Economics and Envy and Social Justice

AD Robles

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I just wanted to do a short video today on this tweet from Paul Krugman. Paul Krugman is an economist, at least that's what his credentials say.

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He's more of a shill, he's a paid shill. He gets paid to essentially buttress democratic and progressive talking points.

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And I started this, I retweeted this, and I said that he doesn't understand why people get paid what they do.

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He doesn't understand the economics of salary. But that's actually not true. Paul Krugman understands full well the economics of salaries and things like that.

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But he's a shill, so he doesn't present the actual facts of the situation. Here's how it started.

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He says, my colleague David Brooks asserts that rising inequality is about productivity and not power.

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People used to say that a lot, but the preponderance of economic analysis has moved the other way for good reason. And here is what his primary piece of evidence that he puts forward in this tweet is.

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He says, consider just one piece of data, CEO pay. Do we really think that CEOs have gotten hugely better since the 1960s while workers haven't?

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So the idea is that the disparity between what a CEO makes and what a worker makes is larger.

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And therefore, what that says is that we're saying that the CEOs have gotten better, but the workers have not gotten better.

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And this is just not how it works at all. You don't get paid based on how hard you work. You don't get paid based on how much better you are at your job than you used to be necessarily.

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Sometimes you do, especially if you have like a sales job or something like that. If you have a sales job, then obviously if you get better at that sales job, you're going to make more sales and you're going to get paid more.

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But that's not really what it's about. They're not compensating you for getting better. They're compensating you for your production.

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So if you produce more as a salesman, you will get paid more. That's how it works. Now, but the thing is like, we don't, so nobody in this argument should be saying that CEOs work harder than lower skilled workers.

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And so therefore, that's why they get paid more. Oftentimes they do, by the way. So this is also an interesting part of this fallacy.

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Like CEOs work extremely hard. They may not work physically hard. They may not be the actual laborer from a physical sense.

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But if you, if you had a chance to take a look at a CEO's schedule and how that works, they actually work extremely hard.

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And so somebody said to me on Twitter, this person calls himself cat duck or herself.

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And she says, right. It's not that people who don't clean toilets, who clean toilets don't work hard.

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Of course they do. But the problem is that anyone that has a brainstem can clean a toilet. So it doesn't require any extra qualifications.

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It doesn't have as much value as something that does require a lot more effort to learn how to do.

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It doesn't take a lot to learn how to clean a toilet. So you could work very hard cleaning toilets, but you're not going to make as much as someone who has a skillset that's worth more and has more value, produces more and that kind of thing.

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And cat duck finishes this tweet by saying very few people can do the work that a

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CEO does, which is reflected in their value on the market. And that's true. Very few people can do the work of a

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CEO, a good CEO, or even a bad CEO for that matter. But actually there's more to it than this because not only here's what

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I said to cat duck. I think cat duck is right, but it's not only can very few people do the work of a

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CEO, but also when it comes down to it and you find out what's really involved with the work of a

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CEO, very few people even want to do that kind of work. And I'll just give you an anecdotal example.

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One of my customers is a CEO of like a $10 million company. So we're not talking like major enterprise here, $10 million company.

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I know depending on your context, that might sound like a lot. It's a small company and he's a CEO of this small company.

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And I was talking to him the other day and we were just talking about sort of life and things like that.

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You know, I'm a salesman. So I talked to him about his life and he just had a baby with his wife, right?

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Him and his wife just had a baby. And so we were kind of commiserating because I've got three kids and he's just as his first one.

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And he was telling me about the difficulty of raising a child when he's got this schedule that he's all around the world, trying to glad hand people, trying to win business, trying to get some financing for his company and things like that, because it's a startup, you know, that kind of thing.

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And this guy's on the road all the time, all day. He said, I'm not going to be home for like a month. And it's like,

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I'm not saying that's wrong. I wouldn't do that. You don't mean like, I don't want to do that.

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And this guy makes more money than I do. He's got more income than I do. You know what I mean? He's got a more lavish lifestyle than I do, but I wouldn't be willing to do that.

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It's just, it's just something I am not willing to do. So when it comes down to it, many people, they, they, they, they glamorize this life of a

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CEO. Well, they're just raking in the dough and they ain't doing anything because they're not working with their hands. They're not cleaning the toilets.

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I'm the one who's doing all the work. And it's like, no, you're not. You know, you, you probably don't want that life.

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I mean, you probably don't want that life. Let me say it again. You probably don't want to do that work.

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Not too many people do. In fact, everyone in theory wants to be a CEO, but very few people are willing to put what it takes to get in there.

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And not to mention the fact that your, your life is filled with anxiety off the, often and, and, and you get stressed out and, and your marriage suffers and your relationship with your kids suffers and all that kind of stuff.

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When you're the CEO of one of these were major companies, it's difficult. It's not easy. And so this, this whole idea is just all about envy.

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You see what the CEO makes and you're envious of that. And you think you deserve that. He doesn't deserve that.

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What business of, of it is yours? What the CEO is making? Stop being envious.

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That used to be one of the seven deadly sins. It's one of the 10 commandments. Don't covet things. Don't covet things. And this, and this is very relevant to the stuff

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I talk about because all this stuff about economic disparities and social justice and stuff like that, oftentimes it just boils down to enshrining envy into Christian circles.

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All of you social justice warriors are promoting envy with your rhetoric. It's just that simple.

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It's just that simple. Let me tell you something. I mean, this is, this is the kind of things that those of us on the

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Contra social justice side talk about in our comm boxes. I know you guys have your comm boxes too. You talk about how to destroy us, how to discredit us and stuff like that.

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Well, here's what we talk about. We know that's what you talk about. And so we say, yeah, I wonder what

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I'm going to do if I get canceled today. Every single day of our lives, we worry, we don't worry, but, but we talk, we, we think about getting canceled.

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I remember one time I talked to my wife about what happens if I get canceled, how are we going to provide for my family? And I told my wife, and I hope this is true.

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If I ever got canceled, hopefully I have enough notoriety at that point to, to spin that into an income, right?

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That's, that's, that's the thing. So, you know, I know that I could get, you know, they can plaster my name on CNN or something like that.

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And I'll get canceled one day that could happen. But hopefully if that does happen, that I can spin that into something.

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I talked to a brother, he said, you know what, I'm going to put out a video tomorrow and I might get canceled. I might get canceled.

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And you know what? I don't care. If I have to clean toilets, I'll clean toilets. And see this, this brother gets it, man.

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He gets it. He's like, look, anything that you do for an income, you know, as long as it's not sinful is valid for income, right?

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He doesn't want to clean toilets. He wants to do something more productive with his time, but there's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. Cleaning toilets is productive.

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We need, we need people to clean toilets, but, but this brother is, is, is, is, is knowing that he doesn't deserve anything extra.

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If he's cleaning toilets, he doesn't deserve a CEO or a manager's salary for cleaning toilets. He, he's just happy to have a way to provide for his family.

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That's, that's it. See, that's not envy. That's not, that's the opposite of envy. That's being content with your position.

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Now, I would, if I had to clean toilets, I would, I would, these are the things we talk about, but I would also seek to, to figure out how can

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I clean toilets in a way that is as productive as possible that puts me in a position to actually provide a living for my family.

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And if I can't figure out a way to do that with cleaning toilets, how are we going to, how are we going to translate what we do now into income in the future?

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That's something that we talk about all the time because we know that social justice advocates are trying to cancel us.

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We get it. We get it. And we're planning for the future. So if you're not planning for the future and you're, and your wages haven't gone up in a long time, and you're not trying to scheme in a good way,

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I mean, you know, scheming like in a, in a moral way. If you're not scheming on how to improve your situation, let me suggest that instead of griping and trying to elect a thief like Bernie Sanders into office, why don't you instead plan in your comm boxes, try to get some help and figure this out because this is what we talk about.

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We talk about this all the time. How can we help each other out here? And so, I don't know, just a suggestion.

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I hope you, I hope you found this video helpful. A little rambly, a little ranty, but anyway, God bless.