One thing that I’ve observed, is that over the last 30-40 years there has been a shift where the wealth generated by companies is going in increasing proportion to the owners rather than the workers.
If the workers, who are the bulk of the citizenry, have been afforded greater overall wealth growth than in the past as a result of this change, I would think of it as a win-win. That hasn’t really seemed to be the case, it seems it’s more of a deal where ownership has been more successful than in years past in directing the wealth to their own pockets.
In a nutshell, wealthy folks in this country have the power to enact their own wealth redistribution plans, and they have. Everyone else, the 99% that are on the wrong side of those plans, has the power of the government to redistribute money back. Tit for Tat, we each use the power we have to do what is best for ourselves and our families.
We weren’t talking about how much food is produced by whom, or the state of agriculture. DesertDog wrote something factually incorrect without apparently ever having bothered to punch
percentage of family farms
or
percentage of corporate farms
into Google. He was wrong. You agree. Thats it. If anything is misleading, it’s your non sequitor implying we were discussing something else.
The number of shareholders is not how anyone here has defined a family farm. A * corporate* farm that is held only by family members is a corporate farm that is also a family farm.
The Walton family owns less than half of Walmart shares. There are over 3 million shares held by nearly 2k institutions and I don’t know how many individual holders. I’m not sure what your point is, but maybe try using some actual facts when you try making it.
A family farm is “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, as well as farms with hired managers.” So nothing like Walmart.
This thread is about living paycheck to paycheck. This conversation is about farmers living paycheck to paycheck (or harvest to harvest.) And I don’t know how many farmers are living paycheck to paycheck, but I do know that most farms are family farms, and most farms don’t have all that much farm revenue. That said, most farm households also have off-farm revenue. USDA ERS has a report, “Off-Farm Income, Technology, and Farm Economic Performance” that I’m having trouble linking to from my phone. It’s ERS #36.
I feel like this framing is fundamentally unfair. It paints taxation as an inherently unreasonable, cruel action - something we do to cut rich people down, rather than a reasonable and necessary part of society that helps fight power accumulating among a handful of extremely rich people, as well as keep the poor from starving in the street. Allow me to
But the second part is this idea that asking the rich to pitch in is “punishing” them.
So, Rich Guy, let me explain this as calmly and logically as I can:
Are you fucking 6 years old? Do you still think mom made you clean up your room because she was mean? In the adult world, we get asked to do things because shit needs to get done. It has nothing to do with fairness, it has nothing to do with judging you. It has nothing to do with you at all. There’s a whole world out there, with people who need helping and projects that need accomplishing.
You’re only being asked to pitch in because you have the resources. You’re not a tall person who us dwarfs are jealously trying to cut down to size. You’re a tall person being asked to get something down from a very tall shelf because nobody else can fucking reach it.
I mean, why is “society” in scare quotes? Society is absolutely a thing, and we ignore that entirely at our peril.
^This guy gets it.
Personally, I’d go with the (also at least somewhat workable) approach of applying value to labor. It avoids some of the sillier contradictions.
I mean, it’s arbitrary, but it’s a problem with your conception. If I hire someone and pay them $100 an hour to dig a ditch and fill it in again, is their work more valuable to society than… well, any given minimum wage job? If we merely look at market value, we miss things like the extraction of value and the dynamics of a race-to-the-bottom job market.
I’m mostly going by value extraction theory here. How do you get rich? You hire people, who do work that has value X to you, then you pay them some amount Y which is smaller than X, and X-Y is value you have extracted from their work as profit. You basically cannot get rich in a classical corporate structure without that kind of value extraction. There are, as always, exceptions, but in the service industry, that is absolutely how those at the top generate a huge portion of their value. Consider - McDonalds could pay its workers $15/hour and still be massively profitable. But it chooses not to be. And that’s just profit - it ignores things like the fact that the CEO gets paid 74 times what the lowest-paid workers get paid. This is what I’m talking about here. And to grab something from further ahead…
I mean, it’s not worth that in the market because of race to the bottom conditions (there are always those for whom “a little money” is better than “no money”)… But it should be. If nobody was willing to offer their labor for $7,50/hour, you bet your ass the market would adjust pretty darn quickly. If $15/hour is the wage you need to live off a full-time job, then that’s what your labor at a full time job needs to be worth, regardless of how easy the job is - it’s a full-time job that needs doing. And it could be worth that - the reason it isn’t is because there are people willing to offer for less, and companies have no incentive to take any but the absolute cheapest in jobs like this.
I think this is a confusion of terms. I’m being sloppy with my language.
My whole thesis here is that if workers in the third world demanded the kind of pay needed for the standard of living we have when making our products, our products would be far more expensive. That’s it - that’s my point. I don’t really know how you could possibly dispute this, honestly. Now, there are arguments to be made that people in those countries are better off having the sweatshop jobs than not having them, and that’s a totally different story.
In my opinion, DesertDog slightly misspoke. Because while you are correct that there are lots of farms, the vast majority of farming is not done by them. Because the absolute number of family farms isn’t that interesting a statistic when considering the economy, wages, or agriculture. The number of acres farmed by small/large operations is a much more salient statistic.
The cites I find show that the Walton family owns a controlling share of Walmart, ie, > 50%. Which isn’t “almost all”, but it’s also not what you said. So, perhaps Walmart was a bad example. My point was that when people think of a “family <business>”, they primarily think about size, not ownership stake.
Like all good debates/discussion, we’ve reached the point of arguing semantics
The definition below might be a totally reasonable one, but it’s not the one that most people have in mind when they say “family farm”. “Family” is a proxy for “small”.
My point is that when people say “family farm”, they are probably not imagining some possible agricultural businesses that fit into the definition you’ve provided.
For example, Cargill, which is 90% owned by the Cargill family, but is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, doesn’t quite qualify because 10% of shares are held outside the family. But imagine if they were. If it were 100% owned by the Cargill family, that might make it fit the definition of “family farm” that you’ve provided, but it would definitely not fit the definition that most people have in their head when they think of a family farm.
I agree that we’ve strayed quite far from the topic of the thread, so I’ll leave this tangent alone. Feel free to have the last word.
ISTM that the logic of your position is that you should not be charging your tenants any more in rent than is required for maintenance and upkeep. You shouldn’t even be charging to cover your mortgage - why should they pay for your risk?
I feel like this framing is fundamentally unfair. It paints taxation as an inherently unreasonable, cruel action - something we do to cut rich people down, rather than a reasonable and necessary part of society that helps fight power accumulating among a handful of extremely rich people, as well as keep the poor from starving in the street. Allow me to
I think you are doing a bit of a bait-and-switch here. If you are charging taxes so people don’t starve in the streets, that’s one thing. If you are charging taxes even if people aren’t starving in the streets, so that some people don’t accumulate “too much”, then you are absolutely tearing them down - not to bring anyone else up, but to bring them down. These are different things, with different ends.
Digging holes and filling them in doesn’t create any value to society. It presumably creates value for you, or you wouldn’t pay them to do it, but it doesn’t create anything of value for society.
The difference would come in if the government hired people to dig holes and fill them in. Governments get the money to pay people from taxes. It is not a voluntary exchange. So the basic exchange of the free market - you have something I want more than what I have, I have something you want more than what you have, we exchange and both are better off - doesn’t apply. The digging doesn’t achieve anything. It would be the same if I just gave you the money without requiring you to do anything.
There’s almost no such thing as value extraction. Nothing is worth anything until you can convince someone else that it is worth something. Oil was useless until the demand for it arose. Extracting it wouldn’t have been any more valuable to society than digging holes and filling them up.
Entirely correct. The lesson being, if you don’t generate a profit for your employer, you won’t get hired. That’s why jobs where you produce $20 an hour for your employer and get paid $20 an hour are pretty thin on the ground. Employers want to make a buck off you for the same reasons that employees don’t work for free. In a free market, employers and employees agree on how much of a buck they will make off you, and how much more than free they will pay, and everybody ends up with more than when they started.
Jobs that pay $15 an hour and produce anything less than $15 an hour don’t exist. Employers don’t hire people if they lose money on them. It doesn’t need doing, at least not by a worker in that job market. Maybe it will be automated, maybe it will be outsourced. If it can’t be either - it won’t get done.
Correct. People are willing to work for it. They value the lesser amount of money more than they value not working. Something is better than nothing. And “nothing” is what employers pay to employees who cost more than they generate.
Sure, that’s true. But guess what - if the Third World decides it won’t work for less than Western wages, the Third World has lost its main advantage over the rest of the world. And the jobs will be done in the US or Europe, while they get automated. And a whole bunch of Third World workers now discover that something is better than nothing.
How about when Sam Walton died? Even if I buy your argument that Bezos and Walton built their companies and somehow therefore shouldn’t be taxed on their wealth and/or income, Sam Walton’s kids didn’t. Perhaps there should have been heavy taxes on his estate.
There are two types of libertarianism: left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. Right-libertarianism is what got termed “libertarian” in the US and encompasses philosophies such as anarcho-capitalism (which I would argue isn’t even truly anarchism because of the inherent inequal distribution of power due to the creation of a monied oligarchy) and objectivism.
Left-Libertarianism encompasses, roughly, anything that’s Democratic Socialism or left of that, including most varieties of Marxism that don’t ultimately stem from Marxism-Leninism (such as Stalinism, Maoism etc). Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho-communism, and a variety of post-Marxist and post-Leftist schools of thought are all forms of left-libertarianism. Left-Libertarianism is traditionally what unqualified “Libertarian” refers to in Europe, though it’s not always consistent. I’ve talked to more than a few Brits who have mentioned they need to remember to code switch when listening to US politics because “Libertarianism” means right-libertarianism here, but I also get the impression that’s either changing or varies from person to person.
My point is that is just how it is.
Me making $3-400 an hour when I work isn’t because my hour is 6-8 times as productive as Omars who makes $50 an hour.
Yet he wants to believe that’s how it is.
This means he can feel like he deserves $50 an hour because he’s 8 times as productive as a fast food worker.
Meanwhile by the same logic, when I make a few phone calls a month to repair guys, or the tenant who collects rent for me my completely unskilled work is 8 times as productive as his.
Yes it’s a capital investment but money doesn’t just make babies. Someone has to work and produce in order to make that capitol grow.
In this case the bank made a capitol investment in me by giving the loan , meanwhile my tenants do the work that pays them interest which is how the banks money is growing… Yet another entity with their hands in the pockets of these poor working class.
But as I’ve said it’s a pyramid and they are on the bottom. Just like it’s always been, those in bottom produce the most, if not individually then by the sheer numbers of them, as there are many many times more people making $8-15 hour than people making $50, and that’s how people make more.
By using some means, be it in demand skills, experience, circumstance, whatever, to position themselves further up.
This why as you go up in income there are less and less people making that income.
Besides that like you said, if the third world won’t work for less than Western wages then the jobs would be done here… Hmm guess there’s a reason they are currently done there.
Makes goods cheaper and profits higher so my tenants can afford to live because of cheap goods and the companies importing them make more money.
I’d say that pretty much qualifies those cheap products as subsidizing our lifestyle here.
Btw the other , albeit small portion of my income right now comes from airbrush and spraygun products and accessories. Some of which I designed, then had made in China for about 1/20th of what it would cost here. I just test them and make minor modifications myself.
Some I just buy as they are from Taiwan and resell.
So anyhow, a lot of this I know first hand and if it’s a problem well, I’m part of the problem.
Completely off subject but basically what I’ve been doing with the stuff I didn’t design is simply looking at customs reports to track down where the major brand names are having their products made… typically mainland China or Taiwan.
Sometimes I don’t get the direct name because they use a trading firm so I have a few more steps to figure it out.
Then I just buy the exact same things straight from the factory.
I’m hoping to get some good sales numbers by selling some of the same exact items as the big guys are for about half the cost ( still almost triple my cost).
You’ve made the point much clearer than I. As I kind of hinted at, even if the farm is owned by a single family, in order to make a go of it a big chunk of them have become contract farmers, one small step above tenant farmers. Chicken (and to a lesser extent, egg) producers are a prime example of this.
(Underline mine)
Thank you for that. I tell people I am proof that Ayn Rand is neither necessary nor (IMHO) sufficient in order to be a libertarian. The only work of hers I have read is Night of January 16th 'cause it’s short (No John Galt speech for me, thanyouverymuch).
Looking ahead to when automation kicks in hard time, I am intrigued by universal basic income and was keenly disappointed when Finland throttled its experiment. Likewise, while I am no BernieBro, I thought the Democrat hierarchy were stupid in thwarting his campaign in order to serve up the most hated woman in America as a candidate in 2016.
ISTM that you are conflating return on investment with earned income. They aren’t the same thing.
You are correct - someone has to work, and capital investment is what enables people to work. No investment, no work, and therefore no productivity.
This part I agree with.
The free market is neither moral nor immoral - it is amoral. It does not concern itself with matters of right and wrong. Prices in a free market reflect the equilibrium between perceived supply and experienced demand in a given market. Doesn’t matter if it is rental property, factories, or crack. Somebody wants it and is willing to pay, somebody else is willing to supply it, price reflects the point at which both are willing to exchange.
Prices are information. It’s like a thermometer. A thermometer isn’t good if it reports that it’s 80[sup]o[/sup] out even if that means you can go to the beach, and it isn’t bad if it says it is -10[sup]o[/sup] even if that means that homeless people will freeze to death. The temperature is the equilibrium between the sun’s energy coming in and heat loss going out. Like it, hate it - doesn’t make any difference.
If you are cold, put on a coat. If you are hot, turn on the fan.
Pass a law encouraging investment, and you will get more of it, along with more wealth inequality for the (successful) investors. Pass a law discouraging it, and you get less of it, along with less wealth inequality - and more unemployment.
Yes, I see that every day. Through the use of technology and outsourcing, companies constantly strive to save money. The end result is that profits get funneled into a smaller and smaller caste of owners and senior leadership. It’s a common complaint of tech companies that in spite of their large revenue, they employ relatively fewer high-income employees compared to say, an automaker or steel mill.
Now a days, many companies don’t even want permanent employees at all.
There is a difference between being compensated for indirectly creating economic value and economic rent collecting. I would characterize it as Sam Walton creating “means of production” in building Walmart vs his descendants living off the stock dividends in perpetuity.
Its value is as an example as to how this whole theory is bizarre.
But we’re talking about jobs. Things that, by definition, are worth something to the employer. And we’re talking about situations where companies easily could afford to pay their employees far more than they get paid… but don’t…
…So we’re talking about jobs that are easily worth far more than $15 per hour in terms of what you produce for the employer (as evidenced by the corporation still being grossly profitable if it paid all its minimum wage workers $15/hour), but you make maybe half that.
“Agree” is a very strong word to use. A person does not go to a McDonalds job fair and say, “this is how much I’d like per hour, and I’d like these bonuses for high performance, and I’ll gladly negotiate down for certain benefits like health care”. In fact, if your job isn’t high-demand, low-supply, and high-skill, pulling a stunt like that will get you laughed out of the building. I mean, I make damn good pay as an IT specialist in a country where “represented by a union” still means something, and even so the closest I’ve come to that kind of negotiation was when I offered my resume to an HR coordination company who said, “We’ll see what jobs we have in that price range”.
No. A person who signs up for a job at McDonalds is effectively told, “This is how much you make. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” And depending on the job market, that second option may be somewhere between “untenable” and “suicidal” - if you’re trying to land a job at McDonalds, chances are most of the other jobs on offer are also offering about that rate (minimum wage).
What choice is that, exactly? When my options are “agree” or “starve”, the idea that I have a “choice” is laughable. And yes, working a shitty, minimum-wage job is better than starving - but it’s not hard to see how this logic is still pretty fucking horrible when you consider just how much off of the actual value of the work the company is skimming, and how the CEO makes 50 times what the line cook makes.
If we want it done, it needs doing. And if we want it done, we cannot simultaneously degrade those who do it by demanding that they work full time and still fail to make ends meet.
Man, if only there was some way we could change the system so that workers in the third world don’t have to settle for pennies while the result of their labor makes a small portion of people so wealthy that the best thing they can think of to do with their money is lobby the government to let them keep more of it.
Right , but according to these guys I’ve produced housing, which I am directly compensated for. I say I produced nearly nothing, by sheer virtue of expected eventual ownership I’m allowed to ask for a tribute. Some small part of which goes to defense and law enforcement, just like it’s a little feifdom.
And the someone else is benefitting from your investment, because it enables them to do the labor.
People have to have a place to live, so they can work. You supply a place to live. They work, and you get a return on your investment. If nobody gave them a place to live, they couldn’t work. So they wouldn’t have jobs, or a place to live, and you wouldn’t get a return on your investment.
This way, they benefit from your investment and you benefit from their work. Everyone comes out better off than when they began.
Exactly.
But just like most rich people, I’m not making more money than the tenants because I’m more productive.
I’ve just positioned myself ( through a loan). Where I basically have 12 people laboring for me. In return I give them somewhere to live.
If the houses were nicer ( more expensive). Then I would just have people who make more money laboring for me. Again placing me further up the pyramid.
If my houses rented for triple the money I wouldn’t be three times as productive.
If I manage a McDonald’s I’m not producing three times as much as my employees, in fact I’m probably directly producing nothing.
My employees are producing, laboring for me.
Mainly because I’ve learned the inside and outside of the of running the place and I now have a skill not everyone has.
