They love painting owners as entrepreneurs, but never bother defending the owner who’s not the founder. Their entire justification collapses when the owner is not the founder, but just a rich leech who bought out the company. A lot of entrepreneurs basically have to go beg these leeches for more capital when they run out and trade huge stakes of their company’s ownership just to keep going. Or they get established and just sell it to the rich for a payout.
Yeah, I notice these sorts love to bring up Henry Ford as an example to try to defend billionaires and CEOs, which, even if we ignore the fact that he was a turd to the laborers he relied upon for his fortune, isn’t an accurate comparison the vast majority of the time, because most of these modern business giants are just some chode that walks in to an already extant company and manages to simply avoid crashing the gravy train.
Just realized now that the first two panels are nearly inherently contradictory; you can either have a dream about wanting every household to own your product, AND you can do extensive market research to determine every household’s needs, and the two results need not coincide. Either people want your prodcut or you want to ensure every household has it; if buyers do not want your product, you had best think up another strategem. The comic posits a priori that his dream is shared by the market as a whole.
spoiler
Yes, I know this entire comic is a strawman, no I will not elaborate.
No this is fair, we can place a value on the bosses initial labour.
once that loan is paid back they can, of course, fuck off.
I want to know more about this magical tea cup making machine. One that doesn’t require any labor to run
Atlas, why don’t you just do it yourself then? If it doesn’t require that much work, why don’t you just make all the teacups without purchasing others labor?
Anyone else love how something like 90% of being a lefty is having to contend with lazily wrought strawmen? Love when more than half the burden is getting people to correctly understand what they’re arguing against.
It depends. The guy (and yes, it’s a guy) who mainlines Ben Shapeeno videos and was president of his College Republicans chapter? Yeah, you’re not going to convince them of anything.
But in a media environment that’s been saturated with militant anti-communism for at least the last 70 years, you’re also going to find plenty of people who regurgitate bad arguments because they’ve passively assimilated them from the background noise and never really dug into the matter. If you get them interested in digging a little deeper, you might get somewhere.
And of course – especially online – there are always the folks reading, listening to, or watching the conversation but not participating. They might be closer to that second guy, but they have enough doubts about a bad argument to not voice it themselves. They might be persuadable even if you can’t reach the first two.
I guess, but I personally struggle with it more almost, because there’s something weirdly demoralizing and frustrating about people throwing out arguments that shitty because they’ve picked them up from chud youtube or whatever. Like, for every one I go through to try and refute, it feels like a dozen more jackasses come to parrot the same anti-communist propaganda.
“Took the risk of investing my money” - if you have enough cash on hand to start a manufacturing business, you’re already sat on a pile of extracted wealth (either personally stolen from your workers at other companies you own, or inherited from your family who did the dirty work for you).
