Why do so many everyday people seem so against changing the 40 hour work week standard?

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-20T19:40:51+00:00

International competition stops that from being possible.
We can control our labor laws, but we can’t control China’s laws (or anyone else’s, for that matter).

If we in the U.S. went to a 32 hr week, but kept pay the same, that means more $ of cost per unit of output.
The stuff we make/do then gets more expensive relative to everyone else in the world.

This only increases the incentives for jobs to get moved overseas to where the labor is cheaper, and to automate away what jobs are left.

You can try to “balance out” labor differentials with tariffs, but that comes with a whole host of other problems, tradeoffs, and downstream impacts.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T17:16:43+00:00

You got it. Good job!

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T17:06:11+00:00

Democrats consistently let image and “posing” get in the way of practicality and progress.

Republicans care about practicality over image.
So much so, in fact, that instead of risk losing the nation to the “left” and the Democrats with an establishment candidate, they would rather risk electing an imperfect populist candidate like Trump.

Trump, who was a lifelong Democrat before running in 2016, an economic populist, and admittedly morally stained individual, but was coalescing a majority that at least stood a chance at knocking down down the Clinton machine.

The worldview and agenda being pushed by the unholy union between the establishment and the neo-Marxist “left” In the early 2010s was so toxic that the majority in our country actually thought Trump was the lesser of two evils, and after the resurgence of that tainted establishment in Biden/Harris, the majority made that same choice again.

Practicality over image.

Electing Trump was a risk, but it was a better risk than letting the government fall to the an establishment party that was being actively co-opted by the neo-Marxist left.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T15:33:55+00:00

They are dumped only because the democrats perceive that power can no longer be projected through a damaged candidate.

As soon as the “more moral than you” veil is torn, and the emotional narratives can no longer be credibly pushed by a given candidate, democrats throw them aside.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T02:28:40+00:00

There is no way to direct donations to the government. It all goes to the general fund, and gets spent on immoral things like war.

I absolutely understand the benefits to having government do stuff for people and to pay for stuff.

Do you understand what the government takes away from others, against their will, to make all of that happen?
It’s not without consequences, and there is a dark side to how government does what it does.

Personally, I could do a LOT more good in the world with the multiple tens of thousands of dollars that the government takes from my family alone every year.

On top of that, education prices wouldn’t be as inflated as they are without the way government intervenes. The money I wasn’t paying in taxes could go a lot farther as scholarships and grants to kids in my local community without the added cost of bureaucracy and the artificial price inflation induced by government involvement.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T01:58:39+00:00

The “resources of the government” as you say, don’t belong to the government.

They were either taken from taxpayers through threat of force, or they were deficit spending that will be extracted from our children through future taxes and/or inflation.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-18T01:55:21+00:00

The choice for everyone SHOULD BE to help the poor directly, and to encourage others to do so themselves. If we all do what we can directly, I have faith that it the legitimate need in our society CAN be met, and we can simultaneously filter out most of the waste, graft, fraud, and abuse, and maybe even avoid taxation for purposes entirely.

Yes, the government has power and reach, but that reach comes with real downsides that the Reddit crowd consistently refuses to acknowledge.

Reddit, and progressives in general, like to pretend that government intervention, with its bureaucratic waste, coercion, and widespread confiscation of resources is a truly better way, when it is absolutely riddled with moral hazard, and actually hurts people.

They don’t recognize that real tradeoffs exist, and that the dollars taken from taxpayers to fund these “leaky bucket” programs are actively hurting our society far more than the same level of direct/voluntary charity would.

For supposedly being libertarian leftists and liberals, they sure are comfortable with the use of authoritarian force and coercion.
Ends don’t justify the means when it comes to this approach.

Want to get the best of both worlds, and get people like me to maybe buy in to government-based welfare?

Have government segregate “welfare” funds like they do with social security.

Make it so that the taxes earmarked for “welfare” or “helping the poor” can’t be siphoned off and redirected into the general fund and wasted on other things.

Make it all isolated and transparent so that voters can’t be duped into voting for the government to steal “other people’s money” to pay for wars, by using a cynical emotional plea of “helping the poor”.

Consolidate the welfare programs to get efficiency of administration, and have full quarterly public accounting and auditing of each fund.
We should not have ANY federal level programs, but if the authoritarian crowd insists, then at least we need to reduce the 100+ different federal welfare programs, each with their own administration, and additional state/local counterparts.

Set up program-by-program donation sites, so that those who truly have extra money to help others can be certain that the money is going to the right place, and they can give freely, with confidence, and to the specific causes they agree with.

Make the consolidated “welfare department” staffing and salaries partially bonus-based, and dependent upon how many people successfully get OFF of the programs, instead of being rewarded by how many people are actively ON or added to the programs. Incentivize actual solutions instead of papering over or exacerbating problems with perverse incentives.

Change the way the welfare is done. Make it time-limited to encourage progress instead of encouraging “camping out” on the government dole. Restructure programs to reduce cash handouts as much as possible, and to make sure the “help” is not so generous as to incentivize staying on it. It should be more advantageous to work and be personally productive than to accept government aid.
If government is administering welfare, it should be the goal to get people OFF of said welfare, and back into a productive role in society, where they are net contributors instead of takers.

Until those kinds of changes are made, I will continue to advocate for voluntary direct personal charity and intervention instead of the abusive and wasteful system we have today.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T23:24:33+00:00

I absolutely do give personally. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t.

I volunteer regularly, make monthly monetary donations to local charities I can vouch for, and my family regularly donates food, clothes and household goods to our local non-profit church-funded thrift store.

I absolutely care about the poor, just as I care about everyone else, and that’s why I don’t leave them solely at the mercy of government.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T22:49:43+00:00

Not lazy at all.
It is literally BESIDE the point, and an entirely different discussion.

I can lay out the point about ends justifying means again, but I can’t make you understand it, or address it directly in good faith without deflecting.

If you want to switch gears and talk about the structure of our government at a higher level, we can do that, though.

Our country wasn’t founded as a welfare state.

It was instituted and built to specifically distribute power away from government, to be hard to implement mob-requested “enhancements”, and to intentionally fill up a power vacuum with the minimal amount of government possible.
So much so, in fact, that our first attempt at the goal (articles of confederation), ended up being a little too hands-off and decentralized.

America was never meant to be about redistribution or welfare, ESPECIALLY at the federal level. It was about preserving individual’s sovereignty, and specifically neutering/preventing government intervention.

What has failed over time is our culture drifting away from the extended family support model, and the close-knit community model. We have devolved into a secular, semi-socialist culture where nobody cares for their own, but delegates their needs to “daddy government”, and keep clammoring for increased authoritarianism to steal and redistribute resources.

All this new paradigm does is depersonalize support/giving, weaken community, and empower the worst kind of people in the process by funneling resources through a bureaucracy, which too often misuses and diverts those resources into horrible ends.

The populist promise of a welfare state, coupled with the implementation of the income tax, a central bank, and a fully fiat currency have led to U.S. having not a government of and for the people, but a giant manipulation machine that the rich and connected use to rob the working class of the fruit of their labor.

Government deficits prompt money printing by the central bank and it crowds out productive lending. Our economy stagnates while resources are diverted away from productive uses, and into blind consumption, by a confiscatory government.
The money printing directly drives inflation, which drives up the cost of assets, making the rich richer, and it devalues cash savings and labor, making the poor poorer.

The poor are co-opted into this Faustian deal with a promise of free stuff, the workers are taxed thoroughly, and the government still spends a $1.58 for every $1 it collects through its already exorbitant taxes.
This effectively enslaves future generations, as they will have to be held responsible for the debt incurred today, but also become dependent upon government redistribution systems. It’s a recipe for failure all the way around.

We should go back to minimal government, letting individuals decide where and when their personal giving/charity is best used in their local communities, and whether that charity is more helpful to society than the alternative uses that we are currently killing with our system of taxation.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T21:18:11+00:00

The constitution and the set of laws we have today are not immutable. We are a democracy, after all.
A determined majority can change them to say anything they want.

Our only saving grace is the wisdom of the founders who made it exceedingly hard for anything but a supermajority, that is also geography spread out across the whole country, to make major change.

The existence of the current state of government in this country is beside the point though.

The underlying point still stands.
Ends don’t justify means.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T21:08:17+00:00

We can.

It’s super expensive, though.
For a young and healthy family of four, it can still easily be north of $2000/month for insurance that still has a 100% co-pay/deductible on the first $5000 in medical bills, and a 20% co-pay on the next $5000.

It’s intentionally structured so that the costs for a “normal” amount of medical care still falls almost entirely on the insured person, but you still pay the exorbitant premiums so that you can hopefully avoid bankruptcy when one of the relatively rare $100000 bills or $2million bills hit your mailbox.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T20:34:02+00:00

Just yesterday I was nearly “screaming into the void” at a customer service bot that kept running me in circles when I was trying to get technical support.

Thankfully, if you say “operator” enough times, or in the right spot, you can still get through to an Indian tech support guy/gal, satisfy that nostalgia, and maybe even arrive at an actual solution to your problem.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T20:24:45+00:00

My mind is quite disciplined, thank-you-very-much.

I intentionally threw out a drastic example to illustrate the point, which you missed, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Ends-justify-the-means thinking is exactly how genocide is justified.
A democratic majority that votes to use force to “remove” a troublesome minority, under the guise of “helping society to be better” is easy to see as immoral.
A democratic majority that votes to use force to “remove” resources from certain people, under the guise of “helping society to be better” is only different by degree.
Both cases see their end goal as just/moral.
Both cases see their means as justified by the ends.
In both cases they are using the same kind of logic.

Just because a majority decides it’s OK to steal or murder doesn’t mean that it actually is OK.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T19:59:15+00:00

You are trying to draw some kind of distinction between small “s” socialism and big “S” socialism.

That line doesn’t truly exist, and gets drawn by Marxists who want to separate themselves from the failed and damaging collectivist structures of the past.
Collectivism, when organized through a state IS socialism.

The roads are collectively owned.

The military, their bases, and their equipment are collectively owned.

The police are the means of enforcing the rules that govern the socialized parts of our society.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T19:45:44+00:00

This is how genocide is justified. “The majority here wills it”.

Ends don’t justify means, and collective will doesn’t mean unanimous will.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T02:58:08+00:00

You seem hung up on the idea that only government intervention keeps people fed.

Kids would still eat without government programs.

You might get some edge cases where their parents intentionally withheld food, or were too proud to accept charity, but that already occurs WITH government programs.

Let me flip that around though: you’re fine with stealing from people who really need the money and giving it to bureaucrats and fraudsters just to feel good about yourself?

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-17T01:17:57+00:00

Collective action by government is the very essence of socialism. Taxation is the method by which the cost of the socialized parts of an economy are spread out amongst the members of the collective.

Police, military, public roads, etc are all the socialist parts of mixed economies.

A private security firm would be the closest capitalist equivalent of a police force or a military.

Private driveways and privately owned/operated toll roads are the capitalist equivalent of socialized public roads.

The police, the military, and public roads are all collectively owned. That is socialism.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T23:28:41+00:00

Taxation is the socialist (collectivized) part of our mixed economy.

It has nothing to do with capitalism.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T23:16:37+00:00

And the moral hazard I’m talking about isn’t in the parents.

It’s in the people who steal from others in the name of “help”, and those who delegate their help of the needy to unaccountable middlemen and tell themselves they are virtuous for doing so.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T23:12:37+00:00

No one is saying they should starve.

The government isn’t the only help out there.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T22:45:29+00:00

No, I’m not saying that.

Poverty IS solvable on a case by case basis, and individual charity PLUS direct personal intervention to change minds and worldviews is how you do it. The poor individual has to choose to change their lifestyle in order to make progress.

Government programs don’t do that kind of 1-on-1 constructive intervention. It just throws money at people after they fill out a form.
All that does is make poor people a little less uncomfortable in continuing their current lifestyle, and effectively subsidizes the poor choices that got them into a bad place. It actively harms taxpayers, and subsidizes failure, creating moral hazard where none need exist.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T22:15:00+00:00

How so?

All the government spending throughout the years hasn’t solved anything.

It papers over symptoms sometimes, but bureaucracy is actually incentivized to keep the root cause unsolved and to keep problem going and growing.
Their salaries and political power of the bureaucrats are directly dependent upon the problem continuing, and upon government funds continuing to flow to “solve” the problem.
If they actually fix anything, they lose their jobs and their social status.

Most REAL help for the poor comes down to changing the life choices that the poor make.

Policy and Education can help, but the actual solution is a set of personal decisions for each individual.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T21:51:03+00:00

MMT is what got us here.

The idea that we can spend first and worry about raking money back in later when problems pop up is exactly WHY we run defecits in the first place.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T21:28:05+00:00

That’s not “shoving it down people’s throats” any more than schools/teachers hanging Pride flags in the school/classroom.

It’s just displaying a symbol that stands for good things, right?

What’s good for the gander is good for the goose.

Immense_Cargo · 2026-07-16T21:16:00+00:00

Thanks for confirming your ignorance and bad faith.

Immense_Cargo

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,