So, then, the man who needs a job for fear his family may suffer, he is on an equal footing, bargaining wise? An equal footing with a man who can totally screw the pooch and still walk away with 1000 times the first man’s yearly wage?
Well, then, perhaps this Free market is a miraculous thing, if such wonders be true! Must be why it is spoken of in terms of worshipful awe. Shock and awe, oftimes.
Of course not. But let’s try to dispel some myths about true source of bargaining power:
[ul]
[li]The “free market” does not guarantee “equal bargaining power”.[/li][li]Getting an MBA from Harvard does not guarantee equal bargaining power.[/li][li]Being 6 foot tall or possessing an IQ of 150 does not guarantee equal bargaining power.[/li][li]Being well-endowed with large genitals does not guarantee equal bargaining power.[/li][li]Even having a union boss or government on your side also does not guarantee equal bargaining power.[/li][/ul]
The only true bargaining power one has is his value to society (without artificial government coercion). That’s all he can count on. Politicians who promise otherwise are just manipulating people for votes. The sheep who fall for that nonsense get what they deserve.
The Sacred Free Market dictates nothing. It doesn’t dictate value. It doesn’t dictate price. It doesn’t dictate terms and conditions. It dictates nothing.
The Sacred Free Market is not an actor. It has no objectives. It has no wants. It does not distinguish between right and wrong, because it can’t. It has no judgement nor feelings.
It is not pushing or directing any process in any way, shape or form. It doesn’t wring it’s hands in despair at a bad result. It doesn’t cackle with glee at a good result.
All the Sacred Free Market is, is a collection of voluntary decisions. So if you don’t trust the Sacred Free Market, what you are saying is you don’t trust yourself to make your own decisions, and you don’t want to accept the consequences of your own decisions. Which, given the numerous posts on this subject over the years, is something that I suspect is close (maybe too close…painfully close) to the truth.
No transaction can happen in the Sacred Free Market that affects you, without your consent. You have all the power to make the Sacred Free Market do whatever it is you want it to do.
Exceptions are those transactions that create public externalities. And where the government steps in to forcibly extract resources from the citizenry to socialize losses. The latter is happening right now, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Sure it did - so did you. That’s why you posted it.
No, actually, the problem (if there is one) is that the chart demonstrates that the place where we spend the most per student has the absolute worst results, and the second most expensive one isn’t even in the top ten in results.
What you and Lightnin’ are trying to assert is that, if we spend more, we can be relatively sure that it will help improve education. It doesn’t take much beyond what has already been shown to make it clear that no such thing is true. It is clearly not the case that the more we spend, the better the students do. Otherwise Arizona would have the worst scores in the nation, and DC would be the best. 'Taint so.
Regards,
Shodan
I have to agree with Shodan here. Increased funding, while necessary in some districts, is no magic bullet and, while there’s certainly some correlation with money spent per child and the quality of that child’s education (updated text books and early computer skills classes are no brainers, I think, though sometimes costly), this “more cash equals more smarts” idea is just wrong.
I believe instead fundamental, structural changes in the education system are needed. Take, for example, the idea of “middle school” as we understand it. There’s a steadily growing consensus that the K-8 model is stabler for children, improves both their academic achievements and social skills, and cuts down dramatically on drop-out rates down the line. This isn’t a problem that needs significant funding; more money here is not the point. It would take a fundamental upset of the educational status quo but, if we’re going to sit here "I want"ing things, I’m mentioning this. And while we’re there: far less of an emphasis on standardized tests. And as little federal control of schools as possible, if any at all. I think those things would improve a child’s learning environment many times more than simply tossing a few thousand extra dollars at the problem.
I also want a pony.
It would be nice if there was a coherent thought here and you stopped trying to confuse the issue by interspersing random bits of rhetoric and hyperbole.
Boo hoo working man has to feed his family. I’m sick of these bullshit emotional need-based appeals. No one held a gun to his head and made him have a family. No one is holding a gun to his head to take any particular job. He is free to take any job he can find for as much as he thinks he can get for it. If he doesn’t have the financial wherewithall to support a family, maybe he should hold off on having one.
So why should someone hold a gun to an employers head and tell them how much to pay their employees?
You don’t like working for AIG, go apply for a job at MetLife, or Prudential, or TIAA-CREF or look in other industries.
The only thing “magical” about the free market is that it lets people decide to enter or not enter transactions of their own free will. If you take that away then you are relying on someone elses sense of “justice” and “fairness”. That leads to corruption and favoritism.
I see. So, in your estimation, a stock trader has many times more value to society than, say, a firefighter or a teacher?
This may have already been mentioned, but…
I disagree. Religion should not be given any more protection than any other opinion. It should be protected by the right to free speech, but apart from that it should get nothing.
It doesn’t matter what his estimation is of the stock trader’s value. Don’t you get that? Don’t you understand that? It doesn’t matter what someone’s estimation of someone else’s value is. It’s irrelevant. Value is not determined by a 3rd party’s estimation of their ‘worth to society’. It doesn’t matter.
All that matters is the value of the stock trader to whomever chooses to do business with him. It doesn’t matter what the ‘value to society’ is. Is ‘Society’ going to pay the stock trader’s grocery bill? Is ‘Society’ going to decide whether the stock trader deserves another chance at stock-trading, after he screws up? No.
Why the judgmental comments? I notice these types of comments frequently from people on your side of the argument. The same type of judgmental comments can be made about people whose belief in a failed ideology is dogmatic, irrational. The true sheep are the people buying into an economic philosophy championed, in spite of its failures, by the people with the money to influence policy; the people benefiting from a rigged market hidden behind the pretense of a free market.
The deregulation of prices and wages has not allowed a competitive free market to flourish. All it has done is rearrange social power and the result has nothing to do with market efficiency or consumer choice.
Did deregulation of the airlines increase efficiency? Did union busting, lower wages, and forfeited pensions help the airlines maximize efficiency? Have the airlines invested in technology or planning to remain competitive in the age of declining oil?
The problem with free market purism is that it is an ideal not a reality. The free market can only be achieved if there are no distortions in the market at every level of production. All the markets have to be competitive. Right? At least, this is how I understand it.
Price and wage controls exist to reduce economic inequality in the real world economy and have been used historically in the U.S., and still used in economies all over the world. The benefit is to ensure the basic components of a civilized society.
The concrete mathematics you’re looking for show that even though our GDP soars above almost any other country on a per-capita basis, our quality of life is slipping versus nations with socialized medicine, much smaller comparative military budgets, and greater organized labor strength. It also shows that the gap between the richest Americans and average Americans is much, much higher.
Your analysis of the worker vs. owner relationship is a matter of opinion, and that’s fine. I have the opposite opinion. Why don’t we allow the market to go a bit freer and completely remove the barriers against worker organization, and see who’s right?
Well, what’s more valuable to you? The guy who is managing your retirement fund or the lady who is training our young people for their future careers in our nations mills, factories and cubicle farms? And how many people can do one vs the other?
It’s not as simple as “oh I think teachers are great and stockbrokers are jerks so teachers should make more”. First of all, teachers are paid by the town government. Stockbrokers work on commission. How many teachers have to worry about not making their numbers and going hungry or being fired each quarter? How much education is required to be a teacher vs a stockbroker?
More importantly, no one forced either to take those jobs. If you want to make stockbroker money, go become one. If you want to have summers off, go teach third grade public school.
Mosier for Handicapper General 2012!
I trade for a living. I don’t work at a large institution, but at a smaller trading firm. I am only guaranteed a small yearly wage (think 15% tax bracket - in Chicago.) Everything I make beyond that is 100% due to my performance. If I buy at $10 and sell at $20, I make what is left after the firm takes its cut. In every transaction I make, I am counter party to another willing buyer or seller. We both agree on the price and make the trade. This free market thing actually works out quite well! I buy when others want to sell and sell when they want to buy. They transfer risk to me, and I make money if I can successfully work out of it. If not, I lose - my own - money.
From your original post…would you consider me to be “earning” my money? The problem arises when traders operate from an asymmetrical risk position (AIG FP traders, for example). If I was guaranteed $10 million/year just for showing up, with potential for only huge upside bonus through profitable, risky trades… well, that would probably influence trading decisions.
As for net societal benefits of traders vs. firefighters…
I would argue the marginal utility of each firefighter and teacher is greater than that of a stock trader in the US equity markets. It would only become a debatable issue at the extreme of having very few or no traders. With no liquidity, the financial markets would grind to a halt.
So child porn and bestiality flicks for everyone, right? Awesome. That’ll be great for society.
I daresay. Yes, I think you are on very solid ground, there.
That’s just ignorant. There’s no moral component to the free market, since it’s just a convenient way to describe the way that markets work if generally unfettered by outside regulation, severely asymmetrical information or other things that would preclude both parties making an informed trade. That’s the usual fallacy I see around here- people who bash the “free market” because it doesn’t tend to look out for poor Pepe the laborer and his huge family of semi-legal immigrant children.
Those other things are things like insider trading, fraud, etc… that would tend to skew the information involved in a seriously asymmetric way.
What the free market would imply is that the man who the man who needs a job for fear his family may suffer had damn well make sure he has a very good idea of what his labor is worth. Otherwise he may undercut himself and not get paid what he needs to support his family, or he may, through ignorance price himself too highly for the jobs he’s qualified for.
In the case of Pepe, who has 7 children, and works in landscaping, it sucks that he only makes $7 an hour, but the fact of the matter is, it doesn’t take much in the way of brains, talent or training to jockey a weedeater or run a mower. And, to compound things for Pepe, there are thousands of guys named Hector, Juan, Heriberto, etc… who can do the same exact job that he can. That’s why the market would say that his job pays $7 - because that’s a salary point at which the employer can get qualified employees and make money. If he paid them more, he generally wouldn’t get any more for his money, and if he paid them less, he might not get someone as good as Pepe.
On the other hand, let’s take Roger the network engineer. Roger’s single, white, got a 4 year degree, has 10 years of industry experience and several professional certifications. Roger makes 80k per year plus benefits. How horribly unfair to poor Pepe.
Not really… guys like Roger aren’t a dime-a-dozen. If you need a guy like Roger, you have to pay them in the neighborhood of 80k per year and throw in benefits. You don’t pay Roger 100k because there are guys as qualified who will do it for 80k, and you don’t pay Roger 70k because someone else will pay him 80k and he’ll either not take your offer, or will leave shortly to take the higher paying job. That’s how the free market works also. You can’t hire Pepe to do Roger’s job for any amount of money, and if you hired Roger to do Pepe’s job, there’s no reason to pay him more than $7 per hour.
The fact that Pepe puts every cent toward buying his kids shoes and rice while Roger buys bottles of Cristal with strippers in the Champagne Room every Friday night has nothing to do with the free market at all (except that it pretty much guarantees that Roger’s strippers are hot).
Here’s me, clapping slowly.
This is as far as I got. I very much doubt that you and I have anything to talk about.
How can you survive knowing you missed the thrilling inclusion of Heriberto? HOW?