Collectivism is Inherently Selfish

One-sided lies and you know it. Since we outnumber the rich, we can overwhelm them at any time. If we overdo their punishment, we can just say,"Life isn't fair," right? Of course you won't agree to that because you hate your Daddy for not getting rich and spoiling you. This infantile fixation makes you want to have a generous fatcat adopt you. So the only ones excusing unfairness are your father-figures. It's a good sign that nothing they own is earned.

"Rely on someone else"? That's exactly my point about taking away Daddy's Money from the freeloading Heirheads. No trust funds, no inheritance. No living off an allowance in college and soon the ruling class will demand that everybody get paid when their own brats drop out at the same rate and for the same reason as everybody else. If we have to do it on their own, so must the spoiled-rotten brats. Or else we don't have to do anything their Daddies tell us and can confiscate the property they made from unearned privileges, which are one-sided like everything they preach to us. "It's not fair that you take what I've gotten unfairly."

 

So your problem is that in capitalist countries workers don;t get the full value of their productivity? How would business be able to invest in capital goods, which make their employees the most productive and highest paid in the world, if they paid all the productivity to their employees? Would the employees share n losses too now, or only in all the profits?

I don't make that elementary mistake, explain how you would run your socialist economy without government or a body backed by government and - guns and imprisonment and fines to enforce it. No such thing as economics free from politics in this world.

 

My problem? Nope. Capitalism wouldn't deliver that result if the market was characterised by exchange.

Sounds like you need to brush up on your supply & demand. If supply & demand operates the market will deliver wages according to productivity criteria (Note that the labour demand schedule is represented by the marginal revenue productivity of labour). If it doesn't we have inefficient economic rents, by definition.

I'm not an anarchist. Government is required (e.g. ensuring investments according to social return, rather than just private return). The important point is that "Government involvement in the economy is the opposite of capitalism" is invalid. Capitalism, given market concentration, is inherently unstable. Government interventionism is a crucial part in its continued survival and the reproduction of capitalist profit. Without government capitalism will, without doubt, die

 

Explain the specifics of how this works please, I am curious.

The market sets prices much better then the government does. When wages depart from productivity the furthest is when government is paying salaries. In that case, productivity is way below the salary paid. You want more of that?

Wages are low now because people value a job in this economy, and that gap is much of that value.

Quite the opposite form what it sounds like, it sounds like you are a big fan of government control of everything.

So basically you believe government should give out and direct whatever is defined as a social return? So basically, an unlimited government? What limits would you like, specifics, not a bunch of words in a sentence that do not make sense together but sound good.

No, that is what real capitalism is, and the closer we get to it there better. Government and the economy should only be linked to protect citizens and uphold contracts and common law protections.

Are there no recessions in government driven economies? Capitalism self correcting mechanism are done by the experience of millions in their own field, what champion do you have that can so deftly manage the economy?

No, we just need them for defense. Government needs its people, do not fall for the confidence game that it is government that builds the world for the people. They live off the production of the people. Private markets will always outperform public ones, except in defense and security. It is no coincidence the freest markets are the richest, and that as markets drift towards freedom they grow faster. (Capitalism = free market = freedom of people to trade with who they want and do what they want)

 

Its basic supply & demand. If we had a market characterised by exchange we would simply have the profit maximisation objective working. The market would deliver a wage where marginal revenues are equated to marginal costs (for labour). That would would have to be paid by the firm, else market forces would drive it out. The very existence of underpayment is confirmation of coercion in the labour contract.

The success of the minimum wage shows that you're being rather simplistic. We can't even discount the negative effects of monopsony in the labour market. That only requires the existence of labour market frictions (i.e. job search), with the minimum wage then partially eliminating inefficient economic rents.

Similar analysis can be used to refer to labour market discrimination.

You've started with a false comment. Government workers tend to be more educated and therefore of course can derive higher wages. You could go for a 'crowding out' argument, but that's a different issue.

Low wages isn't a recent phenomenon. The US, for example, has high working poverty compared to its western counterparts.

I'm a realist. Someone that says "Government involvement in the economy is the opposite of capitalism" isn't.

The distinction between private and social returns refers to a form of market failure. We can't ignore the existence of these factors. There's nothing earth shattering in that, given its based on orthodox analysis into the likes of public goods, merit goods, positive externalities etc.

You're merely celebrating myth. Laissez faire is neither achievable or desirable. Its also naff all to do with capitalism. For example, most capitalist nations saw economic development through government coercion (e.g. use of protectionism to allow infant industries to grow in a more stable economic environment)

First, I haven't referred to command economies (so that is a deliberate red herring). Second, I haven't referred to the business cycle. I've referred to economic crisis. That outcome only requires market concentration, a result naturally delivered in capitalism.

There is no self-correction. For example, an economic shock will be simply magnified if firms are adopting cost-plus pricing.

A public good reference (something you ignored earlier)

The idea that "Market=Capitalism" is another elementary error. The market is easily implemented within a socialist context. Indeed, if anything, there is greater market allocation (given a reduced need for government interventionism and, given greater equality of outcome, a means to ensure greater firm creation)

Why do you think the US has the higher poverty and lower social mobility than their European counterparts? Does it represent less 'free markets'?

 

Who would decide this in practice in your socialist state? A body of elected people? A government backed union? etc... Could people freely work for an agreed upon wage, or would they always have to go through your council of powerful people?

What success? Unemployment among the poor has never been higher, and ticks up everytime they do it, and we usually get a little recession and slowed growth. If you think minimum wage is a success, I don't need to waste any more time arguing with you, you need to get back to supply and demand basics. How much is a welder's apprentice worth per hour, a person who has never held a bow torch? How much is the time of their skilled mentor worth?

All monopolies have government backing, they do not exist in free markets. If you disagree, name one true monopoly in our history that did not get their position from special government treatment.

Where do these rents as you describe them go these days? Who owns them, and how did they get them? (I am going to explain risk and return to you here in a moment, and the value of investment)

Big nothing statement.

Says who? Why can't they sell their services then, and not have to demand their pay by force? How come Space X can reach space for 1/3 the cost of NASA in their 5th year of operation, why does the military turn to Lockheed?

By all means, lets see what other economic fallacies you are operating with.

BEcause of our capital investment. A "poor" lawn worker here can mow a lot of lawns today because of high speed ride on mowers, gas powered weed wackers etc.. and live a life much better then their counterpart overseas without that. Capital investment improves the lives of workers, that is the point - you just get it backwards you think it is the border that matters, when it is the production of a valuable service as defined by the buyer.

Shoot me the definition of laissez faire when you can, all here will agree that is the pinnacle of capitalist systems. Lets go from there. (Defense and security excepted as always)


The distinction between private and social returns refers to a form of market failure. We can't ignore the existence of these factors. There's nothing earth shattering in that, given its based on orthodox analysis into the likes of public goods, merit goods, positive externalities etc.


You're merely celebrating myth. Laissez faire is neither achievable or desirable. Its also naff all to do with capitalism. For example, most capitalist nations saw economic development through government coercion (e.g. use of protectionism to allow infant industries to grow in a more stable economic environment)


First, I haven't referred to command economies (so that is a deliberate red herring). Second, I haven't referred to the business cycle. I've referred to economic crisis. That outcome only requires market concentration, a result naturally delivered in capitalism.


There is no self-correction. For example, an economic shock will be simply magnified if firms are adopting cost-plus pricing.


A public good reference (something you ignored earlier)


The idea that "Market=Capitalism" is another elementary error. The market is easily implemented within a socialist context. Indeed, if anything, there is greater market allocation (given a reduced need for government interventionism and, given greater equality of outcome, a means to ensure greater firm creation)


Why do you think the US has the higher poverty and lower social mobility than their European counterparts? Does it represent less 'free markets'?[/QUOTE]

 

I've already stated: we'd expect supply & demand to determine compensation. Within the individual firm? That's up to them.

Sounds like you need to brush up on your knowledge. A meta-analysis will show that the minimum wage increases wages without significantly increasing prices or unemployment (Indeed, as we'd expect with monopsony, some analysis has found positive employment effects)

I referred to monopsony! In the labour market that merely needs the rejection of the market wage, with firms deriving wage-making power (as they face an upward sloping labour supply schedule)

Again, you only inform me that you don't understand the basics. Underpayment is an economic rent, by definition. It represents an inefficient form of profit as it describes coercion within the labour market (stopping mutually beneficial exchange from being exhausted)

Given the continued existence of labour market discrimination (and the failure of the profit motive to eliminate it), this isn't a cunning reply!

The empirical evidence. A public sector worker, on average, will be more educated than their private sector counterparts. If you don't control for those human capital differences then you're making a nonsensical comment on wages.

I've given you a possible valid angle to pursue: crowding-out through a skewing of the use of human capital. Try and use it!

This has nothing to do with the quote you're replying to. Here it is again: The US, for example, has high working poverty compared to its western counterparts. Note, for example, that upskilling is more common in those western counterparts.

Laissez faire is even less useful than a concept such as perfect competition. At least that is used to try and ascertain the extent of market failure 'in reality'.

 

If the firm itself decides the market price of labor how is that any different then capitalism?

 

So how is that any different then the system we have now where an employer advertises a job opening at a wage they decide? Doesn't the applicant have to agree to that price? So what is the problem?

Don't be a jerk.

No it doesn't, look at the employment levels for black teenagers from inner cities, or 1st generation Hispanics, and you will see a bump in unemployment after every major minimum wage law increase. More black teens were working in the Jim Crowe South then the LBJ big minimum wage nation at large. That is your meta analysis. I know prices don't go up, prices are already set at their highest maximum value, anything else would be charity. The problem is less people are hired, some jobs have to go overseas, and more skilled workers are hired compared to non skilled workers. How much is a welder's apprentice worth per hour, if they have no clue what they are doing and need a skilled laborer to spend their valuable time teaching them? How much, as a number? Probably zero, or even in the negative. So we have trade schools now, no more apprenticeships b/c of the minimum wage.

Oh, my bad. That happens when there is a sluggish economy, in a strong economy that goes away - so the questions is how do you create a strong economy? Surely, government state run economics doesnt do it. You have no examples of it working better then capitalism either.

No, those don't exist. They are getting the value of what they offer, namely job security.

No it doesn't it gets invested or spent. That is efficient enough. No one was coerced into that job. They worker valued the job security. If they want to be business owners they can do that, no one is stopping them.

Dodge again. Define labor market discrimination for us.

No, if we do not reduce salaries for government jobs that we have more qualified applicants for then positions available they are not at all running it like a business. WHere are your workers more educated then their private sector counterparts anyway? Please name one example. It isn't your attorneys, your rocket scientists, your teachers, or your clerks, so where are these amazing people? Be specific lefty.

Uggh.

Pick a European country andd I will compare it and show you how you are wrong, except to the extent that other country has a freer market then us. For example, if you say Sweden, I will say the US working poor live in homes larger then the middle class in Sweden, they have higher PPP for every dollar, they have more cars, more video game consoles, and food. They are less likely to die of a heart attack should they suffer one, and more likely to survive cancer if diagnosed. They have less mobility then the Swedes though, because Sweden has an excellent voucher system model that has made their workers the smartest in the world. We should copy it.

Not at all, name one country that moved towards laissez faire and saw their economic position decline rather then improve over a decades time. Just one country.. (With the exception of countries that took wealth by force prior to that - neither of us are advocating plunderism)

 

For ownership and control of the means of production, we'd need the firm to be owned by the workers.

 

Like an employee owned company like they have now? If not exactly like the ones they have now, (which pay similar wage rates to other non employee owned companies), how do I get to own a company that way, do I have to buy in, or when I get hired I get my share?

 

You're after repetition. Wages do not reflect supply & demand. The existence of underpayment cannot be explained unless we refer to coercive relations. That ranges from the discrimination you ignore to the use of involuntary unemployment to discipline the workforce.

Consider, for example, Doucouliagos and Stanley (2009, Publication Selection Bias in Minimum-Wage Research? A Meta-Regression Analysis, 47:2, pp. 406–428 ). This makes the following conclusion:

In any case, with 64 studies containing approximately 1,500 estimates, we have reason to believe that if there is some adverse employment effect from minimum-wage raises, it must be of a small and policy-irrelevant magnitude.

There's very little evidence in support of that view. There's a recent EPI study, but that stands out as its overall results are inconsistent with the general findings into disemployment effects. Even if it is the case then you're actually only highlighting the consequences of inequality of opportunity, with ethnic groups 'crowded' into low skilled labour.

This makes no sense, given the use of sub-minimum wages to allow exchange of pecuniary benefits for training benefits.

That isn't true. Monopsony continues no matter the extent of demand. The equilibrium unemployment rate necessarily rises.

Sounds like you adopt a 'head in the sand' approach to the labour market. Underpayment is the norm. That isn't really debatable. Crikey, even orthodox and heterodox economics agrees on it (though they of course compete over the different sources)

Again, you only inform me that you don't really understand supply and demand. Economic rents are inefficient. Without wages reflecting productivity we cannot achieve an efficient outcome. In economics language, it means there cannot be an exhaustion of mutually beneficial exchange.

Depends which approach you're adopting; but they're united with the view that the worker is not paid according to their worth or that the worker has a lower probability of advancement just because of their type. The Chicago school's 'taste for discrimination', for example, would estimate discrimination according to the underpayment necessary for an employer to accept employment of a type of person that they find disagreeable. A Marxist approach, in contrast, would integrate discrimination within a 'divide and conquer' context.

Its a standard result in analysis of the labour market. For example, Lee (2004, A Reexamination of Public-Sector Wage Differentials in the United States: Evidence from the NLSY with Geocode. Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 43: 448–472) notes that "both male and female public-sector workers have higher mean education and tenure"

Refer me to one empirical study that, by adopting an absolute poverty measure (such that we ignore issues associated with domestic income inequality), shows that the US poverty rate is lower. Also please refer me to one empirical study that finds the US has greater social mobility than European countries.

There is no 'movement towards laissez faire'. Laissez faire cannot exist after all. An anarchist socialist would be able to refer to the elimination of government interventionism, but we would neither use that in support of laissez-faire myth-making or see that as necessarily agreeable.

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Its a simple proposition: only SMEs can have private ownership. All other firms must be owned by the workforce.

 

It's best that the stock market be abolished and employees own the corporations instead of Washington or Wall Street. The ruling class and the fake opposition it owns won't let you think about this obvious alternative, so it must be right. If they own a man's work, they own the man.

The motto of the openly totalitarian is, "We got ours and we're not going to let you have yours." The motto of their sons who pretend to be Liberals is, "We got ours and we're going to give yours away."

 

Your distilled wisdom saved me from having to sweat through ponderous tomes. Besides, I don't trust anything the rulers allow to be printed. We have the best freedom of thought that money can buy. Our Netwit samizdat comprises Dittoheads from the Left and the Right, so the Web is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a copycat medium. Who tells us that it's independent? Why, the pre-owned media are the ones creating that illusion. We are the Web and the 1% is the spider.

 

I believe we should solve simple poverty in our republic when due to a simple lack of gainful employment. Having to spend that money on human capital merely means that our elected representatives won't have too much discretionary income to spend on boondoggles.

 

Supply and demand doesn't dictate wages? Since when? Maybe government wages, but how so in the free market? You forget the otherwise of the equation, the supply of available labor. The rest o your ideas fail because of this.

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Fine. Can they spend it on vouchers or must people go to public government run schools?

 

Already said. The existence of involuntary unemployment and underpayment shows that it doesn't.

That wouldn't be true would it? I referred directly to the standard profit maximisation criteria, MRPL=MCL (with labour demand representing the left hand side and labour supply the right.

 

Where are people involuntarily employed? Where are people who are underpaid, unable to leave their job?

So what is your point? If there are more people willing to take a job, then there are jobs, the supply of labor is high, therefore the price goes down. It becomes a buyers market, which is market correcting mechanism for times of unemployment. It is a good thing in the long run. That employee is trading the extra money per hour they used to get, for the security of a job when they are hard to find. On the other end, when times are good and skilled people are hard to find, they can command the highest wages.

Checkout what happened under Thatcher in the UK. For all the left complains about her, the income to productivity gap closed pretty fast, and those weren't hay days for the unions.

 

Both confirmed by the economic evidence. We can't understand unemployment trends without referring to its involuntary nature. The inability to use frictional and structural definitions, for example, led to the orthodox use of the efficiency wage hypothesis. And, as I said, both orthodox and heterodox economists agree that underpayment is the norm: from the orthodox analysis into monopsony to the institutionalist analysis into internal labour markets

Thought that was clear. Your comment "(y)ou forget the otherwise of the equation, the supply of available labor" was clearly invalid.

You're essentially saying "supply does matter". Of course it does. However, we don't have the 'MRPL=MCL' result and therefore supply & demand cannot explain actual wage distributions

She quadrupled unemployment and destroyed the industrial base. Child poverty went through the roof

 

Why do we need more government "programs" if, hypothetically, individual Persons can no longer claim to be in official poverty. Shouldn't they be able to solve their own problems, in that case?

 

It is you who wants the government involved in providing everything, I just want to know of it can be done efficiently or not?

 

Your stats are way off. Do you agree strong Real GDP growth raises wages?

 

Mine? Nope. Its accepted economic analysis.

GDP reflects consumption, investment, government spending, exports and imports. The impact on wages? Ambiguous obviously

 

It is the right that would rather exhibit cognitive dissonance than end entitlement spending and mentalities for the wealthiest.

 

Really? Consumption and investment up in real terms and the worker isn't in a better off position to sell their labor at a higher price?

How would you ensure the wages you want people to have but are unwilling to pay right now?

Do you pay asking price when you go to the supermarket,or do you pay based on your valuation of the product?