Income inequality, taken too far, is a bad thing. My cite is the current economy. The more wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, the less wealth there is in the hands of the masses. And when that happens, there is less aggregate demand for everything except the most inelastic of goods. Do you dispute this?
Your argument is symptomatic of the stereotypical conservative’s binary view that, liberals argue for exact renumeration for everyone. That is not what is being argued here. The argument is that if too many have too little, there will be no one able to consume goods no matter how much you incentivize supply. A good businessman is not going to produce one widget nor employ one person more than required if tax rates – a mere percentage of profit or revenue that the entrepreneur is able to pass along to the consumer!-- are too high.
Now, instead of merely taking a percentage of the profits, let’s eliminate the very source of revenue itself, the consumer, through their own lack of revenue due to the a lack of an incentive to pay them, and extrapolate from there.
And Bricker–I never took you to be someone to argue for printing more money. So… why do you reject the zero sum argument again? Protip: poor people don’t start businesses, and making poor people out of the middle class, which you will do without either printing more money or installing some leveling mechanism, means fewer businesses will be started. And if the corporate class, the C-blank-Os and the very uppermost management (and of course, attorneys) are the only ones we as a society choose to consider as having a right to more than subsistence wages, well… we’re in zugzwang.
I think the American adult is probably getting overpaid, actually. Labor, like grain, #4 hex nuts, and laundry detergent, are worth what a willing buyer is prepared to pay a willing seller. Labor should not be priced by someone’s determination of what rate people need. It should be priced by what rate people are willing to pay.
No – because, once again, you offer up a zero sum game, as though “wealth” were a fixed number of gold coins, and if we concentrate those coins in a few hands, there are obviously not as many left to spread around to the masses.
I contend that wealth is the result of applying work to resources. Allowing person with ability to reap the rewards of their ability creates an environment in which more wealth is created – the total amount of wealth in the system increases. Yes, it’s true that the guy who figured out how to build a better mousetrap gets much more wealth than his laborers who simply assemble the pieces according to his design. But all of them ultimately benefit, because the world which before had scrap lumber, springs, and pins sitting around (value=small) now has highly effective mousetraps (value=large). Or, in other words, the number of gold coins in the world has magically increased.
Do you think there’s a possibility of systemic class privilege which’d allow inflation in executive remuneration? Or is it only working class adults which’re overpaid?
Except you think wage labour, on average, imputes more than the reward of a person’s ability and thus that a surplus of executive labour must be expended in order to subsidise such wages?
If wealth were not a zero sum game, then surely the maxim “to each according to need” could generally be applied?
You still seem to be laboring under the apprehension that I am arguing for the same, or even similar, compensation for the inventor, the CEO (by the way, that Venn diagram has a union about as small as my Herman Cain '16 bumper sticker business has of going Fortune 500), and the janitor. To the extent you frame your responses in those terms, that is the extent to which you reveal your reliance on stock arguments and not on analysis in good faith.
I submit that what you posit as an environment where people with ability are able to reap rewards exists right now. The power of the union is at a low ebb in this country. Wage pressure is nil. As I mentioned earlier, tax rates are infinitesimal.
So, we’re in economic ice cream, right?
As we know, the amount of resources in the world is fixed. Moreover, surely not even you could deny that a great deal of capital is owned by a limited number of players. And those players do not have an incentive (in this country), despite historically low taxation, to work more on resources and increase your mythical pile of gold coins. Why should they? The marginal utility of an additional dollar… or million… for a billionaire is approximately …lemme see… carry the two… chicken feed.
So… if the people who own the resources won’t produce at optimal conditions for them, whither comes the incentive to do the work on resources? It’s all well and good if small business (real small business, not hedge fund managers crying on CNBC) did have the ability to expand, but they cannot. Because no one has any dollars to spend. Because there is no one to resist the trend toward real wages spiraling ever downward as a share of the total economy while corporate profits and executive salaries soar.
That is why unions are necessary. That is why their weakening, as shown in my cite, dovetails with the stagnation of wages. That is why Walker, though he will not be indicted, should have been recalled.
Anyone whose wage is a result of something other than a freely reached agreement is, in my view, potentially overpaid. Put another way, we should have no confidence in the wage, price, or consideration that is procured by anything other than free agreement.
Does this mean: I think a laborer’s wages are too high and they are covered, so to speak, by drawing from an executive’s labor?
Again, I say we have no confidence in any wage not determined by free agreement.
Why so? The statement does not imply unlimited wealth. It simply means that the amount of wealth is not fixed. It increases as people apply work and innovation to resources. But how in the world does that imply that society should adopt a policy that allocates wealth at all, much less assigns wealth to anyone without regard for the role the recipient had in producing it?
Low ebb, perhaps, but by no means trivial. Union “contracts” still dominate the manufacturing sector in the US. We have a minimum wage that sets a floor without regard for what the actual value of the labor might be.
In a sense, yes. But in 1800, you could have made the same argument, and never counted oil as a resource. Indeed, oil was a bad piece of news, a way to ruin land. No one regarded oil as a valuable resource.
Fast forward a couple hundred years. Did the amount of resources in the world increase? I say it did, in the sense that oil, then regarded as a nuisance, is now valuable.
What changed was our innovation. What changed was a smart guy named Jean Lenoir, who figured out how to engineer a design that made use of refined oil.
Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense.
Sez you. In fact, they do. People like Carnegie, Rockefeller, DuPont, all increased the pile of coins.
[qute]That is why unions are necessary. That is why their weakening, as shown in my cite, dovetails with the stagnation of wages. That is why Walker, though he will not be indicted, should have been recalled.
[/QUOTE]
I do not agree. And thank goodness neither did the voters of Wisconsin.
We can assume he will be asked whether he ordered her to work on his campaign on county time. If he doesn’t take the fifth, (and doesn’t get the subpoena quashed) then either prosecutor has nothing or we should know soon after if he was sandbagging Walker and has other witnesses against him. The trial starts October 15 and I’d imagine Walker would be called within a week. So, we should know one way or the other by the 26th or 29th.
At any given point in time, “wealth” is indeed a “fixed number of gold coins”. In fact, you obliquely acknowledge that in your next paragraph (bolded by me).
He says exactly the opposite, and I’m having trouble seeing how you’re reading otherwise: either you’re not clear on what “fixed” means in this context, or you’re not clear on what “magically” means, are my best guesses.
“Fixed” in this context doesn’t mean “discrete”: it means “unable to be altered” (i.e., the same meaning as in veterinary clinics). There is a discrete number of people on earth right now, but not a fixed number of people.
“Magically” is being used sarcastically.
If there’s some other misunderstanding, I don’t know what it is.
Yes, I understand that “magically” was being used sarcastically; it doesn’t alter the fact that Bricker acknowledges that the amount of wealth on the planet does, in fact, increase over time (with effort, of course).
And that doesn’t change the fact that at any given point in time the amount of wealth on the planet (the “number of gold coins”) is fixed (yes, meaning “discrete”).
His attempt to refute Enfant’s position falls flat, because at any given point in time, there is, in fact, a limited amount of wealth, and if that becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, then, in fact, at that time, there are not as many left to spread around to the masses.
The fact that the ultimate number can (and does) change over time doesn’t alter the fact that at any given point in time, “wealth” is in fact a zero sum game.
By that definition of zero sum game, there’s no such thing as a game with points that’s a non-zero-sum game. Basketball is a zero sum game by that definition, since at any moment, there’s a discrete number of points in play.
There are games with points that don’t involve direct competition: attempting to reach a threshold faster than another player (such as in Tetris) doesn’t involve direct competition. In basketball there are resources to be competed for and the opponents control over the ball means one can not score (which could be a metaphor for the means of production).
Yes, perhaps it is inaccurate to claim it as a zero sum game. It is a competitive game where a gain in excess of one’s labour implies a corresponding loss in labour elsewhere, though the products of labour can also be disposed of in other means (and increasing labour efficiency means there is an ever increasing product of average socially useful labour).
Last night was a good night for me personally, but I am disappointed that the Republicans have regained the state Senate, and therefore control of the Assembly and of course governor. With a handful of the major things that they did in 2010/11 getting held up by the courts, maybe they’ll be slower to move on things. It’s funny how Wisconsin elected Tammy Baldwin and Obama, but also gave the Republicans state control again. I understand how, but it’s still a strange state.
In the last 2 years, we’ve voted out a progressive senator for a tea party senator; voted for Walker, recalled Walker, and then voted for him again; voted for Obama for the 2nd time; voted for the first openly gay US Senator; and a conservative state government.
Given the gerrymandering, the Republicans regaining control of the State Senate was almost inevitable.
This, BTW, is the current state of the investigation:
I suppose this kind of thing probably goes on every day in most states, but Wisconsin has long had a clean government ideal that has been (mostly) maintained for over 110 years. Wisconsinites take this sort of thing seriously.
