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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Well, there are widely accepted definitions of such terms as ‘capital’, just not accepted here on StuporTorpor perhaps. And while you will never get more than two economists to agree on where to do lunch they do agree on their parlance. I do sympathize with the inconvenience of not agreeing with reality though, we all of us have that problem to some degree. 😉
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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^^^ Was that printed on yer package of rolling papers?
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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The worker gets what he produces and the capitalist produces what he gets.
Okay, to show the idiocy of that idea, let's see one of the "workers" in my company "produce" anything of value outside of the context of the infrastructure and intellectual property that my partners and I contributed as "capital."
Any "worker" who can do so is welcome to become our competitor.
Your "worker" idea considers labor to "produce" in a vacuum, but NO labor exists in a vacuum.
In that sense, capital logically precedes labor.
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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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" Riddle me this: how come I predicted the housing collapse when the head of the Fed, an economist I assume, said everything was hunky-dory?"
Ok, if you are such a f*#kin' genius, did you short CDO's in 2008? Oh, so you aren't a millionaire?
Lot's of people "predicted" the "housing collapse". Anyone living in California knew that gravity might exist...
Did you act on it? No? Chicken sh#t. That's why you want others to bail you out...
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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^^^ So, your argument is that "capital" is coextensional with "labor." Fine, I'll agree with that in your limited context. But even that doesn't get us to Gary's point.
Your point amounts to a comparable equivalency as apparently exists between matter and energy: Matter is just "coalesced" energy. So, I don't want to dicker about what "form" it was "really" in at the moment of the big bang, like, "What existed first, matter or energy?"
My point is that labor does not exist in a vacuum, like it has some intrinsic, objective value outside of a context of "infrastructure."
At the simplest level, investing one's labor into picking some apples from a public-domain tree gains one the possession of the apples (the "capital"). So, in that sense, "capital is just coalesced labor."
However, even that possession occurs at a net loss of labor, as it takes more calories to gain the apples than are contained in the apples (in general: 2nd law of thermodynamics). And that general principle is certainly true as soon as all of the apple trees are owned by somebody.
Once there are not enough public-domain apples to go around (which happened pretty dang early in human history!), the distinction between the haves and the have-nots emerged.
Gary's overarching point (oft-repeated in many different ways) seems to be: "The haves could ONLY have gotten what they have by abusing the have-nots." But that can be instantly disproved by a simple thought experiment outlined by Robert Nozick.
Cliff's Notes: Imagine that you could redistribute ALL capital to achieve perfect equality of distribution. Every person on Earth has exactly the same share of capital as every other person. Okay, now what? How long will that perfect distribution continue?
Answer: Not ten minutes, probably not even one! Why?
Different people have different values, desires, priorities, capabilities, talents, etc. For example, BITD, Michael Jordan might be approached by a large group of people with the following proposition: "We know that since the redistribution you have no monetary desire to play basketball anymore, but we sure loved watching you play. What if we agreed to give you annual amounts from each of us, and you organize a team around you? We'll, of course, approach other great players as well, and, hey, let's get this basketball thing fired up again."
Almost immediately, Michael Jordan is earning vastly more money than the people that are each paying to watch him play. And piles of people who COULD be out there EARNING in various ways instead PAY guys like Michael Jordan, so that they can SIT THERE watching HIM take their money! But they are not feeling ripped-off. They VALUE (to the point of paying him for it!) watching him play.
A computer programmer approaches a former professor and says, "Listen. I'm not interested in risking what I have to start a business, but if YOU will risk what YOU have to start a business, I'd love to get some pay to do some programming for you."
And it goes on and on. IMMEDIATELY we see that the supposed equality between labor and capital dissolves, because BOTH are freighted with piles of entirely other intangible values! Is Michael Jordan engaging in "labor" to PLAY the game he loves to play anyway? Well, in a very real sense: absolutely not. He negotiates a massive salary BECAUSE he detects that what he loves to do anyway has massive value to other people.
And the FACT is that various activities (most of which cannot be neatly distilled into "labor") have more or less value to more or less people. And so, a very organic and natural filtering process occurs in which "labor" of various sorts comes to have a "market value." Of course that "value" can be artificially manipulated and distorted by various forces. But almost universally the "market" itself establishes the "value" of a particular sort of "labor."
I'm not a laissez faire believer. Unchecked greed CAN factor in and must be regulated against, ACCORDING to PRINCIPLES. But one of those principles is NOT something as trite as Gary's principle, and that's because it cannot possibly be true.
If ALL you can do is climb apple trees, and somebody invents an apple-harvesting machine, well, guess what. Suddenly your "labor" is worth a LOT less on the market than it was! Suddenly, people don't NEED (and, thus, value) your skill. Suddenly people that only know how to climb apple trees are literally a "dime a dozen." The MARKET made that happen, not some "corporate greed." Time to learn new skills! Time to INVEST YOUR LABOR into learning new skills, so that you can invest SKILLED LABOR into a market that values what you then know how to do!
And, as ALWAYS, your labor will get you capital at a "reduced rate of return," because NOBODY will INVEST THEIR CAPITAL into the risks of creating infrastructure (context) for "your" job without seeing a return on THAT "labor."
If you just want a paycheck with little risk, then take a JOB. If you are willing to take risks with your "labor," then your labor now includes RISKS that are not inherent in the "labor" of the "laborer." As a "capitalist," your "labor" now has something intangible and very difficult to quantify built into it. And IT IS WORTH MORE for that very reason.
So, the "equations" that makes "labor" prior to "capital" or that make the two just "two sides of the same coin," are both mistaken, because both fail to build in the vast number of intangibles that include values, priorities, talents, risks, etc.
Finally, to the point that instantly emerges here: Well, you didn't EARN your talents, values, etc. So, it's not like you're ENTITLED to the fruits of them; you benefit from fruits you did not EARN.
Okay, then who IS "entitled" to those fruits? Some random person? Some random group of people? And WHY?
If you're looking for the universe to be FAIR, then you've come to the wrong universe! And if you try to turn the universe into a fair one, you've taken upon yourself an IMPOSSIBLE task and one that can ONLY have the result of screwing EVERYBODY up. Because then you must be totalitarian at a level that has never even been conceived by the most ruthless dictators in all of history! And even if you could, miraculously, produce perfect fairness for a brief moment in time, it would not last ONE MINUTE before the disparities of values, priorities, talents, etc. would take their toll, dividing people AGAIN up into haves and have-nots.
So, the best compromise that's ever been dreamed up is to try to "level the playing field" insofar as providing as much equal OPPORTUNITY as possible (and we're still, and will ever be perpetually, working on that!). But under NO POSSIBLE circumstances will that EVER result in equality of outcome.
Thus, equality of outcome is NO measure of success regarding equality of opportunity. None! And every attempt to make such a correlation and then "tweak" the "market" to get "closer" just plunges the market down a slippery slope that inevitably leads to more "tweaking" and more "tweaking" until, for example, you get the absurdities of our present tax code, which, guess what. The RICH then "tweak" to their own benefit DUE TO the complexity that produces loopholes and places to hide their sometimes corruption.
But, don't pit "labor" AGAINST "capital." They are NOT "two sides of the same coin." BOTH contain a vast array of intangibles leading people to WISH to have more of one or the other, and some attributes will inevitably have more or less value in different markets over time. These things cannot be manipulated in a fine-grained manner.
And don't pit "rich" AGAINST "poor." Most "rich" people didn't get there by corruption and abuse. And most "poor" people aren't there because they were abused by the corrupt. Don't make an occasional problem into the basis for "sweeping reforms" that really just mean chasing the chimera of equal OUTCOME!
In the end, if all you're skilled to do is take an order or bend a burrito, and kiosks and other machinery come along, YOU ARE IN TROUBLE! Rather than wasting your energy stumping for more money than your skill is worth, invest some of that energy into learning new skills that have more market value. INVEST in those skills. Maybe take out loans to get educated, you know, like "capitalists" take risks and loans to create businesses.
The solution to poverty is INVESTMENT rather than hand-wringing. And usually it is investment in education. Investment IS RISK. Period. No pain: no gain. If you eschew the pain of investment, then you're guaranteed the pain of poverty. And sometimes, even if you take the risks of investment, you still get the pain of poverty, because, guess what. The universe ain't fair, and there's NO fixing that!
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Nice post DMT...Elegant...Ol Johnny gonna head out the door and go peepin in the sea food store...
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Restated - it is immoral to pay a person for a day's labor if that pay is not sufficient to sustain the laborer for that day with a little left over. If the capitalist profits, so too should the worker. She should profit from her labor while in the employ of the capitalist.
I agree that everybody should profit. The problem I see in your perspective is that you seem to think that MORALLY-speaking there is an arbitrary minimum value to ALL labor. I don't see how that can be true.
Let's say that ALL a laborer can do, her ONLY skill, is picking her nose. Well, there's no market for that. That labor has NO value because it has NO market. Immediately we see that there is no arbitrary minimum value held by all labor just in virtue of being labor. The value of labor is necessarily tied to its market value.
Back to my apple-picking example. Perhaps there was a day in which an apple-picker could get paid one apple out of every ten picked (a relative pay rate of .1), let's say 100 apples per day. He could sell apples and eat apples and make a decent living that way. But as soon as a machine is invented that can get all the apples from a tree without manual labor, suddenly no apple orchard owner is going to pay the manual laborer .1 of the produce.
Sure, it costs some initial investment to purchase the machine, but then the owner can harvest apples at 100 times the per-day rate of paying the manual laborer. Now, one laborer skilled in running the machine can replace 100 manual laborers. So, the owner now pays the machine operator something like .03 of the produce instead of .1, but because the machine is so much more efficient, it means that the machine operator is getting paid much more per day (300 apples instead of 100) than the manual laborer (he is somewhat skilled, after all), and the value per day of the manual labor plummets to being no longer a "living wage." After all, nobody can live on 30 apples per day.
Now the machine operator complains: "But you are getting 100 times the number of apples per day than you were before I came along to operate your machine. I'm 100 times more productive than the manual laborer, yet you're paying me MUCH LESS relative to my productivity! Also, the industrialization of apples has deflated their value. I'm not happy with only .03 of all the apples! Pay me more, or I'll take my skill elsewhere."
The owner replies: "I've invested in the machine itself. You haven't. It takes a LOT of apples to pay off that investment before I even START netting apples. Moreover, there's upkeep on the machine, and I have to lay money aside to to replace it, because it won't last forever. If you want job-security, you necessarily expect ME to cover all these things for you. I also have to purchase pesticides, etc. that I didn't before. Now the market is so flush with apples that each apple isn't worth what it was back in the manual-picking days! So, I have to harvest a MUCH higher proportion of apples from each tree and even plant more trees just to break even, and that means that the costs of production have gone up dramatically. In short, I'm not making much more than I was back in the manual-picking days, and I've got a LOT more overhead and hassles than I did back then. So, actually, if YOU won't run the machine for the agreed-upon amount, I'll either find somebody who will, or I'll run it myself, or I'll just sell my orchard to somebody who will tear out all the apple trees and grow something more profitable."
And notice that our discussion of what's "fair" for the machine operator has totally left the discussion of what's "fair" for the manual picker in the dust! What was once a marketable skill in our example now just isn't! While the machine operator is negotiating wages, the manual laborer has NO negotiating power. And if higher wages for the machine operator causes great tension in the owner who is operating on thin margins, that owner would not negotiate higher wages AT ALL for a manual laborer who simply CANNOT pick enough apples in a day to be competitive AT ALL.
Unless, that is, if the manual laborer says, "Listen, individually I can't pick but a fraction of what the machine can. But you don't have to replace ME at cost every ten or fifteen years. You don't have to pay maintenance on ME. And if you pay 100 of us during a day, you get the same number of apples as running the machine! And, I'll work for just a bit more than the same amount I always did, let's say for .11 instead of .1, which is a net savings for you, because you gain by paying 100 of us .11 instead of 1 machine operator paid at .03, since you can then abandon the machine costs. Moreover, you'll probably see a slight net gain even over that, because we handle the apples more carefully than that machine does."
The owner replies, "That makes economic sense, if I can abandon the machine! That machine DOES cost me about 10,000 apples per day, so this approach is a small savings to me. But that proposed pay-rate is NOT paying each of you 100 manual laborers individually a 'living wage,' because the value of apples is now deflated! In fact, the 110 apples you'd get per day is more like 75 of the apples you used to get. It doesn't feel right, but I'm between a rock and a hard place. Do you really want to work for that little?"
The manual laborer replies, "I sure do. It's not like ALONE I'm going to 'make a living' for a whole family doing this. I'm taking out loans to go to school and learn a more valuable trade. Meanwhile, since this is ALL I know how to do, something is better than nothing! And I've moved into an apartment with several other guys who will also work on this crew with me, so that between all of us pitching in, we can make it until we learn other trades. I sure can't afford to start a family, but I CAN just make it while I learn to be competitive in another field."
And, just that quickly, the machine operator finds that he has LESS negotiating power, because now there is another viable alternative for the owner. But the reason that originally the manual laborer had less negotiating power was because of the machine operator. The two modes of labor are in necessary competition.
So, in this simple example, it becomes apparent that NEITHER mode of labor can establish some arbitrary minimum that their labor SHOULD (particularly in some MORAL sense) be worth. There is a symbiotic relationship between the modes of labor and the costs the orchard owner has inherent in those modes of harvesting. The value of apples themselves comes into play, establishing the upper bound of what the owner has to "work with" in determining how to bring the apples to market. And the modes of harvest themselves affect the expectations of the market, which makes the total costs to the owner a moving target.
Labor does NOT exist in a vacuum. It exists in a context provided by the market. The market is constantly adjusting its expectations! The market is constantly adjusting its "return on investment!" Thus, labor must be constantly adjusting, both in WHAT it does and in what that mode of production is WORTH.
Even what you call a "living wage" must adjust. People at the lowest end of the labor-value spectrum must adjust. Perhaps such people need to coop, living together as they work together to make their collective labor valuable enough to be competitive, just as in my example above. But when you establish an entirely arbitrary "minimum wage," ALL you really accomplish is to ensure that such labor cannot negotiate ACTUAL VALUE propositions. And the net effect of that is always to reduce the number of such jobs that will be available, as "capitalists" are then FORCED to replace such labor with other modes of production.
You're already seeing this at McDonald's, and you'll see this at an increasing rate as you raise the minimum wage. Or, you'll see what it COSTS to live increase, so that the actual purchasing power of a "living wage" goes up ONLY (at best) commensurate with the amount you increased the cost of living. And that is because the value of labor is so intimately tied to a vast array of other market forces that you cannot "adjust" it in a vacuum.
Thus, the market entirely decides within a quite narrow range what particular labor is worth.
Some labor is worth literally nothing. Some is worth very little. Those are facts. That's why labor cannot have a "minimum" without that "minimum" quickly being worth less than it was before each new "minimum" was established. Increase the "minimum," and the market will simply adjust. It must. Even in the most totalitarian nations, the black-market simply takes over due to the failings inherent in the artificial market. And when goods like PANTY-HOSE are black-market items, you KNOW that your "market" has failed (what happened in the USSR)!
There are very, very few "greedy capitalists," and that's because if you are stripping off too much profit, then it's possible for somebody else to offer what you offer more efficiently and thus at lower cost. And thus the market itself determines how much profit a "greedy capitalist" CAN make.
Where regulation needs to exist is to ensure that such market manipulations as price-fixing and "trusts" cannot exist! The reason we have anti-trust legislation is that "trusts" artificially inflate profit by disallowing the VERY competition that would enable the maximum range of profit to be tied to MARKET forces, thus artificially inflating prices while deflating the value of the requisite labor.
Thus, the MARKET, when kept genuinely competitive, itself determines the upper bound of profit, which in turn establishes the lower bound of the value of various sorts of labor. And, just as "trusts" game the system in favor of profit, "minimum wages" game the system in favor of labor.
If you game the system at all, it's definitely better to game it in favor of labor! But that's only because it is much easier for the market to correct such gaming (always, of course, by keeping the NET MINIMUM VALUE of labor pretty consistent). Minimum wage jobs can be eliminated, or entire business sectors can go away. But you cannot in a vacuum set an arbitrary minimum value on labor. You "can" do it legislatively, but in practical effect you CANNOT have the effect you're seeking. The market simply won't allow it, and the market will necessarily adjust to compensate for your arbitrary manipulation.
And then you'll complain that "The value of labor has not increased over decades, while productivity has." And thus you'll be comparing apples and giraffes, because you'll then be looking at cumulative stats that build in the NET VALUE of labor, including the necessary results of the arbitrary gaming you keep trying to accomplish.
And you're then really just seeing that the market ADJUSTS to your arbitrary gaming, and low-end labor is NOT worth more just because you SAY it is! Meanwhile, the "increased productivity" you complain about in contrast really reflects the VERY adjustments in efficiency that you in part FORCED the market to have BY gaming low-end labor.
Obviously, entire books have been written to make the points I'm trying to nutshell. So my WoT is necessarily simplified. But the overarching point is that labor does not exist in a vacuum, so its value cannot be arbitrarily established. The MORALITY of its minimum value inheres ONLY in that it is not being arbitrarily deflated by such manipulations as "trusts" and so forth.
But, for example, there are no "trusts" manipulating profits in the fast-food industry. That industry exists on a razor-thin margin. So, you can't just "fix things" for burrito-benders by setting some arbitrarily higher minimum wage. Artificially increase the wage, and you'll indeed force "increased productivity," typically in the form of more "industrialization," which will just have the effect of fewer such jobs that are even less competitive even while they are "more productive."
And the empirical reality of these principles has been studied countless times with the same results: Increase minimum wages, and you decrease the number of minimum wage jobs (among other baleful net effects).
http://www.nber.org/digest/apr98/w6111.html
And, btw, that source is rated "least biased" by numerous independent bias-rating agencies. Here's an example.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/national-bureau-of-economic-research-nber/
You CANNOT effectively increase minimum wages to some arbitrary amount. The market won't let you have the desired effect. And MORALITY has nothing to do with it as long as the market is kept genuinely competitive via such regulation as ENFORCED anti-trust.
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Gary
Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Okay, to show the idiocy of that idea, let's see one of the "workers" in my company "produce" anything of value outside of the context of the infrastructure and intellectual property that my partners and I contributed as "capital."
Okay, to show the idiocy of that idea, let's see one how much capital you produce without anybody else doing the work.
Workers have no problem producing capital. Labor is required to produce capital. How much labor can you produce?
Take away all the workers, line workers, foremen, management, from GM and let's see how much capital is produced by the major shareholders.
Again, your WOT on arbitrary value of labor is answered by the worker shall get what he produces, and the capitalist shall produce what he gets. In other words, there is no arbitrary value. You argue against a premise that no one is making. With all your fancy philosophizing I don't understand why you continue to miss the point.
Did you act on it? No? Chicken sh#t. That's why you want others to bail you out...
Nobody is bailing me out of anything. I control my own labor to the best of my abilities. As a matter of fact I did OK buying all that stock when it was deeply discounted. IIRC, however, the taxpayers did bail out the chicken sh#t capitalists.
That's how free markets work. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. And guess who the mark is: you.
Restated - it is immoral to pay a person for a day's labor if that pay is not sufficient to sustain the laborer for that day with a little left over. If the capitalist profits, so too should the worker. She should profit from her labor while in the employ of the capitalist.
Which is why Sanders introduced his Stop BEZOS bill. Not a bad idea.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a Senate bill — the "Stop BEZOS Act" — that would require large employers such as Amazon.com and Walmart to pay the government for food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their workers.
The bill's name is a dig at Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos and stands for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act.” It would establish a 100 percent tax on government benefits received by workers at companies with at least 500 employees, the former presidential candidate said Wednesday.
"In other words, the taxpayers of this country would no longer be subsidizing the wealthiest people in this country who are paying their workers inadequate wages," Sanders said at a news conference announcing the bill. "Despite low unemployment, we end up having tens of millions of Americans working at wages that are just so low that they can't adequately take care of their families."
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Not arbitrary, that is your trigger happy assumption.
As I said, the min wage per day should be high enough to sustain the worker for the that day, with a little left over. That’s room, board, clothing, transportation, etc... hardly arbitrary.
No, it IS arbitrary, and it's wishful thinking as well.
It is arbitrary because "sustain" means different things to different people. Examples....
Food -- Do you mean an austere, vegetarian diet? Do you mean a "little left over" enough to go out to eat once a week? Once a month? Do you mean NO junk food? Do you mean NO alcohol or cigarettes?
Room -- Do you mean with no roommates in a "decent" part of town? Do you mean a studio apartment or a one bedroom? Etc.
Clothing -- Do you mean minimally functional, or do you mean a pair of Nikes (oh, the irony) now and then? ANY jewelry? Manicures now and then? Makeup?
Transportation -- Do you mean the bus? Riding a bike? A "decent" car?
And you've entirely left out "communication." A cell phone? Internet? What bandwidth?
And it goes on and on and on! The "dirt poor" in the USA are WEALTHY compared to the genuinely poor in most third-world nations. So, you are OBVIOUSLY "scaling" the "minimum" to the US standard of living. But that necessarily means that it's not the MINIMUM that's possible to be "sustained."
In FACT, you want people to have a "good" life or a "decent" life, but that's FAR above "sustained." So, your "sustained" IS arbitrary.
Moreover, as I argued above, you cannot set an arbitrary minimum wage. Wherever you try to set it, the market WILL just adjust to compensate, leaving your "minimum wage" worker at exactly the same place. Oh, and with certainly fewer jobs at that level to choose from.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Okay, to show the idiocy of that idea, let's see one how much capital you produce without anybody else doing the work.
I have no idea from your statement what you think "that idea" means.
I have never claimed that capital emerges magically in a vacuum, which is what you seem to have me saying.
What I have said is that there is not an EQUATION between labor and capital. The relations between those are very subtle, complex, and build in a PILE of intangibles (such as talent and risk) that EQUATIONS always fail to contemplate. But those intangibles themselves ADD VALUE to economics that EQUATIONS cannot quantify.
Yet, it is those VERY intangibles that distinguish, for example, people that WANT to work for wages from people that invest and invent.
Workers have no problem producing capital. Labor is required to produce capital. How much labor can you produce?
Nobody is denying this. But what you've just said does not logically (nor empirically) get you your desired conclusion (which you restate just below).
Take away all the workers, line workers, foremen, management, from GM and let's see how much capital is produced by the major shareholders.
Nobody is arguing that labor is not a necessary condition for production. Nobody.
Again, your WOT on arbitrary value of labor is answered by the worker shall get what he produces, and the capitalist shall produce what he gets.
And there's the BS conclusion that does NOT follow from your above points.
In other words, there is no arbitrary value.
My point exactly. The MARKET sets value, and there is literally NO other way in which value can actually be set.
You argue against a premise that no one is making.
Pot calling kettle. Listen, in not one sentence of what I've written have I asserted that value is arbitrary. I've been arguing AGAINST the idea that you can by fiat SET a minimum wage, BECAUSE that is an arbitrary assessment of value that is decoupled from the MARKET.
When YOU assert that there is some equation between labor and capital, such that it is possible to stand-back, assess profit, productivity, and wages and JUST DECIDE what wages SHOULD be, you are actually (you clearly don't see it) establishing an ARBITRARY value for wages.
It is arbitrary because it is NOT market-driven, it builds in piles of assumptions about what "sustain" means, and it assumes a falsehood, which is that there is an EQUATION between labor and capital.
With all your fancy philosophizing I don't understand why you continue to miss the point.
With such superficial thinking, I can understand why you do.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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It is well known that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and The Bern is hellbent on paving a super-highway, especially when he starts arbitrarily defining ‘large companies’ and other stoopid sh!t. Do you think Swedish ‘large companies’ are forced onto a different playing field? I don’t honestly know but I suspect not.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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MB1....Your reply to Dingus ...that's like the reporter that asked Theolonious Monk if he liked all types of music...Monk replied yes and the reporter then tried to bait Monk by asking if he liked country western...Monk said i already answered that question...
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Bad Climber
Trad climber
The Lawless Border Regions
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Boy, MB1's been on a rippin' roll. He addressed some of my thinking re. DMT's "living wage" comment. That is one slippery concept. Some would argue that living wage = supporting a family of four. If that's the standard, you'd see the death of many, many, many businesses. If the busboy at the local Arby's has to be paid enough to support himself, a wife, and two kids, yer burger and fries would be, what? $150? I'd love to see those calculations. In San Franpsycho, that would be $650.
But the problem of wages is being compounded significantly by technology. I think this has been mentioned before, but the striving for profits and efficiency (kind of the same thing) drives companies to reduce labor/personnel, which is often the greatest expense for any given product or service. I'm currently deep into Andrew Yang's book: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, and I can't recommend it highly enough. As AI (artificial intelligence) comes on line, more and more of us, our skills, almost ANY skill, will be rendered too expensive. Elon Musk, Google, Amazon, Uber et al. are investing vast sums and super human energy into the goal of putting millions of people out of work. And if we think these legions of the unemployed can all be retrained into software engineers, we're dreaming. The Luddites weren't wrong: There was a lot less work for weavers once the power loom was developed, but for centuries since, each new wave of tech development did create more jobs. But there is a lot of evidence that the "lump of labor fallacy," as it's called, which was the operating ethos of those destroying the looms, is no longer fallacious. I highly suggest ya'llz read Yang's book. It's sobering and disturbing. I've lost a little sleep over it's revelations. I'm hoping his proscription of "minimum universal income" can work, but I haven't read that part of the book yet.
One thing for sure: One way or another, the huge accumulation of wealth in a very small number of hands is not good for society. Companies MUST do a better job at rewarding their workers. How to do that is a very difficult question.
BAd
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Trump
climber
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As far as thinking goes I like the thinking that a person should be paid a livable wage. But I think when push comes to shove, the only should that exists is that the fittest should survive, and we don’t always get to be the ones that define fittest, much as we might think that we should be.
If we can convince other people that the fittest thing for each person to do is to pay everyone a livable wage, then that’s what we’ll do. Sure, I’m with you, let’s do that - you probably more effectively than me. But we might find that other fitness constraints get in the way of our convincing other people that that’s true for them.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Capitalism succeeds only if there is a working class who is desperate enough ( there's an abundance of these people ) to work for a low wage allowing the business people to make a profit and live the american dream that the low wage workers will never realize...Excuses by the business people to justify this disparity are endless and self serving...
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Trump
climber
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Yup, those selfish genes, and their self-centered manifestations in the thinking of other people like businessmen and white people and good old always right me. I’ll show those greedy genes they’re not the boss, and I’ll start believing that the beliefs that me myself and I believe are wrong! Wish me luck.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Oct 11, 2018 - 06:59pm PT
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When the Mammoth Vons brow beat the local union , most of the long time union employees bailed...Vons instituted a lower paid tier which at the time was barely higher than the minimum wage...Many of those positions were filled with undocumented workers who were using social services to supplement their meager wages...Now Vons has a employee retention problem creating a high turn over of employees and lousy customer service.... a result of weakening the union and paying lower wages ....What's the old saying...? You get what you pay for...?
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Oct 11, 2018 - 08:09pm PT
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Dingus.. Yeah i shop there....It's the only game in town....A grocery outlet is being built...
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Oct 11, 2018 - 09:14pm PT
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There is an organic store but it's a bit pricey with a limited selection...I go there when the weekend vons riots are goin down...
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