"Brothers, you asked for it."
Brad Aisa
>When a businessman asks for lower taxes and less regulation, what is he
>really saying? He's saying,"I'm too stupid and lazy to make money in this
>environment and I need the government to make my life easier. Last year I
>make 10 million and only got to keep 5 million; society owes me more!"
To all modern businessmen who refuse to challenge the status quo, and who
refuse to check their premises, about all I can say, in the context of
reposting the above comment is, "Brothers, you asked for it."
--
Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Giovanni 8
> When a businessman asks for lower taxes and less regulation,
> what is he really saying? He's saying,"I'm too stupid and lazy
> to make money in this environment and I need the government to
> make my life easier. Last year I make 10 million and only got
> to keep 5 million; society owes me more!"
It's not that "society owes him". It's that the government has
stolen from him that value which he had been smart and ambitious
enough to create. If he did not object, he would be guilty of
encouraging his own destroyers.
=== ==============
jgo "Valid FSU Card" is an oxymoron. Batman Forever
ot...@fsu.edu http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~otto Triumphant
Danny Low
: He didn't create the wealth or value -- those who worked for and
: with him did. So at the very least, he should share it with them.
He did create the wealth. Those who worked for him only assisted him
to create the wealth. He is sharing the wealth. He is paying them
for their assistance. Consider the example of a choreographer.
He or she cannot dance all the roles. That is done by the dancers.
By your line of reasoning, the dancers created the dance and not
the choreographer. This is clearly ridiculous. It takes a special
talent to be a choreographer. Otherwise every dancer would be doing
choreographing. It takes a special talent to run a company and get
people to work together. Most people do not have that talent. That is
why most people do not run companies and many of those who try to
run companies fail. Without a good manager to manage the company
the workers would have no work. Even co-ops have someone managing the
day to day affairs of the co-op. Otherwise all the workers would be
too busy doing management duties to do their own work.
Danny Low
"Question Authority and the Authorities will question You"
Valley of Hearts Delight, Silicon Valley
HP NSD dl...@ppg01.sc.hp.com
Brad Aisa
>[A businesman] didn't create the wealth or value -- those who worked for
>and with him did. So at the very least, he should share it with them.
>Moreover, the value is not his alone: without the people he
>served (kindly note that word) there is no value. It's the
>community he is a part of that creates the value, for it is their
>willingness to utilise his services that gives thme value.
Actually, wealth is created through the productive process _by_ the person
who has acquired, organized and directed the means. The various factors of
production, such as raw materials, land, and labor (whether physical, or
increasingly today, intellectual), are assigned a certain value by the
democratic market process (to the degree such is even still in existence).
The entreprenuer or businessman figures out a way to recombine these
factors to create something new, which (if he is successful) is voted by
consumers as having a higher value than the arithmetic sum of the inputs.
This increase is the profit, and is the same as the value created. It is
the person who directs the combination of these factors to creation of the
new end who has in fact created the profit. The workers contribute just as
much, and no more, as any mineral or scrap of land or building does.
Workers are raw materials, nothing more, nothing less.
>A business person dereseves a fair wage, like any other worker.
>But he does not deserve to feed his greed, any more than any other
>worker does.
The poster is equivocating on the concept "wage". Wage is the price
contractually paid to an individual by an employer for services rendered.
It is economically equivalent to the payment made for any other raw
material of production. Owners, qua owners, do not get "wages" in the sense
that they don't pay themselves. They earn either profits if successful, or
(as is numerically more often the case) suffer losses. (Note: there may be
tax or accounting reasons for owners to pay themselves the equivalent of a
wage, but from an ownership viewpoint of financial flow, this is merely an
advance on assumed profits.)
Thank you for considering my ideas.
Dave Till
>Actually, wealth is created through the productive process _by_ the person
>Workers are raw materials, nothing more, nothing less.
Workers are only raw materials if they are performing menial, unskilled
labour. The vast majority of workers are "wealth creators" by your
definition: they take raw materials and turn them into wealth-producing
entities. Take your average software shop as an example: the workers
there are taking raw material -- a mental map of an algorithm, plus
a C or C++ compiler -- and turning it into wealth.
It's been a while since I read Ayn Rand, but I do recall noticing that
she has a tendency to assume that the wealth of a factory or industrial
complex is produced by one man (or woman) simultaneously filling the
roles of inventor and producer of the product. (Example: Hank Rearden
and his "Rearden Metal".) When you compare this model with the real
world, the obvious conclusion is that Rand's model is a gross
oversimplification of how work actually gets done in the modern workplace.
[Cute pseudonym, by the way. Aisa, for "A is a".]
--
--Dave Till, Word Mangler, KL Group Inc, Toronto, Ont., Canada.
My postings are my own opinions, not my employers', but you knew that already.
email: da...@klg.com or am...@freenet.toronto.on.ca or da...@interlog.com
WWW: http://www.interlog.com/~davet/
Wolf Kirchmeir
>>snip my stuff<<
>Actually, wealth is created through the productive process _by_ the person
>who has acquired, organized and directed the means. The various factors of
>production, such as raw materials, land, and labor (whether physical, or
>increasingly today, intellectual), are assigned a certain value by the
>democratic market process (to the degree such is even still in existence).
>The entreprenuer or businessman figures out a way to recombine these
>factors to create something new, which (if he is successful) is voted by
>consumers as having a higher value than the arithmetic sum of the inputs.
>This increase is the profit, and is the same as the value created. It is
>the person who directs the combination of these factors to creation of the
>new end who has in fact created the profit. The workers contribute just as
>much, and no more, as any mineral or scrap of land or building does.
>Workers are raw materials, nothing more, nothing less.
>>snip my stuff<<
>The poster is equivocating on the concept "wage". Wage is the price
>contractually paid to an individual by an employer for services rendered.
>It is economically equivalent to the payment made for any other raw
>material of production. Owners, qua owners, do not get "wages" in the sense
>that they don't pay themselves. They earn either profits if successful, or
>(as is numerically more often the case) suffer losses. (Note: there may be
>tax or accounting reasons for owners to pay themselves the equivalent of a
>wage, but from an ownership viewpoint of financial flow, this is merely an
>advance on assumed profits.)
>
>
>Thank you for considering my ideas.
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Glad to consider your ideas, but they sound like standard
Economics 100 to me. Frankluy, I don't give a damn what the **
technical** definitions of **wages, etc** are. I'm concerned
with realities. Wages is the money you make. Therefore, the
earnings of a business person are wages. Etc.
Thanks for responding to my post. I enjoy a good discussion. So
I'll give a couple of my assumptions to chew over.
1. The economic system exists solely to produce and distribute
the goods and services of the society that uses it. Thus, it is a
means and not and end. .
2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
distribution is morally wrong.
3. No morally wrong system can survive for any length of time,
since the victims of both real and percieved injustices will
eventually try to change it. In the past, many attempts to change
the system have been extremely violent.
4. Every participant in the system is both a producer and a
consumer. These functions are of equal value.
5. One's self-worth is related to, but not tied up in, one's
economic function and value.
I have others, but I won't tie up bandwidth with any more of my
small opinions.
wol...@ibm.net (*v*)
My opinion: 'tis a small thing, but 'tis mine own.
Brad Aisa
>Brad, perhaps, may have undervalued the worker in his evaluation. A worker
>is not just "raw material". He may, and often does add to the creation of
>wealth.
Nope. I explained this elsewhere on this thread.
It is inarguable that a worker can and does contribute to the final
product. An assembly line worker contributes to the final product. A
robotic machine, performing the same function and replacing the worker,
contributes to the final product.
The unique role of the entrepreneur is economic: he performs a market
analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of the
parts.
Rod Lilak
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
To extend *your* metaphysics a to their logical conclusion:
is it *really* your opinion, or is it the property of the collective
and you just the agent responsible for stringing the words together
in an attempt to form a coherent sentence ?
This is rather amusing. Note Wolf's posting address.
I wonder who Wolf thinks created the IBM he is depending on for his
daily bread? But look at the bright side - there he can only be a
drain on a large corporation which can (but should not be required to)
absorb a little non-productivity. But if he ever goes to Washington
and is able to push his views on the rest of us, then we are all
in line to watch the lights go out.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Rod Lilak | MooseWare Personal Computer Solutions
Voice (719) 685-9174 | Custom Software for Vertical Markets
|
================================================================
It's not just Software - It's MOOSEWARE !
----------------------------------------------------------------
Brad Aisa
>Brad Aisa <ba...@hookup.net> wrote:
>>Actually, wealth is created through the productive process _by_ the
person
>>Workers are raw materials, nothing more, nothing less.
>
>labour. The vast majority of workers are "wealth creators" by your
>definition: they take raw materials and turn them into wealth-producing
>entities. Take your average software shop as an example: the workers
>there are taking raw material -- a mental map of an algorithm, plus
>a C or C++ compiler -- and turning it into wealth.
This is an excellent observation, and raises an important issue: the
difference between economic value, and other forms of value.
A software program (or any other intermediary result in the process of
production in any field), may have very many valuable aspects, from some
particular viewpoint and standard. But it is not the program code itself
that people buy -- it is the fully tested and debugged program rendered
onto installation disks, in a package, with users manuals, from a store,
knowing there is customer support, etc. It is the entrepreneur who has
brought all the elements of production together in a way which will result
in _economic_ value. Until this happens, the program code, while perhaps
very clever and good from a software engineering standpoint, is still just
a value from that aspect -- it has no economic value. Individual workers
may contribute much in the way of particular values to the overall product,
this is not in dispute. But it is the entrepreneur who makes the decisions
regarding both what will be delivered to the market, as well as how it will
be produced. Thus he is responsible for the profits or losses which result.
So the idea that the process is: algorithm + compiler -> wealth, is just
plain incorrect.
>It's been a while since I read Ayn Rand, but I do recall noticing that
>she has a tendency to assume that the wealth of a factory or industrial
>complex is produced by one man (or woman) simultaneously filling the
>roles of inventor and producer of the product. (Example: Hank Rearden
>and his "Rearden Metal".) When you compare this model with the real
>world, the obvious conclusion is that Rand's model is a gross
>oversimplification of how work actually gets done in the modern workplace.
Ah, but don't fault Rand for being a writer of Romantic fiction. She did
not hold the idea that fiction is social documentary. Her purpose was to
defend and idolize the productive genius, and to demonstrate his
importance. There were many upstanding characters in her novels, who
weren't the owners. Dagny's attempt to find good men to put in positions of
responsibility underscore the theme of the novel: the role of the mind in
man's existence. Ayn Rand would _never_ deny that thought and creativity
were unnecessary nor unimportant to any level of work. But she _would_
argue that there is a definite hierarchy of value in the order of man, and
the top of that pyramid are the men and women who are the owners and
entrepreneurs of business. And of course, in the free society advocated by
Ayn Rand, the opportunity is available for everyone to rise to whatever
level their ambition, competence and creativity can take them.
Mark Young
writes:
>
>In article <4dgnt2$i...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, Brad Aisa <ba...@hookup.net>
wrote:
>>Actually, wealth is created through the productive process _by_ the person
>>who has acquired, organized and directed the means. [...]
>>Workers are raw materials, nothing more, nothing less.
>
>Workers are only raw materials if they are performing menial, unskilled
>labour. The vast majority of workers are "wealth creators" by your
>definition: they take raw materials and turn them into wealth-producing
>entities. Take your average software shop as an example: the workers
>there are taking raw material -- a mental map of an algorithm, plus
>a C or C++ compiler -- and turning it into wealth.
>
<snip>
Brad, perhaps, may have undervalued the worker in his evaluation. A worker
is not just "raw material". He may, and often does add to the creation of
wealth.
What a worker *does* is trade his time and efforts for a fixed rate of
payment. He also trades potentially large rewards (or losses!) for the
security of a regular paycheck, limited liability, and freedom from
organizational hassles. Raw materials do not make cost benefit analyses.<G>
There is NOTHING ignoble about that. We must all choose our own battles and
one need not be the risk taker (in every instance) to be a valuable member
of the team, creating more wealth that would otherwise be created in his
absense.
If more folks understood their role in business, and the implicit
trades (and trade offs) they were making, methinks that individuals
would be happier and wealthier, and companies would run much more
efficiently.
Mark Young, RIA
Publisher
The Steward Analytics FaxLetter
http://home.aol.com/oexchaos
Terry Johnson
>
>It is inarguable that a worker can and does contribute to the final
>product. An assembly line worker contributes to the final product. A
>robotic machine, performing the same function and replacing the worker,
>contributes to the final product.
>
>The unique role of the entrepreneur is economic: he performs a market
>analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
>process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of the
>parts.
>
to use a Napoleonic-era naval analogy here.
Ship captains of the time were a kind of entrepreneur. They often
invested their own money into manning and provisioning their vessels.
Think of one of these warships as a business--the captain hires
labour and raw materials, which he then hopes to turn to profit by
capturing enemy vessels and claiming the fortunes of war.
But practise at the time also saw all crew members, however lowly
their station, receive a set portion of whatever prize money the
ship brought in. Otherwise, captains could not have maintained
discipline. The crewmen, in effect, reasoned that even though they
had been paid for their labour in wages, they were still entitled to a
share of whatever proceeds their labour created.
That is human nature. People recognize that whatever individual
role the entrepreneur may play, he owes a share of his success to the
workers he employs. That's why workers employed by profitable
companies reason that they deserve more money than those doing
similar work for less profitable companies. They're willing to give
the captain of the enterprise his due--but they also expect a just
wage that reflects the value their labour created.
In effect, they recognize the basic truth that work is a cooperative
activity and that wages alone don't represent the value they
contribute to the process. They want a share of the prize money,
too.
That's the difference between human labour and machines.
------------------------------------------------
Terry Johnson \\ It's not that we're on Marx's side. It's
a...@ccinet.ab.ca \\ that Marx was on our side--E.P. Thompson
Brad Aisa
Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
machines.
So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur. Is this
a correct summary of your position? Also, I am curious, should employees be
held to such a circumstance according to a statute of law, or should such
kind of arrangement be purely voluntary between those employees and
capitalists who wished to undertake it?
Brad Aisa
>Over the past few months an idealogue named John Lamboutrn has been
posting to
>these newsgroups under not one but several pseudonames.
I have seen the posts of the various pseudo-names, and the additional
claims of evidence posted by some, such as finding the root name in
response to "finger", then when this is published, finding it mysteriously
change. The posts are all written in a similar style, with certain
characteristics that make it all but certain they originate from the same
pen, so to speak.
I can't possibly imagine what could lead someone to do this as a seeming
matter of purposeful deception. I've seen that this "Cerise Lopez" had a
letter published in Eye, for instance.
The notion that ideas are about _quantity of adherents_, and not their
content, is really quite mistaken. The NT/Zon loonies pull this stunt all
the time, cloning themselves endlessly on AOL to the rest of our torture.
If your ideas make sense, people will consider them. If they don't,
repeating them under a variety of aliases will get you nowhere. In fact,
such deception can only possibly serve to discredit you -- if you lie about
who you are, then why should anyone accept you are honest in other
intellectual matters? A person who could require before considering the
validity of an idea, a demographic poll be taken to ascertain its
popularity, is not an intellectual, and is impervious to ideas. They are
exactly the kind of fodder out of which dictatorships are built. Surely
someone who is adamantly opposed to the likes of Adolph Hitler would not
wish to pander to the kind of mentality which follows his type.
So, if you have been a bit beside yourself lately, may I suggest you pull
yourself together?
Brad Aisa
Tom Clarke
>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
<Interesting analogy with arrangements on privateer man-o-war truncated>
>>In effect, they recognize the basic truth that work is a cooperative
>>activity and that wages alone don't represent the value they
>>contribute to the process. They want a share of the prize money,
>>too.
>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur.
But most employees already share in the downside risk.
Just ask any of the 40,000 AT&T employees who are losing
their jobs.
I suspect the smart capitalist, like the smart sea captain,
will realize that the carrot works better than the stick, even
if its a very small carrot. If a bonus of 10% motivates the employee
to be produce 20% more profits, then both capitalist and employee come
out ahead.
Tom Clarke
--
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices - Adam Smith, WofN
Danny Albers
>Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
>machines.
>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur. Is this
>a correct summary of your position? Also, I am curious, should employees be
>held to such a circumstance according to a statute of law, or should such
>kind of arrangement be purely voluntary between those employees and
>capitalists who wished to undertake it?
Employees already take loses when the company does. They get laid
off. And in a company where profit bonuses are handed out, the loss
of such a regular bonus is in itself a loss.
Believe me when a company starts doing poorly and needs to cut costs
to save its profit margin, lay offs are usually the quickest way.
Workers are already in a position to sustain loses just as
shareholders are.
Look at the big picture. People figure the only risk taker in a
business is the owner. Even though the owner has hired people who
have invested similar amounts of money on education gambling (and
today it is a gamble) that they will even find a job. When someone
has a $50,000 school loan to pay back so they can have a skill to make
them seen as valuable by a company. These people use their education
that they paid for to do their job for someone else. They have
invested in that company whether or not you see it.
As well, many people go beyond the call of duty at work and as a
result the company does better. A good example of this was Lee
Iacoca. He worked the first year as CEO of Chrysler for 1 dollar.
He was CEO but still an employee. He showed his value and he took
his risk.
We pay salesman by commission. No sales no cheque. Big sales big
checque. No one has a problem with this type of system. Yet when an
assembly team works extra hard increasing production, increasing
profit, they should be happy with their base wage they could have made
working the same slow pace.
If the employees of a company have put in the extra effort and as a
result the company made lets say 10% more money because of this, why
shouldn't some of that 10% go back to the workers who went beyond what
was called for in their job description.
Tom S.
>In effect, they recognize the basic truth that work is a cooperative
>activity
> and that wages alone don't represent the value they
>contribute to the process.
to develop and deliver a product.
> They want a share of the prize money,
>too.
When they are also willing to put up money up front, to invest and take
risks, and SUFFER THE LOSSES then they are entitled to return on their
INVESTMENT.
>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
No, that is the difference between trading value for value and wanting the
rewards but not the risks. Children engage in this all the time.
>
When I become King, my first official act will be to proclaim that NO ONE may
be an employee for more than five consecutive years. After that five years,
every person, to earn an income, must be self-employed for at least the next
two years.
This will go a long way towards eliminating the whining by people who never
have to do anyhting more than show up at 9:00AM or whatever. Politicians will
go first into the fire.
Tom Scheeler
Sick and Tired
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in
Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement.
An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's
not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education,
the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not
freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations
of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. -- P. J. O'Rourke
Brad Aisa
Herein is an awesome display of the role of rational epistemology in human
affairs, and the reason for my signature quote.
> If you beleive that a worker doesn't invest money into a company
then
>think again freind. Most skilled workers I know have spent large
>amounts of money acquiring their skills. Most skilled workers have
>spent the equivalent money on their education that it would take to
>start a business.
Astounding equivocation on the economic concept 'invest'.
> And you don't think workers suffer losses when a business goes bad?
>Well, thousands of people have been laid off and will argue otherwise.
Absolutely amazing equivocation on the economic concept 'loss.'
> In fact, most business managers lay off workers before they are
>willing to suffer a loss themselves.
Holy economic smokes Batman -- I hope that business managers act to prevent
losses to the corporation for which they work. Business is not a charity.
Business is not social work.
But what causes such lousy business climates, and all these recessions?
Hmm? blank out... (Or: it must be the 'evil greedy capitalist's' fault
somehow -- everything is the businessman's fault. etc.)
>And some of us use our free time in the community. Making it a better
>place for both us lowly workers and high and mighty godsends known as
>entrepeuners. (however you spell that.)
I like the Reverend Ike's sentiment on this (as reported by Ayn Rand): "The
best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one."
People can in fact achieve their values, and don't need a whack of busybody
professional altruists intruding into their life and helping them to death.
Misfortune occasionally occurs, and kindess in the face of it is indicated.
But it is not something I care to worship.
I prefer to worship achievement, my own and that of others.
Terry Johnson
>wol...@ibm.net (Wolf Kirchmeir) wrote:
>
>
>>2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
>>distribution is morally wrong.
>
>bushels, why does he owe even a single grain of wheat to the man who has
>planted none?
The poster wrote "equitable" distribution. That means fair or just.
It doesn't mean "equal." You can't really be opposed to fair and
just distribution of economic rewards, can you?
Mark Young
>oexc...@ix.netcom.com(Mark Young ) wrote:
>
>>Brad, perhaps, may have undervalued the worker in his evaluation. A
worker
>>is not just "raw material". He may, and often does add to the creation
of
>>wealth.
>
>
>product. An assembly line worker contributes to the final product. A
>robotic machine, performing the same function and replacing the worker,
>contributes to the final product.
This is where I will quibble, and I think, when we step back, we would
agree on the following:
Workers and Labor are not the same thing. Labor, as an input, may be
readily exchanged with capital. A worker MAY (though not always will)
participate in the act of innovation, or managment of the production
process. This is not readily replaced by a machine, and is eagerly sought
after, as it serves to increase the leverage of the entrepreneur.
The only reason I belabor this point is that the entrepreneur who mistakes
the creative worker for a readily replaced input is the entrepreneur who
may be likely to face fierce competition from another budding entrepreneur
in the person of his undervalued "worker." Or, less painfully, he is the
one who will be looking for replacements, while his competitor enjoys the
creative labors of his best employees.
>The unique role of the entrepreneur is economic: he performs a market
>analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
>process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of
the
>parts.
Many a worker does this too, or some permutation of the above. Those
that do, are not raw material.
I hope you agree.
Mark Young
Mark Young
<snip>
Brad writes:
>>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur. Is this
>>a correct summary of your position? Also, I am curious, should employees be
>>held to such a circumstance according to a statute of law, or should such
>>kind of arrangement be purely voluntary between those employees and
>>capitalists who wished to undertake it?
>
> Employees already take loses when the company does. They get laid
>off.
Sorry, the employee does not own the job. He is only allowed to fill the
position. He does not lose anything other than opportunity. Not the same
thing as financial loss.
>And in a company where profit bonuses are handed out, the loss
>of such a regular bonus is in itself a loss.
Nope. Sorry. Lost potential, perhaps, but not a loss, per se.
> Believe me when a company starts doing poorly and needs to cut costs
>to save its profit margin, lay offs are usually the quickest way.
Which would imply that the worker wasn't adding enough value to justify his
existence at the company. Otherwise they wouldn't be letting him go, would
they?
> Workers are already in a position to sustain loses just as
>shareholders are.
Nope. You don't understand what a loss is. Please, show me the money that the
employee puts up as an INVESTMENT.
> Look at the big picture. People figure the only risk taker in a
>business is the owner. Even though the owner has hired people who
>have invested similar amounts of money on education gambling (and
>today it is a gamble) that they will even find a job. When someone
>has a $50,000 school loan to pay back so they can have a skill to make
>them seen as valuable by a company. These people use their education
>that they paid for to do their job for someone else. They have
>invested in that company whether or not you see it.
Nope. They invested in themselves, NOT their employer. They may pick up at any
time to work for another company, and their investment, ostensibly will be of
unchanged or greater value. It is their product that they sell to the
employer.
I went to Northwestern University, and spent lots of money on it. Am I an
investor in my clients? My subscribers? To claim so is ludicrous.
> As well, many people go beyond the call of duty at work and as a
>result the company does better.
True. Those that do, and are not adequately recognized leave or compete. I
know many and example of this. In fact, I am one, I suppose.
>A good example of this was Lee
>Iacoca. He worked the first year as CEO of Chrysler for 1 dollar.
>He was CEO but still an employee. He showed his value and he took
>his risk.
True, but it was written into the contract. He was acting as a
pseudo-entrepreneur, I suppose. Would this be a contractual entrenpreneur?
> We pay salesman by commission. No sales no cheque. Big sales big
>checque. No one has a problem with this type of system.
It is similar to the above, and works in a very similar fashion to typical
entrepreneurship. Not quite, but similar.
>Yet when an
>assembly team works extra hard increasing production, increasing
>profit, they should be happy with their base wage they could have made
>working the same slow pace.
Obviously not. That is why some companies that recognize this do much better
than others. I think Nucor is one. (fact check anyone?)
> If the employees of a company have put in the extra effort and
as a
>result the company made lets say 10% more money because of this, why
>shouldn't some of that 10% go back to the workers who went beyond what
>was called for in their job description.
I think some of it should, but not all 10%, and would write it into the
employment agreement. But, this is a management decision. Sometimes,
we have found that incentive compensation doesn't work particularly
well.
I have found that treating employees more like entrepreneurs (to the
degree they are comfortable with such) improves results, just as
entrepreneurship improves the results (productivity and wealth) of an
economy.
Mark Young
Brad Aisa
> This reminds me of a joke David Spade tells regarding his deadbeat
>father:
>
> "Hey Davey, let's put all our money in a pile and split it!"
:-)
It reminds me of a certain social/economic system that seems somehow
familiar to me.
In exchange for the system such as police, courts, education, etc. which me
and other productive individuals have CREATED, FUNDED, are perfectly
capable of RECREATING wherever we may be (see _Atlas Shrugged_), the
slothful and incompetent propose to reward us with the privelege of putting
all our money and lives in a pot, to which they contribute nothing, but
from which we will all share, with the incompetent zeros in control of
distribution.
Ya know, it really is time for a dramatic change in who's in
charge and what ideas will govern the social system, a revolution if you
will.
glen...@fn1.freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
<4dgnt2$i...@noc.tor.hookup.net> <4dhin7$g...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>:
Organization: Edmonton Freenet, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Distribution:
Wolf Kirchmeir (wol...@ibm.net) wrote:
: 1. The economic system exists solely to produce and distribute
: the goods and services of the society that uses it. Thus, it is a
: means and not and end. .
This assumes there is an "end" in the first place. I'm not sure there is one.
: 2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
: distribution is morally wrong.
Depends what you mean by "equitable distribution"... For that matter,
"equitable distribution" of what? Wealth? If so, I can't agree -- someone
who puts no effort into creating wealth (whether alone or as part of a
team effort) is not entitled to a share of the wealth of the society
simply because he exists in it.
: 5. One's self-worth is related to, but not tied up in, one's
: economic function and value.
My self-worth now is much better than it was a few years ago, even though
I'm making less money now than I was then.
--
Glenn St-Germain | Edmonton Alberta Canada | glen...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
"Your crimewave has crashed on the shores of justice!" -- The Tick
Steve Kangas
>oexc...@ix.netcom.com(Mark Young ) wrote:
>
>>Brad, perhaps, may have undervalued the worker in his evaluation. A worker
>>is not just "raw material". He may, and often does add to the creation of
>>wealth.
>
>Nope. I explained this elsewhere on this thread.
>
>It is inarguable that a worker can and does contribute to the final
>product. An assembly line worker contributes to the final product. A
>robotic machine, performing the same function and replacing the worker,
>contributes to the final product.
>
>analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
>process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of the
>parts.
What tripe! You paint the dehumanizing picture of worker as
robot, and the only one filled with life and intelligence in
this great economy is the thinking entrepreneur surrounded by
all his machines. You really ought to see a psychiatrist,
although I doubt he could prescribe something for
entreprenuerial narcissism.
Your beliefs don't even stand a rudimentary comparison
to reality. The vast majority of improvements and innovations
on the production line come from the workers and lower/middle
managers themselves. They are the experts of their local
production site; they know which problems need to be solved and
what solutions should be sent up the chain of command. At the
very least, they give upper management the information and
educated assessments that they need to make their own broader
decisions. In the mechanical workforce you describe, the
executive would need the omniscience of God to create the
impossibly complex plans needed to direct his impossibly
complex operations.
You can be sure that a robot assembly line does not give a
manager the feedback necessary to make production more
efficient. For this reason, the management at such factories
require a small army of engineers and maintenence personnel to
find problems and design improvements. The large size of these
crews at automated factories is a direct indication of the
innovative role of live workers.
Your post was not only insulting to workers, it was stupid. I
have many friends in the computer industry who verify that
upper management does not write, design or improve their
software. This is left to the company's rank and file
programmers. Often, a lower programmer may find an innovation
or short cut that he takes to upper management, and this then
influences executive strategy! The invention of CD ROM
technology is a prime example.
You cannot possibly be working for a large corporation with
beliefs as ignorant as this; and if you do, you are a
remarkably ignorant individual.
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
Steve Kangas
David W. Olson
>Thanks for responding to my post. I enjoy a good discussion. So
>I'll give a couple of my assumptions to chew over.
>
>distribution is morally wrong.
This puts you on soft, mucky, ground. People are born with
inherent differences in ability.
Not everyone can be a good farmer.
Not everyone can be a good sailer.
Not everyone can be a good blacksmith.
Not everyone can be a good watchmaker.
And Society values those products and services differently. It isn't
possible that craft an economic system where everybody receives the
exact same reward for their work, and to try is to ruin, economically,
your society.
Not to mention that people generally don't want to receive the exact
same thing. That is why H.Ford, with his one model of car, painted
black, fell behind GM, which offered cars in several colors.
David Olson. my posting, my response.
Danny Albers
>When they are also willing to put up money up front, to invest and take
>risks, and SUFFER THE LOSSES then they are entitled to return on their
>INVESTMENT.
If you beleive that a worker doesn't invest money into a company then
think again freind. Most skilled workers I know have spent large
amounts of money acquiring their skills. Most skilled workers have
spent the equivalent money on their education that it would take to
start a business.
And you don't think workers suffer losses when a business goes bad?
Well, thousands of people have been laid off and will argue otherwise.
These people have lost money just as much as the fellow who started
the business.
In fact, most business managers lay off workers before they are
willing to suffer a loss themselves.
Sure human labour demands raises, benefits, bonuses and machines don't
but if you buy a $50,000 machines you can't lay it off. And if its a
specialized machine you may not be able to sell it during hard times.
Where humans just get laid off.
>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>No, that is the difference between trading value for value and wanting the
>rewards but not the risks. Children engage in this all the time.
When, while playing pogs?
>When I become King, my first official act will be to proclaim that NO ONE may
>be an employee for more than five consecutive years. After that five years,
>every person, to earn an income, must be self-employed for at least the next
>two years.
Oh, are you in line somewhere behind Prince Charles. Excuse me. I
didn't realise I was contradicting the next King. My apologies my
liege.
>This will go a long way towards eliminating the whining by people who never
>have to do anyhting more than show up at 9:00AM or whatever. Politicians will
>go first into the fire.
I hope you know that over 80% of fortune 500 hundred companies are
headed by people who work no more than 45 hours a week.
I think most people have to do more at their job then just show up.
One of the hardest jobs I've ever heard was working at Burger King. I
ran my ass off for 8 hour stretches. Sometimes I didn't take a break
if it was busy. I made less than $7.00 and hour. If you had come up
to me then and said all I did was showed up everyday I would probrably
have punched you in the nose.
And some of us use our free time in the community. Making it a better
place for both us lowly workers and high and mighty godsends known as
entrepeuners. (however you spell that.)
>Tom Scheeler
>Sick and Tired
don't forget spoiled and self important.
>Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in
>Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement.
>An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's
>not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education,
>the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not
>freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations
>of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. -- P. J. O'Rourke
That's interesting because when we actually had slaves they weren't
entitled to education or health care.
Jack R. Tallent
>oexc...@ix.netcom.com(Mark Young ) wrote:
>
>>Brad, perhaps, may have undervalued the worker in his evaluation. A worker
>>is not just "raw material". He may, and often does add to the creation of
>>wealth.
>
>Nope. I explained this elsewhere on this thread.
>
>It is inarguable that a worker can and does contribute to the final
>product. An assembly line worker contributes to the final product. A
>robotic machine, performing the same function and replacing the worker,
>contributes to the final product.
>
>The unique role of the entrepreneur is economic: he performs a market
>analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
>process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of the
>parts.
>
The factors of production to which Brad refers are _owned_ by the
entrepeneur, either outright, or through financing.
If the buisiness fails, the entrepeneur stands to lose a lot, but like
the saying goes, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." (An excellent saying, in
my opinion.)
To those who would somehow assign the laborer equal status with the
entrepeneur, and thereby justify an equal right to the profits of the business, I ask this--
If this business fails, should the worker lose his shirt, along with the entrepeneur? If risk has nothing to due with who should profit more, its only
"fair" that it have no bearing on who goes to bankruptcy court. Right?
This reminds me of a joke David Spade tells regarding his deadbeat
father:
"Hey Davey, let's put all our money in a pile and split it!"
Jack Tallent
Mark Young
writes:
>ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
>
>>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>
><Interesting analogy with arrangements on privateer man-o-war truncated>
>>>contribute to the process. They want a share of the prize money,
>>>too.
>
>>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur.
>
>Just ask any of the 40,000 AT&T employees who are losing
>their jobs.
Nope. All they are sharing in is the lack of future upside with that entity.
While that is no fun, and not, generally a good thing, it isn't a loss, per
se. And it certainly is shared by the entrepreneur, but again, he risks all
the out of pocket.
As I said before, you don't own the job. You do it. When the job is no
longer there, you have, in point of fact, lost nothing outof pocket.
>I suspect the smart capitalist, like the smart sea captain,
>will realize that the carrot works better than the stick, even
>if its a very small carrot. If a bonus of 10% motivates the employee
>to be produce 20% more profits, then both capitalist and employee come
>out ahead.
This is generally understood. It is part of the contract, in many
places. Yet in others it isn't, and the company is no worse off (and
is in some cases better).
Mark Young
Mike Wooding
>1. The economic system exists solely to produce and distribute
>the goods and services of the society that uses it. Thus, it is a
>means and not and end. .
Well, more generally, an "economic system" is the structure
in which we allocate (and re-allocate) resources.
>2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
>distribution is morally wrong.
No. Any "economic system" that doesn't allow/facilitate the
re-allocation of resources to higher valued uses is morally
wrong.
>3. No morally wrong system can survive for any length of time,
>since the victims of both real and percieved injustices will
>eventually try to change it. In the past, many attempts to change
>the system have been extremely violent.
No, a resource allocation scheme which wastes/squanders its
resources finds itself with fewer of those resources.
>4. Every participant in the system is both a producer and a
>consumer. These functions are of equal value.
Neither sentence is necessarily or even very often true. There
are participants in our economic system who consume without
producing, and participants who produce far in excess of what
they consume.
The value of these functions depends entirely on the view point
of the evaluator and the details of who is producing/consuming
what.
Wealth (and fame?) accrue to those who produce great value.
The reverse seems more likely to those who consume (destroy?)
great value, which seems to imply a consensus evaluation that
production has higher value?
>5. One's self-worth is related to, but not tied up in, one's
>economic function and value.
More correctly, to one's contribution?
--
mi...@wse.com (Mike Wooding)
Brad Aisa
of my messages, in which he makes a very common error: that of equating the
sciences of management and economics. In fact, management and economics are
not the same thing at all -- management studies business from the point of
view of directing production processes to achieving the ends desired
(product created, service delivered, etc.) in the best way possible. The
overriding considerations of achieving profit and avoiding loss (in
economic ventures), or minimizing costs and achieving particular ends (in
non-economic, i.e., bureaucratic ventures, such as managing a charity, or
a police department) are the standards directing the consideration of
what is "best".
Economics on the other hand, is the science that studies the regular
phenomenon of a market of individuals engaged in production and trade. It
identifies various categories of regular phenomenon, such as prices, money,
interest, profits and losses, rent, capital -- and then seeks to explain
the occurance of these phenomena.
It is the fact that so many hard-nosed businessmen think that being able to
read a balance sheet is the same as having a doctorate in economics, which
has been partly (and significantly) responsible for the decline of
capitalism and the successful attacks waged against it. In actual fact,
there are many competing theories in the field of economics vying to
explain the fundamental causes of market phenomena -- if the wrong theories
(i.e., those that are false) come to dominate the policy of those managing
public affairs, then the results can be disastrous. As proof: the twentieth
century in the West, which has been dominated by mixtures of Marxist and
Keynesian economic doctrine, with the consequent disasters to national
economies this has caused. Economics is not a fundamental social science --
morality and politics are more fundamental -- so bad economics alone has
not been responsible for the disasters. But this doesn't change the fact
that liberal (in the classical sense) free market theorists, such as Carl
Menger, and particularly Ludwig Von Mises, have supplied a complete theory
of free market economics, which rails against the kinds of interventions
unleashed on the market this century. They explain in excruciating detail
the operations of the free market, and the deleterious consequences of
intervention. But they have not been listened to in large numbers. And who
should have been trumpeting their message, above all? The businessmen of
course. But most modern businessmen haven't a clue about economics, or only
what they have gleaned from a couple of intro courses, which are today
dominated by interventionist lies.
Now, with all that said, I would like to address Mr. Kangas' points
(prefaced with *'s), which I have summarized, sans invective, below:
*Allegation: I claim the worker is a robot; the only one with life and
intelligence is the entrepreneur.
This is not true at all, and not what I have said nor implied. If you ask
me if there is any (essential) difference in contribution to the production
process of a worker and an industrial robot, doing identical tasks, I will
say: no. This is the point I was trying to make: from the point of view of
an entrepreneur, workers are simply means, _a_ means, to the end sought. An
economic calculation, informed by engineering and production experience,
would be used to make a decision to use an automated vs. a manual process.
My attempt is to _demystify_ the notion that labor is some radically
different raw material than other factors. It differs, obviously, in the
important respect of human intelligence being vastly more sophisticated
than any machine, but it remains stubbornly true that the worker can be
quantified just as easily as other factors.
Not all workers do repetitive tasks of manual assembly. So what is the role
of the worker in more creative positions? It still remains true that the
entrepreneur is the one who establishes the final end to which the entire
production process is to be the means. All aspects of this process are
subordinate to this end, constituting themselves subprocesses of production
which can be separably analyzed. Indeed, the mind is crucial in all
aspects of this process, for operating it and perfecting it, and returning
analysis of its operation to the entrepreneur, as Mr. Kangas points out.
But to use an example, the role of a software developer is not to write the
coolest program of _his_ invention, it is to apply his skills as a
developer to the problem which his _employer_ has established. Even in
environments with substantial input from the workforce, it is ultimately
the entrepreneur who makes decisions regarding what will be the end. There
may be 20 suggestions made by many persons, from development, to
documentation, to packaging, to marketing, but only 5 might be deemed by
the entrepreneur as being efficacious to profit. So it remains, whether the
entrepreneur invents an idea, or it arises in workers at lower levels, that
ultimate decisions of ends to be sought rests in the entrepreneur, and it
is _this_ process of decision making which is ultimately responsible for
profits and losses, as I have explained.
*Statement: very many improvements and innovations come from line workers
and managers [true]; these workers also communicate valuable information
[about... markets? just the production process? about costs? about
alternative modes of organizing the production process? do line workers
recommend their dismissal and replacement with more cost-effective
automated methods???]
*Conclusion: based on the "robotic premise", the entrepreneur would need to
be omnisicient.
My claim is not that workers do not contribute to the product -- this would
be absurd. But as I pointed out elsewhere on this thread, there is no
necessary connection between the quality of work delivered by a worker at
any level, and profits or losses. There are relationships of what I would
describe as qualified necessity, but by no means causal sufficiency. A most
excellent software developer could apply his considerable skills to write
the world's Coolest Program, but if no one buys it, then it is a failure as
an economic product. It might be highly esteemed by software engineers, and
its amazing techniques and algorithms could become the celebrated material
of legends, and the central topic of debate at software conferences for
decades. No one accuses the programmer of being a bad programmer. What we
charge, is that he didn't deliver a desired product to the market at a cost
which people were willing to pay. So you must take great care when
analyzing such issues, to separate out valuation from the standpoint of
craftsmanship or other professional criteria (as could as easily be applied
to marketing, writing, managing, plant management, etc. etc.), and the
_economic_ valuation applied to products by consumers on a market. The
degree to which a venture is _economically_ successful, ultimately depends
on the entrepreneur's having made correct decisions about _what_ to make,
and _how_ to make it. There are innumerable choices to make in this process
-- the division of intellectual labor is that individual subsidiary workers
need to perform their subtasks or functions well according to a standard of
valuing the achievement of that task or function (ex. good, bug-free code,
vs. slow, buggy code), whereas the entrepreneur is responsible for
setting the final end, and choosing an appropriate means of achieving it.
Now consider, that in an extremely large organization, of course the
entrepreneur function will not minutely plan the entire process, but even
so, he or she has been responsible for choosing _how_ the process will be
erected, and always maintains the responsibility of checking that the
process so instantiated in any particular case is in fact appropriate and
economic. And if better methods of internal management become necessary, it
is up to the entrepreneur to select the new methods, again, with the view
to the economic production of future goods. And the question of just _who_
is the entrepreneur, can have different answers in different corporations,
but it essentially comes down to who is supply the means, i.e., the
capital. If wealthy investor A hires clever inventor B to head a new
concern, then A is the entrepreneur, because he is making the ultimate
decisions about what will and will not be delivered to the market. Again,
B's role in making this possible may be crucial, but he has not set the
final end. On the other hand, if B mortgages his house, and invests his own
fortune in his venture, then he becomes the entrepreneur, because it is he
who is making the final decisions about ends and means. But the _concept_
of an entrepreneur, as a tool of analysis, is valid, for nothing else can
explain the emergenece of profits and losses. This is one of the important
contributions of Ludwig Von Mises, to economic theory. (Now, I could
possibly be mistaken about this, but I don't think any other economist
before Mises explicitly identified this crucial fact. If so, I would like
to know who.)
*Comment: live workers can innovate, robots cannot.
These comments were themselves based on loaded premises, and are not
really germane to the current topic, but I will address them.
One does not arbitrarily choose human or mechanical means of production.
One does not choose human's, to be 'kind', or machines, to be 'mean' or
'greedy.' Business is not charity and it isn't social work. Of course
entrepreneurs are perfectly well apprised that robotic machines do not
provide intelligent feedback on the process. But it is equally specious to
suggest that manual laborers are indispensable fountainheads of innovation
to the productive process. Many processes, while being incrementally
improvable, do not permit of wholesale improvements, without completely
restructuring the entire production process. This involves decision making
at a far higher level than of the individual assembly-line worker (not qua
human being, but qua worker in a certain task -- any one of the workers
could possibly be intelligent enough and sufficiently skilled to be plant
manager; the point is that the line worker is not the plant manager). Some
kinds of work are performed more accurately and reliably by automated
processes; others are amenable to labor or automation; others are best
performed by labor (at least at a certain wage level, and degree of
technical advance in automation.) The decision of which to employ is always
an economic one: which will lead to delivery of the best product and the
lowest price.
*Assertion: I have never worked for a large corporation, or if so, am
remarkably ignorant.
Well, in fact I have worked in a wide variety of occupations, from the
utterly menial, up to electronic engineering and software design. My work
is embodied in a high security alarm system protecting thousands of lives
and billions in property in Canada, so I hope for the sake of all those
people and dollars, that I am not as ignorant as the poster asserts.
I have also worked for companies of various sizes, from single
proprietorships, to large corporations, such as Atari, CP Hotels, Delta
Hotels, and Alliance Communications. I have always been amazed at the
importance of rational thought to every single aspect of the process of
production. My fellow dishwashers and other steward's department staff at
the Banff Springs Hotel used to snigger at my earnest devotion to my job as
kitchen day cleaner, and bristle at the punctionality of my coffee
breaks/lunches -- I subsequently couldn't understand their slack jawed
amazement when I was able to become a busboy in the hotel's five star
dining room (while they languished on the dish line), and soon thereafter
to position of waiter. Maybe they should have figured out that a focussed,
goal directed intelligence is needed for the performance of every job, and
that managers are desperately eager for any signs of life among their
charges. However when I was day cleaner, I did not pretend I was chef, and
did not pretend I was the general manager, and I did not pretend I was the
CP stockholders Board of Directors. Others established the end
goals of the organization, and my role was to achieve a particular kind of
task.
So much for my views on the role of the mind in production. For further
information, I refer the interested reader to _Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand,
and _Human Action_ by Ludwig Von Mises.
Once again, I thank you for your interest in my ideas.
--
Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
Danny Albers
>ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
>>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
><Interesting analogy with arrangements on privateer man-o-war truncated>
>>>In effect, they recognize the basic truth that work is a cooperative
>>>activity and that wages alone don't represent the value they
>>>contribute to the process. They want a share of the prize money,
>>>too.
>>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur.
>But most employees already share in the downside risk.
>Just ask any of the 40,000 AT&T employees who are losing
>their jobs.
>I suspect the smart capitalist, like the smart sea captain,
>will realize that the carrot works better than the stick, even
>if its a very small carrot. If a bonus of 10% motivates the employee
>to be produce 20% more profits, then both capitalist and employee come
>out ahead.
>Tom Clarke
>--
> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
> and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
> the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices - Adam Smith, WofN
Well Tom, I am glad to see some one shares my point of view somewhat.
dal...@onlink.net
Danny Albers
>In exchange for the system such as police, courts, education, etc. which me
>and other productive individuals have CREATED, FUNDED, are perfectly
>capable of RECREATING wherever we may be (see _Atlas Shrugged_), the
>slothful and incompetent propose to reward us with the privelege of putting
>all our money and lives in a pot, to which they contribute nothing, but
>from which we will all share, with the incompetent zeros in control of
>distribution.
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Is that something Ayn Rand said in that tirade of insulting nonsense.
That is like saying the "Haves of money" have the moral high ground
and the "Have nots of money" are sitting at home drinking beer and
thinking up ways to get more or your money.
Nobody likes lazy people and lazy people deserve what they get, but
nobody likes elitists and that's what you sound like here.
For someone so full of advice lets hear what you have created. What
kind of empire have you amassed. How many people do you employ? What
financial investment have you made?
I'm curious.
And tell me you don't regard the money you or your parents spent on
education at least a somewhat risky investment. What did your
education cost?
And how much did that leave you with afterwards. You took your
education and tried landing a job where you felt you would be
compensated for all your work and investment getting that education.
Would you work for people who would never give you a raise no matter
how hard you worked? And if your answer is no then I say why should
I? And if you answer yes then you are a fool.
Come on, such black and white views are beneath some one who is
clearly as intelligent as you are.
I was on welfare for 4 months. During that time I wanted a job, or at
least a way off of it. I did not want more welfare. That is not what
people want.
Danny Albers
>><Interesting analogy with arrangements on privateer man-o-war truncated>
>>>>In effect, they recognize the basic truth that work is a cooperative
>>>>activity and that wages alone don't represent the value they
>>>>contribute to the process. They want a share of the prize money,
>>>>too.
>>
>>>So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
>>>their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
>>>equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur.
>>
>>But most employees already share in the downside risk.
>>Just ask any of the 40,000 AT&T employees who are losing
>>their jobs.
>Nope. All they are sharing in is the lack of future upside with that entity.
>While that is no fun, and not, generally a good thing, it isn't a loss, per
>se. And it certainly is shared by the entrepreneur, but again, he risks all
>the out of pocket.
>As I said before, you don't own the job. You do it. When the job is no
>longer there, you have, in point of fact, lost nothing outof pocket.
Your arguement is easy to debunk. Business calculate loss by money in
minus money out. But overall it is the potential earnings of a
business that are important.
An employee with a highly specialized skill deserves good pay. Simply
because by definition specialized skills are hard to find. But when
that same employee loses his job, it may take a long time to find
another. He may lose his savings, his home, etc. But I guess this is
not a loss.
If a business man invests 1000 bucks in a business. In ten years its
worth 1000000 and then in ten more years it goes bankrupt. What has
he lost. 1000000 or 1000 bucks.
An employee invests twenty five years in a company. In his remaining
ten years of service he could earn another oh lets say $500,000. But
he gets laid off. His earning potential just went from $500,000 over
ten years to zip. Nobody hires people this age. But you don't call
this a loss.
>>I suspect the smart capitalist, like the smart sea captain,
>>will realize that the carrot works better than the stick, even
>>if its a very small carrot. If a bonus of 10% motivates the employee
>>to be produce 20% more profits, then both capitalist and employee come
>>out ahead.
>This is generally understood. It is part of the contract, in many
>places. Yet in others it isn't, and the company is no worse off (and
>is in some cases better).
>Mark Young
Mark, the fact is that low employee morale is cause for many business
failures or at least lower then possible profits. People need to feel
they will be rewarded for hard work. Thats why business men go into
business. So they can receive reward for their efforts. They have
just chosen a different route to do it.
When employees know that management values their opinion, rewards
effort and tries to protect them during occasional economic downturns,
those employees will make the difference.
I know a woman who owns a Mikes Mart. After about a year of running
it, she had continual problems with inventory shortages.
She fired the entire staff and hired new ones with good refernces.
And again in six months she had the same problem. Loss of inventory.
Again she fired everyone and hired new staff. And again the same
problem. I know this because I was one of the people she hired in
that last round as she knew me, I was younger, to be an honest kid.
Well again she started to experience losses of inventory. She was
thinking of selling the store but I convinced her to try explaining to
the staff that if inventory stopped dissappearing then maybe she would
be able to provide simple perks like employee discounts and occasional
staff parties.
This she tried, with improved success. Inventory went from being $800
short each month to just $50.00 each month.
Imagine.
But after 5 months without an employee discount or staff party. The
problem returned and we were all fired. She sold the store and bought
a different one. She has now been forced out by Mike' Mart as she
once again started experiencing poor inventory reports.
Well, those 4 sets of employees experienced losses along that path I
can assure you. Maybe not financial loss as such, but now they all
have fired on their job history were many had only glowing references
before.
And there are some that say they deserved it because obviously
employees were stealing merchandise. But I can assure of this, I
stole nothing from that store. I worked hard and was fired with the
rest. And if that is what a person deserves simply because his
investment was himself, not money, then your philisophy sucks.
It goes against the principle that hard work should be rewarded.
Folks like yourself beleive that only people who risk money deserve
money. Well get off of it. I put my reputation at risk when I went
to work for this woman. People are always going to listen to her
assessment of my work, not mine. False or not. And a reputation is
worth money...just ask Brian Mulroney.
>This is generally understood. It is part of the contract, in many
>places. Yet in others it isn't, and the company is no worse off (and
>is in some cases better).
The only companies I can see being better off by not "sharing the
wealth" with employees in one form or another are bankrupt companies.
I beleive that a company is simply an entity who's purpose is to serve
its customers first, its owners and employees second. But it must
serve all three or it is not a worthwhile thing.
Danny Albers
>What's your beef? Just what more do you want from the man?
>Oh, I see.
>That reminds me. I forgot one more important link in the chain of values
>even this single businessman provides: employment for the personal
>bodyguards or local police who protect him against those scum who believe
>exactly as you do, but at least have the balls to put it into action. Not
>to mention the manufacturer of the firearm the scum is shot with, and
>the seller of the hollow-point slug which mushrooms just perfectly as it
>collides at 900 fps with skull and brain matter, and the miner of those
>materials, and so on.
You said that....
>After all, weren't you just trying to gain some kind of respect in the
>first place by posting your childish and idiotic babblings in front of
>hundreds of people--in HOW many newsgroups?
And then call someone trying to prove a point childish and idiotic
babling.
Who's being silly here. You respect people who shoot people who don't
share you point of view. "at least they have the balls to put it into
action."
Man you are just sick. You are perhaps expressing the true thoughts
of the people who's side you take and thus do them a disservice.
Don't expect me to beleive that someone with your kind of values knows
anything about what an investor deserves as opposed to what an
employee deserves.
Someone dumb enough to post such thoughts probrably needs body gaurds.
John Tessin
: When I become King, my first official act will be to proclaim that NO ONE may
: every person, to earn an income, must be self-employed for at least the next
: two years.
It this were to be done to the education community, we may just turn
around the state of education in this country. OTOH - most teachers
could probably exist for 2 years working at McDonalds.
--
jte...@netcom.com
CIS: 71774,1731
===============================================================
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of
servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go
home from us in peace. We seek not your counsels or arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your
chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget
that ye were our countrymen." -- Samuel Adams
===============================================================
Curt Howland
|> >analysis, and figures out how to organize resources and a productive
|> >process in such a way that the product is worth more than the sum of the
|> >parts.
|> >
|> Additionally, there is this: the entrepeneur assumes the risk.
I'm not going a disagree with anyone, since
it really is a personal view. What I want to
do is somehow point out a huge flaw in the
argument:
The worker *is* an entrepeneur.
They assume the risk any time that they take
a job that isn't absolutely firing-proof,
like postal worker; they asses market value
of their wares, namely their labors, and
attempt to balance supply and demand; they
either organize their resources to make
themselves maintain their profitability and
marketability, or they loose their ability
to sell their product, or loose on their
investments.
A worker is *directly* responsible for their
own production, even if that production is
putting one nut on one bolt 10,000 times a
day.
When someone brings up the issue of unemployed
skilled labor, it's no different than someone
trying to make a living selling ice-boxes at
the south pole. No matter how skilled the
salesman might be, if the product is not in
demand, they won't make money.
An entepreneur is used often simply to define
a successfull worker who just happened to
be good at making jobs for others as well.
Curt-
Terry Johnson
>>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>
>>workers he employs. That's why workers employed by profitable
>>companies reason that they deserve more money than those doing
>>similar work for less profitable companies. They're willing to give
>>the captain of the enterprise his due--but they also expect a just
>>wage that reflects the value their labour created.
>
>
>1. "People recognize... he owes a share..." This is incorrect. The only
>thing an employer owes to his employees is the amounts contracted with them
>for their services. What "people recognize" is in fact what _some_ people
>_assert_ -- an arbitrary assertion is not a claim to truth.
>
Of course. That's the point I'm making.
Capitalists buy labour time to do with what they will. But it goes against
human nature to treat work as a commodity like coal, wool or hog bellies.
That's why people begrudge the highly profitable company that pays no
more in wages than the money-losing firm. And that's why workers in
highly automated workplaces, where their work is closely regulated, are
the most likely to feel alienated.
I'll use another analogy. I worked on the greenchain at a sawmill for a
year. We sorted freshly-cut lumber and stacked it into piles: 12-foot-
long 2 x 4s in one, 18-foot-long 3 x 6s in another.... Like industrial
workers everywhere, we tried to gain as much control over our jobs
as we could. We'd double off, for example, with one man working the
job of two so his buddy could grab a smoke. The foremen did everything
they could to prevent this practise. It was a constant source of tension.
Why? The company had bought our time--and paid a good wage for it.
But as workers, we thought we had sold our labour, not our time. We
saw the exchange as x dollars for sorting y piles of lumber. We saw no
reason for the company's umbrage at doubling off--the work was still
getting done. But the company looked on doubling off as theft of what
it had bought: our time.
The company was right. We had sold our labour time, and we had given
up, in return, our right to decide how it would be used. But this is an
inhuman exchange. Work is what makes us human. We sell our labour
because, for most of us, it is the only valuable commodity we have to
exchange. But it is dehumanizing to lose control over an activity so
intrinsic to our being.
>2. A worker deserves exactly what he has been contracted to receive,
>assuming he does his job diligently. Whether a company makes profits or
>losses may or may not have anything to do with the quality of work
>performed by its workers.
I never denied this. I just said workers and capitalists have a different
idea of what is being exchanged. Capitalists assume they're buying so
many hours of human labour; but workers rebel at the idea that their
creative role in production ends at the point they make the exchange.
It's a contradiction that runs through capitalism.
Obviously, labour time has a market value independent of the use to
which it is put. But as human beings, we relate the value of our work
to what it produces.
Brad Aisa
>In <4dktl1$n...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
>>wol...@ibm.net (Wolf Kirchmeir) wrote:
>>
>>
>>>2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
>>>distribution is morally wrong.
>>
>>bushels, why does he owe even a single grain of wheat to the man who has
>>planted none?
>
>The poster wrote "equitable" distribution. That means fair or just.
>It doesn't mean "equal." You can't really be opposed to fair and
>just distribution of economic rewards, can you?
Only if it is the modern, fuzzy, collectivist redefinitions of the concepts
'fair' and 'just' which you mean. Since you are a Marxist, you have already
made a priori judgments about the nature of things like profit, which
embody some undefined, but understood to be, grievously pernicious form of
exploitation of worker by capitalist.
So really, what you want, is for me to agree that, "Of _course_ I believe
in 'fairness' and 'justice'!" in order that you may then either claim that
I somehow implicitly support your Marxist views, or alternatively, so you
can claim that there are logical contradictions in my position.
'Justice' is treating men as their character and actions deserve. Men
cooperate and form associations when their interests intersect. What one
man produces or has acquired, is not taken from any other -- wealth is not
looted, it is produced, and it is the _mind_ -- which Marxist theory
ignores -- that is the source of all property and wealth. When a capitalist
offers to pay a wage to a man for a service, and the service is tendered
and the wage paid, then justice has been done by both parties. The
capitalist is no more willing to pay more for labor services than the
market rate, than is a worker to work for less than the market rate.
And I have explained in extensive detail elsewhere on this thread how there
is no direct connection between labor and profit, thus dismissing any
consideration of "profit based" wages. Different facts of reality give rise
to the variations of these amounts. Again, Marx ignores the role of the
_entrepreneur's_ mind in the productive process, which fact Ludwig Von
Mises proved in his refutation of socialistic calculation. That an economic
theory so fundamentally full of holes as Marx's, and the product of such an
intellectual crank should still be receiving such serious currency can only
be explained by the much deeper affinity of Marx's theory to those of
modern epistemology, ethics and politics. Marxism is really just bad
philosophy, systematically applied to the field of economics.
--
Dave Till
>'Justice' is treating men as their character and actions deserve.
Absolutely true. The problem is determining what someone's character
and actions deserve.
>When a capitalist
>offers to pay a wage to a man for a service, and the service is tendered
>and the wage paid, then justice has been done by both parties.
Only if both the capitalist and his employee enter freely into the
employment contract without coercion (i.e., if both have alternatives,
and yet have chosen to work together). In the real world, unfortunately,
many cases of coercion exist and have existed throughout history.
>The
>capitalist is no more willing to pay more for labor services than the
>market rate, than is a worker to work for less than the market rate.
In some cases, the capitalist *sets* the market rate -- it isn't something
beyond his control. Any history of the 1930s will give you examples of this.
My point (assuming I have one :-)): some advocates of laissez-faire
capitalism assume that *any* wage offer tendered to an employee is just,
regardless of the conditions under which the offer was made. If you are
willing to agree that some employment contracts are agreed to under duress,
and are therefore "unjust", I don't have a problem with your argument in
this thread.
--
--Dave Till, Writer of Manuals, KL Group Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
My postings are my own opinions, not my employers', but you knew that already.
email: da...@klg.com or am...@freenet.toronto.on.ca or da...@interlog.com
WWW: http://www.interlog.com/~davet/ (now new and slightly improved!)
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
: Tom S. (sche...@primenet.com) wrote:
: : When I become King, my first official act will be to proclaim that NO ONE may
: : be an employee for more than five consecutive years. After that five years,
: : every person, to earn an income, must be self-employed for at least the next
: : two years.
: It this were to be done to the education community, we may just turn
: around the state of education in this country. OTOH - most teachers
: could probably exist for 2 years working at McDonalds.
McDonald's isn't being self-employed.
--
Jonah Mainwaring, Rice University
TANSTAAFL
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
: >Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
: >machines.
: >So in other words, what you are saying is that in addition to receiving
: >their wage, all employees must sign contracts obligating them to
: >equitably share in the losses of the company, should such occur. Is this
: >a correct summary of your position? Also, I am curious, should employees be
: >held to such a circumstance according to a statute of law, or should such
: >kind of arrangement be purely voluntary between those employees and
: >capitalists who wished to undertake it?
: Employees already take loses when the company does. They get laid
: off. And in a company where profit bonuses are handed out, the loss
: of such a regular bonus is in itself a loss.
: Believe me when a company starts doing poorly and needs to cut costs
: to save its profit margin, lay offs are usually the quickest way.
: Workers are already in a position to sustain loses just as
: shareholders are.
Wrong. Workers stand to lose _future earnings_. Shareholders
stand to lose future earnings, and capital investment. A laid off worker
isn't one cent poorer than he was right before the layoff. He has lost
nothing, except the promise of future earnings. A shareholder whose
company goes under is quite poorer than he was earlier, as he has lost
things that he once owned.
: Look at the big picture. People figure the only risk taker in a
: business is the owner. Even though the owner has hired people who
: have invested similar amounts of money on education gambling (and
: today it is a gamble) that they will even find a job. When someone
: has a $50,000 school loan to pay back so they can have a skill to make
: them seen as valuable by a company. These people use their education
: that they paid for to do their job for someone else. They have
: invested in that company whether or not you see it.
Wrong. They have invested in _themselves_. If the company goes under,
the employee still has the diploma and skills that they paid for. They
haven't lost their "investment". If the company goes under, a _real_
investor looses his isnvestment. Sorry, you are simply wrong.
: As well, many people go beyond the call of duty at work and as a
: result the company does better. A good example of this was Lee
: Iacoca. He worked the first year as CEO of Chrysler for 1 dollar.
: He was CEO but still an employee. He showed his value and he took
: his risk.
Yes, he did take a risk, because he bought Chrysler stock, and stood to
loose his investment. A normal employee doesn't have that risk.
: We pay salesman by commission. No sales no cheque. Big sales big
: checque. No one has a problem with this type of system. Yet when an
: assembly team works extra hard increasing production, increasing
: profit, they should be happy with their base wage they could have made
: working the same slow pace.
Wrong, because if theya re mking a good wage, and don't work
hard, they will likely be replaced (rightly) with a good worker.
: If the employees of a company have put in the extra effort and as a
: result the company made lets say 10% more money because of this, why
: shouldn't some of that 10% go back to the workers who went beyond what
: was called for in their job description.
Becasue maximum speed is already in the job description of most assmebly
jobs. If they are capable of raising production 10%, then they have only
been working at 90% of what they should have been, and should have been
fired a long time ago.
Steve Kangas
>...Since you are a Marxist...
And:
> Again, Marx ignores the role of the
>_entrepreneur's_ mind in the productive process, which fact Ludwig Von
>Mises proved in his refutation of socialistic calculation. That an economic
>theory so fundamentally full of holes as Marx's, and the product of such an
>intellectual crank should still be receiving such serious currency can only
>be explained by the much deeper affinity of Marx's theory to those of
>modern epistemology, ethics and politics. Marxism is really just bad
>philosophy, systematically applied to the field of economics.
Hhhmmmmmmm... I wonder, Brad, if you would be kind enough to
tell us the details of Marx's philosophies on Marxism. Keep in
mind that Marx never wrote much about his communist utopia, and
devoted 99 percent of his writings to a withering critique of
capitalism. Nonetheless, I am sure you understand this
"Marxism" better than the man himself, and will enlighten the
rest of us poor naifs, sitting eagerly at your feet and
joyously waiting for your pearls of wisdom.
Or perhaps you would care to concede there is complexity to the
political left? That not all who believe in activist government
are Marxists? That there are numerous distinctions on the left
end of the spectrum, many of them diametrically opposed to each
other, including social democracy, American liberalism, direct
democracy, Stalinism, Leninism, communism, socialism - even,
for God's sake, Noam Chomsky's anarcho-socialism?
Somehow, I doubt you have the sophistication to define the
differences between these very different ideologies. They're
probably all the Red Menace to you.
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
Steve Kangas
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" Ronald Reagan
Steve Kangas
>dal...@onlink.net (Danny Albers) wrote:
>
>Herein is an awesome display of the role of rational epistemology in human
>affairs, and the reason for my signature quote.
Don't worry, Danny, being attacked by Brad Aisa is like being
attacked by a giant two-toed sloth. Continental drift is
sufficient speed to get away.
Mr. Aisa, you bandy about such fine sesquipedalianisms as
"epistemology," but you have completely misused the word, and I
wonder if you even know what it means. It means the study of
the origins, methods and limits of human knowledge. A typical
question for epistemologists is "How does the human brain
perceive blueness differently from redness?" or "How can the
brain be conscious of itself?" Nothing in this post has
anything to do with epistemology, and although you may impress
the yokels with your highfalutin' verbosity, rest assured the
more erudite among us are rolling our eyes.
Seeing as you spend most of your post equivocating over
definitions, I think the word you were searching for was
"semantics."
>
>
>> If you beleive that a worker doesn't invest money into a company
>then
>>think again freind. Most skilled workers I know have spent large
>>amounts of money acquiring their skills. Most skilled workers have
>>spent the equivalent money on their education that it would take to
>>start a business.
>
>Astounding equivocation on the economic concept 'invest'.
I notice a complete lack of supporting arguments, rhetorical
points and factual evidence within your empty assertion. You
simply call it "astounding" and leave it at that.
Mr. Albers' point is valid. Companies spend money on their
training programs for employees; they provide apprenticeships;
the most successful ones send their employees to college
classes. This is certainly an investment in the traditional
sense of the word. But in today's economy, the individual foots
most of the expenses of college himself. Of course, he later
transfers that cost back to the company by receiving a higher
income, but such retroactive purchases do not fall under the
term "investment." The peculiar thing about this arrangement is
that it is the *individual*, not the company, who takes the
risk with this investment, because there is no gaurantee that
the individual will be hired after putting himself through
college. And it is the individual who puts his own money up
front. The company is simply buying a more valuable tool of
production, to put it in the robotic terms you're now
disclaiming. Albers' point is superb.
>
>> And you don't think workers suffer losses when a business goes bad?
>>Well, thousands of people have been laid off and will argue otherwise.
>
>
>Absolutely amazing equivocation on the economic concept 'loss.'
Sigh. I know you are completely unfeeling and unsympathetic
toward workers, but you could at least pretend you have a
shred of human decency.
Even under your very narrow definition of the economic term
"loss," laid off workers qualify as such. Assuming they were
laid off due to improved production efficiency and not a
failing business, they fall under the category of "structural
unemployment." According to my Econ 101 book, "Of the three
categories of unemployment, only frictional unemployment is
desirable... structural unemployment implies that labor
resources are not fully utilized."
In a smoothly running economy, structural unemployment should
be negligible. If structural unemployment is affecting hundreds
of thousands of workers in our economy, it is ipso facto proof
that executives are not planning well. This is as real as
"loss" gets, even in the economist's traditional use of the
term.
>
>> In fact, most business managers lay off workers before they are
>>willing to suffer a loss themselves.
>
>Holy economic smokes Batman -- I hope that business managers act to prevent
>losses to the corporation for which they work. Business is not a charity.
>Business is not social work.
No, but business carries enormous social ramications. Pollution
is a prime example. Striving to stay in business, the owner
dumps his pollution, because treating it costs money, whereas
dumping it is free. If the owner were to pay the extra cost of
waste treatment, he would in effect be performing an act of
charity, since he would be donating to the welfare of others
without immediate reward to himself. I suspect from your
statement that you would forego such charity and "act to
prevent losses to the corporation for which you work."
>
>But what causes such lousy business climates, and all these recessions?
>Hmm? blank out... (Or: it must be the 'evil greedy capitalist's' fault
>somehow -- everything is the businessman's fault. etc.)
Well, since you asked, let's take a quick stroll through
history and examine what causes different business climates.
The 1920s were a period of laissez-faire government. The taxes
on the rich were the about the lowest they've been this
century, and 80 percent of the population was cut from the tax
rolls completely. Hoover instigated the Smoot-Hawley tariff in
1930, which amounted to a mere 2.5 effective tax increase for
all Americans, but other than that, he stuck to laissez-faire
policies right until the end of his term in 1932. And what
happened during this time? Throughout the 20s, economists were
worried that the economy was becoming basically unsound. There
were over 600 bank failures a year in the 20s. Housing
construction completely stopped in 1928. The stock market went
wild, bearing no resemblance to the real economy. The gap
between the poor and the rich grew to the widest its ever been
this century. And THEN the stock market crash of 1929 occurred.
After that, unemployment soared to 25 percent. The GDP fell 40
percent over Hoover's term. Some 11,000 banks failed. Farm
prices fell by more than half. And this was *before* FDR became
president.
The New Deal neither cured nor worsened the Great Depression,
but it did redistribute wealth, and greatly lessened the
suffering of the poor. It was not until government adopted the
Keynesian policy of borrowing and spending in 1939 (on defense,
in anticipation of the war against Hitler) that the economy
experienced a strong recovery. America emerged an economic
juggernaut from WWII. Its success was so striking that
governments all over the world became Keynesian. So much so
that by the late 60s, even Richard Nixon said, "We are all
Keynesians now." Before WWII, it was common for recessions to
worsen into depressions; after WWII, under Keynesian policies,
not a single one has. The top tax rate was 91 percent, the New
Deal and the Great Society were firmly in place, and this
country experienced the greatest economic boom it has ever
known.
And ever since the 70s, this boom has slowed. Taxes on the top
bracket have fallen from 91 to 27 percent. State and local
taxes have actually become regressive. Spending on human
resources has fallen; corporate welfare, like the $500 billion
S&L bailout, has become rampant. Income inequality has almost
reached 1920s levels. Corporate special interests have taken
over our Congress. Unions are at their lowest ebb in history.
If you want to argue correlations, these are some pretty strong
ones.
>
>>And some of us use our free time in the community. Making it a better
>>place for both us lowly workers and high and mighty godsends known as
>>entrepeuners. (however you spell that.)
>
>I like the Reverend Ike's sentiment on this (as reported by Ayn Rand): "The
>best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one."
Sigh. "The best way to help others is to make me rich." Sort of
like Southerners arguing that slavery was good because it
introduced the slaves to Christianity, or the British arguing
that India really wanted their despotic rule because it brought
them international trade. Selfishness has always been disguised
as altruism throughout history.
>
>People can in fact achieve their values, and don't need a whack of busybody
>professional altruists intruding into their life and helping them to death.
>Misfortune occasionally occurs, and kindess in the face of it is indicated.
>But it is not something I care to worship.
>
>I prefer to worship achievement, my own and that of others.
I wonder how much you think you would achieve if you did not
have the help of others. After all, group survival is more
efficient than individual survival. If you don't believe that,
feel free to become a hermit.
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
Steve Kangas
"Many a good man has been ruined by success." - Ben Franklin
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
|> sche...@primenet.com (Tom S.) wrote:
|>
|> If you beleive that a worker doesn't invest money into a company then
|> think again freind. Most skilled workers I know have spent large
|> amounts of money acquiring their skills. Most skilled workers have
|> spent the equivalent money on their education that it would take to
|> start a business.
Yes, but unlike spending that money to start a business, they invested the money in themselves. When a business goes under, an investor loses his investment. A laid off employee still has those skills that he paid to acquire. Sorry, that isn't investment, as there is no risk involved.
|>
|> And you don't think workers suffer losses when a business goes bad?
|> Well, thousands of people have been laid off and will argue otherwise.
|> These people have lost money just as much as the fellow who started
|> the business.
No, the fellow who started the business lost the prospect of future earnings, as did his employees. However, the owner also lost his capital investment, losing money that he had already spent, not merely losing potential future gains. Employees don't. Not even close to the same.
|>
|> In fact, most business managers lay off workers before they are
|> willing to suffer a loss themselves.
Of course. A business manager's job is to maximize the business's profits. Do you know of another reason for starting a business?
|>
|> Sure human labour demands raises, benefits, bonuses and machines don't
|> but if you buy a $50,000 machines you can't lay it off. And if its a
|> specialized machine you may not be able to sell it during hard times.
|> Where humans just get laid off.
Which is why some factories still use human labor, despite it's ineffiency.
|>
|> >>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
|>
|> >No, that is the difference between trading value for value and wanting the
|> >rewards but not the risks. Children engage in this all the time.
|>
|> When, while playing pogs?
NO, when they demand an ice cream cone from daddy.
|>
|> >When I become King, my first official act will be to proclaim that NO ONE may
|> >be an employee for more than five consecutive years. After that five years,
|> >every person, to earn an income, must be self-employed for at least the next
|> >two years.
|>
|> Oh, are you in line somewhere behind Prince Charles. Excuse me. I
|> didn't realise I was contradicting the next King. My apologies my
|> liege.
Why not? He couldn't do a worse job than Charles has done as Prince of Wales.
|>
|> >This will go a long way towards eliminating the whining by people who never
|> >have to do anyhting more than show up at 9:00AM or whatever. Politicians will
|> >go first into the fire.
|>
|> I hope you know that over 80% of fortune 500 hundred companies are
|> headed by people who work no more than 45 hours a week.
Yes, but they are good at their jobs, as a general rule. The measure of a worker's value isn't how many hours they work, but how much they accomplish in a week.
|>
|> I think most people have to do more at their job then just show up.
|> One of the hardest jobs I've ever heard was working at Burger King. I
|> ran my ass off for 8 hour stretches. Sometimes I didn't take a break
|> if it was busy. I made less than $7.00 and hour. If you had come up
|> to me then and said all I did was showed up everyday I would probrably
|> have punched you in the nose.
Buddy, if you think that working fast food is hard, then you have had some pretty easy jobs in your life. I have worked in a Burger King, and that was one of the easiest jobs I've ever heard of. Yeah, you stayed busy, but none of the work was either intellectually or physically demanding. If you had punched a person in the nose who said that all you had to do was show up, you likely would have just decked an honest man.
|> And some of us use our free time in the community. Making it a better
|> place for both us lowly workers and high and mighty godsends known as
|> entrepeuners. (however you spell that.)
If it wasn't for entrepeuners, none of your precious workers would have a job. Who do you think fronted the $1,000,000 or so needed to open that Burger King you worked at, a fairy godmother?
Terry Johnson
>
>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>
>No, that is the difference between trading value for value and wanting the
>rewards but not the risks.
One of the problems capitalism has difficulty addressing is the contradiction
between work as a commodity, as something that can be bought and sold,
and work as a creative, human activity.
People don't work for money. They sell their labour for money. They work
for other reasons. That's where the interests of capitalists and workers
come into conflict.
This is clearest in creative, non-manual work.
In another post, Brad Aisa points to the example of the code writer who
values not the economic utility of the program he writes, but its aesthetic
quality. It's a common contradiction. We work because we are social
beings. We feel happy, even joyful, to see our activity contribute to the
happiness of others. But under capitalism, the worker loses all sense of
this because he has no stake in or control over the product of his work.
So he strives to find other rewards.
But this isn't limited to intellectual work. I'll give an example. I worked
one summer as a dock attendant at a marina in B.C. One of my jobs was
carrying ice from shore to the gas dock, where it would be sold. To my
boss, the purpose of the job was clear--the ice had to be moved for him
to be able to profit from its sale. But I turned the job into a game, a
kind of competition between me and my co-workers to see how much ice
we could carry in a single wheelbarrow load. I had no stake in the actual
economic purpose of my job. But as a human being, I sought to turn the
task into a creative activity, something that I could take pride in.
The problem, of course, is that these two views of work often stand in
opposition. In effect, capitalism strives to subordinate one facet of work--
its ability to create value that the capitalist can appropriate--to the
myriad other reasons we engage in labour.
Sometimes the contradictions are trivial. My packing a record load of
ice may have been an inefficient use of my labour, from my boss's
standpoint, but it wasn't a serious impediment to his goal of selling
ice. Sometimes the contradictions are serious, however. When I worked
at Dofasco in Hamilton, for example, one of the attendants in the first
aid station at the mill made a point of encouraging workers to report
to him even with minor injuries. What at first seemed a simple strain
may prove more serious later, he said, and if it weren't reported promptly,
the worker would have trouble receiving compensation for injury. He took
great pride in his diligence, and was admired by his co-workers. But the
company did not share the same view: an increase in reported injuries
would mean it would have to pay higher WCB premiums, reducing its
return to shareholders. It put tremendous pressure on him to do his job
poorly.
The mistake the attendant made was in not recognizing the real nature
of his job, to help make money for Dofasco. But it was a human mistake,
and one workers will always make.
I guess it was a roundabout way of making my point. But here it is.
It may be right to say that capitalists buy labour as a commodity at
a given market price, and that the exchange ends there. That may well
be the "rational" way of looking at what goes on in the labour market.
But as human beings, we bristle at it.
Brad Aisa
one, this one corrects mistakes of reference and diction in my example.
Apologies. BA]
da...@klg-gateway.klg.com (Dave Till) wrote:
>>When a capitalist
>>offers to pay a wage to a man for a service, and the service is tendered
>>and the wage paid, then justice has been done by both parties.
>
>Only if both the capitalist and his employee enter freely into the
>employment contract without coercion (i.e., if both have alternatives,
>and yet have chosen to work together). In the real world, unfortunately,
>many cases of coercion exist and have existed throughout history.
Why didn't the aggrieved party phone the police? Extortion, threats of
violence, etc. are all crimes last time I checked. Actually, these sorts of
things have been crimes since the Roman times and earlier.
>My point (assuming I have one :-)): some advocates of laissez-faire
>capitalism assume that *any* wage offer tendered to an employee is just,
>regardless of the conditions under which the offer was made. If you are
>willing to agree that some employment contracts are agreed to under
duress,
>and are therefore "unjust", I don't have a problem with your argument in
>this thread.
Duress? Please name an instance of this alleged "duress".
My definition of what doesn't consitute duress: Man A is starving. Man B
has food and offers some to A if A performs some work.
Liberal logic ascribes evil to man B in this circumstance. Because he has
been provident, and is able to sustain both himself and others, he is
therefore evil. His providence is de facto evidence that he must have
actually robbed his means from A in the first place. Therefore, it would in
fact be an act of justice for A to actually expropriate from B and enslave
him, though perhaps generously letting him keep his hide (or some of it.)
This is liberal logic. Liberal logic is not logic.
And if government intervention into the economy causes economic problems,
such as depressions and recessions (to which you are probably alluding)
than what should be the conclusion? More of the same? More liberal logic?
--
Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
Danny Albers
>They do, silly person, by paying a wage, and/or offering bonuses. There are
>many companies that do BETTER by offing no incentive over salary. See CFO
>magazine (june issue, I think). Again, that is management, and not the point
>of discussion here.
The point of the original discussion is was wether an employee
deserves to benefit from the succuss of the company he works for.
I feel they do since they do contribute to that success whether you
see it or not.
My opponents feel they don't because they have nothing to lose by a
company going bankrupt.
Anyone who has ever been laid off knows this is bullshit.
But employee risk, according to these people, inherent to working for
other people (and it is) but financial risk is inherent in having
other people work for you.
The bottom line is that I feel companies have a responsibility to
their workforce. In good times and in bad. And obviously people like
Brad Asia beleive companies do not.
Which is why we've never heard of the Bank of Brad Asia Inc.
>> I beleive that a company is simply an entity who's purpose is to
>serve
>>its customers first, its owners and employees second. But it must
>>serve all three or it is not a worthwhile thing.
>Nope, it serves the owner first, the client second, the employees
>third, but you are correct in that it must serve all three.
Well, the point I wanted to make is agreed upon by you in that a
company is just an entity and that all three parties are served by it.
Finally a right winger willing to give a little.
Just when I thought it was impossible.
inform
Terry Johnson
>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>>
>>The poster wrote "equitable" distribution. That means fair or just.
>>It doesn't mean "equal." You can't really be opposed to fair and
>>just distribution of economic rewards, can you?
>
>Only if it is the modern, fuzzy, collectivist redefinitions of the concepts
>'fair' and 'just' which you mean. Since you are a Marxist, you have already
>made a priori judgments about the nature of things like profit, which
>embody some undefined, but understood to be, grievously pernicious form of
>exploitation of worker by capitalist.
>
don't earn a profit can't generate the funds needed for investment.
What Marxists criticise is the private appropriation of profit: that
part of the income of an enterprise that goes to the owner not as
payment for his labour, but as payment for his capital.
>So really, what you want, is for me to agree that, "Of _course_ I believe
>in 'fairness' and 'justice'!" in order that you may then either claim that
>I somehow implicitly support your Marxist views, or alternatively, so you
>can claim that there are logical contradictions in my position.
No. You're being paranoid. I just thought we should discuss what a fair
and equitable distribution of economic rewards should be.
>
>'Justice' is treating men as their character and actions deserve. Men
>cooperate and form associations when their interests intersect. What one
>man produces or has acquired, is not taken from any other -- wealth is not
>looted, it is produced, and it is the _mind_ -- which Marxist theory
>ignores -- that is the source of all property and wealth. When a capitalist
>offers to pay a wage to a man for a service, and the service is tendered
>and the wage paid, then justice has been done by both parties. The
>capitalist is no more willing to pay more for labor services than the
>market rate, than is a worker to work for less than the market rate.
>
This is all true, as far as it goes. But it assumes a capitalist measure
of justice. It assumes that all voluntary economic exchanges between men
are inherently just.
This, of course, is simply justification for inhumanity. It's what allowed
English landlords in Ireland to justify their export of food to England
in the midst of a terrible famine that struck down hundreds of thousands
of lives. It implies that the most fundamental of human rights--the rights
to life and dignity--can be subordinated to the right of free exchange.
Just because there are men whose labour does not bring enough in
exchange to maintain their existence doesn't mean we can ignore their
plight.
In the end, I'd argue, it's perfectly legitimate for societies to limit
the rights to property and free exchange when they conflict with other,
more fundamental rights.
>And I have explained in extensive detail elsewhere on this thread how there
>is no direct connection between labor and profit, thus dismissing any
>consideration of "profit based" wages. Different facts of reality give rise
>to the variations of these amounts. Again, Marx ignores the role of the
>_entrepreneur's_ mind in the productive process, which fact Ludwig Von
>Mises proved in his refutation of socialistic calculation. That an economic
>theory so fundamentally full of holes as Marx's, and the product of such an
>intellectual crank should still be receiving such serious currency can only
>be explained by the much deeper affinity of Marx's theory to those of
>modern epistemology, ethics and politics. Marxism is really just bad
>philosophy, systematically applied to the field of economics.
>
You're confusing two things, labour and capital. Marx never wrote that
only physical labour created value. And it's easy enough to determine
a market price for the creative labour of the entrpreneur...after all,
capitalists HIRE entrepreneurs the same way they hire labourers.
Marx and most other socialist economists didn't object to differences
in the payment of physical and mental work. They objected to the
appropriation by capitalists of a share of that labour.
James D. Ousey
Steve Kangas <kang...@scruznet.com> wrote:
>
>What tripe! You paint the dehumanizing picture of worker as
>robot, and the only one filled with life and intelligence in
>this great economy is the thinking entrepreneur surrounded by
>all his machines. You really ought to see a psychiatrist,
>although I doubt he could prescribe something for
>entreprenuerial narcissism.
Any means of production, in as much as it contributes to a product, need not
be filled "with life and intelligence" unless one of those factors is a
requirement of the function performed. True, intelligence is more a means of
production today than in the industrial age, but the entrepeneur contributes
the most to the product as a marketable good, more so than even the capitalist
who finances a particular endeavour.
The capitalist may have the economic power to launch a venture, but the
entepeneur identifies a need; organizes capital, labor, and other requirements
of production; keeps the project moving towards his goal; and collects the
rewards the market is willing to pay for *his* work, while he pays his workers
at the market rate for their value added work.
>Your beliefs don't even stand a rudimentary comparison
>to reality. The vast majority of improvements and innovations
>on the production line come from the workers and lower/middle
>managers themselves.
..and these workers and managers would never have been in the same building
working on the same projects had it not been for the entrepeneur whose vision
allowed them to come together. Workers and managers do not exist in a vacuum,
they exist in the context of the company they work for, which is not an
immutable fact of existence, but the product of the entrepeneur.
>They are the experts of their local
>production site; they know which problems need to be solved and
>what solutions should be sent up the chain of command.
But they themselves do not choose the task that leads to the problem solving
function. I will not dispute that problem solving skills are a valuable
commodity, the entrepeneur employs them himself. It's just that he is at the
TOP of the chain, while the workers are not. This is not because the ideal
entrepeneur has cheated the workers, but because he has the skills to create
an enterprise, which is a pre-requisite to getting a product to market, while
engineering skills are less important in the current labor market.
>At the
>very least, they give upper management the information and
>educated assessments that they need to make their own broader
>decisions.
And they get paid for that work at market rates. One may argue that the
worker is unjustly compensated, but the entrepeneur does not exist to create
fair jobs, nor make society better by his enterprises, but rather for profit.
If the worker believes himself to be unfairly compensated, let him find
another job that treats him better. If none exist, then let him change his
skills to those more in demand and less in supply.
>In the mechanical workforce you describe, the
>executive would need the omniscience of God to create the
>impossibly complex plans needed to direct his impossibly
>complex operations.
Why would an executive need omniscience? He only needs the skill to acquire
those of differing skills to enact his plans. He directs them, but does not
need to solve the problems he hires them to solve.
Also, can you give some examples of *impossibly complex* plans that an
entrepeneur has managed to bring to fruition despite its impossible
complexity?
>You can be sure that a robot assembly line does not give a
>manager the feedback necessary to make production more
>efficient. For this reason, the management at such factories
>require a small army of engineers and maintenence personnel to
>find problems and design improvements. The large size of these
>crews at automated factories is a direct indication of the
>innovative role of live workers.
Again, Brad did not attack that innovation occurs at many levels, just that it
is some mystically infinite component of value production. Currently, yes,
most problem solving is done better by men than machines as machines; and some
men solve problems better than others, and will be rewarded as the market
allows. To the production process (which may include developing a process),
problem solving is a means, like any other, of production as is treated
accordingly by the market for that means.
---------------------------------------------
You mean I *NEED* a signature file?
- James D. Ousey
---------------------------------------------
Mark Young
Johnson) writes:
>
>In <4dkttl$c...@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>, sche...@primenet.com (Tom S.)
writes:
>>
>>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>>
>>No, that is the difference between trading value for value and wanting the
>>rewards but not the risks.
>
>One of the problems capitalism has difficulty addressing is the
contradiction
>between work as a commodity, as something that can be bought and sold,
>and work as a creative, human activity.
This is not a problem with Capitalism, per se. This is a management
issue. The wonderful thing about Capitalism is that those who find
better ways of structuring the exchange of work for money will profit.
>People don't work for money. They sell their labour for money. They
work
>for other reasons. That's where the interests of capitalists and
workers
>come into conflict.
They make an exchange for mutual benefit. Sometimes this is and feels
fair, sometimes it isn't/doesn't. It is the responsibilty of the
parties to address this. It has NOTHING to do with Capitalism, per se,
except that Capitalism allows the freedom to correct poorly designed
compensation schemes and the reward of folks for doing so.
Mark Young
Mark Young
writes:
>
>>They do, silly person, by paying a wage, and/or offering bonuses.
There are
>>many companies that do BETTER by offing no incentive over salary.
See CFO
>>magazine (june issue, I think). Again, that is management, and not
the point
>>of discussion here.
>
>The point of the original discussion is was wether an employee
>deserves to benefit from the succuss of the company he works for.
>
>I feel they do since they do contribute to that success whether you
>see it or not.
If they have agreed to some arrangement for such, beyond being allowed
to continue to exchange their labor for money.
> My opponents feel they don't because they have nothing to lose by a
>company going bankrupt.
They don't have a right to anything that they have not earned or that
no one has agreed to pay them.
>Anyone who has ever been laid off knows this is bullshit.
Anyone who has been laid off was not providing adequate value for the
amount of money being paid them (by and large). Whether they think
something is bullshit or not is of no importance. They invested in
themselves NOT in the company. End of story.
>But employee risk, according to these people, inherent to working for
>other people (and it is) but financial risk is inherent in having
>other people work for you.
Risk is everywhere. But we aren't talking about the same types of
risks, and you SHOULD know this, but apparently don't. The employee
loses NOTHING when laid off. As he has invested nothing and leaves the
relationship with as much or more than when he started.
>The bottom line is that I feel companies have a responsibility to
>their workforce. In good times and in bad. And obviously people like
>Brad Asia beleive companies do not.
What you FEEL is of no import, here. Companies have the responsiblity
that they freely take. It ends there. You mistake rent seeking (I
think) for "duty".
<snip>
Mark Young
Franklin Reveal
>>>But most employees already share in the downside risk.
>>>Just ask any of the 40,000 AT&T employees who are losing
>>>their jobs.
>>Nope. All they are sharing in is the lack of future upside with that entity.
>>... it isn't a loss, per se.
>> And it certainly is shared by the entrepreneur, but again, he risks all
>>the out of pocket.
>>As I said before, you don't own the job. You do it. When the job is no
>>longer there, you have, in point of fact, lost nothing out of pocket.
>An employee with a highly specialized skill deserves good pay.
No. He deserves WHAT HE CAN GET in trade for his skill from
someone else who values it. Otherwise he "deserves" nothing.
> But when that same employee loses his job, it may take a long time to find
>another. He may lose his savings, his home, etc. But I guess this is
>not a loss.
Not a loss in terms of the business in which the employee did NOT INVEST (as
below).
>An employee invests twenty five years in a company.
NO.
Here is your problem: Did the employee actually "INVEST" or did he trade his
work for something else of value like money?
Please understand that you are confusing your terms.
An INVESTMENT is when you put your capital at risk, whether it be TIME or
MONEY...BUT _TIME_ is NOT an INVESTMENT _UNLESS_ it is expended AT LESS THAN
THE MARKET VALUE. And calculation of compensation must include ALL value
received: Money, Insurance, Vacation AND... WHAT IS LEARNED ON THE JOB.
This means that if an employee takes a job, this is the best package trade he
can make in the market for his time... in other words in his own selfish
interest, its the best deal he can make with what he has to offer.
Franklin Reveal
Nick Rossi
>their workforce. In good times and in bad. And obviously people like
>Brad Asia beleive companies do not.
Why? Why does a company have this responsibility?
>>> I beleive that a company is simply an entity who's purpose is to
>>serve
>>>its customers first, its owners and employees second. But it must
>>>serve all three or it is not a worthwhile thing.
But a company exists to produce a product valued by some set of consumers.
That's the whole reason it is there. The owner and investors put up
their money and property, and employees agree to do work in exchange for
money. The employees would not have that particular opportunity to do
that particular work were it not for the investors' money and the
owner's product or service idea.
>>Nope, it serves the owner first, the client second, the employees
>>third, but you are correct in that it must serve all three.
>
>Well, the point I wanted to make is agreed upon by you in that a
>company is just an entity and that all three parties are served by it.
But the point you may be missing is that a company must provide payment
to its employees because they do work, and only for that work. What
other criteria should be used? Acts of charity are nice, and may even be
beneficial to a company in some circumstances (if it helps future
productivity), but to claim that there is an obligation of some sort is
*extremely* unfeeling.
>Finally a right winger willing to give a little.
>
>Just when I thought it was impossible.
I'm no right-winger. I deplore censorship, religion, and legislated
moral authority.
Nick
Terry Johnson
>
> Wrong. Workers stand to lose _future earnings_. Shareholders
>stand to lose future earnings, and capital investment. A laid off worker
>isn't one cent poorer than he was right before the layoff. He has lost
>nothing, except the promise of future earnings. A shareholder whose
>company goes under is quite poorer than he was earlier, as he has lost
>things that he once owned.
>
layoffs.
Workers fashion their lives around their jobs. They buy houses, invest
their time in their community. Obviously they don't have as much
capital to lose as a capitalist--otherwise they wouldn't be workers.
But go to Uranium City or Port Alberni, and ask how much equity in
homes alone was lost after the closure of the local mine or mill. To
deny that capitalists have any social responsibility for their actions,
given the wide dislocation their investment decisions can make, is
to deny any concept of human values.
>
>Yes, he did take a risk, because he bought Chrysler stock, and stood to
>loose his investment. A normal employee doesn't have that risk.
>
This is a very limited definition of risk taking.
Workers don't have capital to risk, that's true. But capitalists don't
risk their lives and health. In 1989, 1,164 Canadians lost their lives
in workplace accidents. Another 656,000 suffered disabling injuries
on the job. (Cited from the 1992 Canada Yearbook, published by
Statscan). Again in 1989, with 10.5 million Canadians in the
workforce, there were more than 1 million reported work injuries. And
1989 was a relatively good year.
>
>: If the employees of a company have put in the extra effort and as a
>: result the company made lets say 10% more money because of this, why
>: shouldn't some of that 10% go back to the workers who went beyond what
>: was called for in their job description.
>
>Becasue maximum speed is already in the job description of most assmebly
>jobs. If they are capable of raising production 10%, then they have only
>been working at 90% of what they should have been, and should have been
>fired a long time ago.
>
You've obviously never worked on an assembly line.
It's true that speed-ups can crank more production out of the line. But
it comes at a cost. If the pace of work is too high, it becomes
unsustainable over any period of time. Employees burn out and quit,
in the same way soldiers suffer shell shock. And speed-ups are
always associated with a higher incidence of workplace injuries.
You need to spend some time in the real world.
JanHolland
>>Tell me, what will happen when all
>>the worker are replaced by machines????
.. deletion
>So, in answer to your question, look at reality. What happens when
>industries are increasingly mechanized? It improve the productivity of that
>industry, and frees up people to pursue other typically more interesting
>things -- the types of work most amenable to automation are the least
>interesting for humans anyways.
No, many people (far simpler than us of course) like to do simple jobs of
repetitive character if theteam where they work is satsifactory, emotionally
rewarding, ....
>Thus, higher levels of work are created.
>Just look at the numbers for the personal computer industry, which didn't
>even exist 20 years ago. Now, it is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry,
>employing in total 100s of thousands, most in jobs with primarily
>intellectual components in safe, well appointed surroundings. This is a
>magnificent elevation of man's station.
>Of course workers whose jobs become redundant must find some other form of
>employment, but people can learn new skills.
And forced (in a reasonable way) to adapt is a learning experience. Animals in
the wild live shorter but have more braincells than in the Zoo.
>It is the intervention of today's welfare state which crushes employment.
Unemployment in the Netherlands is lower than in a 3rd world country !
>A free market would always be starved for employees, because every other kind
>of physical resource exists in massive quantities, but the amount of human
>labor at any given point is firmly fixed.
2xNo: space is scarce in a city and
your labour is not fixed. You can work 8, 10 or 12 hours.
... deletion
>Until then,
>Ludditism is as false today as it was the instant it was formulated.
But the worry of the people can be reacted on in a positive way. If you do not
you get Ludditism. It is a reaction on bad leadership, neglect, ...
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Which does not say that they do (grin)
I post to the original groups but read only APhilObj + APolEc
Jan Holland
t...@pi.net
"A fact is a broken dream, A dream is a future fact"
Wolf Kirchmeir
>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>
>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>
>Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
>machines.
>
<<snip>>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Now we're getting somewhere close to the fundamental irrelevance
of this discussion.
Tell me, what will happen when all
the worker are replaced by machines????
wol...@ibm.net (*v*)
My opinion: 'tis a small thing, but 'tis mine own.
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
: In <4dotlk$4...@larry.rice.edu>, main...@rice.edu (Jonah Paul Mainwaring) writes:
: >
: > Wrong. Workers stand to lose _future earnings_. Shareholders
: >stand to lose future earnings, and capital investment. A laid off worker
: >isn't one cent poorer than he was right before the layoff. He has lost
: >nothing, except the promise of future earnings. A shareholder whose
: >company goes under is quite poorer than he was earlier, as he has lost
: >things that he once owned.
: >
: You've obviously never visited a town where there have been massive
: layoffs.
: Workers fashion their lives around their jobs. They buy houses, invest
: their time in their community. Obviously they don't have as much
: capital to lose as a capitalist--otherwise they wouldn't be workers.
: But go to Uranium City or Port Alberni, and ask how much equity in
: homes alone was lost after the closure of the local mine or mill. To
: deny that capitalists have any social responsibility for their actions,
: given the wide dislocation their investment decisions can make, is
: to deny any concept of human values.
Workers stand to lose _potential_ assets. Owners stand to lose
_potential_ and _real_ assets. See the difference? A worker has _not_
invested in a company, and is not immediately poorer for the failure of a
company. Yes, in certain town the entire economy suffers when a factory
closes. In the vast majority of closings, this is not the case. As an
example, a gas station near my residence closed recently. The employees
lost jobs, and future earnings. However, at the end of the last day,
their net worth was the same as it was at the beginning of the day. If
they find another job with the same pay, they have lost _nothing_. The
owner of the gas station has lost any future earnings the station would
have given him, and whatever capital investment he had in the station,
that he can't recoup through sale of the land. At the end of the day,
his net worth was significantly lower than it was at the begining of the
day. He _lost_ money. The employees didn't. Even if the owner findas a
new job the same day, with the same pay as what he made from the station,
he is poorer. See?
: >
: >Yes, he did take a risk, because he bought Chrysler stock, and stood to
: >loose his investment. A normal employee doesn't have that risk.
: >
: This is a very limited definition of risk taking.
: Workers don't have capital to risk, that's true. But capitalists don't
: risk their lives and health. In 1989, 1,164 Canadians lost their lives
: in workplace accidents. Another 656,000 suffered disabling injuries
: on the job. (Cited from the 1992 Canada Yearbook, published by
: Statscan). Again in 1989, with 10.5 million Canadians in the
: workforce, there were more than 1 million reported work injuries. And
: 1989 was a relatively good year.
Changing the subject again. The point is that the workers do not loose
net worth when the company goes bad. The owners do.
: >
: >: If the employees of a company have put in the extra effort and as a
: >: result the company made lets say 10% more money because of this, why
: >: shouldn't some of that 10% go back to the workers who went beyond what
: >: was called for in their job description.
: >
: >Becasue maximum speed is already in the job description of most assmebly
: >jobs. If they are capable of raising production 10%, then they have only
: >been working at 90% of what they should have been, and should have been
: >fired a long time ago.
: >
: You've obviously never worked on an assembly line.
: It's true that speed-ups can crank more production out of the line. But
: it comes at a cost. If the pace of work is too high, it becomes
: unsustainable over any period of time. Employees burn out and quit,
: in the same way soldiers suffer shell shock. And speed-ups are
: always associated with a higher incidence of workplace injuries.
: You need to spend some time in the real world.
Actually, I haven't worked an _assembly_ line, but I have worked on a
line in a factory. Russel Stover's Candy Plant in Cookeville, TN. We tried
speed-ups on a few occaisions. Inevitably, a machine would break under
the increased work load. Eventually, management realized that we were
working at may production, and simply moved to working seven days a
week. Despite the high workload, I never did see the "shell shock" build
up beyond what was normal. Of course, the fact that day seven paid
double time may have had something to do with everyone's tolerance.
OTOH, it was third shift, and we all looked pretty shell-shocked to begin
with, so maybe I just couldn't see it.
Have you ever worked on a line?
Brad Aisa
>Workers fashion their lives around their jobs. They buy houses, invest
>their time in their community. Obviously they don't have as much
>capital to lose as a capitalist--otherwise they wouldn't be workers.
>But go to Uranium City or Port Alberni, and ask how much equity in
>homes alone was lost after the closure of the local mine or mill. To
>deny that capitalists have any social responsibility for their actions,
>given the wide dislocation their investment decisions can make, is
>to deny any concept of human values.
Capitalists have broad shoulders, thank god, but you are really expecting a
bit much here.
People who decide to 'put their eggs in one basket' shouldn't be too
surprised if the handle falls off or the bottom breaks through. A contract
of employment at a mill or mine, is not a guarantee that it will operate
forever. Decisions to buy or lease property must be made on that basis.
Property and houses in such areas is bound to be substantially discounted
from equivalent homes in large cities anyway. If another company strikes a
giant lode nearby, thus nearly guaranteeing the long-term life of the area,
and sending property values skyrocketing, what then? Don't you think the
new owner should get their fair share of all that new value?
The thing is, that you seem to be always willing to saddle capitalists with
liabilities (by force?) that are not their responsibility, but only if this
works in favor of the workers. Do you think this is honest? I don't,
particularly if one looks at the statistics for business success -- most
fail. Therefore, if anything, factors should be weighted in favor of the
capitalists. I don't advocate this, but if one were intervening, it is the
capitalists who risk the most, fail most often, and make employment for
everyone else even possible. Yet they keep getting cursed and regulated and
expropriated from.
>It's true that speed-ups can crank more production out of the line. But
>it comes at a cost. If the pace of work is too high, it becomes
>unsustainable over any period of time. Employees burn out and quit,
>in the same way soldiers suffer shell shock. And speed-ups are
>always associated with a higher incidence of workplace injuries.
There is a complex trade-off here between worker safety, productivity, and
costs.
Fortunately, in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, human labor (of every
kind) becomes the limiting factor of production, and thus jobs are always
available. This means that consideration in employee matters always weighs
heavily in favor of the worker.
The most eloquent demonstration of the fact that the
socialist/interventionists can't even conceive of such a possibility is
that their current measurement of employment doesn't even permit of
expressing the market circumstance I describe. (Many other measures, such
as inflation or interest, can be negative -- but unemployment is the ratio
of jobless to employed; the institutional (as opposed to purely voluntary)
unemployment rate in a free market society would be zero, but this doesn't
tell the whole story...)
Brad Aisa
>In <4dku23$n...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
>>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>>
>>Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
>>machines.
>Now we're getting somewhere close to the fundamental irrelevance
>of this discussion.
>
>Tell me, what will happen when all
>the worker are replaced by machines????
Well, let's see -- what century were the Luddites from -- the 18th, wasn't
it? Over 200 years ago?
Now, according to Ludditism (can I 'ism' it?), mechanization causes
uneployment and human impoverishment. But if Ludditism were true, not only
would the present generation be unemployed, but 3 generations of their
yet-to-be born descendents besides. And not only would mankind be poorer
than in the 18th century, but we should verily have plunged well into
conditions of negative wealth (whatever the hell that could be).
But observation of reality tells us Ludditism is false. This points out the
central problem with most ideas which posture as economic "truth" -- they
completely contradict the facts of reality. In popular conception,
economics is literally approached with the same mental processes as
religion -- a branch of 'knowledge' disconnected with reality, concerned
with fantasy constructs, and filled with a long baffling series of
assertions about the nature of these constructs (God, heaven, angels,
etc.), and how we should adjust our lives to satisfy their nature. Just
exactly so economics. Ludditism is nothing but religious doctrine, but
nevertheless, unions and socialists foment for restrictive measures
and coercive legislation to 'protect jobs' from the 'evils' of
mechanization.
Only bad epistemology, in conjunction with deeply flawed moral philosophy,
can explain the spectacle of modern economics. Here we are in the middle of
the most advanced age in human history, with new technology and wonderful
services and mediums of communication springing out of our ying-yangs, and
yet people venomously curse and rant against this marvelous system (or
more precisely: what is left of it, under the current crushing load of
interventions).
So, in answer to your question, look at reality. What happens when
industries are increasingly mechanized? It improve the productivity of that
industry, and frees up people to pursue other typically more interesting
things -- the types of work most amenable to automation are the least
interesting for humans anyways. Thus, higher levels of work are created.
Just look at the numbers for the personal computer industry, which didn't
even exist 20 years ago. Now, it is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry,
employing in total 100s of thousands, most in jobs with primarily
intellectual components in safe, well appointed surroundings. This is a
magnificent elevation of man's station.
Of course workers whose jobs become redundant must find some other form of
employment, but people can learn new skills.
It is the intervention of today's welfare state which crushes employment. A
free market would always be starved for employees, because every other kind
of physical resource exists in massive quantities, but the amount of human
labor at any given point is firmly fixed.
We can revisit this part of economic theory when scientists discover how to
either: a) clone whole humans (rather than the current manufacturing
process), or b) manufacture sentient robots or androids. Until then,
Ludditism is as false today as it was the instant it was formulated.
--
Dan Hankins
: In <4dotlk$4...@larry.rice.edu>, main...@rice.edu (Jonah Paul Mainwaring) writes:
: >
: > Wrong. Workers stand to lose _future earnings_. Shareholders
: >stand to lose future earnings, and capital investment. A laid off worker
: >isn't one cent poorer than he was right before the layoff. He has lost
: >nothing, except the promise of future earnings. A shareholder whose
: >company goes under is quite poorer than he was earlier, as he has lost
: >things that he once owned.
: >
: You've obviously never visited a town where there have been massive
: layoffs.
: capital to lose as a capitalist--otherwise they wouldn't be workers.
: But go to Uranium City or Port Alberni, and ask how much equity in
: homes alone was lost after the closure of the local mine or mill. To
: deny that capitalists have any social responsibility for their actions,
: given the wide dislocation their investment decisions can make, is
: to deny any concept of human values.
I have. I was one of the targets of such a large layoff. I still
disagree that I (or any of my fellow layoff-ees) lost anything by virtue
of the at-will contract being terminated.
Value is not an absolute...the value of a house to the owner may change
with respect to its value to potential buyers, but that's how markets
work. The value of a home to an owner is not solely its value to a
potential buyer (unless, of course, one decides to sell).
Dan Hankins
dhan...@gate.net
Brad Aisa
>[...]The Luddite argument failed both
>theoretically and practically because in their day new
>technologies enabled re-allocation of human skills and labour.
>That's no longer the case. New technologies now enable total
>replacement of human skills and labour.
No, you are merely asserting Ludditism 1.1 (TM). You need to consider that
every extra good or service produced is a valuable thing. There is a
literally unlimited consumptive demand, which is checked only by the
ability of each person to produce to exchange.
>What we are facing, at least in the developed world, is a
>monstrous overcapacity for production of things, and increasingly
>of services..
This is absurd. Jean-Baptiste Say refuted this nonsensical idea centuries
ago -- it is called Say's law, which states, "Supply creates its own
demand." In other words, it is precisely the act of production which
creates demand. The idea that there can be "overproduction" or "oversupply"
is just complete nonsense. Of course it might be useful to statist
economists trying to explain to the confused populace why the economy is
shrinking during a recession, and why they are out of work. Such an
economist could then blather that the problem was a severe oversupply of
production... Well, not to worry -- I'm sure his advice will correct the
oversupply of production readily enough.
Wolf Kirchmeir
>wol...@ibm.net (Wolf Kirchmeir) wrote:
>>In <4dku23$n...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
>>>a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>
>>>>That's the difference between human labour and machines.
>>>
>>>Well, this may be why capitalists are so eager to replace humans with
>>>machines.
>
>>Now we're getting somewhere close to the fundamental irrelevance
>>of this discussion.
>>
>>Tell me, what will happen when all
>>the worker are replaced by machines????
>
this iggerunt hick jes' didn' know about all them historical
facks an' all....>>
>>-- >Brad Aisa, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Never make the asumption that your interlocutor doesn't know what
you know. Assume instead he knows at least as much. I, for
example, assumed you were aware that *** for the first time in
human history *** we are able to replace most if not all the
producers with machines (including, increasingly, the planners and
market analysts that Mr Aisa and others seem to believe are
morally superior to the mere makers of things.) So the Luddite
argument is irrelevant. The Luddite argument failed both
theoretically and practically because in their day new
technologies enabled re-allocation of human skills and labour.
That's no longer the case. New technologies now enable total
replacement of human skills and labour.
What we are facing, at least in the developed world, is a
monstrous overcapacity for production of things, and increasingly
of services.. What we also have,is a mental set that cannot accept
that our present beliefs and values are irreleveant. It doesn't
matter very much whether a worker "chooses" his employer wisely or
not, or whether the capitalist "chooses" to invest in one rather
another new technology.
The skills that most humans are capable of learning we are also
capable of programming machines to do. What's more, in the name of
something called "efficiency", we are busily competing to lower
costs, gain market shre, etc etc etc (the technical arguments
about how to apportion moral praise and blame in this process are
really quite amusing.) Whoever can reduce the human labour
component has a short-term edge. Etc, Etc, etc.
The end result will be a *** very *** small producer class, who in
the present sense of the word "own" the means of production, and
a *** very *** large class of consumers. But Mr Aisa and his kind
don't want to think about that.
My observation is this: our economy is changing so fast in its
fundamental nature (the means of production and distribution) that
traditional economic/political/moral concepts are no longer
relevant. Whether you call yourself socialist/left-leaning, or
capitalist/right-leaning don't matter a damn. Nor does the
self-styled objectivist stance of the disciples of Ayn Rand. Nor
do your disagreements. You're all ignoring a fundamental fact of
human history: by the time people have figured out a way to "fix"
the problems, the problems have changed.
Your comments on each others' analyses depress me. They are merely
high-school debating points. So what if your opponent hasn't used
your analytical methods properly? Suppose neither his nor yours
are the ones to use?
Suppose you're debating how many angels can dance on the head of a
pin? Suppose there aren't any angels?
There is some indication that some segments of our society are
blundering towards a new economy in the existence of this very
medium athat we are using. I'm not entriely hopeless about the
future. :-)
What I resent, of course, is that all sorts of these
backward-looking twits get into positions of power, and fuck up
the world trying to fix problems that no longer exist. Why?
Because they are aboslutely sure that they know The Answers.
I think it would be more useful if all you who believe you have an
Answer should start debating what the questions should be.
Nick Rossi
Wolf Kirchmeir <wol...@ibm.net> wrote:
>Glad to consider your ideas, but they sound like standard
>Economics 100 to me. Frankluy, I don't give a damn what the **
>technical** definitions of **wages, etc** are. I'm concerned
>with realities. Wages is the money you make. Therefore, the
>earnings of a business person are wages. Etc.
How convenient to throw out definitions in order to make your point.
>Thanks for responding to my post. I enjoy a good discussion. So
>I'll give a couple of my assumptions to chew over.
>
>1. The economic system exists solely to produce and distribute
>the goods and services of the society that uses it. Thus, it is a
>means and not and end. .
Yup.
>2. Any economic system that doesn't achieve equitable
>distribution is morally wrong.
And equitable distribution means: people are rewarded for the value they
produce. Those who produce more value, should get more. Those who
produce less value, should get less.
Those who create and innovate new ideas, direct production, and make
products available to consumers, create more value than those involved in
the physical aspects of production itself.
There is no objective criteria of value. Value is determined by
consumers in the decisions they make with the money they spend, and
no other way. Wages, therefore, is the price paid by employers for the
work of employees. They are subject to the same supply-and-demand forces
which determine all other prices.
>3. No morally wrong system can survive for any length of time,
>since the victims of both real and percieved injustices will
>eventually try to change it. In the past, many attempts to change
>the system have been extremely violent.
Yep. As people continue to be disenfranchised by government taxes for
programs, the unrest builds up.
>4. Every participant in the system is both a producer and a
>consumer. These functions are of equal value.
Yep. People forget this fact quite often.
>5. One's self-worth is related to, but not tied up in, one's
>economic function and value.
Yep.
>I have others, but I won't tie up bandwidth with any more of my
>small opinions.
Sounds like good old capitalism to me. The further we move away from it,
as we are in the U.S., the worse the social unrest becomes.
Nick
Danny Albers
>>
>>Just when I thought it was impossible.
>I'm no right-winger. I deplore censorship, religion, and legislated
>moral authority.
>Nick
Well Nick...learn the difference between a right and left wing person.
You are definately part of the right.
At least in your views about labour.
RoadRuner
discussion lacking somewhat. I'd like to focus on the largest segment
of our economy, small businesses. Companies with less than 50 employees
account for over 80% of the private sector, I think it is reasonable to
narrow the discussion to that segment of the economy instead of arguing
over assumptions based on large bureacratic corporations.
I have risked my life savings, mortgaged some of my future and committed
myself to make my business successful. I bust my ass everyday to make the
thing work and at the end of the day, the only person responsable for
paying the bills is I. It was my idea to start this business, I take all
the risks, I bring in the clients, I am liable for everything and I stand
behind the product, don't be surprised when I expect to reap 100% of the
benefits.
I just can't believe some of you people trying to claim that somehow
"society" owns my business and I deserve a good wage, but it is ultimately
"society's" money and decision as to how redistribute the wealth. My first
observation is that other nations have tried to implement that theory
and have failed miserably, it just does not work. My second observation
is that it is my business, I own it like I own my house, my car or my
computer. I can do whatever I want with it and there would have to be a
civil war in which the socialists win before that ever changes.
Finally, I produce ALL of the wealth generated through my business and
that is why the law recognizes that I own all of the profits. Hired
help is just that, they are not entitled to anything more than the
agreement we signed when I decided to hire them.
ALL of the profits of a business belong to the business OWNER.
-RR
Nick Rossi
>And equitable distribution means: people are rewarded for the value they
>produce. Those who produce more value, should get more. Those who
>produce less value, should get less.
>
>Those who create and innovate new ideas, direct production, and make
>products available to consumers, create more value than those involved in
>the physical aspects of production itself.
>
>There is no objective criteria of value. Value is determined by
>consumers in the decisions they make with the money they spend, and
>no other way. Wages, therefore, is the price paid by employers for the
>work of employees. They are subject to the same supply-and-demand forces
>which determine all other prices.
It sounds like I contradicted myself here. I state that those who
innovate and direct create more value, then I say there is no objective
criteria of value other than what consumers decide. This needs
clarification.
The *object* of value is determined by consumers, but the hierarchy of
values that go into the production of the object favors the innovator or
director of production, because the object would never have been produced
without the original idea. Creation and direction are always
prerequisites to the physical production itself - they make the physical
production possible. Therefore there is necessarily more of the
consumer's value attached to their tasks than to those who physically
construct the object.
Tonly
>He didn't create the wealth or value -- those who worked for and
>with him did.
Really. Those, that are paid to perform labor to achieve a specific
end defined by an a person or entity with the courage to invest the
money and to take the risk, and the vision to create the product or
service, those employees deserve a share of the profit, simply becouse
they are employees.
Are they prepared to sacrifice their wages, when the idea fails. Are
they prepared to return their wages if the business fails. I don't
remember seeing anyone pointing out a two way responsiblity of labor.
Unvaringly the total responsibility is capital or management. Why?
Because "The rich are greedy and deserve any negative result they
get."
When they ( Capitalists ) try to make a profit they are "greedy" and
when they fail they are "stupid." And if the idea or the business
fails, then labor walks away to find another employer to complain
about.
And socialist thought feeds the disatifaction of labor to increase
it's power. And power is all that its about. Not benevolence.
There has never been a socialist revolution that was benevolent except
to those in power. One group ( at least one group) was always
punished. Thats not the definition of benevolence.
There has not been, in the last 70 years a communist government that
allowed a free election that would risk its replacement. So long as
it had any power to prevent it. That's not freedom.
The idea that Socialism could work, If only it were done right negates
and ignores the evidence of the life-lab of the world experiment where
Capitalism and Socialism aka: Communism, side by side worked towards
there own ends for the last 70 years.
The result is that capitalist regimes prospered and socialist regimes
failed. Those that were a mix of the two, succeed to the degree that
capitalism is allowed to flurish. Whitness China and Hong Kong.
China isn't interested in making Hong Kong, communist, its working
like hell to make BeJing capitalist.
What is there left to talk about except the never ending utopian
dreams of frustrated socialists morning the loss of relevence and
power.
Enough. Really. Enought. Give it up. Socialism doesnt' work..
Brad Aisa
[...]
>Enough. Really. Enought. Give it up. Socialism doesnt' work..
The problem, is that people have still not discovered the proper morality
of freedom and capitalism: rational egoism. Men are still taught that
altruism -- sacrifice of self to others -- is the ideal and proper system.
Not only is it against man's needs as a living being, it doesn't even
provide a standard of value for what might be in man's interests, so that
even if one were mistakenly acting for others one would even know what to
do.
Until there is a change in people's morality, they will still view
socialism as an ideal, and still try to practice it or introduce socialist
elements into every partially free system.
We see the evidence of this everywhere. Even alleged "far right-wing"
conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Ralph Klein and Mike Harris and
others, do not challenge the moral legitimacy of the
welfare/interventionist state. None of them say this is _morally wrong_ --
they just apologetically complain that it costs too much, or that there is
too much 'abuse' of welfare, etc. Rational egoists rebel against the
fundamental tenets of socialism, and call for the complete elimination of
these programs.
Chris Cathcart
> Tell me, what will happen when all
> the worker are replaced by machines????
Who will produce the machines?
(Typical answer: "machines will."
My reply: "Ok then, who produces _those_ machines?"
There is not some infinite regress here - the machines are produced by
_someone_.)
For a good, brief refutation of the idea that machines on balance create
unemployment, see the chapter entitled "The curse of machiney" in Henry
Hazlitt's _Economics in One Lesson_. A quote from that chapter:
"Joe Smith is thrown out of a job by the introduction of some new
machine. 'Keep your eye on Joe Smith," [economic] writers insist. 'Never
lose track of Joe Smith.' But what they then proceed to do is to keep
their eyes _only_ on Joe Smith, and to forget Tom Jones, who has just got
a job in making the new machine, and Ted Brown, who has just got a job
operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what it
used to cost her. And because they think only of Joe Smith, they end by
advocating reactionary and nonsensical policies" (p. 59).
Chris
Mark Young
ott...@freenet.tlh.fl.us (Giovanni 8) writes:
>
<good stuff snipped>
>
>Most LBOs are kind of weird, though, because the "buyer" is putting up
>what he does not own as collateral. That seems a bit fraudulent in
>some cases.
Can I ask why you think this? Do you have any examples? I might be
able to clarify.
Mark Young
Steward Analytics, Inc.
http://home.aol.com/OEXCHAOS
>
>No, capitalists have no "social responsibility". What the heck do
>*you* *mean* by that term, anyway? They have the responsibility to
>keep their agreements with other individuals, the same as anyone else
>does.
>===
==============
>jgo "Valid FSU Card" is an oxymoron. Batman
Forever
>ot...@fsu.edu http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~otto
Triumphant
Giovanni 8
> da...@klg-gateway.klg.com (Dave Till) wrote:
>> In article <4dmpd7$g...@noc.tor.hookup.net>,
>> Brad Aisa <ba...@hookup.net> wrote:
>> "Justice" is treating men as their character and actions deserve.
> Absolutely true. The problem is determining what someone's character
> and actions deserve.
>> When a capitalist offers to pay a wage to a man for a service,
>> and the service is tendered and the wage paid, then justice has
>> been done by both parties.
> Only if both the capitalist and his employee enter freely into the
> employment contract without coercion (i.e., if both have alternatives,
> and yet have chosen to work together). In the real world, unfortunately,
> many cases of coercion exist and have existed throughout history.
Right. If either, or a third party, initiates or threatens force,
the it's not a freely entered agreement.
>> The capitalist is no more willing to pay more for labor services
>> than the market rate, than is a worker to work for less than the
>> market rate.
> In some cases, the capitalist *sets* the market rate -- it isn't
> something beyond his control. Any history of the 1930s will give
> you examples of this.
Not that I've been able to tell from reading or talking with my folks,
who were just out of high school.
> My point (assuming I have one :-)): some advocates of laissez-faire
> capitalism assume that *any* wage offer tendered to an employee is
> just, regardless of the conditions under which the offer was made.
> If you are willing to agree that some employment contracts are agreed
> to under duress, and are therefore "unjust", I don't have a problem
> with your argument in this thread.
Yes, any wage offer is just, so long as it's not accompanied by threat
of force or fraud, and any potential employee is free to accept it or
turn it down and look elsewhere for employment, or become self-employed.
Phil Ronzone
>You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
>supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist
>now. Brad, you might be interested to know that few
>mainstream economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only
>ones who do are the supply-side cranks on the fringes of the
>field. For one thing, there is a clear refutation to Say's ...
Well then again, there are very few wealthy economists. Think about it.
Say's law is very valid, whether or not some number of economists believe
in gravity or any other reality.
Supply precedes demand is the more accurate statement.
Who ever "demanded" the transistor, the phone, the copier, fast food,
etc.?
And so on.
--
"I didn't do it, nobody saw me, and you can't prove it!" - B. Simpson
These opinions are MINE, and you can't have 'em! (But I'll rent 'em cheap ...)
Giovanni 8
> a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
>> In <4dotlk$4...@larry.rice.edu>,
>> main...@rice.edu (Jonah Paul Mainwaring) writes:
>> isn't one cent poorer than he was right before the layoff. He has lost
>> nothing, except the promise of future earnings. A shareholder whose
>> company goes under is quite poorer than he was earlier, as he has lost
>> things that he once owned.
> You've obviously never visited a town where there have been massive
> layoffs. Workers fashion their lives around their jobs. They buy
> houses, invest their time in their community. Obviously they don't
> have as much capital to lose as a capitalist--otherwise they wouldn't
> be workers. But go to Uranium City or Port Alberni, and ask how much
> equity in homes alone was lost after the closure of the local mine or
> mill. To deny that capitalists have any social responsibility for
> their actions, given the wide dislocation their investment decisions
> can make, is to deny any concept of human values...
People have expectations that aren't realized. The stock-holder can
lose his entire investment. The employee who expects a steady income,
"who expects to continue living in the manner to which he has become
accustomed" and the stock-holders are both losers if the company goes
under. For the employee, because he has contracted to pay debts which
he then cannot. This is not a fault of the stock-holder, which may be
the employee of some other firm whose pension depends on that stock.
The employee has no right to expected future income beyond what is
in his contract. In some cases, the contract does guarantee a certain
income until a certain date, unless and until the employee commits
some especially bad act; this is known as tenure, the holding of a
property right in the work/position.
Most LBOs are kind of weird, though, because the "buyer" is putting up
what he does not own as collateral. That seems a bit fraudulent in
some cases.
No, capitalists have no "social responsibility". What the heck do
*you* *mean* by that term, anyway? They have the responsibility to
keep their agreements with other individuals, the same as anyone else
does.
Steve Kangas
>wol...@ibm.net (Wolf Kirchmeir) wrote:
>
>>What we are facing, at least in the developed world, is a
>>monstrous overcapacity for production of things, and increasingly
>>of services..
>
>ago -- it is called Say's law, which states, "Supply creates its own
>demand." In other words, it is precisely the act of production which
>creates demand. The idea that there can be "overproduction" or "oversupply"
>is just complete nonsense.
You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist now.
Brad, you might be interested to know that few mainstream
economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only ones who do
are the supply-side cranks on the fringes of the field. For one
thing, there is a clear refutation to Say's Law: recessions and
depressions. Inventory is everywhere, but people are hoarding
their money. Why? Because everyone else is, and if I spend what
little savings I have, there is no guarantee that my neighbor
will reciprocate by spending his too. It is a classical form of
the prisoner's dilemma (have you heard of this concept? I
somehow doubt that you have.).
It was this recognition that allowed Keynes to discover the
secret of ending depressions: expand the money supply, or, as a
last resort, increase government borrowing and spending. This
would "prime the pump" of the economy and get money circulating
again. It is a brutally simple concept, and one that has
eliminated depressions from global experience since World War
II.
>Of course it might be useful to statist
>economists trying to explain to the confused populace why the economy is
>shrinking during a recession, and why they are out of work. Such an
>economist could then blather that the problem was a severe oversupply of
>production... Well, not to worry -- I'm sure his advice will correct the
>oversupply of production readily enough.
With those words, it's REALLY clear to me now that you have no
idea what the prisoner's dilemma is. Go to school or go to
sleep.
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
Steve Kangas
"Trees cause 80 percent of our air pollution." Ronald Reagan
Gary Forbis
|> It was this recognition that allowed Keynes to discover the
|> secret of ending depressions: expand the money supply, or, as a
|> last resort, increase government borrowing and spending. This
|> would "prime the pump" of the economy and get money circulating
|> again. It is a brutally simple concept, and one that has
|> eliminated depressions from global experience since World War
|> II.
You know, there might be a test of supply side economics. We might be able
to look at silver prices before, during, and after the Hunt brothers' buying
spree.
As I understand it the Hunts tried to corner the silver market. Silver prices
went up by an order of magnatude. Others broke the back of this market by
selling short. It took quite a bit of fortitude and money to kill this monster.
I suspect that production went up with price. I wonder if production remained
high after the price dropped.
So there could be two things at work here. When people are hording goods one
might be able to prime the pump to get them to stop hording. Production
might create its own demand albeit at reduced profitablility. Could something
like "momentum" be at work?
--
--gary for...@u.washington.edu
Andrew R. Southwick
>You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
>supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist now.
You should know better, Steve. This is a blatant lie. We are
not supply-side economists. We are Objectivists. Objective
economic thought is derived from observation of reality, not
the reading of pedantic economic texts.
>Brad, you might be interested to know that few mainstream
>economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only ones who do
>are the supply-side cranks on the fringes of the field.
(argument from authority)
>For one
>thing, there is a clear refutation to Say's Law: recessions and
>depressions.
The standard consumerist line. You *are* aware that you are
spouting consumerist propoganda, yes?
>Inventory is everywhere, but people are hoarding
>their money. Why? Because everyone else is, and if I spend what
>little savings I have, there is no guarantee that my neighbor
>will reciprocate by spending his too.
In an economy with fiat money and a free-money policy, individuals
are prompted to spend like crazy and borrow more. They have virtually
no savings. Economic adjustments to such a system take years, since the
furthest reaches of such a policy (working men) are far removed from the
instigators of this policy (government and its contracts). And the
countless layers inbetween, including all large and small businesses.
Since no-one has much in the way of savings (compared to an economy with
a real money supply, or less so one with fiat money and a tight-money
policy), businesses are very prone to disaster when the need for cash
appears. The stock market crashed in 1929, and destroyed a sizeable
amount of the assets of individuals and corporations both. Such
investments *were* the bulk of corporate and individual savings.
The crash could be survived; it did not deal a death blow to the economy.
But then the Fed reigned in interest rates. Money suddenly got *very*
tight, and savings became far more important than it had been in the years
since the Fed was created in 1913. Most businesses had little hard
currency savings, though, since they had been living on credit risks for
so long. Spending dropped dramatically, and hence purchases. After
increased protectionistic measures were drafted by Hoover, the bottom
dropped out of markets. A depression was the result.
This depression was different, however, in the breadth of the crash and
the subsequent squeeze on the money supply (which was NATIONAL, not
localized). There had been many depressions before in American history,
but this would prove to be by far the worst--and (suprise!) accompanied
by the greatest degree of intervention in the economy by the government.
>It is a classical form of
>the prisoner's dilemma
What a clever bit of psychologizing, Steve. Instead of addressing the
*causes* of such a grand depression, Keynes (and now you) turned his
attention to how government intervention might most quickly move countries
out of the depression. His *assumptions* were the consumerist suppositions
of the continuance of the depression that you mirror. Banks had failed
because of public response to the economic adjustments that are natural
consequences of free money. Why weren't banks on a gold standard? Why
was there such rapid, national fluctuations in credit rates? Why was the
stock market so overvalued? Why was there such emphasis on credit? Such
questions never bothered Keynes, although von Mises had, by this time,
answered them! Von Mises had also explained the results of the policies
promoted by the US government, as the disastrous results of Keynes answers
to economic recession.
>(have you heard of this concept? I
>somehow doubt that you have.).
And some insult to futher your argument, no?
>It was this recognition that allowed Keynes to discover the
>secret of ending depressions: expand the money supply,
Since the governments of the world were screwing around with the money
supply anyway (every major nations of the world switched to using $US as
their standard--instead of gold--in 1934), a solution was sought in terms
of further screwing with money. Expanding the money supply would *help,*
but a tight money supply itself wasn't the *cause* of the depression: it
only exacerbated the problems caused by fiat money in the first place.
>or, as a
>last resort, increase government borrowing and spending.
Where does government "borrowing" come from? When the government "borrows"
money from future taxpayers, the resulting funds compete with existing
funds, driving down the purchasing power of existing dollars.
Government spending moved production from consumer goods to public goods.
Public employment scams put people to work, but only by destroying wealth--
by deflating the value of the stored wealth that existed at the time and
replacing it with objects that did not represent anywhere near an equal
value in wealth, especially to an economy that needed *investment.*
>This
>would "prime the pump" of the economy and get money circulating
>again. It is a brutally simple concept, and one that has
>eliminated depressions from global experience since World War
>II.
Compared to ... ? At the expense of ... ?
Having blank-outs? Try: even worse government policy-induced depressions,
and standards of living.
>>Of course it might be useful to statist
>>economists trying to explain to the confused populace why the economy is
>>shrinking during a recession, and why they are out of work. Such an
>>economist could then blather that the problem was a severe oversupply of
>>production... Well, not to worry -- I'm sure his advice will correct the
>>oversupply of production readily enough.
>With those words, it's REALLY clear to me now that you have no
>idea what the prisoner's dilemma is. Go to school or go to
>sleep.
Authorities don't answer questions about reality. Reality answers those
questions itself. All you have to do is open your eyes, and turn on your
mind.
>>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>Steve Kangas
Andrew R Southwick -={C++/OO Programmer}=- asout...@vnet.ibm.com
#include <stddisclaimer.h> I speak not for IBM.
-= Freedom by permission is a contradiction in terms =-
Steve Kangas
>Steve Kangas <kang...@scruznet.com> writes:
>>You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
>>supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist now.
>
>You should know better, Steve. This is a blatant lie. We are
>not supply-side economists. We are Objectivists. Objective
>economic thought is derived from observation of reality, not
>the reading of pedantic economic texts.
Hee hee. According to your "objectivist" (read: common sense)
views, human beings should not be able to fly, but thanks to
those "pedantic" theoreticians you slander, they not only fly,
but they're exploring outer space.
>
>>Brad, you might be interested to know that few mainstream
>>economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only ones who do
>>are the supply-side cranks on the fringes of the field.
>
>(argument from authority)
Our best scientific minds are not infallible, true, but their
theories deserve first consideration.
>
>>For one
>>thing, there is a clear refutation to Say's Law: recessions and
>>depressions.
>
>The standard consumerist line. You *are* aware that you are
>spouting consumerist propoganda, yes?
Neo-Keynesians worry about the supply-side of the economy just
as much as anyone else; they also happen to believe that
consumption is also a leading force in the economy. The fact
that you think this is "consumerist" indicates to me a degree
of ignorance about neo-Keynesianism on your part. Don't worry.
That can be corrected by reviewing "pedantic economic texts."
>
>>Inventory is everywhere, but people are hoarding
>>their money. Why? Because everyone else is, and if I spend what
>>little savings I have, there is no guarantee that my neighbor
>>will reciprocate by spending his too.
>
>In an economy with fiat money and a free-money policy, individuals
>are prompted to spend like crazy and borrow more. They have virtually
>no savings.
Balderdash. Compare the savings of the average 1960 household
with the average 1995 household. Compare the average US
household savings of $4,201 with Japan's $45,118.
>Economic adjustments to such a system take years, since the
>furthest reaches of such a policy (working men) are far removed from the
>instigators of this policy (government and its contracts). And the
>countless layers inbetween, including all large and small businesses.
You're confusing money circulation with potential productivity,
but I've become accustomed to computer programmers such as
yourself thinking that their math and logic skills make them
experts in economic theory.
>
>Since no-one has much in the way of savings (compared to an economy with
>a real money supply, or less so one with fiat money and a tight-money
>policy), businesses are very prone to disaster when the need for cash
>appears. The stock market crashed in 1929, and destroyed a sizeable
>amount of the assets of individuals and corporations both. Such
>investments *were* the bulk of corporate and individual savings.
You just made an excellent case for Keynesian expansion of the
money supply at the onset of recessions. You *are* aware of
that, aren't you?
>
>The crash could be survived; it did not deal a death blow to the economy.
>But then the Fed reigned in interest rates. Money suddenly got *very*
>tight, and savings became far more important than it had been in the years
>since the Fed was created in 1913.
Again, we have the Milton Friedman myth that the Fed reigned in
the money supply. Here is economist Paul Krugman rebutting this
oft-cited myth:
"But the Fed did not actually pull money out of the system.
What happened was that a wave of bank failures, which proved
self-reinforcing as it led to a run on banks that might
otherwise have survived, generated fears about the safety of
banks of all kinds. Families began hoarding currency instead of
putting their money in banks..."
Friedman propogates his myth by playing definition games with
money. He includes money market accounts and other inaccessible
financial instruments to form what he calls "money aggregates."
The broader definition of money allows him to prove anything he
wants to prove. But if you look at traditional definitions of
money, the Fed maintained the money supply.
>Most businesses had little hard
>currency savings, though, since they had been living on credit risks for
>so long. Spending dropped dramatically, and hence purchases. After
>increased protectionistic measures were drafted by Hoover, the bottom
>dropped out of markets. A depression was the result.
If you're talking about the Smoot-Hawley tariff, this only
affected the 6 percent of the GDP that was based on trade, and
amounted to no more than a 2.5 percent effective tax increase
on the average American. This may have slightly worsened the
slump, but if you think this insignificant tax (80 percent of
all workers were off the tax rolls entirely) caused the Great
Depression, you're nuts.
>
>This depression was different, however, in the breadth of the crash and
>the subsequent squeeze on the money supply (which was NATIONAL, not
>localized). There had been many depressions before in American history,
>but this would prove to be by far the worst--and (suprise!) accompanied
>by the greatest degree of intervention in the economy by the government.
Not only economically, but historically ignorant as well. The
worst decreases in the economy all happened on Hoover's watch,
from 1929 to 1932. After this, the economic indicators either
bottomed out or slightly improved - all during the New Deal. I
know you won't believe me, so I'll prove my point by
statistical force.
Prior to the Stock Market Crash of 29, there were many
indicators the economy was in trouble. Agriculture had been in
dire straits, and so too coal, for most of the 20s. There were
about 600 bank failures a year. Housing construction came to a
stop in 1938. Personal debt soared. The stock market was a
circus that bore no resemblance to the real economy. And all
this was *before* the crash. The policies of this time? No
taxes on the bottom four-fifths of workers, only 25 percent on
the rich. Laissez-faire ruled government.
On Hoover's watch after the crash, from 1929 to 1933: about
11,000 banks failed. Stocks lost 80 percent of their value.
About $2 billion in deposits evaporated. The GNP sank over 40
percent. Farm prices fell 53 percent. Unemployment soared to a
peak of 25 percent in 1933. And the policies of the time?
Hoover remained committed to the principles of laissez-faire
and economic individualism. He insisted that the Fed take no
action. Historians can only point to two obvious things he did
that could be called interventionist: the S-H tariff, which, as
we have seen, had a miniscule effect, and the 1932 creation of
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was broadly
criticized as too little too late. It was Hoover's inaction
that shattered his reputation and set up FDR's easy victory in
1932.
During the New Deal era, the economy did not worsen. Some
indicators, like unemployment, actually improved: 17 percent by
the end of the decade. And this was in the presence of the
greatest expansion of government in history. But it was not
until FDR took the Keynesian action of massive borrowing and
spending in 1939 (in preparation for WWII) that the economy
experienced a strong recovery. By 1945, the US was enjoying the
greatest economic boom in history.
>
>>It is a classical form of
>>the prisoner's dilemma
>
>What a clever bit of psychologizing, Steve. Instead of addressing the
>*causes* of such a grand depression, Keynes (and now you) turned his
>attention to how government intervention might most quickly move countries
>out of the depression.
Complete nonsense. Keyes was very clear about the cause of
recessions: people begin hoarding their money, greatly slowing
the circulation of money in the economy. Even conservative
economists accept this explanation. What we don't know is why
people begin hoarding their money in the first place - no
single theory has proven bulletproof yet - and there is a Nobel
waiting for the first economist who finds the answer.
>His *assumptions* were the consumerist suppositions
>of the continuance of the depression that you mirror. Banks had failed
>because of public response to the economic adjustments that are natural
>consequences of free money. Why weren't banks on a gold standard?
Oh, Lord, not the gold standard! Bartley has been campaigning
for this from the pages of the Wall Street Journal for a
generation now, and the vast majority of economists *still*
look on his campaign with bemused indifference. Well, you don't
have to look any farther than Europe to see how successfully
fixed money works. The EMS was stable as long as it was tied to
the German mark, since the German Central Bank was legendary
for its anti-inflation policies. But as soon as they tried to
unite currency (in effect creating your gold standard),
disaster followed. European leaders were in the press
exchanging public recriminations. A very embarrassing fiasco.
Don't you find it the least bit suspicious that the vast
majority of the nation's top economists, after a thousand
brutal conferences and peer-reviewed articles, still refuses to
sign on to this lame-brain idea? Or are you another crank
hurling accusations of basic stupidity at the entire scientific
community?
>Why
>was there such rapid, national fluctuations in credit rates? Why was the
>stock market so overvalued? Why was there such emphasis on credit? Such
>questions never bothered Keynes, although von Mises had, by this time,
>answered them! Von Mises had also explained the results of the policies
>promoted by the US government, as the disastrous results of Keynes answers
>to economic recession.
One of the surest tests of ascertaining a person's knowledge is
to ask them how much they can explain. If they can explain
everything, then they are small minds. If they can't explain
everything, they are intelligent enough to know their
limitations.
FYI, Keynes can be found in any Econ 101 book. But Von Mises
doesn't even merit a mention in most texts.
>
>>It was this recognition that allowed Keynes to discover the
>>secret of ending depressions: expand the money supply,
>
>Since the governments of the world were screwing around with the money
>supply anyway (every major nations of the world switched to using $US as
>their standard--instead of gold--in 1934), a solution was sought in terms
>of further screwing with money. Expanding the money supply would *help,*
>but a tight money supply itself wasn't the *cause* of the depression: it
>only exacerbated the problems caused by fiat money in the first place.
I'm sure you will provide the mechanism by which fiat money
slows the circulation of money in the economy. Be complete,
now; there is a Nobel waiting for you at the end of the
exercise.
>
>>or, as a
>>last resort, increase government borrowing and spending.
>
>Where does government "borrowing" come from? When the government "borrows"
>money from future taxpayers, the resulting funds compete with existing
>funds, driving down the purchasing power of existing dollars.
>Government spending moved production from consumer goods to public goods.
>Public employment scams put people to work, but only by destroying wealth--
>by deflating the value of the stored wealth that existed at the time and
>replacing it with objects that did not represent anywhere near an equal
>value in wealth, especially to an economy that needed *investment.*
Keynes always advocated borrowing and spending as a last
resort, *after* the money supply had already been expanded.
>
>>This
>>would "prime the pump" of the economy and get money circulating
>>again. It is a brutally simple concept, and one that has
>>eliminated depressions from global experience since World War
>>II.
>
>Compared to ... ? At the expense of ... ?
Compared to before the war, when 8 recessions worsened into
depressions, and after the war, when 9 recessions did not.
Once you accept this correlation, then "at the expense of..."
becomes clear: at the expense of risking a depression.
>
>Having blank-outs? Try: even worse government policy-induced depressions,
>and standards of living.
Can you cite a single depression that has occurred since World
War II? And are you aware that hourly worker productivity - the
statistic that economists use to measure standard of living -
was 1.8 percent before WWII, but 2.8 percent after it? Can you
de-correlate that with Keynesianism? Having blanks?
>
>>>Of course it might be useful to statist
>>>economists trying to explain to the confused populace why the economy is
>>>shrinking during a recession, and why they are out of work. Such an
>>>economist could then blather that the problem was a severe oversupply of
>>>production... Well, not to worry -- I'm sure his advice will correct the
>>>oversupply of production readily enough.
>
>>With those words, it's REALLY clear to me now that you have no
>>idea what the prisoner's dilemma is. Go to school or go to
>>sleep.
>
>Authorities don't answer questions about reality. Reality answers those
>questions itself. All you have to do is open your eyes, and turn on your
>mind.
Oh, God, I'm getting lectured on reality by a computer
programmer.
>
>>>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>
>>Steve Kangas
>
>
>Andrew R Southwick -={C++/OO Programmer}=- asout...@vnet.ibm.com
Steve Kangas
Brad Aisa
>I just can't believe some of you people trying to claim that somehow
>"society" owns my business and I deserve a good wage, but it is ultimately
>"society's" money and decision as to how redistribute the wealth.
Believe it. This is the premise on which our present society is based. This
is what is implicitly and explicitly taught to the children in schools.
> My first
>observation is that other nations have tried to implement that theory
>and have failed miserably, it just does not work. My second observation
>is that it is my business, I own it like I own my house, my car or my
>computer. I can do whatever I want with it and there would have to be a
>civil war in which the socialists win before that ever changes.
In my humble opinion, your second observation should have been your first.
This is why you and other businessmen are losing this battle. That you
would make the first point you did, implicitly endorses the notion that the
"collective" may engage in any sort of experimentation it wishes; that IN
FACT, all wealth of individuals DOES belong to "society", who may then
experiment until it finds a method which achieves some kind of equitable
distribution -- according to WHAT standard, though, I ask???
There doesn't need to be any civil was with the socialists to permit them
to take over -- how do you think we got to where we are today? All it
requires is that they successfully get property owners and the productive
to believe in the moral superiority of altruism, and in the collectivist
premise. Then, the property owners will be morally unable to resist any
attempts to expropriate and control them. All a bureaucrat or
bleeding-heart liberal politician needs to do, is identify some needy
recipient, or some "worthy goal", and they can then proceed to implement
the plan, because the property owners will be unable to assert their
_selfish_ rights.
There can be no such thing as values outside the context of individual
valuers, and means. (i.e., that proposed mult-billion dollar subway is ONLY
a value IF those who wish to benefit from it can afford to pay for it
THEMSELVES.)
The only way to fight the socialists and collectivists is with the
amazingly simple and effective method of refusing to sanction them: be
selfish, and refuse to grant any credence to the morality of altruism.
Altruism is not kindness or benevolence, it is self-sacrifice.
--
Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
Terry Johnson
>
>The problem, is that people have still not discovered the proper morality
>of freedom and capitalism: rational egoism. Men are still taught that
>altruism -- sacrifice of self to others -- is the ideal and proper system.
>Not only is it against man's needs as a living being, it doesn't even
>provide a standard of value for what might be in man's interests, so that
>even if one were mistakenly acting for others one would even know what to
>do.
>
interests for others, there would be no human society.
Even something as basic as family life requires economic sacrifice.
It's just that human beings put higher value on non-economic goods,
and are willing to forsake economic returns for love, self-respect,
or personal reputation. Any philosophy that fails to account for
this is inhuman.
------------------------------------------------
Dave Till
>My definition of what doesn't consitute duress: Man A is starving. Man B
>has food and offers some to A if A performs some work.
My definition of duress: Man A is starving. Man B uses the fact that
Man A is starving to lower the amount of wages paid to Man A, knowing that
Man A has no alternative.
My definition of a fair wage contract is one that does not use Man A's
need as a lever against him.
>Liberal logic ascribes evil to man B in this circumstance. Because he has
>been provident, and is able to sustain both himself and others, he is
>therefore evil.
This reminds me of someone's comment about George Bush (does
anybody have the attribution?): "He was born standing on third base,
and thinks he hit a triple."
While hard work and effort are essential requirements of success,
opportunity, ability and luck -- which are manifestly not evenly
distributed -- have just as much, if not more, to do with the eventual
outcome than work. The question, I think, is how much do we want to even
out the unfairnesses of life?
The laissez-faire capitalist's answer is "none". To the strong go
the spoils! The socialist's answer (and I am not a socialist, BTW),
is "make the rich pay!" I'd like to think there's some middle ground:
since hard work is required for success, some sort of reward commensurate
with this hard work is just. The capitalist should get to keep a large
part of what he or she earns. However, the world in which the capitalist
lives functions better -- and the capitalist is able to earn his or her
living better -- if a strong safety net is in place, and the weaker
and unluckier members of society are not frantically busy worrying about
where their rent money or next meal is coming from.
>His providence is de facto evidence that he must have
>actually robbed his means from A in the first place. Therefore, it would in
>fact be an act of justice for A to actually expropriate from B and enslave
>him, though perhaps generously letting him keep his hide (or some of it.)
>This is liberal logic. Liberal logic is not logic.
Straw man. Sigh. I know of no "liberals" who want to expropriate
wealth (unless you consider *any* form of taxation expropriation).
--
--Dave Till, Writer of Manuals, KL Group Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
My postings are my own opinions, not my employers', but you knew that already.
email: da...@klg.com or am...@freenet.toronto.on.ca or da...@interlog.com
WWW: http://www.interlog.com/~davet/ (now new and slightly improved!)
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
: a...@ccinet.ab.ca (Terry Johnson) wrote:
: >If human beings were unwilling to sacrifice their personal economic
: >interests for others, there would be no human society.
: >Even something as basic as family life requires economic sacrifice.
: >It's just that human beings put higher value on non-economic goods,
: >and are willing to forsake economic returns for love, self-respect,
: >or personal reputation. Any philosophy that fails to account for
: >this is inhuman.
: You are equivocating on the term 'sacrifice'. A sacrifice is an exchange of
: a value for a lesser value or no value. A proper theory of rational egoism
: does not ignore the fact that other human beings can be of personal selfish
: value to you. But it _does_ provide a standard for guaging just what
: _types_ of people can be a value, and thus allows you to evaluate others,
: and decide who you wish to associate with, and hold in personal regard, to
: whatever degree. Of course the welfare of those who are important to you is
: a value -- only an irrationalist could value something without valuing that
: upon which the existence of the value depended. (In fact, it is this latter
: which is the collectivist view -- they value production, but ignore what
: production requires: freedom.)
: Providing for your family is NOT a sacrifice -- it is loyalty to your
: rational, choosen values: your _choosen_ wife, the children you _chose_ to
: have, the parents you _chose_ to honor (and which honor a rational man
: would withdraw if his parents were immoral or vicious), the grown-up
: children you _choose_ to love and cherish (because they have earned your
: respect through their estimable characters, such love being withdrawn if
: they were louts).
: What rational egoism rails against is any form of trading value for
: non-value -- supporting a loafing adult child, etc.
Brad, you are contradicting yourself. Why is caring for an adult child
less valuable than caring for a minor child? Why should a person not
choose to love and cherish a grown-up child, regardless of their earning
potential and personal accomplishments? Why do you define supporting a
16 year-old child as value, but supporting a 36 year-old child as
non-value? The benefits can be the same. I sense a lack of rationality
in your "rational egoism". Although there is a lot of rationalizing.
: There is no dichotomy between economic goals and personal goals. Man must
: produce to live, so a rational man recognizes that any other values he
: holds, such as "love, self-respect, or reputation" can only be made
: possible if he is able to support his own existence, and in proper
: contexts, those he values and loves.
Really? You are setting an arbitrarily infinite value on life, in that
case. What about, for example, the Bhuddist Monks who practiced
self-immolation in protest to the war in Vietnam? They were quite
capable fo acheiving their values without supporting their own
existance. A Japanese nobleman who starved, or committed sepukko<sp?>
rather than take bribes _was_ acheiving his values, despite a purposeful
rejection of economic goals.
The problem with rational egoism, and Objectivism in general, is
that it claims to provide a system of ethics, when in actually, it only
provides an ethos. When you grasp the distinction, you will understand
(one of) the major flaw in the work of Ms. Rand.
: Rational egoism IS a philosophy for humans. It is altruism that is inhuman
: -- man is not a bee or an ant; his philosophy should probably reflect this
: fact.
Man is also rarely rational. His philosophy should probably reflect
this fact.
: Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
: ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
: "The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
: guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Ah yes, Madam Rand plaguraizes Plato's Republic. Why not credit the
quote to its original author?
--
Jonah Mainwaring
A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. - Heinlein
Jonah Paul Mainwaring
: In article <4e19om$g...@news.scruz.net> Steve Kangas <kang...@scruznet.com> writes:
: >You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
: >supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist
: >mainstream economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only
: >ones who do are the supply-side cranks on the fringes of the
: Well then again, there are very few wealthy economists. Think about it.
: Say's law is very valid, whether or not some number of economists believe
: in gravity or any other reality.
: Supply precedes demand is the more accurate statement.
: Who ever "demanded" the transistor, the phone, the copier, fast food,
: etc.?
: And so on.
: --
: "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, and you can't prove it!" - B. Simpson
: These opinions are MINE, and you can't have 'em! (But I'll rent 'em cheap ...)
Supply sometimes precedes demand. That does not prove that supply
creates demand. For example, the supply of Television stations has
increased greatly in recent years. Despite this, the Neilsen<sp?>
ratings show flat hours watched per viewer over the past five years.
Supply has increased, demand hasn't. If Supply creates Demand, why
didn't the large supply of Edsel's create demand for them. Say's Law is
not a law, as it does not hold in all cases. It is a hypothesis that is
easily disproven by empirical data.
Tom S.
>In article <4dpc0f$o...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, Brad Aisa <ba...@hookup.net> wrote:
>>My definition of what doesn't consitute duress: Man A is starving. Man B
>>has food and offers some to A if A performs some work.
>
>My definition of duress: Man A is starving. Man B uses the fact that
>Man A is starving to lower the amount of wages paid to Man A, knowing that
>Man A has no alternative.
No alternative? Is B the only employer? The only place I've heard that scenario is
in a socialist society where the state is the only employer... such as the Soviet
Union, where undesirables could not get jobs.
>
>My definition of a fair wage contract is one that does not use Man A's
>need as a lever against him.
In a contract, external factors are not a consideration.
>
>>Liberal logic ascribes evil to man B in this circumstance. Because he has
>>been provident, and is able to sustain both himself and others, he is
>>therefore evil.
>
>This reminds me of someone's comment about George Bush (does
>anybody have the attribution?): "He was born standing on third base,
>and thinks he hit a triple."
How about a more viable example: How about Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Ken Hamblin,
Rush Limbaugh. I'm not fans of all these, but their stories are fascinating. How
about Sorichio Honda?
>
>While hard work and effort are essential requirements of success,
>opportunity, ability and luck -- which are manifestly not evenly
>distributed --
They are not evenly distributed because they are generally created, not previously
existing. Consider the "Third Base" example cited above; ever heard of the "Blown
Opportunity" of not getting the runner in from third?
> have just as much, if not more, to do with the eventual
>outcome than work. The question, I think, is how much do we want to even
>out the unfairnesses of life?
>
How much CAN be evened out?
{snip of more weird examples]
Tom
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in
Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement.
An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's
not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education,
the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not
freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations
of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. -- P. J. O'Rourke
Phil Ronzone
>In <4e12ao$h...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, ba...@hookup.net (Brad
>Aisa) writes:
>
>>The problem, is that people have still not discovered the
>>proper morality of freedom and capitalism: rational egoism.
>>Men are still taught that altruism -- sacrifice of self to
>>others -- is the ideal and proper system. Not only is it
>>against man's needs as a living being, it doesn't even
>>provide a standard of value for what might be in man's
>>interests, so that even if one were mistakenly acting for
>>others one would even know what to do.
>>
>economic interests for others, there would be no human
>society. Even something as basic as family life requires
>economic sacrifice. It's just that human beings put higher
>value on non-economic goods, and are willing to forsake
>economic returns for love, self-respect, or personal
>reputation. Any philosophy that fails to account for this is
>inhuman.
Poor Terry -
Somehow he has missed the overwhelming evidence that the worse (or less of)
economic goods and services people have, the less love, self-respect and
personal reputation there is.
People living wretched poor lives can not afford such things. Look at
the world, from Russia (nay, most of central Europe) to the PRC to
North Korea and so on.
As many Asian countries raise their standard of living, it is notable
how unpopular arranged marriages become and the increasing better off
"kids" want to marry for love ...
Terry Johnson
>
>The thing is, that you seem to be always willing to saddle capitalists with
>liabilities (by force?) that are not their responsibility, but only if this
>works in favor of the workers. Do you think this is honest? I don't,
>particularly if one looks at the statistics for business success -- most
>fail. Therefore, if anything, factors should be weighted in favor of the
>capitalists. I don't advocate this, but if one were intervening, it is the
>capitalists who risk the most, fail most often, and make employment for
>everyone else even possible. Yet they keep getting cursed and regulated and
>expropriated from.
>
Externalities. It means those costs--and benefits--that a capitalist
enterprise doesn't show on its books. That's all I'm talking about. It's
impossible for a functioning free market to make allowance for all
such externalities. That's why people pressure the state to intervene.
Obvious examples are the costs of pollution and social dislocation,
which are spread out over many people. But it can also work in
reverse: some activities, while they cannot be run at a profit and
so would not be taken up by capitalists, do generate economic benefit.
I'd identify free, compulsory education as an example. A capitalist
enterprise is unlikely to invest a great deal in education because
it has little control over its investment--the workers it educates
can move on to other employers.
>
>Fortunately, in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, human labor (of every
>kind) becomes the limiting factor of production, and thus jobs are always
>available. This means that consideration in employee matters always weighs
>heavily in favor of the worker.
>
This is highly debatable.
Southern Mexico may be a good example. Most of the people living there are
small peasant farmers. But they can't compete with mechanized agricultural
producers in the US and Canada; their land is instead being expropriated
to raise cattle. Neither are there buyers for their labour. The tragedy, as
Mexican writer Gabriel Garcia Marquex pointed out, is not that these
indigenous labourers are being exploited; it's that nobody wants to exploit
them. They are superfluous.
I think it would be more accurate to say that capital is the limiting
factor of production. Without training or access to capital, the indigenous
peoples of souther
>The most eloquent demonstration of the fact that the
>socialist/interventionists can't even conceive of such a possibility is
>that their current measurement of employment doesn't even permit of
>expressing the market circumstance I describe. (Many other measures, such
>as inflation or interest, can be negative -- but unemployment is the ratio
>of jobless to employed; the institutional (as opposed to purely voluntary)
>unemployment rate in a free market society would be zero, but this doesn't
>tell the whole story...)
>
>--
>Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>ba...@hookup.net web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/
>
>"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
>guardians and integrators of human knowledge." -- Ayn Rand
Nick Rossi
Mark Young <oexc...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
[..]
>There is NOTHING ignoble about that. We must all choose our own battles and
>one need not be the risk taker (in every instance) to be a valuable member
>of the team, creating more wealth that would otherwise be created in his
>absense.
>
>If more folks understood their role in business, and the implicit
>trades (and trade offs) they were making, methinks that individuals
>would be happier and wealthier, and companies would run much more
>efficiently.
IMO, this is an excellent description of a "worker", at any level of an
organization. And even though battle lines seem to be ever more common
between employees and employers, middle-class employees still feel a
sense of pride and accomplishment in the work they do, at least some of
the time, if not always.
When Boeing "open housed" its first 777 to tens of thousands of its
employees, the cheers and the tears were nearly unanimous. At least for
a moment, they remembered what it was they were doing at the company.
Nick
Gary Forbis
|> Say's law is very valid, whether or not some number of economists believe
|> in gravity or any other reality.
|>
|> Supply precedes demand is the more accurate statement.
|>
|> Who ever "demanded" the transistor, the phone, the copier, fast food,
|> etc.?
|>
|> And so on.
I'm pretty sure your examples are backwards to what you are attempting to
support with them. Bell Labs had a demand for smaller, cheaper, and more
reliable switching circuits long before transistors. The demand for cheap
and efficient long range communications has existed for millennia. There
has been a demand for photocopiers for millennia. And fast food? Do you
even need to ask?
--
--gary for...@u.washington.edu
Jack R. Tallent
>If human beings were unwilling to sacrifice their personal economic
>interests for others, there would be no human society.
>Even something as basic as family life requires economic sacrifice.
>It's just that human beings put higher value on non-economic goods,
>and are willing to forsake economic returns for love, self-respect,
>or personal reputation. Any philosophy that fails to account for
>this is inhuman.
If the "non-economic" goods are of a "higher value" than what has been
given up to obtain them, it what sense can it be said that a sacrifice has
been made?
Sacrifice entails giving a value in exchange for a lesser value.
Jack Tallent
Gary Forbis
|> The only way to fight the socialists and collectivists is with the
|> amazingly simple and effective method of refusing to sanction them: be
|> selfish, and refuse to grant any credence to the morality of altruism.
|> Altruism is not kindness or benevolence, it is self-sacrifice.
It seems to me that many of those who take advantage of the altruism of others
also promote it. I think the way for the altruistic to fight this behavior
is based upon an anti-infection model. One finds the foriegn body, marks
it, and, through group behavior, eliminate it (not the individual, just the
behavior.)
The advantage the group has over the individual is that the individual,
being an individual, cannot engage in group behavior. The individuals may
band together but this belies their advancement through individual effort.
The individual cannot win but can inflict heavy damages.
--
--gary for...@u.washington.edu
Anonymous
> Brad Aisa wrote:
> >
> > The notion that ideas are about _quantity of adherents_, and not their
> > content, is really quite mistaken. The NT/Zon loonies pull this stunt all
> > the time, cloning themselves endlessly on AOL to the rest of our torture.
>
> All of the NT posters have always been separte and distinct individuals.
How can you possibly know this? Are you a system administrator on AOL?
Do you have access to caller ID records for all the 'separate' users? If
you don't have that data you are talking through your ass.
- King of all Heretics
Mark Young
Johnson) writes:
>
>In <4e12ao$h...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa)
writes:
>>
>>The problem, is that people have still not discovered the proper
morality
>>of freedom and capitalism: rational egoism. Men are still taught that
>>altruism -- sacrifice of self to others -- is the ideal and proper
system.
>>Not only is it against man's needs as a living being, it doesn't even
>>provide a standard of value for what might be in man's interests, so
that
>>even if one were mistakenly acting for others one would even know
what to
>>do.
>>
>interests for others, there would be no human society.
>Even something as basic as family life requires economic sacrifice.
>It's just that human beings put higher value on non-economic goods,
>and are willing to forsake economic returns for love, self-respect,
>or personal reputation. Any philosophy that fails to account for
>this is inhuman.
>
>Terry Johnson \\ It's not that we're on Marx's side. It's
>a...@ccinet.ab.ca \\ that Marx was on our side--E.P. Thompson
>
Terry,
you haven't read any objectivist philosophy, have you?
And you don't understand the real (accurate) meaning of sacrifice.
I wish I had more time to educate you, but I imagine someone else will.
Mark
Jim Klein
writes:
>My definition of a fair wage contract is one that does not use Man A's
>need as a lever against him.
Later, da...@interlog.com (Dave Till) writes:
>The capitalist should get to keep a large part of what he or she
>earns. However, the world in which the capitalist lives functions
>better -- and the capitalist is able to earn his or her living better
>-- if a strong safety net is in place, and the weaker and unluckier
>members of society are not frantically busy worrying about where their
>rent money or next meal is coming from.
This is great---Man A's need should not be used as a lever against HIM,
but it is a lever against every other person on Earth (at least those
that can earn their way). May I be so bold as to inquire where you got
this notion...was it Divine Revelation, or just your idea of
"fairness"??
>I know of no "liberals" who want to expropriate wealth (unless you
>consider *any* form of taxation expropriation).
Could you kindly give us an example of involuntary taxation which is
NOT expropriation?
jk
Nicholas Rich
Vanishing Pips in Cyberspace
PIPS are people who purposely attack values by distorting out-of-context
fragments of those values. Using those distortions, pips attack with bogus but
often good-sounding criticisms. They make problems where none exist by
conjuring up and then bashing straw men.
Who are pips? Generally pips are people who never produce great competitive
values for others and society...or exert the hard efforts required to do
something really excellent with their lives -- something about which they can
be really proud. But, why do pips attack and try to destroy values? What does
pipping mean?
PIPPING means attacking values by isolating out-of-context fragments ripped
from the achievements produced by others or their businesses. Pipping means
pumping one's ego by manipulating words rather than by producing values.
Pipping is done to make oneself appear more important, more moral than the
values, achievements, businesses, or individuals being attacked.
Pips are not interested in accurate answers, explanations, or learning. They
are interested in enhancing their egos, which they try to do through spurious
attacks. Thus, pips reject any response that places their distorted fragments
back into context. Pips refuse to look into understanding the accurate, full
context of the values they are attacking. Thus, once pipping is detected, all
communication or argument is worthless and should cease. A generalized template
such as this is the appropriate response. The attacking pip will then stand
alone, recognized as a pitiful clown or pip-squeak, seeking unearned
importance. ...Hence, malicious self-proclaiming "victims" and attack-mode pips
will vanish from cyberspace. Time will be saved. Justice will be served.
In the noncyberspace world, heroic giants throughout history were constantly
attacked, harmed, and sometimes destroyed by self-proclaiming "victims" and
attack-mode pips. By contrast, in cyberspace, sincere questions and valid
criticisms naturally occur concerning, for example, Objectivist philosophy with
its live-action applications of Neo-Tech and Zonpower. Such valuable questions
and criticisms deserve patient, respectful responses that are mutually
beneficial. But, when ego-pumping pipping is detected, further communication
not only wastes irreplaceable time of the respondent, but supports the pip in
allowing him or her to continue wasting other people's time.
--
=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
Nicholas Rich Sachs, Savage & Noble a...@ss-n.com
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Alan Bomberger
> ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) wrote:
> >wol...@ibm.net (Wolf Kirchmeir) wrote:
> >
> >>What we are facing, at least in the developed world, is a
> >>monstrous overcapacity for production of things, and increasingly
> >>of services..
> >
> >This is absurd. Jean-Baptiste Say refuted this nonsensical idea centuries
> >ago -- it is called Say's law, which states, "Supply creates its own
> >demand." In other words, it is precisely the act of production which
> >creates demand. The idea that there can be "overproduction" or "oversupply"
> >is just complete nonsense.
>
> You have to forgive Brad; he's read a book or two on
> supply-side economics and thinks he's an expert economist now.
> Brad, you might be interested to know that few mainstream
> economists take Say's Law seriously, and the only ones who do
I know that the demand for transistors in the 16th century must
have be amazing.
Microsoft's ability to flood the world with garbage is direct
proof of Say's law. Make it and they will buy it.
Perhaps you both are being a bit simplistic.
--
Alan Bomberger | (408)-992-2748 | al...@oes.amdahl.com
Amdahl Corporation | Opinions are free, worth it, and not Amdahl's
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. - David Hume
Phil Ronzone
>I'm pretty sure your examples are backwards to what you are
>attempting to support with them. Bell Labs had a demand for
>smaller, cheaper, and more reliable switching circuits long
>before transistors. The demand for cheap and efficient long
>range communications has existed for millennia. There has
>been a demand for photocopiers for millennia. And fast food?
>Do you even need to ask?
No, not at all. There was no demand for the transistor. A general incoate
"desire" for better somethings exists everywhere.
But, both the xerographic copier and the computer, for two examples, were
felt to be relatively (compared to now) demand-less items. IBM actually
thought there was a world market for maybe 10 or so computers.
The Xerox 914 sold in the first 6 months what was projected to be the
entire lifetime demand for the product, and the number was that low only
because they couldn't physically make 914's to meet the demand.
Frozen foods were thought to be totally impractical.
And my favorite, the guy that started FedEx did his masters paper on the
FedEx concept, to which his grading professional commented it was a rather
impractival idea for a service.
And of course, the Fortune magazine article of 1978 claiming that the
new "hobbyist computers" would never make an impact in the business world
and hence there'd be no business demand for them ...
Direct long distance dialing was thought to be impractical because people
said they'd never want to track all those long digit strings. Bell itself
did the market research (remember the old ATlas5-1212 type numbers)?
Even the "people" themselves thought they didn't want (demand) direct
long distance dialing.
But the supply came, and THEN the demand grew ...
Phil Ronzone
>Brad Aisa (ba...@hookup.net) wrote:
>>What rational egoism rails against is any form of trading
>>value for non-value -- supporting a loafing adult child, etc.
>>
>Brad, you are contradicting yourself. Why is caring for an
>adult child less valuable than caring for a minor child? Why
>should a person not choose to love and cherish a grown-up
>child, regardless of their earning potential and personal
>accomplishments? Why do you define supporting a 16 year-old
>child as value, but supporting a 36 year-old child as
>non-value? The benefits can be the same. I sense a lack of
>rationality in your "rational egoism". Although there is a
>lot of rationalizing.
Jonah - you did not read carefully enough. Supporting a child, that is
someone who be definition is not mature enough to support itself is
certainly rational.
Supporting a loafing adult is irrational. A lioness that does not teach
her cubs how to hunt, that instead suckles them or hunts for them when
they themselves should be, is an irrational mother.
Just what are her children going to do when she dies?
The "worst" examples of human beings are often children of the
very rich tht have never had to support themselves.
The standard cliche is the rages-to-riches-to-rags-in-three-generations.
Andrew R. Southwick
>ba...@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) writes:
[ ... ]
>Externalities. It means those costs--and benefits--that a capitalist
>enterprise doesn't show on its books. That's all I'm talking about. It's
>impossible for a functioning free market to make allowance for all
>such externalities. That's why people pressure the state to intervene.
People put pressure on the state to intervene in cases where property
rights have been violated, *and* the state refuses to recognize those
rights. Hence, "public" rights or "economic" rights are invented to
combat the crimes--although sometimes the government just steps in and
decalres "this is wrong" without any logical explanation of *why* it is
wrong and what business government has in intervening.
If you build a house alongside a stream, in open country, then you might
establish use of the stream, and the surrounding area. You establish
property rights to those entities. If an industry moves in and puts
a plant in upstream and starts dumping toxic chemicals into the water, then
they are violating your rights--which were established by prior use. But
such rights a ignored throughout the united states. Rights to privacy
can be violated, since it is accepted behavior to ignore them in some
instances. Valued peace and quiet can be overrun by a government eager to
put an airport nextdoor to your house.
Externalities such as polution are natural consequences of industry. Some
externalities are bad, some of them are good. But government efforts to
control the "bad" externalities ignore the underlying rights. We advocate
protection of those rights, from the start.
>I'd identify free, compulsory education as an example.
I won't address education here, other than to point out the following:
>A capitalist
>enterprise is unlikely to invest a great deal in education because
>it has little control over its investment--the workers it educates
>can move on to other employers.
Then why does my company match my contributions to my alma mater? Why
will they send me to seminars and classes? Why will they reimburse my
efforts to get an advanced degree? Why are companies--such as IBM,
although many others both large and small, too--funding secondary education
with research grants? Why are they willing to bring co-ops on board, when
the market value received from such employees is typically far less than
the wage they are being paid? (NOTE: I said typically, and this is based
on my experience across industries, from students in many different fields.)
>>Fortunately, in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, human labor (of every
>>kind) becomes the limiting factor of production, and thus jobs are always
>>available. This means that consideration in employee matters always weighs
>>heavily in favor of the worker.
>This is highly debatable.
>Southern Mexico may be a good example.
I'm not sure (my education in geography was from a *public school*), but
I thought Mexico was a different country than America. Why are you
comparing economic conditions in that country with conditions in America,
where individual rights have received their strongest protection in the
history of the planet?
>Terry Johnson \\ It's not that we're on Marx's side. It's
Andrew R Southwick -={C++/OO Programmer}=- asout...@vnet.ibm.com
Brad Orahood
: In article <4dpc0f$o...@noc.tor.hookup.net>, Brad Aisa <ba...@hookup.net> wrote:
: >My definition of what doesn't consitute duress: Man A is starving. Man B
: >has food and offers some to A if A performs some work.
:
: My definition of duress: Man A is starving. Man B uses the fact that
: Man A is starving to lower the amount of wages paid to Man A, knowing that
: Man A has no alternative.
Wow, for every person there is one and only one job!?!? After all, if
that's not the case, your analogy cannot be true now, can it.
: My definition of a fair wage contract is one that does not use Man A's
: need as a lever against him.
If Man A has no need, why the hell would he work? I wouldn't mind
an extented vacation, but I have bills and responsiblities, so
I work. For a wage. For a higher wage, since I recently
changed jobs, unlike poor man A who isn't smart enought to check
a want ad.
: >His providence is de facto evidence that he must have
: >actually robbed his means from A in the first place. Therefore, it would in
: >fact be an act of justice for A to actually expropriate from B and enslave
: >him, though perhaps generously letting him keep his hide (or some of it.)
: >This is liberal logic. Liberal logic is not logic.
:
: Straw man. Sigh. I know of no "liberals" who want to expropriate
: wealth (unless you consider *any* form of taxation expropriation).
First of all, after your definition of duress, you have no right
to complain about the straw men of others.
Secondly, you yourself said that life isn't fair. If you want to
take from B by force ("Hello, we're the IRS, and we would like
to talk to you") and give it to Man A ("You -can't- take care of
yourself, let us do it"), then the above is true. This -is- what
you want to do, isn't it?
Giovanni 8
> va...@wam.umd.edu (RoadRuner) wrote:
> As a business person, I've read this thread with interest and find the
> discussion lacking somewhat. I'd like to focus on the largest segment
> of our economy, small businesses. Companies with less than 50 employees
> account for over 80% of the private sector, I think it is reasonable to
> narrow the discussion to that segment of the economy instead of arguing
> over assumptions based on large bureacratic corporations.
>
> I have risked my life savings, mortgaged some of my future and committed
> myself to make my business successful. I bust my ass everyday to make the
> thing work and at the end of the day, the only person responsable for
> paying the bills is I. It was my idea to start this business, I take all
> the risks, I bring in the clients, I am liable for everything and I stand
> behind the product, don't be surprised when I expect to reap 100% of the
> benefits.
Good for you!
> I just can't believe some of you people trying to claim that somehow
> "society" owns my business and I deserve a good wage, but it is ultimately
> "society's" money and decision as to how redistribute the wealth. My first
> observation is that other nations have tried to implement that theory
> and have failed miserably, it just does not work. My second observation
> is that it is my business, I own it like I own my house, my car or my
> computer. I can do whatever I want with it and there would have to be a
> civil war in which the socialists win before that ever changes.
>
> Finally, I produce ALL of the wealth generated through my business and
> that is why the law recognizes that I own all of the profits. Hired
> help is just that, they are not entitled to anything more than the
> agreement we signed when I decided to hire them.
>
> ALL of the profits of a business belong to the business OWNER.
In a rational society, yes. Unfortunately, there are those pesky
occupational, business & professional licensing fees, both state and
local; property taxes; sales taxes; inventory taxes; inspections and
inspection fees... to the point that the current regime views you as
a mere junior partner.
=== ==============
jgo "Valid FSU Card" is an oxymoron. Batman Forever
ot...@fsu.edu http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~otto Triumphant