wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist's wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply infinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker's yearly salary in a single night's sleep.
For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.
A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax productive output as wages1. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do every day is stolen by Capitalists.
Funnily enough the problem with capitalism is actually that eventually you run out of other people's money.
Tap for spoiler
Capitalism inherently serves to concentrate wealth since the ones with the money make the rules. As wealth disparity increases and people get poorer they can't buy as much stuff and growth dries up. Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that's unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it. That's quite a problem, and it's one which might feel familiar to the astute reader.
Hey I recognize this happening.
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I wish the watermark said "made with beer" at the bottom left.
I get that it's a meme but 85% is delusional. If you think under socialism we could work 15% as much as we do now and maintain the same standard of living then lol, lmao, etc.
*online leftists coping and seething after food and housing don't just magically spring forth from the earth when you abolish rent-seeking
If you have a Real Job where you interact with the material world it is impossible to believe that 85% of the things you physically make or do are consumed by capitalists.
85% is a bit of an overestimate, but not by all that much. For the United States, total wages paid by companies to employees are about 11 trillion, out of a GDP of 29 trillion (stats from a year or two ago). This doesn't count sole proprietorships and partnerships, but the high-end estimate is 62%.
@draco_aeneus@mander.xyz's implication that wealth follows linearly from income isn't super rigorous, but it does match up closely enough in this case.
If you have a Materially Productive Job and you have the ability + information required to calculate how much revenue a worker contributes to the company, you'll know that this checks out. I wouldn't expect everyone to be adequately positioned and also care enough in order to have that insight though.
Nitpicking whether the executive and shareholders appropriate 85% or 50% of value is pointless. It's a huge amount, it's far more than income taxes, and it is the most important dynamic of the capitalist economy. And it is further corroborated with reports (from mainstream/orthodox sources) over the past year of how the majority of consumer spending is done by the rich.
85% vs 50% is a massive difference. It would be the difference between a 20 hour work week and a 6 hour work week.
Both those possibilities (20h work week and 6h work week) sound great. The prospect is either working less, or working the same amount and keeping the monetary value of your labor, as opposed to working full-time just to pay 3/4 of your income just sustaining your existence, which goes straight to landlords or bigger companies.
And if you can arrange a living that avoids the most common money traps, you can easily get by with 20 hours of work per week or less. I've certainly done enough juggling of part-time jobs to know this.
The top 10% of households hold 67% of all wealth. If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value, that implies โ of value produced by the average worker is being taken.
Of course, 33% is not 15%, but I'd say it's roughly in the ballpark. And in certain cases, there are definitely workers who are exploited to that level.
Wealth is not income. You can't derive the rate of exploitation from wealth inequality.
If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value
I mean lol again. Especially if you need to stretch as far as the top 10%. Doctors, surgeons, electricians, linemen, plumbers, veterinarians, dentists, engineers, etc are all going to be producing more than double the value of your average retail worker.
The only way to create wealth is via work, e.g., income. It's not a perfect measure, I concede, since wealth is static and can accumulate over time. However, I think we can still use it as a rough estimation of stolen income over time.
However, this source claims there is a 70% gap between wages and produced value. That roughly matches the number I gave.
That is not what that data is or says.
158 is not 30% of 285 for starters.
~~Total wages paid are a bit over half of gdp. 55% is notably quite a bit more than 15%.~~ Think I had gdp from a different year than wages, still closer to accurate than 85%
itt people who don't know who Margret Thatcher was enough to have seen this misattributed/misquoted from her before.
Well yes, the rich are running out of their worker's money after a while and that totally is an issue for them. Isn't that exactly what they say all the time? I don't get it. 
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