You have the choice to leave and find another work, you can aspire to get more money and scale the salary ladder by performance and/or getting more academic achievements and eventually you are also allowed to start a business and eventually employ other people. Is really far from slavery as long the enomy works at least halfassedy.
My thoughts on this are the same as your reaction to any positive take on socialism.
To me, this is an unrealistic romantic depiction of capitalism that doesn't match up with 90% of the population's lived reality.
And if you want to talk about strawmen you will hard pressed to find anyone who will defend rent seeking.
If it's a strawman to suggest that defending capitalism means defending an extremely prominent capitalist practice, then what the hell does that say about capitalism? And it's not like your claims about socialism, where the behaviors of associated historical figures that you point to have nothing to do with the ideology. Rent-seeking is maybe not an explicit goal of capitalist ideology, but a completely unavoidable outcome. The core of capitalist ideology is the game of leveraging property for more property in the most efficient manner possible, and there's no other behavior more in tune with that game.
"Profiting off of laborers" on the other hand, is a very ideological way of perceiving the labor market.
Yet what you go on to describe is exactly this, with the generous caveat that it's actually a good thing because rich people do things poor people can't.
Organizing a productive enterprise and contributing the capital required to actually start it are of paramount importance. Do you actually believe that executives just sit around doing nothing but collecting a check? Or that shareholders don't contribute anything of value to enterprise? Organizations, especially large organizations, need to be managed, or they will collapse into a mess of confusion, infighting, and factionalism, and drag the livelihoods of who knows how many people along with them. Managing large organizations effectively and making good choices for them going forward is an uncommon skill. Shareholders, large shareholders anyway, usually do take part in the management process. But even if they don't they still provide both funding for the organization (through investment) and they keep the organization on task - being a productive enterprise - instead of making room for entryists, or people who want to use the organization's resources for whatever their pet project or cause may be. Nobody is forcing you to work for anybody either, unlike what happened in the "'owned' by the workers and managed for them by the state" model of socialism that set the standard for the model in practice you are perfectly free to set out to make your own living. There's no guarantee you'll succeed of course, but there was no guarantee anyone else would either. If you haven't got any useful skills, haven't got any idea how to run a business, and haven't got an actual plan you will almost certainly fail, but nobody is stopping you from doing that, either! Just don't expect anyone else to pitch in to fund it for you.
Please. And you accused my speech of being too ideological to parse. Good grief.
I've been in the workforce for 15 years, and the last 4 years in low level management at a mid-size company. My experience so far has been that the world continues to function as much as it does only because bottom level workers explicitly neglect the orders of clueless executives at every opportunity. Because our company isn't that large, I've been privy to high level management and business decisions, and executive conference calls. I can verify pretty confidently that their world is a mess of neurotic confusion and circle jerking.
The only reason they persist is because they inherited all the cards. They use them to collectively conspire to ensure they hold all the bargaining power in labor agreements. Kinda hard to strike out on your own and try to compete with the people who dictate the terms of your daily existence. Not to mention the basic contradiction in stating that contributing capital is of paramount importance to the founding of an enterprise to legitimize rich executives, but then turn around in the same paragraph and suggest that anyone can do it (of course "there's no guarantee you'll succeed" *insert mustache twirl and evil cackling*).
"Nobody is forcing you to work for anybody" indeed......... nevermind that being homeless is literally against the law in many places, specifically because homeless people are inconvenient to capitalism. But yeah, sure. I can just stop and try to start my own business tomorrow with zero resources and certainly fail and suffer horribly as a consequence, but at least we can say that technically nobody's forcing me to work for anybody, right? Just that doing anything else from the position of someone who didn't inherit a bunch of wealth and connections is a really bad idea, but totally not the same as being forced.
For all that though the actual central thrust of socialism, 'worker ownership,' is not objectionable to me at all. There's no ideological reason things like co-ops, or stock options for employees, or profit sharing compensation schemes shouldn't exist.
But they're vanishingly rare because they're inconvenient to social control of the upper class, or require favoring generosity over profit and competition.
I will never, ever trust socialists with power though, because they are inseparably linked for both historical and practical reasons to a lot of other, far more terrible ideas. Marxism, class warfare, atheism, internationalism, violent "redistribution," liquidation of inconvenient peoples, political groups, and social classes, and political repression are all part and parcel, in whole or in part; and in the modern era we can add mass migration, overt anti-white rhetoric, and cancerous sexual politics to the list as well.
Marxism - what?
Class Warfare - Only bad when the lower classes fight back, right?
Atheism - what?
Internationalism - what?
Violent "redistribution" - You mean like what capitalists do to indigenous people?
Liquidation of inconvenient peoples - Happens under capitalism, except when the circumstances are ripe for slavery instead
^ Political Groups - Happens under capitalism
^ Social Classes - See class warfare/slavery
Political repression - Happens under capitalism
Mass migration - Happens under/because of capitalism
Overt anti-white rhetoric - what?
Cancerous sexual politics - Happens so very much under capitalism
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