There are not different sets of rules. That is something you seem to have made up. The owner of the company decides what wages she can afford to pay. Period. The workers can try their damnedest to persuade her to pay them more, but the decision is ultimately hers. That goes for all the workers, all the management and the owner. If you want to be 100% certain that you can set your won wage, then you should start your own company.
It’s her company. If the workers demand a wage that is too high for her to pay, she can shut the factory down, and no one gets any wages, including the owner.
No I fucking haven’t clarified this now. This has clarified for you a dozen times in this thread. It seems you have finally grasped it now.
Bullshit!
For the twentieth fucking time, they can do anything they like to compel their employer to increase their pay, including withdrawing labour and firming Unions. The only thing they can’t do is use threat of force or emotional manipulation.
No. Once again, for the twentieth time, they are entitled to whatever wages they can legitimately negotiate. Whether the employer wants to give the those wages is irrelevant.
I have no idea where you got the idea that what the employer wants counts for shit. It matters not at all, just as what the employees want counts for shit. All that counts is what value the two parties perceive in the transaction. Want don’t enter into it.
For fuck’s sake. :rolleyes:
For the twentieth time, the workers are producers. It’s not about what “their producer” does. The workers are producers. They do not have a producer. They are a producer.
Why the fuck can’t you grasp this really simple point? No matter how many times I state it in black and white, you just have to keep equating “producer” with “employer”. You have some serious mental block here that makes discussion of this subject nigh impossible because I spend half of every post repeating this same simple fucking point.
For the last time, producer is not synonymous with employer. you can not use the terms synonymously as you just did. It is wrong and it makes no fucking sense.
Because the value of the company belongs to the company owner, by definition. She gets to dispose of it and apportion it as she sees fit. If a worker does not like the way that an owner wants it apportioned, he is free to take his labour, tools and anything else of value he has produced and leave.
The value of the company does *not *belongs to a person who works for the company, by definition. He does not gets to dispose of it and apportion it as he sees fit. If an employer does not like the way a worker wants it apportioned, she is free to take her management skills, factory and anything else of value she has produced and leave.
Did this really need to be explained to you?
That’s right. The rules apply equally.
What I think you don’t get is the difference between “the rules apply equally” and “all property is divided equally”. Those are not the same thing at all.
The worker owns the value of what he has produced, and is free to distribute that as he sees fit. The company owner owns the value of what she has produced, and is free to distribute it as she sees fit. That’s the only rule that is pertinent to your example, and as I hope you can now see, it has been applied perfectly equally.
You exaggerate the concept of private property to a moral certainty, the axis on which all other rights depend. Your assertion that this is true is no more provable than the notion that “property is theft”. You are welcome to your opinion, of course.
As to this:
What, pray, is the difference between an emotional manipulation and a moral argument? If I shame a man for decisions that enrich him at the cost of making others poor and miserable, is that an emotional manipulation? Or a moral argument?
Say a man gains private and personal ownership of a factory that is profitable and employs a thousand workers. Has he the right to shut it down because his dog said so? What are the limits of private property? We already recognize that someone should not use his private property to the detriment of the environment and health of others, or at least we recognize it to the extent that we pay lip service to it, and occasionally act upon it.
Are we morally wrong to protect our people from the greed and selfishness of individual persons? I think not, but cannot prove it, it is a moral value, and therefore beyond the touch of proof. But by the same token, you cannot prove otherwise, you can only assert and insist. You can argue otherwise, naturally, and the richly deserved scorn and derision you harvest shall be exclusively yours. Your private property, so to speak.
First of all, let’s clarify if we’re talking about our own personal moral code, or the code as represented in the book.
I assume the latter. Yes, he can shut it down. Suppose you are to argue that he can’t. Is he obligated to run the company well? To work his ass off, as he did before, in order to protect the workers? What if he says: OK, I’ll keep the company open, but I’m on vacation 9 months of the year, because I just don’t want to do this anymore and I don’t want to sell. The company then goes bust. What is the difference between that scenario and him just shutting it down?
That, btw, was one of the lessons of the book. Laws had to be passed to prevent people from doing what I described. Would you support such laws? A factory owner cannot just quit? He must produce exactly the same amount of goods that he produced the year before?
Let’s say he wants to shut it down on a whim. Can you force him to keep it open? Can you force him to devote time and effort to something that he does not want to do? If all he does requires brute force, perhaps. It was Rand’s thesis that if it is the product of his mind that you’re interested in, then you cannot. Property rights are not some absolute truth of nature, no. But they do work a LOT better than the axiom “property is theft”.
Yes, indeed, you can pose my question as an absurdity, and lo! it will become absurd. That does not mean that the fundamental issue is an absurdity, only that you can twist it about to make it one.
I do not, as a general rule, support laws that are fundamentally unenforceable, nor did I offer a legislative solution to the matter. That is entirely your own doing. I can pose the opposite absurdity: since it is already legally established that there are limits to the privilege of personal property, for instance damage to our shared environment, then we can safely say that the limits to personal property is already a legal fact. Would you have them undone, then?
Sauce for the silly goose is sauce for the silly gander.
The rights of personal property is but one of a constellation of rights we have bestowed upon ourselves and each other. They are not Written, they are made up, we say that they are “self-evident”, which is a clever way of saying we can’t prove shit, but are willing to assert them as fact anyway.
There are those among us who appear to hold property rights as central and essential, the crown jewel for which other rights are merely grace notes and embellishments. Given that nothing is Written, that is as valid as mine own opinion. I will accept that, but not that it is more valid.
Prove it. The fact that enforcement mechanisms exist for property rights does not prove that they “work” better, only that they require such enforcement to work at all. And what experiment have we performed to test the latter stance? Is such an experiment even possible? As it happens, I think that axiom is silly and pointless, but I don’t believe for a moment that I can prove it, nor do I believe that you can.
Without being told to just read the book(this is Great Debates, not the Straight Dope Book Club), could someone explain to me how the common worker was enticed to quit their jobs and leave friends and family to move to Galt’s Gulch? What compelled the factory worker, the janitor, the grocery store clerk and other such folk to take such a risk-no minimum wage, no workers rights(and there were none, because of the unsaid threat of what would happen if you tried to leave to get a job elsewhere-Galt’s Gulch is a secret), no bargaining power for the same reason etc.?
Tell me why the common worker, the supposed bulk of Galt’s Gulch society, would be there.
No, we’ve all known this all along. But some people have been pretending this 800 lb gorilla isn’t in the room.
For all the talk of equal opportunity, there is a fundamental divide in Galt’s Gulch between the people who own property and the people who do not. Property owners have a bunch of rights that people without property do not. The guy who collects garbage is not equal to the guy who owns the garbage company.
Objectivism is just a system of centralizing power in property and maximizing the power of property owners while minimizing the power of non-property owners. Objectivists want to eliminate things like majority rule that would equalize the balance of power. It’s an elitist system.
OK, so does the guy have the right to shut down his factor? Perhaps I misunderstood, but it seemed that by posing the question you were implying that he didn’t. But I could be mistaken.
Keep in mind that you said “right”, not “moral duty”. Those are two different things.
It’s just a little more complicated than that, I think. Does this guy’s factory provide an essential service to Galt’s Gulch that would not be easily replaceable? Would the factory workers want to leave Galt’s Gulch to look for jobs elsewhere(thus exposing the secret)? Would other factory owners use this as an example to threaten workers with-“If you don’t want this to happen to you, you’ll shut the hell up about rights and raises. And don’t even think about going elsewhere, because my friends that run the other factories are in complete agreement with me.” By the way, is price fixing allowed in Galt’s Gulch?
I’m not giving answers-I’m asking questions. Is closing down a factory to spite workers in Galt’s Gulch as simple as some make it out to be, especially if it is an essential industry not easily replaced? How do you entice the common factory worker to drop everything and move there? Is wage fixing among factory owners to keep the workers obedient allowed? What stops workers from giving up and moving away, thus exposing the secret of Galt’s Gulch? The only thing I am saying is that I would like to know the answers to these questions.
An owner can shut down a factor at will. There are no exceptions.
The outside world is collapsing around him. He values his freedom and opportunity more than anything, and so he moves to where freedom is the greatest. There is no opportunity in the outside world, only the chance to be a moocher or a looter.
Yes.
They’re love of freedom and don’t want to live as a moocher or a looter. They can organize and form a union if they feel they need more negotiating power. Unions are every bit a part of free enterprise as the owner’s ability to shut down the factory.
The common worker is going to leave a guaranteed minimum wage, health benefits and hard-fought-for workers rights because…freedom? And none of them will leave after they find out they have no bargaining power because…freedom?
