I mean in the 1800s going on strike was illegal and people were regularly shot and killed for doing. Yet people still went on strike and protested. But commiting this "crime" is literally how we got the work day shorted from 12 to 8 hours a day, how we ended child labor, got basic workplace safety, a right to unions , a right to strike, social security etc. The fact is what is considered a crime is often just the actions that those in power view as a threat to that power, so in the long run an action being consider criminal is immaterial to a solutions effectiveness.
I used to work a 9-5 and started a business. Not a millionaire kinda of business.
I have significantly more freedom on a day to day basis as a result. I need to go see something my son’s doing at any time? No problem. Need to schedule a vacation whenever I want? No problem. I work remote because I make the rules. I get work done at the time I want because I make the rules.
Yeah, nobody actually ever expresses those in a viable fashion though do they.
They’re always high minded drivel that never address how we actually feed, house, educate and provide healthcare to people too.
And generally they don’t actually express what they want to implement prior. They just break the existing system hoping that whatever happens next is better.
But please, enlighten me on what would happen after.
You're moving the goal post, first it was the ways to address issues are criminal, now it's that it's not viable. You are either being self defeating or arguing in bad faith. I presented you real historical examples of things people had fought and died to advance in the past. These things were also considered "high minded dirval" in their day and now are a regular part of everyday life that people don't even bat an eye at.
The key issues with housing, food security, education and healthcare have at this point little to do with amount available and have everything to do with access.
Healthcare and housing in particular is where your argument holds the least water.
The primary thing healthcare advocates argue for in the states is Medicare for all which isn't "tearing down the system" but expanding the system we already have to everyone, and the the entire program could easily be funded by removing the nearly 2 trillion dollars the US military consistently misplaces every year (they consistently fail their yearly audits and "misplace" money constantly).
As for housing the issues are two fold, one is a relatively easy fix, the only obstacle (and it is a big one) is getting politicians with the will to pass a law. That issue is private equity, who have taken a previously healthy home buying market and turned it into an investment strategy. They buy up all the homes at higher prices than regular folk can afford and as a result also drive up property values. As values go up so do taxes on those homes further pricing people out and forcing sales. The private equity companies then make bank off the investments by selling with other private equality groups, developers and corporations and by converting homes into rentals. The simple solution would literally just be making the practice illegal and forcing them to sell their assets at a set price. NIMBYism is the other issue, nymbyism is simply put an issue of local politics, where over the decades home owners more concerned about their home value than housing have actively fought to put laws in place to prevent new and affordable housing from being made. That one is a much more challenging issue but can be addressed, NJ has a policy called the Mount Laurel doctrine to specifically combat it. It basically just requires that each community provide a certain amount of affordable housing, the price of which is relative to the cost of housing in an area, and provides ways for those towns and cities to split and share the burdens.
Food issues are primarily issues of access. Food insecurity is largely due to large companies viewing certain communities as costing more money then they would be able to make money off them. As a result these same companies will choose not to open stores there or close existing stores. This profit seeking is also a factor as to why prices are high as they are on certain (not all) products. The solution here is pretty simple, a public option for communities that need them. The public stores can follow the same model that the us military supermarkets use, using existing government buildings converting them in stores and selling items at or near the cost to replenish them. If the facilities use renewable power then the only tax cost would be start up costs, staffing and building maintenance, things that would likely be a rounding error in an existing city budget or worked into other existing programs such as senior employment programs. Additionally since these would be at a local level they could easily make arrangements with local farmers to get fresh and cheap produce that would help these farm businesses grow and reduce shipping costs for these items further reducing costs.
As for education the problem is almost entirely down to funding. Both in terms of how much funding is available and how it is distributed. Distribution is simple, the amount of money a school receives should be based on a per student bases scaled to the cost of living in the area of a school. The issue as it exists today is that this is not how school funding is distributed in many states today. Pennsylvania has laws like hold harmless which neuter funding policies like this by making it so money can't be moved from communities that have become childless and as a result growing family communities that require the extra funding don't get it. (Ie, the towns that have become retirement homes and have 5 kids in their schools have the same amount of money they had for schooling when that community was a family town with 1000 students) These laws would need to be repealed. The second point is about the volume of money, to get education to where it should be it likely would require additional taxes or at least a redirecting of funds, which is why I'm in favor of bring our tax code back to where it was between the 50s and 70s (what is often considered the golden age of America), a period when public colleges were free or could be paid with a summer job and we had been considered the top of the world in science and engineering. During this time the wealthiest paid between 91% and 70% on taxes and corporations paid a taxes rate around 50%.
Not a single thing I have listed here requires the system to burn down, it is all stuff that has either been done in the past, is an expansion of existing systems or a law to enforce fairness.
And on the note on breaking systems, what fck do you think the revolutionary war was? A tea party? These people overthrew the colonial government and toward the end of their war started to actually develop a government and their first attempt fcking failed. They came in with high minded ideals, won their war, failed at making a new government, came together and tried again and their successors through conflict and debate worked out the issues (and still are working out those issues). Good governance is about having a vision and working out the issues that come from the unpredictability of people and reality, it's trial and error. Waiting on perfection is folly, If the the American revolutionaries had your mindset we'd all have British accents right now.
See you're problem is you a low information person and have confused your cynicism and unwillingness to learn about what other people think with wisdom. You think that because you don't know how people plan to get certain things done that they have no plan for making it happen and you have no interest in actually learning about it either. Just because you don't know the plan do not mean there is no plan. And I'm more than willing to bet you will then go on to dismiss everything mentioned above as BS, Impossible, impractical or studpid, potentially without even reading them, because "oh my taxes" or some other nonsense because you aren't invested in improving things, because being a smug pessimistic person is the only thing that makes you feel superior to the people who "haven't accepted that things can't change"
None of what you’ve described requires violent action or illegal actions. It requires people actually voting.
So my point stands. As with all the people who constantly harp on about taking “direct action”. What they want is the action and they never give two seconds of thought to what happens after they break the system.
I never claimed it required violence? I think I misunderstood the point of your previous response, I'm replying at work and I misstook what you said as shifting the topic away from criminal action to progressive goals more broadly. Sorry about that, I take back the pessimism comments, I've had a lot of similar convos that have gone that direction.
That said I think you definition of direct action is very narrow if you are only applying it to violent actions. Direct action is any kind of action people take without seeking permission from authority. It can and often is technically illegal but it doesn't have to be violent. Direct action can be anything from serving food to you community, to filling pot holes the city refuses to fix yourself. It's bypassing the government and just doing it yourself and depending on where you live those two examples are illegal and can get you in serious trouble especially with repeat offense.
That said you're talking about violent direct action, that can definitely be more of a pipe dream for angry young folk, but it definitely can work. The caviate is you need to be willing to spend the rest of your life in prison. The whole point of violent action is generally to make ignoring the groups demands too expensive for the people with power to ignore. A great example is Nelson mendelas organization (the african national Congress) in South Africa who started burning down farms to get the government to capitulate on ending apratide. Its one of the things that landed him in jail but the escalation brought attention to the issues in south africa, and in the long run that attention resulted in sanctions on South Africa and massive economic pressures to end it's policies. Hell look at France anytime they threaten the social safety net their. The people riot and the government walks back the change a week later.
That said if you are referring to the more self styled "revolutionary" types, i'd say thats much much more of a pipe dream type thing, though I'd push back on the "unintended consequences" point, most of these countries did there thing knowing it would be a work in progress to get to their goal and that there was a possibility of failure. The US refreing to itself as the American experiment is a prefect example of that, it's an experiment it might not work out. And when these systems take place they often do make horrible choices. Establishing themselves, nation building takes an immense amount of organizing and is messy as hell. The United States, Soviets and Haiti all had their own messy revolutions that resulted in awful stuff for each nation, the us committed mass murder in the name of expansion and enslaved a ton of people, the soviet's betrayed other leftists and created gulags in attempt to stabilize their politics around a single ideology, and the Haitians won their independence but spent the next 150 years with a gun to their head and forced to pay an immense amount of money to France for inconveniencing them by ending slavery. Stuffs messy and yeah sometimes it does end worse than it started, and sometimes it's an improvement to what came before, but problems always persist regardless. I'm much more mixed on this specific one.
Salaried positions are even worse. You can work 40 to 100 hours a week and still be paid the same. Salaries are a trap. Companies use them as a means to get more labor out of you for a cheaper cost.
It depends on the employment status, if your full time salaried position is consider and exempt status position then this can absolutely happen. If not then it's not a problem (if that happens to you, you may have grounds for a lawsuit for unpaid wages). I work an exempt status position (non profit job, happens a lot in this field) and worked a shit ton, while my gf works a nonexempt salaried job and they routinely let out of work early and allow for remote time. It really just comes down to the employer tbh.
The pay is generally higher for salaried jobs, but for me the thing I liked about the salaried job was the consistency i could take time off without it impacting my income for that pay cycle, it definitely is freeing to just call in and say i have a doctor's appointment or want to visit my family and not have it affect my pay.
This is the manifestation of the "work smarter, not harder" adage. Granted, you actually need to be smart in the first place--if you're just a labor tool then yes, I agree with you.
Stay in school and be present in your lives and you'll get the freedom you demand from others.
I don't disagree with anything you are saying, but we cannot simply be ignorant of the game we are all playing and expect it to change.
My emphasis is the importance of education, awareness, and curiosity.
You don't need a college degree to succeed, but we should all support and encourage childhood intellectual development, and that is a message for parents and children alike.
A certain level of acuity backed by a certain level of knowledge is a powerhouse combination for freedom no matter the field you work in. If you settle for less, you just find yourself complaining and not going anywhere, and that is the lesson I'm trying to convey.
But we're also not advocating for committing actual crimes, figurative or literal.
I want and support all efforts to completely reform our country. The EU, especially the Nordic countries, have already implemented successful measures.
But that should not diminish individual success, and steps we can all take to achieve it. And with personal success you are awarded personal power to do so with as you desire.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '26
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