There are many ways in which we could look at the U.S. versus Denmark as an unfair comparison.
But I'm going to set that aside for the moment, because I've done some reading about Denmark. From what I can tell, unions in Denmark share little in common with unions in the United States besides the name. They sound like mutual societies for working people, not government sponsored extortion rackets. Also, apparently doing business in Denmark is not an onerous exercise in ass-covering like it is in the United States, and trade restrictions are minimal.
So let's come back to examining what makes the U.S. and Denmark different, because Denmark sounds like it is doing a lot of things right. First and foremost, the U.S. is a federal republic, not a unitary state like Denmark. In this way, Denmark is truly closer to a state than the U.S. as a whole. However, thanks to our particular brand of social and economic "reformers", the national government has a massive economic regulatory apparatus which would stand squarely in the way of doing anything approaching what Denmark has done. In our case, the best we can do is so-called "right to work" laws which simply curtail the ridiculous power granted to unions under national legislation, and even then this task is accomplished by restricting the ability of employers and employees to negotiate. Add to that onerous and complex taxes and regulations, and you can pretty much guarantee that nothing like what Denmark has done is possible here.
But I would absolutely be on the bandwagon for scaling all of that unconstitutional economic interference back, if it meant we could end up with a state or three like Denmark.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that some businesses cannot afford those highly paid union workers. I don't know if any attempts at labor negotiations have been made, and how the sides have behaved during those negations, so I can't speak to the behavior of the unions or the business people. But I know that when I see a surge in the "low-income sector", Occam's Razor tells me it's because the "high-income sector" is untenable.
I will accept your anecdotes over my generalizations, but they don't really change my point. So you've known a lot of coders who would make great managers, that's wonderful. But you're not one of them.
Because I have no interest, and it isn't something I would be good at. That doesn't mean it's an amazingly hard job that so few can do.
The entire point of my rejoinder to you is that you don't get to make both statements. The value of a job you are absolutely unwilling to do is essentially infinite from your perspective. For someone else, it is finite. The best you can do is thank the other person for accepting a sum immeasurably less than you would to do the job.
Except that lots of startup companies have made it without rockstar CEOs, so your position is a myth.
One path does not refute the other. If you don't need to raise capital by convincing uninformed people who have money to spare, then good on you. Many enterprises don't have that luxury.
I'm not going to criticize the German experience with unions, as I know nothing about it. Perhaps, as with Denmark as mentioned by someone else, Germany has found a reasonable balance between free enterprise and organized labor. I question the sustainability of the model, but I'll at least accept that it's more or less working right now and has worked for a while, in those countries.
However, I have to take issue with the notion of "anti-unionist forces". Have there been changes to German labor law that restrict union activity? If so, what were those changes, and what "anti-unionist forces" brought them about?
The biggest problem we had as we grew was that many of these coders were burned out on coding and would rather have done management. Any of them would have been competent managers
Why? Because they were competent coders? That says nothing about their ability to manage people. People are not like computers; they are irrational, stubborn, and at times outright brilliant. Culturing the right environment is an extremely difficult task. And how often did these coders interact with the customers? If you were designing something from scratch in a startup funded by venture capital, you probably had a lot of freedom to develop things without regard to customer demands. But where did your VCs get their money? What happens when the startup capital runs out?
I was actually the only coder in that environment that had no interest in it.
If you think managers are overpaid and have it easy, then why not become one of them? You say you have "no interest" in it, and that's fine, but why do you begrudge those who do?
As for management being stressful, coding is also stressful. So is pretty much any job that you have to grind 8 hours a day at.
Stress levels are relative. One aspect of a manager's job is to insulate the technical people from the more stressful aspects of the business environment, so that they can just "get the job done". I have seen many decent coders get extremely stressed out when working with customers, because the coders speak one language and the customers speak a totally different one.
Management is an overpaid position because of hierarchical thinking and the buddy-buddy system
If you can do it better, why don't you? We come again to you are not interested in doing it, yet you think you can do better, or at the very least you think someone else is doing it wrong.
For top-level CEOs, a lot of that is rockstar thinking.
If you have a business idea but no capital, how do you acquire the capital? People look on CEOs with envy and ire, but honestly a "rockstar" CEO is no different from an entertainer or professional sports player. One of the jobs of CEOs, as the public face of the company, is to convince people with money to part with it. Your contribution to the company is important, but is it essential, i.e. does the company cease to exist if you stop participating? If the answer is no, then frankly your contribution is worth less than the CEO who is keeping the company funded. How much less is entirely subjective.
Again, if you think you have a better solution, put it into practice.
If you divided the United States into 50 states of equal area and population, they would each be larger and more populous than Denmark. The U.S. economy produces more output in a week than the Danish economy does in a year. What the Danes have may be working for them, but what about other EU countries like Greece?
Actually, the job is vastly underpaid even though most people who hold it are indeed overpaid. Let me explain.
You are a technical person, I presume, but if not, just assume it as a hypothetical. You can make, say, $80k/year as an experienced technical worker for an established business. As a low-level manager, you could make say $100k/year. But management is stressful, because it requires understanding and coordinating not only the task at hand, but also the people doing it and the customer who demands it, and then doing all of this within the time and budget constraints given. So the extra stress is not worth 25% more to you. But for someone whose job opportunities consist of managerial and administrative work, a manager's salary might be a 200% raise. To that person, the added stress is absolutely worth it, and since the only explicit requirements for the job are some vague understanding of the business, coupled with basic literacy and communication skills, they're "qualified" to do it.
The demand for management far exceeds the supply of competent people willing to do it. But there are plenty of incompetent people willing to do it, such that in fact there is an apparent glut in the supply of managers.
You have masterfully identified correlation, without a hint of establishing causation.
Detroit's affluence came about because of the voracious demand for automobiles by the rest of the nation. It was this nearly insatiable demand that led to the rapid growth of the automobile industry, and with rapid growth comes excess. Unionization of auto workers began because the workers felt they weren't getting a big enough piece of that pie, and at the time there was indeed plenty to go around. The key point, however, is that the wealth came before the unions did.
As the market became saturated, the crunch began to set in. Detroit was already having financial crises in the 1950s and 1960s. The unions basically mortgaged their current wages on the future of their industry. In so doing, they set it up for inevitable failure. The death blow came in the 1970s and 1980s when foreign auto makers, primarily Japanese, were selling better quality automobiles for a fraction of the price of their American counterparts.
Protectionist policies blunted some of the effect of this economic upheaval at the expense of other industries, but even so the Japanese started producing automobiles domestically in the late 80s and early 90s, and continued to eat Detroit's lunch. At this point, cars were a mature industry, and the union wages which were predicated upon perpetual economic growth were not sustainable.
Indeed, the slow break up of unions is correlated with negative economic changes. But once again, the wealth began to disappear before the unions did. The government only exacerbated this problem by maintaining high tax rates, which under rapid growth were affordable, but under stagnation became onerous. People left in droves, and those who remained had little money to tax.
Finally, the standard of living in the United States is at an all time high. Even Detroit, a city that by any reasonable economic assessment should have been a complete and total wasteland by the end of the 80s, has limped along thanks to the nearly unfathomable explosion of wealth in other parts of the country. Hell, there are still auto workers making good wages, especially for being in such a mature and automated industry, but most of them are not in Detroit any more.
Detroit's government and the auto workers' unions killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The city's recent bankruptcy, predicated largely by the government's inability to pay ex-workers' pensions, ought to stand as a clear monument to the folly of spreading today's wealth around at the expense of tomorrow's.
So-called worker's "rights" come at the expense of non-workers, a group that grows larger with every privilege extended to workers. American unions by and large have a rightly deserved reputation for ensuring that as little work as possible gets done by the largest group of people as possible. It should come as no surprise that workers themselves have largely rejected unionization, because there are plenty of examples of the consequences (Detroit). I know nothing of European unions, so perhaps they add more value than they remove, but the opposite is definitely true of their American "counterparts".
Eventually companies realize they will lose their consumers when they don't even give them enough money to buy the very things they produce.
While that is true, in some sense, it must also be counterbalanced against the fact that paying workers more for its own sake has the effect of raising prices, which negates any of the benefit. Moreover, the absolute minimum wage has always been and will always be $0, so wage and price inflation inherently creates, rather than reduces, income inequality.
Plus there is this huge Anti Union movement going on now a days.
Once upon a time, the value created by the manufacture of many products far exceeded the labor costs to produce them. Many workers felt they were not receiving a sizable enough share of that value, so they formed unions and used the government (NLRA) to force the companies to pay them more. This did have knock-on effects on unemployment and labor force participation, but those were largely ignored. Even so, again, the value created generally exceeded the labor costs. However, goods that were once novel became commonplace, and inevitable improvements in manufacturing techniques shifted the supply and demand curves. Most unionized companies could no longer afford the wages they were forced to pay. Some folded, some survived despite massive layoffs, and some others were bailed out by the government, their ultimate fate still to be decided.
Essentially, unionization was taking a mortgage against the future economy. This was foolish from the start, but for a long time it was affordable, as long as everyone was willing to ignore the side effects. However, not all business owners are keen to repeat this mistake.
Not sure why exactly i guess most people like to be door mats or something.
Large scale unionization generally leads to two classes: the employed and the unemployed. Areas with lower rates of unionization tend to have lower unemployment, and moreover tend to have more labor mobility. This is not a perfect picture by any means, as there are many other factors involved, but the correlation is still there.
You sit on the board of directors of a failing corporation. Your investors are starting to sell their shares, and your bond rating was just downgraded. What do you do? The "easy" solution is to hire some well known CEO to shore up the company's image. Of course, you have to convince someone who is probably not a complete moron to lead a company that's headed the way of the Hindenburg. So you offer a ridiculously generous compensation package, meant not only to convince the person to take the job in the first place, but also to cover for any loss of reputation he or she might suffer from being associated with a failing enterprise. So what seems like the rape and pillage of a worker's paradise is actually a last ditch effort to keep everybody from losing their jobs, workers and management included. Of course, this strategy rarely succeeds in the long term, but it does keep the corporation limping along a little while longer.
Everyone derides management, but few people are competent at the task, and fewer still want to do it. It ought to come as no surprise that most managers are incompetent. People see only what they let themselves see, and "workers" are no different from "management" in this aspect.
The Venezuelan government has been looking for toilet paper "hoarders", confiscating their toilet paper, and throwing them in jail.
The reason it did this was because the production of paper through capitalistic means did not work...
The paper factories could not make paper profitably (in a country that is half forest!) because the Venezuelan government has undertaken fiscal and monetary policies that have destroyed the value of the bolivar.
In practice there are a whole lot of reason for this "shitty" crisis
Just the one, actually.
but anyway a "socialist or communist" regime does not rule out private ownership or "better compensation for good work"....
True communism does. Private ownership is adverse possession to the collective interest, and variable compensation creates class inequality.
Nonsense. No socialist/communist government has ever completely banned private property. Socialism only refers to government ownership of the means of production.
Venezuela, toilet paper. How is toilet paper, an end product, part of the "means of production"?
For all his wealth, an Egyptian Pharaoh could not buy a television set or a cell phone. Yet such modern luxuries are ubiquitous among "rich" and "poor" alike in the developed world. Where did they get it from? Who had to lose so that they could benefit?
There are basically two kinds of poor people, permanent and temporary. The permanent poor are the kind you describe, who are unable or unwilling to create enough value to justify a wage. The temporary poor, on the other hand, are those who are able and willing to do so, but for whatever reason are momentarily lacking for economic means. Paying anyone more than the value they create has a cost, which must be paid by everyone else. The people hardest hit by the imposition of this cost are the temporary poor, because they are least able to afford it. And so what happens is that people who would otherwise spend only a small part of their lives poor end up spending most if not all of their lives poor. The end result is that there are no temporary poor, only permanent poor, and their number increases until the whole system can no longer be sustained.
Before there were effective bunker busters and drones that kill dozens at a time, there was carpet bombing that killed thousands at a time. Those inclined to do violence for whatever reason will find a way to do so. The engineer who designs a better weapon is making it possible for fewer people to die in the process.
Having said that, in case it seems like I'm not making a point, you can control how you vote and how you spend your time. Vote in the manner the best reflects your interests and spend your time convincing others to do the same.
If you know that a politician doesn't represent your interests, don't vote for him just because he promises you a unicorn. "Getting money out of politics" is one of those mythical beasts; nobody who likes taking bribes is going to make bribery more difficult unless it benefits him in some way. Moreover, attempting to control other people's votes by restricting who can talk to them and how is essentially saying: "I know better than you, and so you're going to do it my way." That statement will definitely come back to haunt you, and it might not even take until the next election.
Were you surprised? Your individual vote only matters insofar as it represents a segment of the voting population that is large enough to affect the outcome of the election. In isolation, it is only 1/N and N is in the thousands or millions. If you want to create organizations for the purpose of coordinating your vote with those of like-minded people, or to spread the ideas you believe are best for your locality/state/country so that more people vote with you, then by all means I encourage you to do so. But everyone else has that right, too. Money is not some evil force; it is just an abstraction of value, and such value is completely subjective. If someone else wants to make a decision based upon flashy ads and empty words, who are you to question their judgment? That's the thing about democracy: assuming it exists, what you end up with is the least-objectionable outcome, which is typically sub-optimal for most people.
What, praytell, is the "importance of class"? All of their "class" didn't save the Roman patricians from the hordes of Goths and Vandals. What is class, anyway? A "classless" communist state with its dear leader and vanguard party is indistinguishable from an aristocracy. Human societies are inherently stratified. The only thing you can change is the way people advance through the strata, and even then only to an extent. There will always be people with more than you and people with less. Stop being jealous of the people with more and stop pretending to care about the people with less.
Slashdot Mirror
That point is neither here nor there. Organized crime exists everywhere. In the U.S., for example, we call our mafia families "DEA", "FBI", and "ATF".
There are many ways in which we could look at the U.S. versus Denmark as an unfair comparison.
But I'm going to set that aside for the moment, because I've done some reading about Denmark. From what I can tell, unions in Denmark share little in common with unions in the United States besides the name. They sound like mutual societies for working people, not government sponsored extortion rackets. Also, apparently doing business in Denmark is not an onerous exercise in ass-covering like it is in the United States, and trade restrictions are minimal.
So let's come back to examining what makes the U.S. and Denmark different, because Denmark sounds like it is doing a lot of things right. First and foremost, the U.S. is a federal republic, not a unitary state like Denmark. In this way, Denmark is truly closer to a state than the U.S. as a whole. However, thanks to our particular brand of social and economic "reformers", the national government has a massive economic regulatory apparatus which would stand squarely in the way of doing anything approaching what Denmark has done. In our case, the best we can do is so-called "right to work" laws which simply curtail the ridiculous power granted to unions under national legislation, and even then this task is accomplished by restricting the ability of employers and employees to negotiate. Add to that onerous and complex taxes and regulations, and you can pretty much guarantee that nothing like what Denmark has done is possible here.
But I would absolutely be on the bandwagon for scaling all of that unconstitutional economic interference back, if it meant we could end up with a state or three like Denmark.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that some businesses cannot afford those highly paid union workers. I don't know if any attempts at labor negotiations have been made, and how the sides have behaved during those negations, so I can't speak to the behavior of the unions or the business people. But I know that when I see a surge in the "low-income sector", Occam's Razor tells me it's because the "high-income sector" is untenable.
I will accept your anecdotes over my generalizations, but they don't really change my point. So you've known a lot of coders who would make great managers, that's wonderful. But you're not one of them.
Because I have no interest, and it isn't something I would be good at. That doesn't mean it's an amazingly hard job that so few can do.
The entire point of my rejoinder to you is that you don't get to make both statements. The value of a job you are absolutely unwilling to do is essentially infinite from your perspective. For someone else, it is finite. The best you can do is thank the other person for accepting a sum immeasurably less than you would to do the job.
Except that lots of startup companies have made it without rockstar CEOs, so your position is a myth.
One path does not refute the other. If you don't need to raise capital by convincing uninformed people who have money to spare, then good on you. Many enterprises don't have that luxury.
I'm not going to criticize the German experience with unions, as I know nothing about it. Perhaps, as with Denmark as mentioned by someone else, Germany has found a reasonable balance between free enterprise and organized labor. I question the sustainability of the model, but I'll at least accept that it's more or less working right now and has worked for a while, in those countries.
However, I have to take issue with the notion of "anti-unionist forces". Have there been changes to German labor law that restrict union activity? If so, what were those changes, and what "anti-unionist forces" brought them about?
The biggest problem we had as we grew was that many of these coders were burned out on coding and would rather have done management. Any of them would have been competent managers
Why? Because they were competent coders? That says nothing about their ability to manage people. People are not like computers; they are irrational, stubborn, and at times outright brilliant. Culturing the right environment is an extremely difficult task. And how often did these coders interact with the customers? If you were designing something from scratch in a startup funded by venture capital, you probably had a lot of freedom to develop things without regard to customer demands. But where did your VCs get their money? What happens when the startup capital runs out?
I was actually the only coder in that environment that had no interest in it.
If you think managers are overpaid and have it easy, then why not become one of them? You say you have "no interest" in it, and that's fine, but why do you begrudge those who do?
As for management being stressful, coding is also stressful. So is pretty much any job that you have to grind 8 hours a day at.
Stress levels are relative. One aspect of a manager's job is to insulate the technical people from the more stressful aspects of the business environment, so that they can just "get the job done". I have seen many decent coders get extremely stressed out when working with customers, because the coders speak one language and the customers speak a totally different one.
Management is an overpaid position because of hierarchical thinking and the buddy-buddy system
If you can do it better, why don't you? We come again to you are not interested in doing it, yet you think you can do better, or at the very least you think someone else is doing it wrong.
For top-level CEOs, a lot of that is rockstar thinking.
If you have a business idea but no capital, how do you acquire the capital? People look on CEOs with envy and ire, but honestly a "rockstar" CEO is no different from an entertainer or professional sports player. One of the jobs of CEOs, as the public face of the company, is to convince people with money to part with it. Your contribution to the company is important, but is it essential, i.e. does the company cease to exist if you stop participating? If the answer is no, then frankly your contribution is worth less than the CEO who is keeping the company funded. How much less is entirely subjective.
Again, if you think you have a better solution, put it into practice.
If you divided the United States into 50 states of equal area and population, they would each be larger and more populous than Denmark. The U.S. economy produces more output in a week than the Danish economy does in a year. What the Danes have may be working for them, but what about other EU countries like Greece?
Actually, the job is vastly underpaid even though most people who hold it are indeed overpaid. Let me explain.
You are a technical person, I presume, but if not, just assume it as a hypothetical. You can make, say, $80k/year as an experienced technical worker for an established business. As a low-level manager, you could make say $100k/year. But management is stressful, because it requires understanding and coordinating not only the task at hand, but also the people doing it and the customer who demands it, and then doing all of this within the time and budget constraints given. So the extra stress is not worth 25% more to you. But for someone whose job opportunities consist of managerial and administrative work, a manager's salary might be a 200% raise. To that person, the added stress is absolutely worth it, and since the only explicit requirements for the job are some vague understanding of the business, coupled with basic literacy and communication skills, they're "qualified" to do it.
The demand for management far exceeds the supply of competent people willing to do it. But there are plenty of incompetent people willing to do it, such that in fact there is an apparent glut in the supply of managers.
You have masterfully identified correlation, without a hint of establishing causation.
Detroit's affluence came about because of the voracious demand for automobiles by the rest of the nation. It was this nearly insatiable demand that led to the rapid growth of the automobile industry, and with rapid growth comes excess. Unionization of auto workers began because the workers felt they weren't getting a big enough piece of that pie, and at the time there was indeed plenty to go around. The key point, however, is that the wealth came before the unions did.
As the market became saturated, the crunch began to set in. Detroit was already having financial crises in the 1950s and 1960s. The unions basically mortgaged their current wages on the future of their industry. In so doing, they set it up for inevitable failure. The death blow came in the 1970s and 1980s when foreign auto makers, primarily Japanese, were selling better quality automobiles for a fraction of the price of their American counterparts.
Protectionist policies blunted some of the effect of this economic upheaval at the expense of other industries, but even so the Japanese started producing automobiles domestically in the late 80s and early 90s, and continued to eat Detroit's lunch. At this point, cars were a mature industry, and the union wages which were predicated upon perpetual economic growth were not sustainable.
Indeed, the slow break up of unions is correlated with negative economic changes. But once again, the wealth began to disappear before the unions did. The government only exacerbated this problem by maintaining high tax rates, which under rapid growth were affordable, but under stagnation became onerous. People left in droves, and those who remained had little money to tax.
Finally, the standard of living in the United States is at an all time high. Even Detroit, a city that by any reasonable economic assessment should have been a complete and total wasteland by the end of the 80s, has limped along thanks to the nearly unfathomable explosion of wealth in other parts of the country. Hell, there are still auto workers making good wages, especially for being in such a mature and automated industry, but most of them are not in Detroit any more.
Detroit's government and the auto workers' unions killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The city's recent bankruptcy, predicated largely by the government's inability to pay ex-workers' pensions, ought to stand as a clear monument to the folly of spreading today's wealth around at the expense of tomorrow's.
So-called worker's "rights" come at the expense of non-workers, a group that grows larger with every privilege extended to workers. American unions by and large have a rightly deserved reputation for ensuring that as little work as possible gets done by the largest group of people as possible. It should come as no surprise that workers themselves have largely rejected unionization, because there are plenty of examples of the consequences (Detroit). I know nothing of European unions, so perhaps they add more value than they remove, but the opposite is definitely true of their American "counterparts".
Eventually companies realize they will lose their consumers when they don't even give them enough money to buy the very things they produce.
While that is true, in some sense, it must also be counterbalanced against the fact that paying workers more for its own sake has the effect of raising prices, which negates any of the benefit. Moreover, the absolute minimum wage has always been and will always be $0, so wage and price inflation inherently creates, rather than reduces, income inequality.
Plus there is this huge Anti Union movement going on now a days.
Once upon a time, the value created by the manufacture of many products far exceeded the labor costs to produce them. Many workers felt they were not receiving a sizable enough share of that value, so they formed unions and used the government (NLRA) to force the companies to pay them more. This did have knock-on effects on unemployment and labor force participation, but those were largely ignored. Even so, again, the value created generally exceeded the labor costs. However, goods that were once novel became commonplace, and inevitable improvements in manufacturing techniques shifted the supply and demand curves. Most unionized companies could no longer afford the wages they were forced to pay. Some folded, some survived despite massive layoffs, and some others were bailed out by the government, their ultimate fate still to be decided.
Essentially, unionization was taking a mortgage against the future economy. This was foolish from the start, but for a long time it was affordable, as long as everyone was willing to ignore the side effects. However, not all business owners are keen to repeat this mistake.
Not sure why exactly i guess most people like to be door mats or something.
Large scale unionization generally leads to two classes: the employed and the unemployed. Areas with lower rates of unionization tend to have lower unemployment, and moreover tend to have more labor mobility. This is not a perfect picture by any means, as there are many other factors involved, but the correlation is still there.
You sit on the board of directors of a failing corporation. Your investors are starting to sell their shares, and your bond rating was just downgraded. What do you do? The "easy" solution is to hire some well known CEO to shore up the company's image. Of course, you have to convince someone who is probably not a complete moron to lead a company that's headed the way of the Hindenburg. So you offer a ridiculously generous compensation package, meant not only to convince the person to take the job in the first place, but also to cover for any loss of reputation he or she might suffer from being associated with a failing enterprise. So what seems like the rape and pillage of a worker's paradise is actually a last ditch effort to keep everybody from losing their jobs, workers and management included. Of course, this strategy rarely succeeds in the long term, but it does keep the corporation limping along a little while longer.
Everyone derides management, but few people are competent at the task, and fewer still want to do it. It ought to come as no surprise that most managers are incompetent. People see only what they let themselves see, and "workers" are no different from "management" in this aspect.
Venezuela has not banned toilet paper ownership
The Venezuelan government has been looking for toilet paper "hoarders", confiscating their toilet paper, and throwing them in jail.
The reason it did this was because the production of paper through capitalistic means did not work...
The paper factories could not make paper profitably (in a country that is half forest!) because the Venezuelan government has undertaken fiscal and monetary policies that have destroyed the value of the bolivar.
In practice there are a whole lot of reason for this "shitty" crisis
Just the one, actually.
but anyway a "socialist or communist" regime does not rule out private ownership or "better compensation for good work"....
True communism does. Private ownership is adverse possession to the collective interest, and variable compensation creates class inequality.
Completely ineffective?
Nonsense. No socialist/communist government has ever completely banned private property. Socialism only refers to government ownership of the means of production.
Venezuela, toilet paper. How is toilet paper, an end product, part of the "means of production"?
If that were true, then we would still be climbing out of the caves and learning to make fire. Humans innovate, adapt, and overcome, machines do not.
Ask yourself this: What was the quality of life for black people in the US right after they were emancipated?
Often worse than when they were slaves. Yet that does not make slavery just, nor its abolition unjust.
For all his wealth, an Egyptian Pharaoh could not buy a television set or a cell phone. Yet such modern luxuries are ubiquitous among "rich" and "poor" alike in the developed world. Where did they get it from? Who had to lose so that they could benefit?
Wealth is not a zero-sum game.
There are basically two kinds of poor people, permanent and temporary. The permanent poor are the kind you describe, who are unable or unwilling to create enough value to justify a wage. The temporary poor, on the other hand, are those who are able and willing to do so, but for whatever reason are momentarily lacking for economic means. Paying anyone more than the value they create has a cost, which must be paid by everyone else. The people hardest hit by the imposition of this cost are the temporary poor, because they are least able to afford it. And so what happens is that people who would otherwise spend only a small part of their lives poor end up spending most if not all of their lives poor. The end result is that there are no temporary poor, only permanent poor, and their number increases until the whole system can no longer be sustained.
Engineers are not fungible.
Before there were effective bunker busters and drones that kill dozens at a time, there was carpet bombing that killed thousands at a time. Those inclined to do violence for whatever reason will find a way to do so. The engineer who designs a better weapon is making it possible for fewer people to die in the process.
Did the engineer who invented the weapon cause harm, or did the person using it?
Having said that, in case it seems like I'm not making a point, you can control how you vote and how you spend your time. Vote in the manner the best reflects your interests and spend your time convincing others to do the same.
If you know that a politician doesn't represent your interests, don't vote for him just because he promises you a unicorn. "Getting money out of politics" is one of those mythical beasts; nobody who likes taking bribes is going to make bribery more difficult unless it benefits him in some way. Moreover, attempting to control other people's votes by restricting who can talk to them and how is essentially saying: "I know better than you, and so you're going to do it my way." That statement will definitely come back to haunt you, and it might not even take until the next election.
Were you surprised? Your individual vote only matters insofar as it represents a segment of the voting population that is large enough to affect the outcome of the election. In isolation, it is only 1/N and N is in the thousands or millions. If you want to create organizations for the purpose of coordinating your vote with those of like-minded people, or to spread the ideas you believe are best for your locality/state/country so that more people vote with you, then by all means I encourage you to do so. But everyone else has that right, too. Money is not some evil force; it is just an abstraction of value, and such value is completely subjective. If someone else wants to make a decision based upon flashy ads and empty words, who are you to question their judgment? That's the thing about democracy: assuming it exists, what you end up with is the least-objectionable outcome, which is typically sub-optimal for most people.
What, praytell, is the "importance of class"? All of their "class" didn't save the Roman patricians from the hordes of Goths and Vandals. What is class, anyway? A "classless" communist state with its dear leader and vanguard party is indistinguishable from an aristocracy. Human societies are inherently stratified. The only thing you can change is the way people advance through the strata, and even then only to an extent. There will always be people with more than you and people with less. Stop being jealous of the people with more and stop pretending to care about the people with less.