Republicans have at long last elected a House speaker: Representative Mike Johnson, a fundamentalist Christian who was also once called a key “architect” in Congress’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.
Johnson finally secured the speaker’s gavel after Republican infighting left the House without a speaker for 22 days. He secured 220 votes.
Johnson is a four-term congressman representing Louisiana. His win also represents the rise of the MAGA front in the Republican Party. Earlier Wednesday morning, Donald Trump endorsed Johnson as House speaker—after quickly killing Mike Emmer’s nomination the day before.
But ask any liberal (which is the majority of both Democrats and Republicans, it’s a political economics term) or listen to the media and the sky is falling.
The same exact diatribe is played out whenever the workers, whom are the vast, vast majority, demand more than psuedo-slavery.
For a quick self reference point for everyone - subsistence living, a la fuedalistic serfs, or agrarian society pre-capitalism, is so far ahead of the poverty we experience today. You need land. You need a house. Farm animals, tooling. It’d take a halfmil to get to as poor as a fuedal serf - who worked less than we do now.
If you receive a paycheck from someone, you aren’t middle class, you are working class. Working class is used interchangeablely with working poor.
If your life can be reduced to you having the freedom to choose how you get to work and what to ingest to stay healthy enough to work - and that’s basically it - you’re a slave who pays for their own room and board. You don’t actually have any freedom. You’re given meaningless choices that effect society in almost no way and told you’re free.
Yes, to people crying that the sky is falling.
But most of the arguments you’re making are inaccurate and complain about your own sky falling.
We are not poorer than serfs, and you can get a plot of land and house today for pretty cheapb(sub 30000) or less free than feudal serfs.
It’s in the zeitgeist to glorify serfs these days, and if you’re very strict about how you judge work time and siestas, you can make the argument that we work more than feudal serfs.
But serfs repaired their own clothes and they lived in huts and they were property of their lords. They woke up earlier than you did and if any of their tools weren’t ready or in good repair, they’d have to make them already themselves. They’d have to feed all of the animals themselves, they’d have to check all of their crops, maintain their land and houses that they did not own, make all of their food for themselves, and give away the products of their labor.
They didn’t take days off, they didn’t have medical or financial resources to call on or research, it just was not a great life.
And they belong to someone else.
The United States has a pretty bad history of workers rights, but it has improved significantly every time workers banned together and try to make a difference en masse.
If you don’t like your job, you can just move to another job. If you don’t like your state you can just move to another state that suits your lifestyle better. If you don’t like this country, you can just move to another country.
These luxuries of opportunity were unimaginable to serfs, who belongs to their lords and produced for them, not themselves.
The situation is direct for jerky people here, and the working class is expanding, but hearkening to the good old days of belonging to someone else ignores the freedoms and radical conveniences our poor enjoy today
There’s a long way to go, but living today and working today is better than living and working as feudal chattel.
I have seen people and been to places where they live in home that is some sticks and a tarp across it next to a neighbor who isn’t doing any better. Where sewage poured into the streets.
I hate this super condensed view of things. You have an Internet connection means about a billion people on earth would murder you for the wealth you have.
For a second I thought you were talking about the sugar cane shanty towns in Florida. But despite living in one room shacks with broken foundations and corrugated steel roofs, the cane cutter families do have functional plumbing and sewage.