[Moderator Hat ON]
The previous thread having gone wonky, I am recreating the last few “invisible” posts (and trimming out some that seem to be redundant) to see if there’s any life left in the thread. If any of you notice a thread is not displaying new posts or “bumping up” to the top, please email David and me. Thanks.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Collounsbury:
So the notion that people might voluntarily leave a peasant farm is an ‘exaggerated libertarian viewpoint’?
I suppose those peasant farmers dying in small boats trying to escape poverty are a figment of my imagination?
And there WAS a mass migration of people into factories at the start of the industrial revolution. Sure, some of them may have been put in no-choice situtations by some unscrupulous factory owners, but unless you can show historical evidence of huge gangs of thugs scouring the countryside and forcing people into slave labor I will still maintain that the vast majority of them went willingly, because they saw a chance to improve their lives.
Pldennison: Did I give you the impression that I approved of Child Labor? Child Labor is terrible, and I fervently wish that every kid could grow up with a good education and enough time for play. I really do. But the fact of the matter is that in the poorest areas of the world then and now, children worked simply because the only alternative was to starve to death.
If you want to end Child Labor, work for a world in which everyone is rich enough that they’ll never have to send their kids out to bring home the bread. And Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth for everyone, workers and capitalists alike.
pantom:
Sam Stone: Was Pdennison supposed to be me up there?
If so, I really did get that impression. Sorry.
Re child labor: It’s one of those evils, like prostitution or burglary, that is an indicator of bad economic times at a particular time & place. It should be criminalized and its perpetrators dealt with harshly, in proportion to the fact that prostitution is considered “victimless”, while burglary does have a victim, and its practitioners dealt with somewhat more harshly. People who practice child labor should be dealt with more harshly still: right up there with kidnappers, I’d say.
Re unemployment figures: I have to be honest here, and say that I just read a column in Barron’s which states that both the figures for discouraged and for part-time workers who want full time jobs were revised sharply downward between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994. I would quote, but that’s probably disallowed by some copyright law somewhere. The bases for the revisions were as follows:
For part-time workers: attempting to figure out who was truly being forced to work part time, the BLS added the question “Last week, could you have worked full-time if the hours had been offered?”. Adjusting for the answer to this question (apparently a lot of people said no), the BLS revised downwards by 25% the number of part-timers who wanted full-time work.
For discouraged workers: two questions added:
1 - “Last week, could you have started a job if one had been offered?”
2 - “Did you look for work at any time in the past 12 months?”
Answers to these questions cut the number of discouraged workers in half between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994.
Interestingly, according to the article, (Economics Beat, the Barron’s of October 2, with the title, “Prosperity Favors Gore; For Bush a Ray of Hope”) 45.1% of the respondents who said they wanted a job in 1994 but hadn’t looked for one, said in 1995 that they actually didn’t want a job at all.
Personally, I think this adds to the accuracy of the figures I quoted above. Grist for the mill though…
kabbes:
But pollution isn’t an on-or-off issue. The aim of regulation doesn’t have to be to eliminate, but it should be to minimise within reason.
A factory doesn’t care about the cost of pollution to society as a whole. It doesn’t care about the quality of life cost, nor does it care about the monetary cost. Its aim is to maximise profits and this involves using the most cost-efficient products it can. The trouble arises if cost-efficient to the factory is in discord with cost-efficient to society. The aim of regulation, taxes or any other system ought to be to turn society’s hidden costs into a direct variable production cost that the factory must factor into its calculations when determining what the most cost-efficient input is.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in pollution (oho!) It was only supposed to be illustrative of the wider point.
Under an unfettered capitalist system, each individual micro-system seeks to optimise itself. Our goal in setting government policy ought to be to ensure that these micro-optimisations coincide with the macro-optimisation of society as a whole - both economic and sociological. There is nothing in an unregulated capitalist society to guarantee that this will be true - your local maxima need not be the global maximum.
In other news - jmullaney, having finally got ourselves out of the rut of explaining to dal timgar why his one trick was rather tedious, we seem to have got stuck explaining to you about… about… well… I’m not sure what we’re explaining to you. Why not summarise your questions about economics - and from what you’ve written (“print less money”??), I can assure you that they are questions - and start a new thread. I for one look forward to being able to explain concepts further to you without worrying about hijacking what is supposed to be a discussion on the problems with capitalism. I can’t resist asking though – if your country is essentially one big floodplain, then what are you supposed to do? Abandon it completely? Even if you think that this is the ethical thing to do, who’s going to accept you as an immigrant?
regards,
pan
**
[Edited by Gaudere on 10-03-2000 at 02:57 PM]