So what?
There are lots of single men out there too, men who would desperately love to have a beautiful girlfriend. But I assume you’d oppose passing a law telling Taylor Swift that it’s her responsibility to date one of them.
Previously you stated that if someone is competent, they will have work. But here you’re acknowledging that this isn’t true. How did the previous claim work in your argument, and, since it’s false, how much damage does that do to your argument?
I do not understand your point.
You’re raising an interesting question, and it’s one I don’t think we can really move forward on without research and data.
I suppose. But another path would be creating a government training program, and paying unskilled workers government funds to attend that program, so they become skilled.
It all depends on what you believe the proper role of government to be.
President Clinton’s speech to the DNC was instructive. He said something like, “If you want a country that’s winner-take-all, vote for Romney. But if you want a country where the policy is we’re all in this together, then President Obama’s plans are the right ones for you.”
I believe this is one of the most cogent, straightforward statements I have heard in the entire campaign. Obviously he didn’t mean either vision as an absolute – we’re not all this this together to the extent I can show up at his house and say, “Hey, Bill, I’m a little short this week; can you spot me a couple of c-notes 'til payday?” But as a way of describing the proper role of government as seen through the eyes of each party, it’s not a bad way to go.
You seem to believe that government should force businesses to help out workers – to adopt policies that hurt them a little bit for the greater good of the country.
I don’t. I think the country will achieve its greatest good when each person works to maximize his own profit and can reap the reward from doing so. I believe that because of the nature of commerce, and the nature of wealth, when everyone seeks to maximize his own profit, the result is more wealth for everyone.
And as a more overarching statement, I believe that freedom is most important: that even if, by forcing me to work for the benefit of the whole country, you could show that the country got better off than it would otherwise, it’s still wrong to do so.
But of course that’s simply my belief, and it’s not objectively provable.
Nor do I support a law requiring employers to hire anyone.
Sure - but the union knows that. It has an incentive not to strike in that case.
Not all disputes work out well.
I like that idea too. Let’s do them both! 
(The government training program, though, would probably come with a lot more overhead both in terms of tax money spent on the program and time spent on assessing and certifying training programs and writing policy etc etc. “Don’t fire striking workers” is much more direct. But of course the effects of both possible approaches would have to be studied etc etc… So the direct training program may well be the better way to go.)
That’s what I believe as well–what I’ve claimed (really I just mean to point out the plausibility of claims, though, rather than to make claims myself) is that measures like outlawing the firing of striking workers are ways to make sure each person can work to maximize his own profit and can reap the reward from doing so.
Sure – one case would use tax money, while the other forces a company to spend its money. Of course there’s a smaller direct tax burden.
Whether it’s the better way to go is debatable, but I would be comfortable with this kind of government assistance – it’s a good use of government resources, in the model of “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime,” idea.
The company is also a person – or, if you prefer, an association of persons. You cannot make sure one person can work to maximize his own profit by requiring another person to give up his own ability to maximize his profit.
I see. But once Taylor Swift is dating someone, she can’t break up with him?
Hm, I thought it was a given in this conversation that maximizing everyone’s ability to profit will require that some people profit less than they might have under the non-maximal system. (So the maximization is not of each individual’s profit, but of the profit of everyone in the aggregate, probably with some kind of complicated weighting that goes too far beyond the scope of the discussion to hammer out.)
But instead, are you saying you think that a system can exist under which each individual is able to profit more than that individual would have under any other system?
Um… no.
No, I’m saying that the only constraints placed on a person’s ability to maximize their own profit should arise from the the willingness of others to deal with that individual. Freedom, in other words, on the part of each person to profit as best they can, with no referee assisting one at the expense of another.
In very short terms: Leave everyone alone. Step in only to prevent or punish fraud or coercion – and note well that “coercion” does not happen simply because you don’t have a job and you want one. Coercion occurs only in the context of force, threat, or intimidation that’s used to prevent you from doing that which is your legal right, or to extort you into doing that which you have no legal obligation to do.
Leave everyone alone. Let them feed the city of Paris without a hand guiding them. The result will be better food for Paris.
But a government sponsored training program will assist people who get the training, at the expense of the taxpayers as a whole. So is a government training program another example where a little bit of freedom for some must be given up for the economic benefit of others?
That’s true. But by the same token, a government-sponsored fire department assists those who have suffered fire at the expense of the taxpayer in general, and to the detriment of those who live in cinderblock homes with very little danger of fire.
My view is that “People should be left alone,” should serve as the overarching philosophy, and exceptions be entered into when the benefits are greater and the harm is small.
It will always be an arbitrary line, to some extent. Which is why I said, “I’m comfortable with…” the idea of government training – to signal that I didn’t regard it as a clearly obvious function but rather as one that I had some personal agreement with, based on my personal weighing of the harms (attenuated across all taxpayers) and the good (greater supply of trained workers).
This is exactly backwards, and flies in the face of all we know about how humans respond to incentives.
Let’s examine the two scenaarios:
In the first one, there is no union, and no job security. The person working there now has an incentive to improve his skills to keep him viable in the job market. If a non-union shop has lower wages and benefits, the worker has a further incentive to better himself.
In the second scenario, we have unions guaranteeing higher pay and better working conditions for unskilled labor. In this scenario, there is no incentive to improve your skills, since you don’t have to worry about losing your job or falling back on the pay scale due to lack of merit. In a seniority-based job, all you have to do is exist, and your pay will go up and your security increase automatically over the years.
Unions don’t cause people to improve their skills - on the contrary, by making low-skilled jobs better than higher-skilled but non-unionized jobs, they lock people into low-skill occupations indefinitely. And in the meantime, they increase the prices of the goods the union shops make. This primarily harms low income people who spend a larger percentage of their disposable income on things like clothing and groceries.
This is how unions transfer wealth from the poor and lower middle class to the increasingly middle-to-upper class union workers.
Democrats have a fundamental contradiction they are going to have to deal with at some point - on the one hand, they claim to be the champions of the poor and the defenders of big government. On the othe hand, their marriage to big labor and especially the white-collar public unions acts directly against those goals by hurting the poor and making government more expensive and able to do less with the same amount of money.
Right now, their answer to this conundrum is ‘tax the rich’. Once they find out that ‘the rich’ don’t have enough money to keep the game going, something’s going to break.
It does always seem like this discussion (not specifically our conversation here but this discussion over this topic which happens between people all the time) ends up in agreement about the basic idea that freedom should be maximized, and disagreement over what constitutes an acceptable exception to the general “leave everyone alone” principle in order to increase some individuals’ freedoms at others’ expense.
That may just be how it has to be.
I did think I was catching on to a general principle for you–that taking money through taxes is less “freedom-inhibiting” in general than is requiring behaviors of people (for example, requiring rehiring of striking workers). That would make a tax funded training program prima facie more acceptable than a rule against firing striking workers, even though each is strictly speaking a lessening of someone’s freedom for someone else’s benefit.
I would predict that, if it were to be shown somehow that the above two proposals end up just about equal in their effects (in terms of whatever it is we want the effects of a government policy to be), you’d prefer the training program over the strike rule. Is that prediction correct?
Analogy doesn’t follow. But your analogy has broken down. This is not about dating.
My claim wasn’t based on incentive structures, it was based on actual physical possibility. A person without job security must scramble to make ends meet, and has no time to go get skills. There’s nothing of psychology in this–it’s simple cause and effect.
Huh? I don’t have job security, and it doesn’t cause me to ‘scramble’ any more than if I was in a union. What it does cause me to do is keep up with the literature in my field, because if I lost my job I need to be viable in the job market.
How does job security give you extra time in the day to study? I’m not following.
And further to my point about how Democrat’s marriage to the big unions is hurting their own cause, consider what the teacher’s unions are doing to poor children in the inner cities. Their seniority rules and tenure means that bad teachers never leave the system. That lauded job security just ensures that kids will be exposed to as many lousy teachers as possible. In non-unionized companies, the bottom 10% of employers are constantly shuffled out of the payroll, making room for more new employees. The company then retains the good ones and the ones ill-suited to the job leave.
This filtering process ensures a high-quality work force. In union jobs with seniority rules and tenure, this filtering doesn’t happen. You can have a school full of 50-year-old burned out seat warmers, but if there have to be cutbacks, the person being laid off will be that energetic young teacher with a fresh education and a burning desire to help the kids, simply because she’s lowest on the seniority ladder. Seniority rules make sense in blue-collar manual labor jobs to prevent old people in poorer health from being fired. In white collar jobs, where there is a huge difference in performance between the best and the worst, preventing the employer from filtering the work force by productivity is very destructive.
The result of the Democratic party’s intransigence in dealing with the glaring flaws in the public education system is weakening public support for it and pushing people away from government-run education. The Republicans are gaining more and more support for school choice and other reforms. Look how the public unions lost in Wisconsin, despite a full-court press by the national union to pump money and manpower into the state to defeat the Republicans. They still lost.
More evidence: In Michigan, organized labor has gotten a proposal on the ballot to ammend the state constitution to ensure that collective barganing agreements must be honored no matter what. Basically, they want to make sure their pay and benefits can’t be cut, even if the city or state is on the brink of bankruptcy. I hope to God the measure fails, because if it passes then Michigan will become the same kind of perpetual financial distaster that California is.
About the only solace is that municipalities can file for bankruptcy in federal court, thus making state laws irrelevant.