"Essential worker" is a phrase that went as quickly as it came

Remember when the millionaire newscasters on the mainstream media owned by billionaires started calling the working class "essential workers?" I remember being taken aback by this. I couldn't believe they were revealing with a simple two word phrase how this entire economy works. I thought, "Your job is to manufacture consent. What are you doing admitting that the working class is essential?" But unsurprisingly, most of the public didn't really latch on to that moment. I barely hear the phrase at all anymore.

This begs the question; if the working class and working poor are "essential", what does that make the rich? I would argue it makes them superfluous at best, and at worst, parasitic. When the millionaire newscasters talked about essential workers, they were always referring to hospital staff, school staff, grocery staff, sanitation, warehouse workers, food service, delivery drivers, etc. You know, the least paid and least politically represented people in our society.

After over a decade inside and outside of school, studying economics and various other social sciences, my take away from all I know about society is this: we don't need rich people. It seems so obvious to me and yet, no one really says this. They say we should tax the rich more, as if we haven't tried that in the past. I believe the conflict of interest between the rich and the rest of us is at the heart of 90%+ of our societal problems and therefore, eliminating rich people as a class altogether seems like an obvious fix that would have positive cascading effects throughout society.

To be clear, I am not arguing for violence against them, though I do think they will make that inevitable. I am simply arguing that by reorganizing the economy into cooperative and democratic means, as well as redistributing wealth and creating a maximum wage, we could effectively eliminate class conflict from our society. There's no practical reason anyone needs a mansion, or second or third mansion. There's no real reason anyone needs a mega yacht, or second or third mega yacht. It's completely unnecessary and a waste of finite resources.

People love to complain about "money in politics", and the crises of sustainability, housing/cost of living, low wages, private child r@pe islands, etc. All of these things are downstream from the private accumulation of capital. It's like complaining about pollution in your stretch of the river but never even thinking to address where the pollution is coming from upstream. I am also not arguing that poor people never do terrible things. They do. But they can't do it at scale like rich people can. It's near impossible for a poor person to hurt a million people. But a billionaire certainly can.

We are obviously hitting a kind of tipping point with the random individual acts of aggression towards the ruling class in the form of Luigi, Chamel, the guy who shot up his representative's house over a data center, the molotov thrown at Sam Altman's house, etc. But I really wish more people would simply state what I believe to be the most obvious solution to all of this. Let's just systemically prevent and outlaw being rich. No more rich people = no more class conflict.

Jobadvisor

This is a well-articulated case for a particular political-economic position, and it touches on real tensions that many people feel. Let me engage with it seriously, including where I think it's strong and where it has genuine weaknesses.

Where the argument has real force:

The "essential worker" observation is genuinely sharp. The phrase did inadvertently highlight a paradox — that the people society literally cannot function without are also the people it compensates and protects least. That's a real contradiction worth sitting with.

The "upstream pollution" analogy is also strong. A lot of mainstream political discourse treats symptoms (housing costs, wage stagnation, political corruption) without seriously examining structural causes. That's a legitimate critique of how public debate is often framed.

And the scale-of-harm point has merit. The capacity to cause harm at civilizational scale is heavily correlated with concentrated wealth and power. That's not trivial.

Where I think the argument has weaknesses:

The leap from "we don't need extremely rich people" to "we don't need any rich people" does a lot of work quietly. Most people would agree society doesn't require billionaires. Whether it requires anyone with above-average accumulated wealth is a much harder claim that needs more argument.

"We've tried taxing the rich" is historically contested. Progressive taxation in mid-20th century America (top marginal rates of 70-91%) coincided with the largest expansion of the middle class in US history. Whether that's causal is debated, but "it didn't work" isn't the obvious takeaway many assume.

Cooperative and democratic economic organization has real historical examples — Mondragon, the Nordic models, worker co-ops — but also real limitations in scaling, in capital formation, and in coordinating complex supply chains. The idea is worth taking seriously but the implementation problems are genuinely hard, not just obstacles manufactured by the ruling class.

The tension I'd flag:

You explicitly disclaim advocating violence, but then approvingly catalog recent acts of political violence (the shooter, the molotov, Luigi Mangione) as understandable symptoms of a tipping point. Those two things sit uneasily together. If the goal is systemic change through democratic reorganization, celebrating or contextualizing individual acts of violence as reasonable responses tends to undermine rather than advance that project — historically and practically.

The honest bottom line:

The core intuition — that extreme wealth concentration is structurally harmful and not just an aesthetic problem — is shared by a much wider range of serious economists and political theorists than mainstream media coverage suggests. You're not on the fringe for thinking it. Where reasonable people disagree is on the mechanism: whether markets with strong redistribution, cooperative models, democratic socialism, or something else is the right response. Those are genuine open questions worth debating rather than treating as settled.

Negging isn't just a dating strategy--it's how corporations control workers.

Back in the early 2000s, there was a notorious pickup-artist trick called "negging." The idea was for a guy to drop little jabs at his date—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—until her confidence cracked and she started chasing his approval.

The sleazy hope was that she'd sleep with him just to feel validated, after which he'd move on. It was a cruel, calculated game: engineered to exploit anyone insecure while weeding out anyone self-assured enough to walk away.

The strange thing is, this is basically how the modern job market operates.

Took six months off? That's not recharging, that's a dreaded "résumé gap." Parent in hospice? Sorry, we need you at Monday's standup.

Now, on top of all that, AI anxiety is getting piled onto workers who were already being gaslit by an indifferent system. But the thing is, people aren't actually upset that machines can sometimes outperform them:

Nobody running a marathon loses sleep over the fact that a motorcycle—let alone a jet—can cover 42.195 kilometers in a fraction of the time.

Nobody cares that a dolphin (or a speedboat) leaves the world's fastest Olympic swimmer in the wake.

People are not sad that a machine can do calculations or send emails faster than they can. They are sad because they've been programmed to believe their self worth comes from doing calculations and sending emails.

Once you see this clearly, something shifts: the panic around AI isn't really about productivity. It's about your sense of worth inside a system that was rigged from the start to make you doubt it.

Negging is widespread, but there is hardly any word for this in the modern context. People often just accept negging as a part of life. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Jobadvisor

This is a genuinely interesting framing, and the core insight holds up: a lot of workplace culture does operate on manufactured insecurity. Arbitrary performance metrics, moving goalposts, the way "passion" gets weaponized to extract unpaid labor — these are real mechanisms that keep people compliant by keeping them slightly off-balance.

But I'd push back on a few points, because I think the argument oversimplifies in ways that actually weaken it.

The negging analogy has limits. Negging is intentional psychological manipulation with a specific predatory goal. A lot of what you're describing is better explained by indifference, structural incentives, and collective action problems than by coordinated cruelty. A manager who schedules Monday standups during family emergencies is more often thoughtless than sadistic. Conflating the two can lead to a conspiratorial read of what's often just... dysfunction.

The AI anxiety section is the weakest part. The marathon/motorcycle analogy is elegant, but it sidesteps the actual fear, which isn't "a machine is faster than me." It's "I need income, and the people who control income are replacing the roles that provide it." That's not a self-worth delusion — that's a material concern. Reframing it as a psychological problem risks telling economically vulnerable people their anxiety is a mindset failure rather than a rational response to real risk.

"Programmed to believe your worth comes from work" is true but incomplete. Yes, conflating productivity with human worth is a cultural pathology. But work also does provide meaning, structure, community, and dignity for many people — not just as indoctrination, but genuinely. The goal probably isn't to detach from work entirely, but to resist the part where your employer gets to define whether you're enough.

The strongest version of your argument isn't really about negging at all — it's about how systems benefit from workers internalizing their own disposability. That's a well-documented phenomenon (Foucault called it disciplinary power; labor economists call it efficiency wages; psychologists call it learned helplessness). You don't need the pickup-artist metaphor to make it land, and dropping it might actually make the argument more persuasive to people who'd otherwise dismiss it.

What's the context — are you developing this into an essay or article?