Yar. Most of the time, the market needs guarrantees that what it gets is really what it paid for, and that both parties are held accountable to the transaction. Politicians, of course, never understood squat about it. Adam SMith had a thing or ten to say about that.
Before I answer this, let me first note this graph. Personal sacrifice as the greatest moral good is an idea that had thousands of years (way before Jesus) to try and actually improve the lot of humanity. Arguing that the free market is bad because it doesn’t guarantee health care (or whatever) is silly given that health care only became something anyone would care about due to the advances of medicine that are thanks to the free market, and our ability to create such a surplus of wealth as to feasibly care about other people–which is again thanks to the free market.
Ultimately, the free market acts as a carrot and stick that actually impact a person in this life. It induces people to try and work to improve the lot of others, for reasons of self-gain.
But back to your specific question: Society decides the value of work. Some work takes more skill, knowledge, study, stress, and risk than other works. The more of that which is necessary and the more vital it is that someone do that work, the harder it is to find someone to actually do it. The high wage impels people to put forth the effort to become qualified and enter that line of work.
Don’t pay people enough, and most of them will just go, “Nah, it takes too much study to become a doctor and I would have to be stressed out about maybe killing people, watch people die, and of course get covered in all sorts of foul goo.” People become doctors because they are bribed into it. Sure, at a standardized wage, some percentage would enter the profession, but not enough would unless, like communist states, you more or less forced them to. People don’t want to spend their days balancing columns of numbers. They’d rather be actors. And hence, accountants and bankers make a lot, while as most actors have a day-job serving coffee.
Wages allow society to convince people to serve society in a way that reciprocates that respect for the person being the one who was willing to step in and serve.
At the risk of going off-topic, I feel I must reply to this. The concept of personal sacrifice as a moral good at all is actually quite recent - much younger than the idea of self-interest and trade. Most of human history was heavily tribal-centered, and the tribe’s good was identified with the person’s. Someone who bravely sacrificed their life was certainly honored, but not as much as the one who say, massacred the enemy tribe, or even the guy who killed his family and took over. However much we see victor’s justice today, it was far worse in bygone eras. And this was certainly common well into Roman and Chinese civilization. It is not even until the advent of Christanity into Europe, at least, that we even see people consider whether mass murder was wrong, as opposed to convenient of inconvenient. We certainly didn’t see the kind of “avoid harm” ethic of today.
It depends. I would say that moreso, everyone was as consistent at ignoring it outside of Christian lands as Christians were, however coming from a Christo-European background we tend to look at other groups as having, of course, been barbarians. Certainly there were groups that were pretty belligerence-oriented, but Buddhism, Confucianism, Platonism, Hinduism, etc. all pretty much say that a person exists for society and that greed, wealth, and power (beyond your station) is bad. The merchant was the lowest class in society in Japan, China, and Medieval Europe. Zoroastrianism is fine if you have wealth, so long as you are giving. Someone on the SDMB the other day was talking about the Potlatch ceremony, where the person who can give away the most goods is considered to be great.
http://www.international-relations.com/cm4-1/Zhang.htm (Confucius ~500BCE)
Plato : Political Philosophy: Political Philosophy - Malcolm Schofield - Google Books (Plato ~400BCE)
World Scripture - Selfish Desire, Lust, and Greed (Various)
Consider that “greed” is essentially synonymous with “meritocracy”. Meritocracy was anathema to the entire world for millenia. Oddly, nearly all philosophers are considered pro-meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was a strong supporter of meritocracy, and yet he was the sworn enemy of banking, industry, and merchants. He thought that the yeoman farmer was the ideal. You see the same thing with Jesus, Confucius, and all of them. They were fundamentally lopping their own feet off because they had this ideal of the “perfect man” who was self-sacrificing and good, and would work hard just for the sake of others. Trying to achieve some sort of mythical human is silly. We’re flawed little beasties, so you’re much better off to work with what you have than dream some sort of unworkable ideal and try and make everyone feel bad for not being that.
I don’t care.
Well, I have over tend years work experience, the past 3 or 4 managing people and making hiring decisions for technology and management consulting companies. So right off the bad your ability to assess a candidate is suspect.
I work in a competetive field. Most DEGREED candidates will get turned down for an interview. We do hire DeVry and tech school grads but they mostly do low-level grunt work. Sometimes we make outside contractors full time offers if they work out particularly well, but that is rare. They tend to want to just focus on the tech side and find the soft skills like project management and client communications to be tedius distractions. Also, there are a lot of big egos in my field. MBAs and lawyers and Ivy League types. It can be tough for techcentric backgrounds to fit in with that culture.
Let me put it another way. I have the degrees, the experience, AND all the necessary technical skills and I still have to wait weeks while the company I am interviewing at interviews 5 other candidates just like me.
One trend I have noticed in general is that the best opportunities for people who don’t have the “perfect background” is during times of extreme change. Companies are deperate to hire people who can get the job done, even if they aren’t “traditional”.
An example, please, of an authoritarian dictatorship that managed to enforce fairness of outcome and equality of lifestyle.
handicap? You’ve missed the half-full glass. In poor countries the opportunity to work your way up the ladder doesn’t exist. All my friends worked their way through school. Yes, we had help from our parents as best as they could manage. But we worked our way through, sometimes working 2 jobs if we could pick up seasonal work. You can’t prevent parents from spending money on their children to improve their lot in life. But in the United States you can’t stop someone from succeeding through hard work.
Life isn’t fair. It’s not fair that my labor is secured by the government to pay stupid people to breed. I am held to account for the poor planning of others. When I see people moving into subsidized housing with big screen TV’s and new furniture then I have to ask what is being subsidized?
It’s a stupid argument that I keep hearing over and over again. “We should pay X more than Y because X provides a tangable positive benefit while Y is a more nebulous corporate-ish job.” The answer is that your individual day laborer’s actual contribution is not as much as you think, relative to the availability of his skills.
Your cite only says they “attempted” something like equality of lifestyle. Did they succeed? Did Pol Pot and all other government officials live the same lifestyle as those they commanded?
I hardly think that is the point. The point is that any time a government has tried to enforce an equality of lifestyle, it often ends up with a lot of people dead.
Asking you to support your claim is “hardly the point?”
Good, so you acknowledge my point that the deck is stacked against people for reasons beyond their control. Unless I’m supposed to draw a different message from your post. Further it shows the idea that the best rise to the top is bullshit. Your fate is influenced by your circumstance as well as your choices.
Also your “life isn’t fair example” shows how much our society exploits the vulnerable when it can. If the market screws anyone can’t say no just because they can’t then on what basis is it free?
So what you’re saying is helping Enron dodging taxes is more important then keeping people fed because agricultural workers don’t make as much as tax lawyers? Is that it?
You’re really saying not paying taxes is more important then eating? For real?
If the all tax lawyers, and all the agriculture workers went on strike so food production and tax lawyering services were not available which would hurt society more? Dealing with taxes or starving as food ran out?
Let’s say all the agricultural workers studied for “corporatish jobs”, who picks the food? Who feeds the cattle?
See in order for a society to function there has to be a large number of people on the bottom doing those jobs. They’re doing vital work. Just because they’re at the bottom doesn’t mean they should be shit on.
Then the wage for corporate jobs would decrease and the wage for agriculture would rise, to meet demand.
The great thing about the modern world is that the majority of us don’t have to farm all day, every day, so that we can just barely stay alive. If you think that this existence is the only noble one and that any job other than subsistence farming is evil, then go and live as a subsistence farmer.
But seeing as you’re some random dude kicking about arguing philosophy and economics on the internet, and not an Amish guy busy trying to save up enough grain to make it through the winter, I’m guessing that you’re quite happy to have all that corporate infrastructure in place which allows you to not have to be a farmer either. Are you really arguing that every other job except farming and whatever job you have is some sort of evil plot, or somehow sinful? How is your job all that much more important than balancing numbers? I mean maybe you’re a doctor or something, but I bet you’ll find that almost everybody is doing something that technically is unnecessary for general life.
So you can’t object to the treatment of group Y unless you’re part of group Y? Do you really wish to make such a stupid argument?
So the “value” of agricultural workers justifies them struggling to put food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads? How about the lack of healthcare? They deserve to face bankruptcy or death for the task of keeping your ass fed?
Ok, so how much of a increase in the price of food are you willing to tolerate?
I’m saying that you’re part of group X and you’re complaining that group X is evil. When that happens, I tend to think that the person doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Like I said in my first post in this thread, the existence of modern medicine, a sufficient supply of doctors, and a surplus of funding for those two things such that we can consider helping those who can’t help themselves is all thanks to the free market. Arguing that the free market is evil because it created the possibility for something good seems very peculiar. It makes me think that the person doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Everyone gets paid the minimum needed to bribe them into filling that job. There’s no point in offering them more than that. The free market seeks to achieve that. So, by the measurement of all of society, everyone is getting paid just enough to make their sucky job worth working. Saying that farmers are making less than others compared to how much their job sucks is untrue. If they thought the job sucked all that much, they would have put forward the effort to get a job that seemed to suck less to them.
A wage is a bribe to show up and do something that sucks. It’s as simple as that.
The odd thing is that I’ve spent my time arguing with msmithand Sage Rat, although I agree with them mostly. 
I actually would like to coninue that discussion, but I don’t want to drag things too far off topic.
Suffice it to say that I agree the Chinese were far more civilized than Euro nations until recently, but that wasn’t really my point. Barbarism isn’t goodness, but civilization isn’t either.
Secondly, while msmithmight be in a glutted field or dealing with bad HR, the nature of one’s degree doesn’t have much of anything to do with the value of one’s work. In many, even most fields, college doesn’t matter much after a decade in the labor market, just nobody cares about High School after College. If the field is glutted enough, lazy HR peeps will just sift through knocking people off arbirtarily, but this is bad practice and incredibly stupid of them. Having seen what comes out of college and tech school - I’d usually prefer the Tech! But after about five years of work experience, I don’t really care about education.
The Tao’s Revenge
One HUGE problem with your arguments is that you cherry-pick your dataset, and then ignore anyone pointing out the falsity of this. You dont’ get to compare Enron to Farmer Joe the Poor Hardworking Family Man unless I get to snidely stroke my mustache and compare Lazy Farmer Henry the Useless with Accountant Harry the Honest. And nothing in the world will improve your argument if you go that route, because it’s fundamentally dishonest.
First, your philosophy has been tried many times, by China (several times), Japan, Cambodia, and even France. In every case, it was either ignored, ignored with pretense, or led to grinding poverty. Usually all of the above in combination.
You want to claim that there is an obvious value to certain activities, but you don’t udnerstand that no human activity has intrinsic economic value. The French Physiocrats thouht as you do, and it led to Economics being dead-end intellectual masturbation until the 20th century. And I would argue until the 1970’s. Nothing has value except as it is valued.
Now, nobody ever said that it is always right. The market relies on accurate information, and people can deceive it. Enron blatantly fed false information all around. True, the market didn’t realize this at the time, but do you think some government agency would have really figured it out. Or perhars you seem to think that you just know how to value things. If that’s true, why aren’t you out making fortunes upon fortunes? If your decisions are really better than those of thousands or millions of people voting with their precious cash, why aren’t you improving things all the time.
Ah so you feel they get screwed, or us? No middle ground? With us or against us? Are you against UHC, low income food assistance, etc.? Cause programs like that sure look like middle ground to me.
Don’t you think a person doing a vital job for our society should expect to be able to provide for themselves and their family?
Just what group, and please provide cites, do you believe I’m a part of?
I am part of the low income group, currently have a factory job and attending community college. Is this group X to you? I suppose it’ll lead to group X, but do you really think the right thing to do would be “hey group Y is really getting assraped, I should go join them and get assraped too”?
Actually a large part of the industrialized world has socialized medicine. They have a longer life expectancy then Americans in those places.
And before you jump on me for using the S word. The attitude I’m trying to express is here isn’t preference for one economic system or the other. It’s preference for the best tool for the job. If capitalism in one area hurts the least amount of people then great, use it. However if on the other hand a different economic system has a track record of working better for a task then use that instead.
Example:
clothing = capitalism
healthcare = uhc of some sort
food = caoitalism with assistance for for basi food for those who can’t afford it
fire fighting = socialism
No it’s evil because it puts profit above all morals. Do you think, to use your medical example, the poor, preexisting conditions, and those who develop expensive conditions being cut off from the funds for the care they desperately need is a “good thing”?
And if the best bribe they can get for their work that puts food on your table leaves them struggling to put food on their own, then that’s okay, right?
smiling bandit, the argument I’m simply making is capitalism isn’t the end all and be all of economic systems. Several posts ago I said it was usually the lesser of evils. What I’m arguing against are people who insist on it for everything, even when something else works better.
Everybody I went to school with, EVERYBODY, rose or sank to the level of their skills and drive. I watched the poor boy to millionaire scenario repeated in relation to skill and drive. I also watched kids with money go down in flames in personal self-destruction. The driving force for success/failure was the drive instilled by their parents.
Now you’re sounding like Karl the Equalizer. Sorry if the Kennedy’s of the world piss you off but Joe’s financial dynasty was spent down. The children of the people I know who excelled were pushed by their parents to excel. They got little in the way of a silver-spooned legacy because their parents knew what it took.
Children who live in poverty have trouble moving up the ladder because their parents dragged them down instead of building them up. My parents had nothing when they started out. They passed away with the same couch they started with when they got married. It’s still in use today. They didn’t give their kids much in the way of monetary support but they did provide a good work/school ethic. The circumstance of poverty is not driven by a lack of money, but by an environment that breeds failure.