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Somfin posted:If a more efficient worker does more work they should be compensated appropriately. With a sufficient level of technology and wealth I entirely agree that the principle of the economy should be based on the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need". We're not currently at that level of development however which means we're still stuck with the law of value and the need to find a way to allocate scarce resources to productive uses. In that context Some jobs are substantially harder and often less pleasant than other jobs. We may one day achieve a level of development and automation where the burden of these positions can be easily spread out across society in such a way that all work truly becomes equal. Until that time, however, we're probably going to be stuck using some kind of pricing system to allocate resources, including labour power. Even the actually existing socialist economies weren't able to avoid this. That will almost certainly necessitate some wage differences in order to ensure that unpleasant but necessary jobs are fully staffed. OwlFancier posted:The skilled worker is more productive, and you can construct an argument that this "entitles" them to more, but I would suggest that a person-oriented concept of work still shouldn't really care about that. Unless you take the position that human life is not equally valuable then all hours of human life should be valued equally. If someone requires years of training to reach a certain level of capability and you compensate them at the same rate as someone with far less experience then you aren't really weighing the full amount of time that the first person invested.
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May 20, 2019 21:49
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Helsing posted:If someone requires years of training to reach a certain level of capability and you compensate them at the same rate as someone with far less experience then you aren't really weighing the full amount of time that the first person invested. "Training is an investment that you, the worker, make in order to make more money later" is a construct that you're assuming should remain true.
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May 20, 2019 21:53
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Helsing posted:If someone requires years of training to reach a certain level of capability and you compensate them at the same rate as someone with far less experience then you aren't really weighing the full amount of time that the first person invested. Why shouldn't they be paid for the training too? They're not doing it for fun. Somfin posted:"Training is an investment that you, the worker, make in order to make more money later" is a construct that you're assuming should remain true. Yeah exactly, I'm training to make someone else money, they should bloody well pay for it and pay me for the time investment. This is already true for a lot of training, trying to fob off the costs onto the worker is just companies being bloody miserly as usual.
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May 20, 2019 21:55
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Helsing posted:If someone requires years of training to reach a certain level of capability and you compensate them at the same rate as someone with far less experience then you aren't really weighing the full amount of time that the first person invested. If a worker invests ten years of training and experience into a field that dies, should their new employer in a different field compensate them for those ten years?
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May 20, 2019 22:15
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Somfin posted:"Training is an investment that you, the worker, make in order to make more money later" is a construct that you're assuming should remain true. The ideal would be from each according to ability to each according to need. We're not there yet. Some skilled and trained workers will receive greater compensation even under a socialist government, and some difficult or unpleasant jobs will command a justifiable wage premium. As scarcity is reduced the necessity for these conditions will hopefully dissipate entirely, but under current conditions they play a necessary role. Paradoxish posted:If a worker invests ten years of training and experience into a field that dies, should their new employer in a different field compensate them for those ten years? Ideally the cost of changing jobs or educating yourself would be socialized and losing your job wouldn't be a life destroying change in your standard of living. I'm not entirely sure what the best arrangement to achieve that would be, it would probably vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances.
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May 20, 2019 23:12
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Helsing posted:Ideally the cost of changing jobs or educating yourself would be socialized and losing your job wouldn't be a life destroying change in your standard of living. I'm not entirely sure what the best arrangement to achieve that would be, it would probably vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances. We literally can't achieve this goal as long as we continue to insist that pay is primarily determined by things like experience and training. If you're a worker with, say, a diploma related to a particular field and ten years of experience in that field, then you will never actually be able to make up for time lost if you're forced to move out of that field. Obviously some work experience is universal and transferable, but ultimately no amount of retraining will ever make you whole in that situation. Your standard of living will always take a sizable hit unless you're moving into a field where entry level pay is much, much higher or wages are in some way guaranteed. Edit- Just to be clear, I'm not saying that everyone has to be making the same amount of money down to the dollar. All I'm getting at here is that you'll never, ever deal with these kinds of problems without regulations that are specifically intended to compress the wage scale. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 01:38
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I believe you are missing his point: a person who has received extended education has inherently paid many extra hours/society paid many extra hours in that, in comparison to person who did not undergo that. No one receives tertiary education degree in an instant, at least from a true school.
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May 21, 2019 01:43
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And society benefits from their increased productivity, or their ability to perform a skilled job, the time they invest should be compensated when they invest it. If your employer needs you to learn to do something then they (sometimes) already pay for the training and for you to spend the time doing the training, on the basis that they will make that investment back through your increased ability. Why should this not be universal? There are multiple approaches to this such as greater pushes for on-the-job training and socially funded education, but there is no justification whatsoever for expecting people to pay themselves for training/education in the vauge hope that someday they'll see a return for it. Other than, of course, the desire to run education as a business and lazy governments looking to avoid spending money/make people spend more money/give ever more handouts to shithole companies that can't be bothered to do anything for society. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:56 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 01:51
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OwlFancier posted:And society benefits from their increased productivity, or their ability to perform a skilled job, the time they invest should be compensated when they invest it. If you're doing on-the-job training, you are being paid to work to learn. This should be the standard for how learning works, but for some reason, tertiary education operates on a system where people pay to work to learn, and usually pay to work to learn a wide variety of information that is very useful if they become an academic, but less useful if they decide to transfer into industry. A lot of companies have to spend quite a bit of time un-training people who came out of STEM university courses because the realities of work do not map well to the theories of tertiary education. Tertiary education gives people a large amount of skill, but also a large amount of baseline assumptions, many of which are outright wrong. If the world was structured sanely, going to a university would be akin to signing up to modern volunteer militaries. You are deciding to dedicate a portion of your life to becoming a more efficient person in some specific area; this should be compensated throughout the ongoing work of becoming that person.
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May 21, 2019 02:01
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Somfin posted:If the world was structured sanely, going to a university would be akin to signing up to modern volunteer militaries. You are deciding to dedicate a portion of your life to becoming a more efficient person in some specific area; this should be compensated throughout the ongoing work of becoming that person. My undergraduate education was paid for by the government ( I went to USMMA) the cost depending on who one asked, was a couple hundred thousand dollars. The other Academies also get paid, we only did during the sea year ( they sent us out in pairs on merchant ships). During sea year one gets that real world experience that grinds most of those baseline assumptions to a fine powder. For this one has to fulfill a commitment, eight years in the Navy Reserve and five years in the maritime industry or sailing commercially. Nominally this is how society gets paid back. But that's not really how society gets paid. Those words you used "the ongoing work of becoming that person." That's actually how society gets its return. There have been many individual days in my career (many well after my commitment was fulfilled, though some before) where me simply being who I am becoming and in the right place have paid back well more than it took to make me. An example one day in a port I won't name I noticed a leaking tank container in a hazardous lot, immediately knowing what was leaking (a low flash point class three) and what was in proximity (other hazardous) I pulled the emergency stop and proceeded to stop welding that was occurring nearby ( within feet of the growing puddle of leakage.) I reported the spill to the port police who took about 15 minutes to respond. I guess what I'm saying is the return on investment for the types of programs that Somfin is talking about can be massive but those returns are not nessisarily measured or attributed to the programs that made them possible. Elizabeth Warren has talked about the government programs that allowed her to educated and the results of her education and has talked on this subject a lot. Helsing posted:The ideal would be from each according to ability to each according to need. We're not there yet. Ability and need aren't nessisarily seperate. I find it more useful to think about it in terms of always trying to give back more than I've been given. That's something one can do that's not abstract.
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May 21, 2019 04:51
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Having more money statistically leads to less children, not the other way around. Okay go tell all my engineer friends who can't afford childcare for even one kid that they are worried about nothing and to just pop a kid out and it'll work out. Volkerball posted:The argument I'm making boils down to "if you are 30 or younger working at a grocery store and not getting by, there are doors open to you to change your situation to one where you are doing well financially." I mean look dude I don't think people should give up trying no matter what the odds look like. I just think it is interesting that when people suggest that there are also broad level systemic issues at work the meritocracy line of argument always seems to come around back to "it's their own fault somehow." I see that you acknowledge poo poo is harder than it has any right to be and that's fine. I'm not like, mad at you specifically or anything. But notice how the rest of your post is justifying away that systemic stuff. Your whole last paragraph is "I did this" and "I did that" and "I, I, I" which is great don't get me wrong but dude I have a friend who has a chronic genetic condition that prevents her from working a "regular" full time job. She can't just sack up and work a rough manual labor job or two until she saves up enough to do better elsewhere or get a degree. I feel like she doesn't deserve to live a life of lovely poverty just for that. Her value as a human being isn't just a function of how much profit she can make for her bosses. This devil nation can't even provide her decent healthcare. How can she work without the healthcare to take care of her chronic condition? No one cares. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 18:26 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 18:20
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wateroverfire posted:If they want to buy me out then sure, why not? This is great. The primary hurdle at the moment is financing for worker coops because a lot of banks look at that and go "lol nah." Some public banking to provide for that would be nice.
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May 21, 2019 18:27
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Helsing posted:With a sufficient level of technology and wealth I entirely agree that the principle of the economy should be based on the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need". We're not currently at that level of development however which means we're still stuck with the law of value and the need to find a way to allocate scarce resources to productive uses. In that context Also nah. Maybe for luxury goods but there is no scarcity issue with regard to housing/food/healthcare and other such necessities for life. There just fuckin' isn't. We're at that sufficient level of technology and wealth already, have been for a while. The way a market functions is that some people just get boxed out and that's that and that's why there are homeless people in a country that has 2 empty investor owned residences for every homeless person. We need to build more housing? Well poo poo we have millions of unemployed people and a govt that can employ them to do so. It's just not profitable to do so.
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May 21, 2019 18:30
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BrandorKP posted:Here's an abstract question. What percentage of one's labor in a organization is it acceptable to get or not get back? rscott posted:How do you even begin to adequately quantify the labor that most people put into an organization in the first place? This is simple folks. A coop pays its workers based on what the workers vote on and think is fair. After labor and expenses, the rest of the money is profit. The coop then votes on how to spend that profit. You don't need to get into "ahhhh but how can we REALLY calculate the value of that person's work." It's something that the coop figures out for itself. If the workers decide they are not getting paid enough given the profits being made, they can vote to raise their wages. There's no boss that stands to lose out on his/her share of the pie that would be trying to curtail that. The management/bosses are elected by the workers themselves.
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May 21, 2019 18:36
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Paradoxish posted:We literally can't achieve this goal as long as we continue to insist that pay is primarily determined by things like experience and training. This isn't a value judgement this is a concession to reality. If you want to keep the most difficult, unpleasant, dangerous and skill intensive jobs staffed then you're likely going to have to offer wage premiums for those positions. Similarly, if you want to stop a doctor who you just spent more than a decade training to remain a doctor you may need to offer incentives to stop him from burning out after a couple years and deciding he'd rather write novels or run a woodshop or something. Wages can and should be compressed and many parts of the economy should be de-commoditized altogether, but people arguing that we're anywhere close to the point where we could simply pay everyone equally based on their labour hours is drifting deep into utopianism. That or they are secretly advocating that unpleasant jobs get distributed equally across the population or filled through corvees or something similarly authoritarian. Somfin posted:If the world was structured sanely, going to a university would be akin to signing up to modern volunteer militaries. You are deciding to dedicate a portion of your life to becoming a more efficient person in some specific area; this should be compensated throughout the ongoing work of becoming that person. In a sane world education would not be primarily intended to develop your vocational skills, though this would no doubt remain an important goal. BrandorKP posted:Ability and need aren't nessisarily seperate. I find it more useful to think about it in terms of always trying to give back more than I've been given. That's something one can do that's not abstract.  Moridin920 posted:Also nah. Maybe for luxury goods but there is no scarcity issue with regard to housing/food/healthcare and other such necessities for life. There just fuckin' isn't. We're at that sufficient level of technology and wealth already, have been for a while. Sure, as long as you're comfortable continuing to plunder the global south and cooking the planet you could probably redistribute a bunch of America's domestic wealth without actually addressing how fundamentally unsustainable things are at an ecological level.
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May 21, 2019 18:40
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Helsing posted:Sure, as long as you're comfortable continuing to plunder the global south and cooking the planet you could probably redistribute a bunch of America's domestic wealth without actually addressing how fundamentally unsustainable things are at an ecological level. Things are sustainable just fine if we didn't do idiot poo poo like demand our entire electrical grid be based on burning fossil fuels when we could have been like France and been down to just 8.6% of our grid being fossil fuels by 2016, or if we had sustainable diets versus "let's slash and burn the rain forest to eat cheeseburgers every day." And anyway I was talking about within the USA itself, for that post. I dunno how you're gonna rebut at me with an ecological argument after I just said we have 2 empty homes per homeless person like that isn't a prime example of some of the wild inefficiency of markets. Besides your argument was broader than that. You said "we require markets because resource scarcity exists and markets are the best way to distribute those scarce resources." That's a) not true insofar as the resource scarcity in many industry sectors and b) some ideology that purports markets to be the best solution in all cases. Like the fundamental instability you're talking about was caused by markets in the first place. quote:We're not currently at that level of development however which means we're still stuck with the law of value and the need to find a way to allocate scarce resources to productive uses. In that context "We can't provide for all so unfortunately we're still stuck with some people going without." It's just not true lol. I'm not saying every person in the world can live as a modern day American with no other changes made whatsoever. I am saying that there is sufficient wealth to end poverty while simultaneously improving the ecological situation. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 18:48 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 18:44
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Moridin920 posted:Things are sustainable just fine if we didn't do idiot poo poo like demand our entire electrical grid be based on burning fossil fuels when we could have been like France and been down to just 8.6% of our grid being fossil fuels by 2016, or if we had sustainable diets versus "let's slash and burn the rain forest to eat cheeseburgers every day." "We'd be perfectly sustainable if... [lists several massive systemic changes to the status quo]" quote:Besides your argument was broader than that. You said "we require markets because resource scarcity exists and markets are the best way to distribute those scarce resources." That's a) not true insofar as the resource scarcity in many industry sectors and b) some ideology that purports markets to be the best solution in all cases. Like the fundamental instability you're talking about was caused by markets in the first place. What I said was that we're going to be stuck with "using some kind of pricing system to allocate resources". That description encompasses everything from an unregulated market to a Soviet style planned economy in which prices are set by the state based on a plan. To use the Soviet example, a special planning agency ("Gosplan") would develop huge tables of required inputs and outputs based on consultations with regional planners and feedback from last years plan. This information was then used to develop prices for intermediate goods which were based on the cost of raw resources, wages, depreciation, etc., plus a markup. Consumer goods were then set up at what was calculated to be the market clearing price. For the foreseeable future we're going to have to deal with the fact that some resources are more valuable than others. We need some way for society to designate that uranium and pinewood are not the same thing. Similarly, we need to deal with the unfortunate reality that not all jobs are equally easy to train someone for or to replace. Being a doctor doesn't make you better than someone who is a construction worker, but it is nevertheless much more expensive for society to train a doctor. Absent some other system such as mandatory labour we are probably going to require a strategy that ensures that somebody who just spent 10 years training to be a doctor will stick with the job and not burn out and leave within two or three years. One way of achieving that would be offering higher pay. Provided wage scales have been compressed and the economy is being planned in such a way that no one is suffering unnecessary deprivation or poverty, I think that's an acceptable concession to allow. If you can actually think of a plausible alternative then I'm all ears. quote:"We can't provide for all so unfortunately we're still stuck with some people going without." You are saying that resource scarcity is still enough of a problem to set limits on how we organize society, which is exactly the point I've been making.
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May 21, 2019 19:45
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I bet the gosplan dudes wish they had a MRP system, although trying to scale one up to plan an entire economy would probably make my brain explode
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May 22, 2019 02:49
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Moridin920 posted:This is simple folks. A coop pays its workers based on what the workers vote on and think is fair. After labor and expenses, the rest of the money is profit. The coop then votes on how to spend that profit. Sorry I thought it was implicit based on the thread topic but I was talking about within the currently existing framework that operates (at least on its face) on the premise that you get paid what you deserve and the economy at least roughly functions as a meritocracy. Obviously just about any other way of determining wages would be better than the circular logic where being paid a lot means you're good at your job doing something important and vice versa.
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May 22, 2019 03:06
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Helsing posted:This isn't a value judgement this is a concession to reality. If you want to keep the most difficult, unpleasant, dangerous and skill intensive jobs staffed then you're likely going to have to offer wage premiums for those positions. Similarly, if you want to stop a doctor who you just spent more than a decade training to remain a doctor you may need to offer incentives to stop him from burning out after a couple years and deciding he'd rather write novels or run a woodshop or something. This doesn't reflect reality, though. We don't have some huge problem where doctors are running off to write novels and we can't replace them. There's actually an artificial shortage of doctors that's largely been created by the AMA to keep wages high. Likewise, we don't pay lovely, awful, dangerous jobs more than any other jobs. There are jobs like that that are well compensated, yeah, but that's because they tend to be skilled positions. A lot of really terrible jobs pay peanuts and they get filled anyway because the barrier to entry is low.
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May 22, 2019 03:38
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Helsing posted:Absent some other system such as mandatory labour we are probably going to require a strategy that ensures that somebody who just spent 10 years training to be a doctor will stick with the job and not burn out and leave within two or three years. One way of achieving that would be offering higher pay. Another way would be to train enough doctors so that all doctors could work a maximum of 40 hours a week and then enjoy their private lives. Helsing posted:You are saying that resource scarcity is still enough of a problem to set limits on how we organize society, which is exactly the point I've been making. I read it differently. I read it as implying "not even every single American can live as a modern-day American", because you guys take "excess" to levels never before seen in history.
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May 22, 2019 03:43
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If I ever start an organization it'll be a coop. I've seen a couple of mission driven not for profits captured by board take overs.
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May 22, 2019 04:05
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Paradoxish posted:This doesn't reflect reality, though. Sure, this is all accurate but it misses the point. In a socialist economy with current levels of technology you would not pay everyone equally. I think you could radically compress wages and the economy would benefit but paying everyone literally the same hourly wage isn't feasible.
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May 22, 2019 04:36
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rscott posted:Sorry I thought it was implicit based on the thread topic but I was talking about within the currently existing framework that operates (at least on its face) on the premise that you get paid what you deserve and the economy at least roughly functions as a meritocracy. It doesn't
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May 23, 2019 00:14
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That is roughly equivalent to saying yeah I'm working goff the current framework of unicorns and rainbows where people are paid in doubloons by the genie who looks at their souls, it's an absolute fuckin fantasy as evidenced by minimum wage not remotely being livable
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May 23, 2019 00:17
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rscott posted:at least roughly functions as a meritocracy Here's the issue. There's no meritocracy because inheritance and infinite corporate lifespans means wealth can accumulate into dynastic hoards that protect and further enrich those who would otherwise fail. The only way modern unrestrained capitalism can function in any way is to have a 100% death tax, a mandatory limited lifespan on corporations with everything they own reverting to the commons on death, with no way to hand poo poo off to your own children in order to to get around that. Everything you gather from the commons has to be returned to the commons when you die, or else we get kings again, as we've seen with multiple modern billionaires. A meritocracy also requires fully-informed and rational markets, which we don't have and never will. Otherwise a better liar has an advantage over a person who has a better product. In theory the system we have is dog eat dog, but in practice, it's whoever got there first gets big enough to eat literally everybody else and deliberately prevents others from gaining any ground, and the only thing that kills one entrenched behemoth dynasty is if it overextends itself and gets caught taking from other entrenched behemoth dynasties. The only way new behemoths are born is if a new market is found and enough resources are pulled in to exploit it more than anyone else is at that point in time, and these days the old behemoths will quietly eat every new market once it proves itself to have any sort of lasting power.
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May 23, 2019 03:40
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Helsing posted:You are saying that resource scarcity is still enough of a problem to set limits on how we organize society, which is exactly the point I've been making. Your point is too broad. Markets don't need to cover literally every aspect of everything. Food/housing/medicine these are not scarcities. There's no fuckin' tragedy of the commons problem with insulin that it needs to cost $1000/mo in the USA.
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May 23, 2019 04:17
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Helsing posted:Sure, this is all accurate but it misses the point. In a socialist economy with current levels of technology you would not pay everyone equally. I think you could radically compress wages and the economy would benefit but paying everyone literally the same hourly wage isn't feasible. I mean, I specifically said in the first post that you were responding to that I don't think everyone can or should be paid equally. I'm not sure that you could even have a purely socialist economy that functions properly in that way, and even some weird hypothetical post-scarcity, post-currency economy would probably still have some inequality. The point is that the labor "market" is wildly dysfunctional because treating labor as a market doesn't actually work. We paper over this fact with nonsense about the economy being meritocratic, but in practice there isn't even a thin facade of meritocracy over our system. At best, labor value functions on a very crude supply/demand model. If you have skills or education that's uncommon then you have a theoretically higher ceiling for your wages, assuming there's actual demand for those skills and you meet a whole bunch of other arbitrary requirements and also get kind of lucky. This is literally the best case scenario for the current labor market, and it's not really meritocratic in any reasonable sense of the term. Compressing wages needs to be about more than just raising the minimum wage. We need to acknowledge that the way wages are determined is fundamentally unfair and that that's largely true because of these weird contradictory lies we tell ourselves about meritocracies and labor "markets." Basically, we need things like aggressive wage insurance alongside either jobs guarantees, universal basic income, or both. And that's just for dealing with the bottom end of the market.
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May 23, 2019 04:39
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:It doesn't No poo poo? That's literally what I said if you would actually read everything I wrote.
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May 23, 2019 16:26
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Somfin posted:Here's the issue. Again, no poo poo that's what I said. Do you guys just read one sentence or one post and then rush off to slam that rebuttal home? My whole point (in response to BrandorKP's question) is that even if you operate within the theoretical framework of liberal economic thought, actually calculating what your labor is objectively worth is basically impossible, and thus answering the question of how much of your labor are you willing to "give away" to ownership or capital is impossible to do in a meaningful fashion.
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May 23, 2019 16:47
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Moridin920 posted:Your point is too broad. Markets don't need to cover literally every aspect of everything. Food/housing/medicine these are not scarcities. There's no fuckin' tragedy of the commons problem with insulin that it needs to cost $1000/mo in the USA. Of course they are. If they weren't then capitalism wouldn't be such a monstrous dysfunctional system. Paradoxish posted:I mean, I specifically said in the first post that you were responding to that I don't think everyone can or should be paid equally. I'm not sure that you could even have a purely socialist economy that functions properly in that way, and even some weird hypothetical post-scarcity, post-currency economy would probably still have some inequality. Yeah but your first post was in reply to something I was talking about with OwlFancier, who is explicitly advocating equal pay for all workers based on labour hours invested. That is and always has been the focus of the argument. And you're right, "from each according to ability to each according to need" was thought to be the way that a future communist society would be run, but Marx and his contemporaries explicitly said that under socialism it would merely be the principle that each worker should receive back from society an amount of wealth commensurate to what their labour created (minus some agreed upon amount reserved for further investment). So even under a hypothetical transitional socialist economy there would be, according to Marx, economic inequality. This also happens to be how every actually existing socialist society has been run, for better or for worse. quote:The point is that the labor "market" is wildly dysfunctional because treating labor as a market doesn't actually work. We paper over this fact with nonsense about the economy being meritocratic, but in practice there isn't even a thin facade of meritocracy over our system. At best, labor value functions on a very crude supply/demand model. If you have skills or education that's uncommon then you have a theoretically higher ceiling for your wages, assuming there's actual demand for those skills and you meet a whole bunch of other arbitrary requirements and also get kind of lucky. This is literally the best case scenario for the current labor market, and it's not really meritocratic in any reasonable sense of the term. I don't think you're doing a very close read of my argument if you still think I'm stanning for free market fundamentalism here. You don't need to waste your time reiterating the numerous well documented short comings of organizing a society around markets. Markets in fictitious commodities like land, labour and capital are particularly problematic. Nevertheless, any system must somehow assign the necessary tasks of maintaining and developing the productive forces of society, so if you want to specifically get rid of a labour market then what is the alternative? Medieval societies often resorted to corvee labour and hereditary jobs. The Soviet Union tried to mostly eliminate the labour market by planning what firms workers would go to when they graduated (though there was still some aspects of a typical labour market in the Soviet design). The Soviet system more or less achieved full employment and did have some impressive accomplishments but most scholars would agree that the system didn't utilize its workforce as effectively as it could have and that there was actually a lot of disguised underemployment or overmanning of positions. Not having a pool of readily available unemployed workers did harm the overall efficiency of the Soviet economy, though it also helped raise the labour force participation rate and reduced inequality.
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May 23, 2019 19:05
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Helsing posted:Of course they are. If they weren't then capitalism wouldn't be such a monstrous dysfunctional system. They're just not and that's partially why capitalism is a monstrous dysfunctional system. How is it an issue of scarcity when we throw away more food than is necessary for world consumption, when there are multiple empty homes per homeless person, and when people are dying from being unable to afford insulin which is easily mass produced for cheap? quote:The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983 quote:Burberry, the upmarket British fashion label, destroyed unsold clothes, accessories and perfume worth £28.6m last year to protect its brand. e: Like markets CREATE this scarcity lol it isn't just the simple Econ 101 of "how do we best assign limited resources to limited people" and even if it was "give it to those with the most money" isn't always the best solution either. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 19:08
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Paradoxish posted:I mean, I specifically said in the first post that you were responding to that I don't think everyone can or should be paid equally. I'm not sure that you could even have a purely socialist economy that functions properly in that way, and even some weird hypothetical post-scarcity, post-currency economy would probably still have some inequality. Fictional post scarcity scifi economies I've seen in fiction still have inequality. Things like fame, social skills, luck, competence in some highly specialized task, etc. become the currency, when everyone has the same material wealth.
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May 23, 2019 19:12
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It's not about equality of outcome. That's a total mischaracterization of leftism imo. Like no one seriously thinks doctors and line cooks should be paid the exact same and receive the exact same benefits. That's some weirdo cold war straw man about leftism, honestly.
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May 23, 2019 19:15
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doverhog posted:Fictional post scarcity scifi economies I've seen in fiction still have inequality. Things like fame, social skills, luck, competence in some highly specialized task, etc. become the currency, when everyone has the same material wealth. Those things aren't that bad when they're unequal, people will cope fine with that like school kids already manage to unlike not having enough food/shelter/medicine.
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May 23, 2019 19:27
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If we manage to get a society where we measure inequality by someone having a huge mansion or a fancy sports car but everyone in the world has good access to food, water, housing, education, etc, then loving sign me up goddamn
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May 23, 2019 19:30
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Moridin920 posted:It's not about equality of outcome. That's a total mischaracterization of leftism imo. There are multiple people arguing that exact point in this thread actually.
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May 23, 2019 21:40
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rscott posted:Again, no poo poo that's what I said. Do you guys just read one sentence or one post and then rush off to slam that rebuttal home? My whole point (in response to BrandorKP's question) is that even if you operate within the theoretical framework of liberal economic thought, actually calculating what your labor is objectively worth is basically impossible, and thus answering the question of how much of your labor are you willing to "give away" to ownership or capital is impossible to do in a meaningful fashion. It was more riffing on what you were saying than disagreeing with you.
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May 23, 2019 21:49
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Moridin920 posted:They're just not and that's partially why capitalism is a monstrous dysfunctional system. You already agreed upthread that the current American economy isn't ecologically sustainable, either globally or nationally over the long term. So you know fully well that resource scarcity is a problem we haven't overcome yet. The fact we could easily house and feed everyone in America if the political will existed doesn't change this fact. quote:e: Like markets CREATE this scarcity lol it isn't just the simple Econ 101 of "how do we best assign limited resources to limited people" and even if it was "give it to those with the most money" isn't always the best solution either. You are hilariously bad at understanding other peoples arguments or intuiting what they believe, to the point that you seem to still think you're debating a liberal. It's good to have people challenging the cult of the free market but ideally you'd know enough about economics to actually make a convincing argument!
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May 24, 2019 00:13
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Somfin posted:It was more riffing on what you were saying than disagreeing with you. Apologies! v  v
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May 24, 2019 00:17
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