I can see debating with you is not going to go anywhere. You are getting tripped up on very specific labels instead seeing the underlying idea and making your arguments on those ideas.
If we keep playing around with word games, then I guess I can make similar statements, “Teachers actually make more than baseball players because the players in my local neighborhood league earn less than $1000 a month. And those minor players are every bit as ‘‘real’’ baseball players just like MLB players. They just aren’t licensed and marketed as such. QED” :rolleyes:
I know of no system that doesn’t result in people valuing the might dollar over everything else. Even in the 1500s when the Catholic Church was the overriding power, the abusive monetary corruption, selling of indulgences, accumulation of land, etc was rampant.
You have to substitute “free will” for “free market” in your question. When you ask, “does the free market work?” you’re really asking, “does free will work?” If you don’t like the outcome of free will, then good luck finding a way to eliminate it without resorting to just killing every human being in America.
I see wmfellows, I’m wrong because you view me as a left wing activist. According to the last election that would put me in the MAJORITY of the country.
But I love how you “know” me. There are quite a few lefties who do quite nicely. Bill Gates is one of them, but he has a social conscience.
Which country do you refer? USofA I suppose. I rather think American polling does not show a majority hostile to free markets (in the broad sense). Not that I interest myself in such details much.
However, you are wrong because observable reality shows that in operative fact, people - being simply apes with big brains, like all primates are group status seeking. Money buys status in general, ergo money (or in general assets) are sought after.
As I made no remark about a need or not for “social conscience” (a vague undefined term in any event), I should think that it not evident at all what I see a need for. I do note that your conversation with all so far seem to revolve around your frustration that your particular value system is not universal or dominant.
Whether or not the free markets work, you have picked a terrible example. Not all athletes get paid big bucks. Minor league baseball players are not rich by any means, and there are plenty of sports, like horse riding, where for the most part you lose money unless you are sponsored.
Even football. John Madden talks about how in the early days of the AFL players for the Oakland Raiders had to take summer jobs to make ends meet. The players of the mighty Yankees of the '50s got paid chicken feed. They got more money through organizing, and by pointing out to the owners that their big revenues would be gone without them. They generate the revenue, and by being demonstrably better than their competition (who didn’t make the cut) they have shown they more or less deserve the money.
The truth is that the median career salary for a professional athlete is still very little. You can be rich if you happen to make it to the big leagues AND stick around long enough, and be good enough, to earn a big contract.
But most do not; taking up professional sports as a career is a high-risk strategy in which most athletes will never pick up a big contract. The majority of professional athletes never make the big leagues and most that do do so only briefly, not long enough to earn a fortune.
You can’t earn a fortune being a teacher, but you also have no chance of being paid $10,000 a year for six years and then being cut and having no career at the age of 25.
I’m not hostile to free markets but what I asked is to show me an example of a totally free market that works. You haven’t done that. You give credit for wealth creation, innovation, etc., and claim they are due to free markets like that’s the only reason for progress. You say it’s like gravity. Okay, gravity is proven science. Again where’s the proof that free markets work. Look at the Chinese, I’m not pushing a totalitarian regime, they’re economy seems to be humming along just fine. Do they operate in a free market system?
Thanks, RickJay, for bringing up another thing I forgot to mention about athletes. They can play for 5-10 years, then they hang up the jock strap (imagery…ewww). You have to pay them enough in 5 years to last them the rest of their lives- or at least enough to have made the 5 years worth it. My mother-in-law is about to retire after 25 years teaching middle school. She’s received 25 years of paychecks, plus a pension. What’s a footbally player supposed to do with a mediocre salary for 5 years? Go back to working McDonalds like in high school?
Why do you have to pay an athlete enough to last him the rest of his life? What’s he supposed to do? How about getting a job? Is an athlete all that different from anyone else? McDonald’s his only alternative? C’mon that’s pretty weak.
You’re not really defining your terms. To help us out, what, to you, would constitute a free market “working”?
The market for personal computers seems to work extremely well. It’s a free market. In just a few decades we’ve gone from almost nobody having a PC to almost everyone having a high quality computer. They get better and cheaper every year. That market’s working great. Is that good enough for you as an example?
Most Chinese are, by your standards, desperately poor.
Actually, the computer is a good example. And I know they’re desperately poor but do they operate in a free market.
Drivel about Walmart? I think not, they are everything that’s wrong about business. Poor working conditions, total carnage to small towns, a reliance on government health programs, Medicaid because they provide such crappy benefits to their employees.
Conversely, it would make the competition to get a teaching job so tough that we’d have a lot more truly outstanding teachers. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing. All those lemonheads that I encountered at university who “fell back” on teaching because they weren’t sharp enough to do anything else would need to take up sewing and drill-press duties.
PS- To all you intelligent and outraged teachers-- I’m talking here about a specific group of dull-witted students I encountered at my university–nothing else. There are plenty of very intelligent and capable teachers out there; just not enough of them.
“So, Johnny, you’ve got two choices here. I know you like to fix cars but I also know you like to play ball. So you can work in Mick’s garage or play pro football. At the garage, in 5 years, you can be the shift manager. It won’t be great but you’ll make some decent pay and you can set your own hours. Plus you won’t have to handle customers much anymore. If you play ball, you’re sure to break some bones and be washed up in 5 years. When you get cut, you can always go work at the garage then. Of course, you’ll be 5 years behind your peers in seniority…”
“What’s football pay?”
“Well blinkie says they have to pay you less than a teacher, so you can only get maybe $30,000 a year. But I hear you can get an extra $1000 for every concussion you sustain, if you negotiate right!”
In case I’m not being clear, blinkie, Johnny’s going to go work in the garage, regardless of how good a quarterback he is. That’s why you have to pay him enough for the rest of his life.
Poor working conditions like 3 breaks a day? Total carnage like providing hundreds of jobs and cheap, affordable products? Crappy benefits like 401k and health plans? I love how everyone who says this crap has never actually worked for Wal-mart, nor spoken to an actual employee. They just hear someone spout this drivel and they repeat it.
I had a professor that was older than dirt. He once went on a hilarious rant about how there’s always a company that the public picks out as being the epitomy of evil for no reason other than a successful business model. “In my day, it was AT&T!”
If it produces a society that values the almighty dollar over everything else it may “work” but in my view it’s a dismal failure.
Well, the dollar is the only peaceful means of exchange. It’s a tool. Complaining about the almighty dollar is like complaining that construction is all about the almighty hammer, or that soda is all about the almighty carbonation. Without money, you don’t have peaceful exchange(other than barter), so there’s not much point in complaining about it. And without peaceful exchange, you don’t have civilization.
Now putting money above all else is certainly a bad thing, but it seems to me that most of the time when people complain about money, their motivation is usually that money isn’t being distributed the way they’d like it to be. The only true anti-money arguments I’ve heard have come from religious folks who find virtue in poverty.
The free market system knows the price of everything and the value of greed. Contrast that with a fool who knows the value of nothing.
Free market removes responsibility from almost every collective of people, be they a country, corporation, club, church, etc. Those individual groups, like churches, may personally value charity, but as a group, our society makes them responsible for virtually nothing of the consequences when things go wrong. (There are a lot of responsibilities when things go right, such as wages, taxes and compliance, etc.)
Consider asbestos. It was used by virtually all manufacturing concerns in this country until the 1970s. It causes (still) thousands of deaths a year and millions of disabilities and reduced life expectancies. What happened to those companies? They were sued until they had their responsibilities reduced in bankruptcy court, changed their names or sold their assets, etc. Despite some people becoming millionaires (and billionaires W.R. Grace) no person has ever as an individual been sued for making tons of profits off asbestos, or tobacco for that matter. That is the very purpose of a corporation.
The free market is about making money, not about rewarding value.
And thus, that’s where government(ie, force) comes in. Asbestos is dangerous so you ban the use of asbestos in situations where it could be dangerous. that’s why we have a government, and not anarchy.
But again, the burden of proof is on those who would restrict our freedoms. Prove a restriction is needed, and the restriction will eventually be imposed.
Good point. I know there is an effort for some sports stars to tell minority kids that they should be spending their time doing homework, not shooting hoops.
In any case, clearly someone has never seen Bull Durham.
What sort of “proof” do you think it is that you are looking for? What would be an example of an economy that “works”? The whole issue here is that society as a collective whole does not value the same things you value. You seem to lack an understanding of what the true definition of “wealth” and “value” means, how they relate to work performed and what the value of a dollar really is.
In it’s basic sense, a dollar represents a promise to perform a single unit of work. Everything you see around you is the product of someone elses labor or ingenuity. None of it materializes out of thin air. In general, when people are allowed to freely exchange goods and services, they tend to work harder and create more things that society as a whole needs and wants. The simple evidence for this is that economies that are more free tend to me more technologically advanced and provide a higher standard of living. And we can observe this happening in places like China where their economy is shifting away from a command economy to a free market one.
Apparently you are unaware that the dangers of asbestos were very clear as early as 1930 and the incredible amount of damage that was done during that time.
As for “the burden of proof is on those who would restrict our freedoms”, it really depends who is restricting whom, now doesn’t it? It is no trouble at all to define any liked activity as a freedom and someone else exercising a freedom as wanting to restrict liked freedoms. You want the freedom to smoke? I want the freedom to breathe unsmoked air. You want tasty foods? I want to keep kids from eating the transfats that used to be in Oreos because it shortens their life, which is their freedom.
As Janis Joplin said, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. Whose freedom? People who disagreed with Caeser were free to die a painful death.