Yes. Yes, I am. Though it won’t be possible to do so in one fell swoop. This is the importance of “socially necessary labor time”, which would serve as “price” under a socialist economy, which is the transitional phase to communism. But now we’re kind of straying off topic again.
I agree completely with the opposite side of the debate that an increase in the price of labor power (i.e. wages) may possibly lead to a decrease in demand for labor power. If demand is defined as “the number of people willing to buy a commodity at a given price”, then obviously as the price goes up there will be fewer consumers of the commodity who are able to afford it.
The conclusion I draw, however, is different. It’s not enough to look at demand, you have to look at want as well. If demand is defined as “the number of people willing to purchase a commodity at a given price”, then those who cannot purchase said commodity at that price should be defined as “need”.
It should thus be clear that as demand decreases, need increases. An increase in need means there are more people who cannot buy a commodity at a given price.
With most commodities, it is the consumer who suffers when need increases. When food gets expensive, you start seeing things like bread lines. Not so, however, with labor. In this case it’s the producer of labor - the worker - who suffers. Demand for labor goes down, unemployment and poverty increase, and thus also need.
Either way, then, capitalists transfer the brunt of the increase in need to the workers when demand for commodities decreases. Keeping wages low increases need, as people are unable to afford even a sufficient amount of the bare necessities. Increasing wages can potentially increase need, as capitalists reduce their workforce (and speed up production) to keep their wage costs within their budgets, throwing workers into the unemployment lines or worse.
This isn’t merely unfair; this isn’t simply immoral. It’s unjust. Using the S/D model to argue against a living wage, then turning around and saying the only possible solution for workers is individual negotiations with their bosses is completely facile. If the S/D model cannot tolerate an increase in wages, what makes you think it can tolerate an increase in employment? More people working means more money spent on labor. The price of labor goes up; demand should therefore go down.
It should be clear by this point that the S/D model depends on low wages and unemployment in order to keep demand for labor up. Procacious’ highly questionable views aside, we all see the effect low wages and unemployment can have on the working class. Therefore, if an economic model posits that an increase in wages and employment is intolerable under the economic structure it reflects, I say we need to trash that structure without further ado and build one in which such increases are not only tolerable, but required.
Several of the cities in California do not have their own police departments, though they do usually “borrow” the police from other larger cities or else they higher private enforcement. You are indeed correct that you can never completely avoid law enforcement taxes, but these cities were what I had in mind when I wrote the sentence that triggered your reply.
What I meant to imply, but did not do adequately, is that you can move to a place that has less law enforcement (and therefore lower taxes for law enforcement) if you feel that the taxes spent on law enforcement are too high in the place you currently live. You will not be avoiding the tax entirely, but it will be less.
Taxes for things that supposedly help everyone (e.g. law enforcement, roads, parks, etc.) are pretty much unavoidable, but the amount of money spent on these things can vary widely depending on where you live. Though you will never be able to avoid such taxes completely, they can be lessened greatly by moving somewhere else.
My primary beef comes in when the federal government makes such a decision (e.g. spending tax dollars on a national memorial) because there is not place to move to (other than leaving the country) to avoid having to pay for such a thing. Even if I personally want a particular national memorial, it doesn’t mean that everyone should have to pay for it including the people that don’t want it. Some things can be effectively argued as helping everyone and therefore having taxes that everyone must pay, but many things that tax dollars are spent on do not help everyone and so not everyone should have to pay (e.g. what good is a national memorial in Washington D.C. to a person that spends their whole life living in Iowa)?
My dislike for such behavior reaches its pinnacle when it comes to wealth redistribution (i.e. taking of money from one person to give it to another). When the government builds a park, there is a chance that every person that helped pay for it will one day use it (that probably will not happen, but it is possible). When the government writes a welfare check, there is no chance that everyone that paid for that check will have an opportunity to use it. I realize that some people find the sight of poor people “unpleasant” and that disease can become a problem if too many people are without health care, but the odds of epidemics are small enough that I do not feel Medicaid is warranted. And Welfare most certainly is not warranted. I have nothing against there being a box people can check to voluntarily pay federal taxes for Welfare, but to force everyone to pay is totally inappropriate.
I do not understand where people get the idea that just because they like the thought of a particular government program, every single person should be forced to pay for it. If not everyone benefits from something then not everyone should have to pay for it. I know people argue that Welfare and Medicaid benefit everyone, but I find their arguments weak. (Although this particular discussion has been about the poor and thus I have mentioned Medicaid and Welfare, I feel the same way about Medicare, Social Security, farm subsidies, and all the other entitlement programs).
Note: I am not against people getting back what they put into Medicare/Social Security, but when they get far more than their fair share just because the lived a long time, that is where my complaint begins. Having people privately save for their own retirement is a far better way to do it even if that means that some people do not have enough when they get old. I am sure many of you have heard the story about the grasshopper that wasted away the summer while the ants stored food for the winter and when winter came the ants had plenty and the grasshopper had nothing. I got the impression that the moral of that story was that you should learn to plan for the future, not that we should take pity on the grasshopper and force the ants to support him against their will.
Yay.
Granted, being the poor bastard that I am, a living wage would raise my standard of living quite a bit, but I am still against forcing companies to provide it. I realize that life for the average person is “better” with all the laws we have regulating business (I am using life in the early 1900’s for my comparison), but I still do not agree with those laws. I view business as providing the resource people want (i.e. employment) and the people as providing the resource that is more abundant (i.e. labor). Those workers with rare and useful skills that are in high demand are the limited resource and so those people have bargaining power, but when it comes to unskilled labor, the jobs are the limited resource and the business owners should have the bargaining power. The life of the average person is nicer because our government does not allow the system to work that way, but it is still my opinion that the government should not be involved. Businesses have rights too. (The government still respects some business rights, but nowhere near as many as they did 100 years ago).
That is quite true. Sadly, not even ideals are black and white. Everything has its pros and cons. Welfare, farm subsidies, murder, everything. And so even my “ideal” world would not be perfect. I am not adamant about changing the world because I realize that every aspect of our current world has its good points. I feel strongly about the rights of people to make their own choices, but that does not mean I feel a world full of child molesters would be a change for the better. I wonder if anyone is completely comfortable with their ideals in every way.
It is true that I listed what I viewed as the two extremes. Though if entitlement taxes were simply optional, I would have nothing to complain about.
The last federal government budget I got my hands on was a 1995 budget (so needless to say it is a little outdated, but the percentages should still give an approximate idea). 54% of the budget was spent on entitlements (Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, farm subsidies, and 4 or 5 other programs). Medicare and Social Security were by far the two big ones. Welfare and Medicaid were the 3rd and 4th most expensive. So it is indeed true that Welfare and Medicaid are not taking up a gigantic chunk of the federal tax dollars each year, but it is still quite significant. The fact that I do not support entitlement programs at all is what made me so upset. 54% of the budget was just handing money from one person to another. Somewhere between 11 and 17% was spent paying the interest on the national debt (I realize that is quite a range, but my memory is failing me when in comes to the exact numbers). So only around 30% or so of the budget was spent on something real (e.g. programs like N.A.S.A and the National Science Foundation). I can see the argument that money spent on the N.S.F. benefits everyone (though I don’t think that gives us a reason to spend federal dollars on it), but the entitlements don’t have a compelling argument at all. I realize that dumping Social Security and Medicare would be unfair to those that have spent their whole lives paying for it, but at some point these programs are going to screw over a generation or two of Americans because they are based on a model for exponential population growth. Apparently the people that came up with the idea failed to realize that we descended from primates not rabbits (i.e. we don’t breed like rabbits).
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Personally, I’d like to see you accept whatever your state/local government can offer you by way of assistance so you can get a better paying job and buy yourself a computer. Until that time, I hope your using your local public library where, among other things, you will find books on Kant and the living wage.
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I have read a little of Kant’s work and he has some interesting ideas, but I do not agree with most of them. It really would be nice if I could convince myself that there is something special about humans that make them worthy of special treatment, but I have not been able to. I guess I should have studied philosophy or religion instead of evolution. The only conclusion I ever came up with was, “In the end, nothing matters.”
I don’t accept government programs because I do not agree with them in principle and I usually avoid private charity because there are people in greater need than I. I can’t get over how many people tell me I live in poverty. There are single mothers with 4 kids that have the same income I have. I save the donations made to churches and private charities for them. I am not truly poor, only American poor. In many of the world’s countries my life would be normal (except for the fact that I have a access to a computer, but that is one of the perks of being surrounded by rich people — which we here in America refer to as the “Middle Class”).
