Interesting allegory, but it doesn’t quite illustrate the distinction between non-monetary paper wealth and meat.
Are you sure of that? I mean, there are examples of stone age societies that have a pretty wide diversity in ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, after all. We don’t know the exact social structure of many stone age peoples, but we can see differences in status goods/grave goods in some. I’d say that Ogar simply couldn’t possibly sit on that pile of meat since, you know, it wouldn’t last ‘a dozen lifetimes’…but Ogar could have high status jewelry or ceremonial flints or other such things that Gruntling doesn’t get to have. And probably the pick of the best women and food as well…again, something Gruntling doesn’t get.
As for killing every animal in sight, well…that happened too. There are all sorts of examples of early humans killing a lot more animals than they could eat by driving them off cliffs or into killing blinds or the like when they could. Ogar would definitely get the choicest cuts while Gruntling would get what’s left. If there was plenty, Gruntling would get to eat…if not, not. C’est la vie…
ETA: Basically, even the poorest Gruntling in today’s world, certainly in the US or any other 1st world country, is so much better off than his or her equivalent in the past that it’s hard to even quantify. And part of the reason for that is capitalism…which has lead to the question the OP is asking and why it’s really a stupid one, when you boil it down.
RESOLVED: Shitty workers making shitty products that nobody wants to buy don’t have a right to be rich.
Now, can we talk about the millions of competent workers that make goods and provide services that are valued in the market and generate profits so the owners of their companies become outrageously rich? What is the value of their effort?
The right says the value is whatever price they can negotiate. This is not unreasonable.
What IS unreasonable is ignoring the fact that negotiations do not occur in a vacuum. The ability of the sides to negotiate is dependent upon the legal structure underpinning the economy. It is up to the government to decide if that structure favors the owners or the workers. or meets somewhere in between.
There is no “natural state” unhindered by government action, you can’t just have the government punt on the issue or be “hands off” unless you want to dissolve all Corporations and LLCs. We can do that, if you like. Level the playing field, as it were. It would be a singularly stupid thing to do, but I’m willing to consider it if you are.
If you’re not willing to dissolve these legal structures, then at least appreciate the fact that they are powerful tools offered by the government to company owners. These (and other legal tools) are used by owners to protect themselves, to negotiate contracts, to structure tax liability. In a negotiation between the owner of a large corporation and an individual worker, one side has a carefully designed legal construct protecting his personal assets from the consequences of the negotiation, he has a legal team, HR professionals and experienced managers handling the deal, and the worker has only himself.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re getting at here. Wages are generally set by a labor market. What this means in practical terms is that like any other commodity (and yes, labor is a commodity), supply and demand interact and wages reach an equilibrium for each position/combination of skills and experience.
This is how ANY market works- grain, clay pots, labor, etc… If there’s a lot of demand, and supply is low for whatever reason, then the price goes up- those who really need that good pay more to get it. And the converse is true- if there’s a LOT of supply and/or the good is fungible or easily substituted, and demand is relatively low, then prices are low as a result.
That’s how wages work as well- most low wage people are essentially fungible- you can fire one burger flipper and hire just about any other person out there to do the same exact job with minimal training. Not so with say… people who set up Kubernetes clusters to do app level virtualization. You can’t just go hire someone with that experience off the street- the number of people with that experience are probably at least two orders of magnitude lower than the number of people qualified to flip burgers at McDonald’s.
So if these people bring that little to the table in terms of skills and experience that they can be replaced by literally anyone else who is physically and mentally capable of flipping said burgers, WHY would a company pay more? You literally don’t get better burgers out of it, and there’s someone else willing to work for that lower pay waiting in the wings. It could be argued that you could foster a better culture in terms of absenteeism and what-not, but that is a different experiment.
It’s not the companies’ legal structure and size, nor is it governmental stacking of the deck; it’s that other person waiting in the wings willing to work for less that drives wages down for those positions. That’s the mistake people make- they assume that its’ always “The Man” holding wages down, etc… when in fact, it’s the ready availability of low wage labor that drives wages down. It’s why things got better for the peasantry in the wake of the Black Death- when a large chunk of the population gets wiped out like that, labor becomes a lot scarcer.
That’s why education is so important- it’s one of the most important ways people differentiate themselves in the labor market, along with experience.
What happens to the profit (if there is any) of a company is unrelated to wages for the most part. It’s due to assumed risk. If I take a job at Company X for Y salary, the terms of that deal are that I get Y salary every year, regardless of profitability or lack thereof. The only real risk to me is that my job is entirely lost- either through layoffs, poor performance on my own part, or the company going under. Absent those things, I’m guaranteed that salary regardless of company performance.
If I’m the owner (we’ll use a single proprietorship for this example), I’ve put up my own personal cash to start the business- let’s say it cost me $100k to rent a little storefront, buy the raw materials, advertise, etc… And I’m promising to pay my two workers $9 per hour to work for me, because that’s what the job I’m hiring them to do goes for in my area.
Let’s say that my business takes off and makes $150k in that first year. I’ve paid my workers their $9/hr and even probably some $13.50/hr in overtime during that year. And let’s say I gave each a $1000 bonus. So they’re coming out of that first year having been compensated with a wage AND a bonus. And I’m coming out with $48k in profit. I’m failing to see how these workers are getting a raw deal here- they’re getting a fair wage for the work they do, and I’m keeping the profit of MY company.
Profits aren’t generally how the owners became outrageously rich. We’ve already been over this.
The government puts it fingers in a LOT of markets, in a lot of different ways. Regulating markets is possibly the single most important economic function of a government.
The ready availability of low wage labor isn’t an immutable feature of the universe, it’s impacted by our laws. An ample supply of desperate people willing to work for shit wages isn’t something our country should aspire to have.
You sound like a nice business owner. Your competitor across the street isn’t as nice. He pays $8/hr, and instead of having 2 workers every day, he has a rotating crew of 6 workers. All six call the shop every morning to see if there is work for them, and he tells them if they’re needed and for how many hours. This way, he can cut his expenses during slow hours, AND doesn’t have to pay any fringe benefits or bonuses, because they’re all “part time”. He’s making more money than you, and may just undercut you because his costs are lower.
Are these workers getting a raw deal? They’re getting a fair wage for the work they do. They agreed to the working conditions. Ultimately, the fact that employers CAN get a desperate person to agree to shitty working conditions doesn’t mean that society is best served by letting them.
There is a natural state, where people own what they create.
That is, of course, subject to the drawback where someone stronger comes along and takes it from you. In order to prevent this, people organize themselves into societies where they recognize the right of others to own what they create, and in return have their own right to own what they create recognized. No one is suggesting that we give that mutual recognition of rights up. Except, apparently, if the government decides you have too much, so they stop recognizing that right.
If you are saying that there is no body of law, and no government organization, that protects workers’ rights, I don’t think that is correct. If you work somewhere, and the place goes bankrupt, you cannot be sued for the company’s unpaid debts. Laws prevent slavery, impose a maximum number of hours of work, set a minimum wage, protect you from unsafe working conditions, etc.
And of course, both sides hold the ultimate power of refusing either to hire, or to work at, a given position. You appear to believe that it is a consequence of government action that unskilled workers cannot demand a higher wage. As bump points out, that’s not the reason. We could, I suppose, mandate a higher minimum wage, but then we would probably have to deal with the problem that not all jobs are worth hiring someone if the MW is too high. Thus offshoring and automation and so forth.
Just saying “it’s not fair that unskilled workers can’t make a middle class income/billionaires got rich just because they took successful risks/the US has moved away from unskilled factory and agricultural work to high-tech manufacturing and knowledge work” doesn’t really address any of the issues.
Regards,
Shodan
As long as they obtained their money legally, I see no problem with it. If it is wrong for somebody to have billions, then identifiy the objectively wrong thing occuring that allow them obtain billions and go after that. What wrong did Oprah Winfrey commit to have billions? If there is one, find it and eliminiate it. That does not have to be done through taxes.
I’m not against regulating markets such that employers aren’t able to skirt the laws by working everybody “part-time”, with no benefits for example. That’s pretty much an attempt to game the laws that mandate full-time benefits and overtime, etc… Just like H1B visas tend to be similar sorts of things in the tech industry.
Where I have a problem with things is the idea that the very wealthy have necessarily built their wealth via this kind of thing, or that they OWE something to their workers beyond their pay. Who’s to say that the low-paid people are the ones “owed” the biggest piece of that billionaire owner’s profit? For all we know, those guys may be being paid commensurately with their actual level of work, while some junior execs making $150k may be providing value way out of proportion to their pay and are therefore owed MORE than the low wage guys. That’s the problem I see- we assume that it’s the low wage people getting the shaft here, when it could be anyone employed by the company. That is, if we even accept that someone necessarily has to be getting the shaft at all.
I’m not sure if anyone has been talking about who is “getting the shaft”, but personally, I don’t care.
Progressive taxation is not about fairness per se. It just comes from two things:
- It’s very bad for society if a large proportion of the population struggles to meet their basic needs
- The relative value of a dollar depends on how many dollars you have (or whatever the correct name for this phenomenon is): give Bezos, say, $5,000 and it changes nothing about his lifestyle. Give that same amount of money to someone who’s working class and maybe it means they can get a car, which enables them to pursue different kinds of employment.
So generally it’s better for society (and the economy), if the marginal tax rate increases with high income.
Additionally, I am personally in favor of a minimum wage.
The mistake some make when considering pay is if, say, a worker is on $7 an hour then they are only “worth” $7 and paying more is forcing their employer to be charitable, or make a loss. But in fact the only relationship between productivity and pay is that the former must be higher: it can in fact be much higher.
e.g. an employee might be generating $100 net profit per hour for a company, but because of market conditions, the company can nonetheless find someone willing to work at that level of productivity for only $7 an hour. If we now change the market conditions somewhat by implementing a minimum wage of $9, the company is not making a $2 per hour “loss” in any sense.
But again, it’s not an argument of anyone getting the shaft necessarily.
Mijin and I have disagreed about a few things in this thread, but are generally in alignment here. There should be debate about what basic needs are, how marginal utility diminishes (that may be the term in question), what should and should not be subjected to the inefficiencies of the state vs markets, how to most efficiently achieve aims (e.g. I prefer other options to a higher MW), etc. But I believe we can and should avoid some amount of suffering. And you can’t get blood from a stone. I can afford to pay a higher rate now than when I was making seven and change an hour.
I am not a big fan of the consumer economy, even as I am reassured to know that Budweiser is not using corn in their brewing process. Happy day, to be sure.
But with a consumer economy, if the consumer has no money to spend, the economy is fucked. A way must be found to put spendable money in the pockets of people who will spend it. Having an investor class is all very well, but those investors expect a return on their investment, people who have more money than they can spend want to invest it to make more money. Which they will invest. To make more money. To invest, at interest.
While the consumer economy, which depends on us ordinary schmucks, gradually falls apart. The labor movement and union power saved the rich folk’s bacon, so naturally, they have done their level best to kill it. And so it went…
I agree with almost all of this verbatim. One change that I would like to see in regards to MW. If there is going to be one, it really needs to be tied to inflation so that it is fluid, and can be prepared for yearly.
Most business owners are not going to like to see a MW go from $8 to $15, on the whims of the government.
So regarding the MW and inflation, I’ve said this in other threads. I believe during some conversation with septimus. Re: inflation, I agree; if you’re going to have one, just tie the damn thing to inflation so we can stop wasting time arguing about it every X years. And while I don’t particularly want one or want a higher one, we’ve had a higher (real) MW. So I don’t think boosting it to historic highs or even a touch more (especially if you ease it in) will have any disastrous effects.
Those discussions a few years back about how the historic high was equivalent to $10.60/h or so can be updated to just shy of $12/h, due to inflation since then.
Obviously states and local governments may do their own thing.
I would agree with that- I suspect part of the problem we see today is because the minimum wage tends to stagnate for a long time, and then jump by quite a bit, which causes a lot more pain to businesses than if it had increased by the same amount spread over time, and hangs people out to dry for the last few years before the jump.
Ah, nothing like a bit of spicy innuendo! “Whim” is about level 2, useful as spin, but without a lot of punch. Did you consider something level 5, like “fanciful notions”? Or got all the way to 10 with “deranged lefty moonbat fantasy”?
I touched a deranged lefty moonbat fantasy once. It was supple, yet firm.
In the context of you and your small business, it makes sense. You’re running a company. You want to keep costs down. You want the best employees you can get with the right skills. If everything goes well, you turn a profit and everyone keeps their jobs. Heck, you probably wouldn’t even get rid of any of your employees, unless they gave you cause.
In the context of aggregate society, it kind of feels like workers are getting fucked. Automation, shared services and outsourcing are reducing the number of jobs needed and increasing the size of the labor market. Companies increasingly shift the onus of education, training, and just general career management onto their employees, yet demanding more from them. Companies are quick to fire and extremely slow and fickle to hire. A lot of firms just encourage “churn” for its own sake.
IOW, all the benefits seem to be going to the large corporations (and by extension, their owners, shareholders and the owner’s agents in executive management positions). Employees have to go fuck off and hope they can find another job.
Perhaps if we had better economic cooperation among individuals, companies, states, and nations, we wouldn’t need to rely on the kindness of billionaires. I think what Bill and Melinda Gates are doing with their money is all well and good, but those who suffer are at the mercy of their spending decisions. They might be spending on billions to improve sanitation and water quality in India, but are they doing the same here in the United States - where they presumably earned the bulk of that fortune?
Um…so, in the context of the aggregate of society, how was, say, the discontinuation of manual switchboard operators a bad thing? From the (few) workers affected it probably felt like they were being fucked, as you say, but I’m not seeing how the aggregate society (including probably at least some of those workers) was anything but improved by this happening. Your argument could be used to encompass literally every technological change since the industrial revolution as…well, I’m not sure. Fucking the workers I guess. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case, in the aggregate. Individuals certainly were disadvantaged and hurt by changes, but the aggregate??
As for automation ‘fucking the workers’ and only benefiting the corporations, even if that were true (which, in the aggregate I don’t think it is, from several perspectives), you’d have to tell me why we should have kept those good switchboard operator jobs going and kept paying those people (and presumably giving them raises and stuff) when we went to automated systems…and why that SHOULD have benefited those switch board operators. Or any of the myriad other jobs that have been lost, changed or downsized due to any automation either today or in the past. Should we keep paying line manufacturers to work even though they aren’t needed anymore? Should they be getting a larger piece of the pie, even though they aren’t doing the work OR really contributing to the capitalization for the automation?? Are the workers paying for that automation or those expert systems and getting shafted? As far as I know, they aren’t. Even if you want to make the case that you had robotics and systems folks watching what they do, or asking them what they do or recording how they did it so they could create the expert systems or hardware, I’m not seeing the fucking…they were, after all, being paid to do those things.