Why does Ross, who is the largest friend, simply not eat the other friends?

I love the reference to Futurama.

Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?

However, yes. Capitalism is fucked up that rewards those with the most resources.

It’s far worse than this:

See how these supply and demand lines intersect over here? Well we get to shift the supply a little lower, sell for higher price, and get to extort workers harder, so that they feel lucky to have a job at all.

The reason that the large class doesn’t eat us, is that we have enough profits to control media and politicians to brainwash and force them not to eat us, and so when we say “free market”, we’re just lying to create a corrupt market and a corrupt society which we get to control absolutely.

–Ahhh says the alien.

Do you have any intrinsic concerns about being evil? Or does the only thing that matters is that the slaves accept your evil and their oppression?

So I say somewhere else that one shouldn’t bother with this comic because its assumptions are flawed, but let’s point out exactly how because otherwise Marxists will live in the flawed understanding that their pov is unchallenged or inherently correct.

— the alien assumes for some magical reason a property cannot be owned, specifically a factory. A factory is not a natural product of the world, there’s not tree growing factories. Someone put in an investment to create it, and the work they allocate in that factory is a recoupment of that factory building investment.

— the workers obey “pieces” of paper because that’s what society decided is civilized behavior. The alternative is one where a factory owner decides to kill people for trying to take what’s theirs, or the workers decide to kill the factory owner to take over. Either way, there is violence and bloodshed.

Marxist believe, for whatever magical reasons, that the violence will stop once they seize the means of production. But why should it? Why wouldn’t another subgroup of Marxists constantly want to challenge the committees who want to run that specific factory? The answer is that without a rule or agreement (piece of paper), various groups will constantly try to seize what they think should be theirs.

— the alien believes that agreeing to work with someone is slavery. Here I have two things to say: 1) for someone who doesn’t want to work, then any kind of work will appear to be slavery, and that’s not a a capitalism problem, that’s a self actualization problem for some people. 2) in reasonable economies, people have choices for places to work, or unions which ensure that employers cannot abuse them, or laws which ensure protections.

The fact is simply this, whenever two people interact, they will have disagreements. We make laws to not kill each other over those disagreements. If you want to experience what it’s like living in an authoritarian state, try living in china or Vietnam. Rule of law means little or nothing in such places, whereas in democracies you can still get some recourse via the courts, or via regulations. Have kleptocrats and oligarchs ruined democracies, yes definitely.

— being a larger class doesn’t necessarily mean anything in violent conflict. I think any philosophy which relies on violent conflict to achieve its goals is tacitly admitting that it cannot win the hearts and minds of people via ideas alone.

Edit to say, I have a busy day ahead so I wont be responding lol, but doesn’t mean I agree or don’t want to challenge this vapid Marxist pov

And once more: lol @ downvoters constantly butthurt that their Marxist pov is challenged

Anyone ever post funny non political or economy based comics, or are these the only kind getting made now

Something tells me the aliens would be smart enough to ask questions like, “How do the factories get here to begin with?”

Even though I lean heavily toward socialism and believe an open source society is our future, we’ve got to move beyond memes and kindergarten oversimplifications of capitalism. Every industry and business empire ultimately starts with clever individuals working very hard on ideas that turn out to be better in some way than what’s already around, so they can grow and grow to become giant corporations. Over the course of time a lot of people get involved who don’t work any harder than a normal person but are just paid a lot more, and others simply inherit the money. Those are really ones everybody gets upset at,. The innovators and entrepreneurs deserve recognition and reward, we just have to find a way to do that without creating oligarchs and vast blocks of wealth.

Nice of you to not include source.