Capital freedom of movement

[untermensche]

So say the masters, not history or science.

Nope, just simple logistics.

No, simple greed.

Top down structures make it easier for those at the top to take from those at the bottom.

That is why they exist.

They are not more efficient in any way. In some ways they are incredibly inefficient since the dictators have all the control and if they are wrong there is nobody to correct them until things are very far gone.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Nope, just simple logistics.

No, simple greed.

Top down structures make it easier for those at the top to take from those at the bottom.

That is why they exist.

They are not more efficient in any way. In some ways they are incredibly inefficient since the dictators have all the control and if they are wrong there is nobody to correct them until things are very far gone.

Nope. They are very efficient, just not as worker friendly as you would like. It has tradeoffs.

 

[ksen]

Easy to claim.

 

[untermensche]

No, simple greed.

Top down structures make it easier for those at the top to take from those at the bottom.

That is why they exist.

They are not more efficient in any way. In some ways they are incredibly inefficient since the dictators have all the control and if they are wrong there is nobody to correct them until things are very far gone.

Nope. They are very efficient, just not as worker friendly as you would like. It has tradeoffs.

There isn't a shred of evidence to support that.

Greedy apes like top-down structures. They will scrape and crawl to get to the top of one, because they know from the top they can steal from all below.

 

[SimpleDon]

Shouldn't labor be as free to move around the world as capital is?

If not, why?

Labor will never be able to move around as freely as capital. Just look at what you would have to do to go to another state, sell your home, buy a new one in the other state, cancel your utilities, pack up and move, travel to the new state what three or four times, unpack, get new utilities, etc. It is a nightmare that people want to do as infrequently as possible. It is even worse traveling to another country. I moved frequently in the Navy, too many to count, and five times in my jobs, including to three other countries. Plus too many short term, months to a year, moves to too many different countries to count.

It is just another one of the absurdities of libertarian philosophy, that you can always quit and move to where the jobs are. You can't, you don't want to and more importantly, you shouldn't have to. It is far better to install capital controls to keep the jobs in the US. Or should I say reinstall capital controls. Loosened capital controls are one of the reasons why we are currently fighting poverty in a dozen other countries instead of fighting to end poverty in our own country.

And we should have controls to prevent the race to the bottom competition between the states, lowering taxes to attract businesses from other states. Mississippi started this competition to attract businesses in the 1970's because they were ranked 50th out of 50 states in nearly everything. After forty years of the program they are still ranked 50th out of 50 but with a much smaller tax base.

 

[arkirk]

No, simple greed.

Top down structures make it easier for those at the top to take from those at the bottom.

That is why they exist.

They are not more efficient in any way. In some ways they are incredibly inefficient since the dictators have all the control and if they are wrong there is nobody to correct them until things are very far gone.

Nope. They are very efficient, just not as worker friendly as you would like. It has tradeoffs.

What the hell are you talking about? Efficient and not worker friendly in a country that is NOT YOURS...that is simple Imperialism. By now you should have figured out that all this imperialism the world has lived with is religion based....Capitalism is as rigid as Catholicism and you are one of its prime advocates. Your hubris and narcissism is only surpassed by Donald Trump.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Just so we are clear, there is multiple areas of efficiency

Let's see if this is your definition

A group of 10 workers makes widgets. Under a capitalist system they make 50 widgets, so 5 widgets per person. Under a worker run system they make 60 because of morale so they are more efficient. I agree this can happen, and the workers can be more efficient in this scenario.

However the other scenarios

10 workers around, 50 widgets are needed. How do the workers get organized to make the 50 or 60 widgets? How quickly can that happen?
10 workers, but now 100 widgets are needed.
10 workers working, but only 50 widgets needed
10 workers working, but now it's 50 lemons needed
10 workers working, but no widgets are needed

The efficiency of the worker owned system is only in the first case, not the other cases.

but prove me wrong. You three find a large room, find at least 47 other people and meet and in that meeting have all 50 people agree on a new business that provides a service or product and how your company will be run. It should be easy since getting 50 together and then 50 to agree on it, should be ok.

 

[SimpleDon]

Just so we are clear, there is multiple areas of efficiency

Let's see if this is your definition

A group of 10 workers makes widgets. Under a capitalist system they make 50 widgets, so 5 widgets per person. Under a worker run system they make 60 because of morale so they are more efficient. I agree this can happen, and the workers can be more efficient in this scenario.

However the other scenarios

10 workers around, 50 widgets are needed. How do the workers get organized to make the 50 or 60 widgets? How quickly can that happen?
10 workers, but now 100 widgets are needed.
10 workers working, but only 50 widgets needed
10 workers working, but now it's 50 lemons needed
10 workers working, but no widgets are needed

The efficiency of the worker owned system is only in the first case, not the other cases.

but prove me wrong. You three find a large room, find at least 47 other people and meet and in that meeting have all 50 people agree on a new business that provides a service or product and how your company will be run. It should be easy since getting 50 together and then 50 to agree on it, should be ok.

It is hard to argue with your construction. But fortunately it has nothing to do with the economics involved. In the real economy if the 10 workers in the worker controlled company are 20% more productive than the workers in the traditional top down company then they will always be able to sell their widgets because they can always undercut the prices of the traditional companies if they have to.

The worker owned companies that I have dealt with have had managers that decide the direction of the company. The reason that so many worker owned companies fail is not because of problems making decisions but because so many of the new worker owned companies are phoenix companies. That is companies trying to raise themselves out of the ashes of a failed traditional company. And that they typically have to overpay for capital.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Just so we are clear, there is multiple areas of efficiency

Let's see if this is your definition

A group of 10 workers makes widgets. Under a capitalist system they make 50 widgets, so 5 widgets per person. Under a worker run system they make 60 because of morale so they are more efficient. I agree this can happen, and the workers can be more efficient in this scenario.

However the other scenarios

10 workers around, 50 widgets are needed. How do the workers get organized to make the 50 or 60 widgets? How quickly can that happen?
10 workers, but now 100 widgets are needed.
10 workers working, but only 50 widgets needed
10 workers working, but now it's 50 lemons needed
10 workers working, but no widgets are needed

The efficiency of the worker owned system is only in the first case, not the other cases.

but prove me wrong. You three find a large room, find at least 47 other people and meet and in that meeting have all 50 people agree on a new business that provides a service or product and how your company will be run. It should be easy since getting 50 together and then 50 to agree on it, should be ok.

It is hard to argue with your construction. But fortunately it has nothing to do with the economics involved. In the real economy if the 10 workers in the worker controlled company are 20% more productive than the workers in the traditional top down company then they will always be able to sell their widgets because they can always undercut the prices of the traditional companies if they have to.

The worker owned companies that I have dealt with have had managers that decide the direction of the company. The reason that so many worker owned companies fail is not because of problems making decisions but because so many of the new worker owned companies are phoenix companies. That is companies trying to raise themselves out of the ashes of a failed traditional company. And that they typically have to overpay for capital.

Are you also saying that akirks argument about them being more efficient doesn't apply either? Worker owned companies offer no advantages? My experiment was simple, but worker owned companies don't have many efficiencies. They are great for the 1, 2,...5 person companies but they won't grow large with their original intent.

 

[SimpleDon]

We can see many of the absurdities of libertarians in this thread.

The idea of open borders. Supply and demand will drive the wages in the high wage country down toward the wage level in the low wage country. This great for the owners of the companies and their profits. It is not so good for the workers in the high wage country.

The concentration on the superior worker, the übermench. This goes back to the Randian idea that the world can only be saved if the one in ten thousand super man is set free to innovate. Of course, the direction and the success of the economy is determined by the average workers, not the high performers.

The idea that labor is no more to the economy than a commodity, a cost of production to be minimized. Labor wages are the primary source of demand in the economy. When you lower wages as a part of GDP like we have been doing you lower economic activity, the growth of the economy and you lower the potential of the economy the same as if you burned down factories.

In general it points to a fundamental difference between the neoclassical, libertarian, Austrian, Friedman conservative view of the economy and the liberal, Keynesian view. Conservatives see people in the economy as economic actors in service to the economy. Liberals see the economy as in service to the people.

Conservatives see themselves as the champions of capitalism, but their view of capitalism is that it is a delicate mechanism that is all too easy to damage. The liberals, painted as anti-capitalistic, are the ones who depend on capitalism's resilience and its flexibility.

It is obvious who is right, all that you have to do is to look at all of the different capitalistic economies in the world to understand that capitalism is a very robust and adaptable model. One that can be manipulated to produce many different economic outcomes without damage to the economy itself.

 

[SimpleDon]

It is hard to argue with your construction. But fortunately it has nothing to do with the economics involved. In the real economy if the 10 workers in the worker controlled company are 20% more productive than the workers in the traditional top down company then they will always be able to sell their widgets because they can always undercut the prices of the traditional companies if they have to.

The worker owned companies that I have dealt with have had managers that decide the direction of the company. The reason that so many worker owned companies fail is not because of problems making decisions but because so many of the new worker owned companies are phoenix companies. That is companies trying to raise themselves out of the ashes of a failed traditional company. And that they typically have to overpay for capital.

Are you also saying that akirks argument about them being more efficient doesn't apply either? Worker owned companies offer no advantages? My experiment was simple, but worker owned companies don't have many efficiencies. They are great for the 1, 2,...5 person companies but they won't grow large with their original intent.

I was just responding to your post where you said that worker owned companies are more productive. You said,

Under a worker run system they make 60 because of morale so they are more efficient. I agree this can happen, and the workers can be more efficient in this scenario.

I worked for an employee owned company, an engineering company, a consultant. The senior professional engineers who worked there owned the company. But there was a president who ran the company. The senior engineers didn't vote on every decision.

Later I had a fabrication shop that we worked with all of the time. They were .heavy metal fabrication shop. They worked with steel up to 6" thick, which is rare. These shops are rare because there isn't much demand for these shops. They went bankrupt with some millions of dollars of our work in the shop. We kept them by paying the workers directly. We finally set them up as a worker owned company, loaning them the money to buy the company. They stayed open for about three years after that. Then we finally bought them and ran them as our company's shop. Throughout all of this the same people worked there pretty much in the same positions. This was their problem, the management couldn't run them no matter who owned them. We bought out the management and made the changes that we knew had to be made, turning them into a light metal shop too and took on some metal fab work, truck trailers and some parts for buses that was only a little more than break even but it was steady work.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is hard to argue with your construction. But fortunately it has nothing to do with the economics involved. In the real economy if the 10 workers in the worker controlled company are 20% more productive than the workers in the traditional top down company then they will always be able to sell their widgets because they can always undercut the prices of the traditional companies if they have to.

The worker owned companies that I have dealt with have had managers that decide the direction of the company. The reason that so many worker owned companies fail is not because of problems making decisions but because so many of the new worker owned companies are phoenix companies. That is companies trying to raise themselves out of the ashes of a failed traditional company. And that they typically have to overpay for capital.

Phoenix companies would get their assets on the cheap--they're worth a lot more in a working form than their value on the used equipment market. My old employer failed 6 years ago--there's a large, expensive track still mounted on the ceiling there. The bank didn't figure it was worth taking apart and selling.

 

[bilby]

It is hard to argue with your construction. But fortunately it has nothing to do with the economics involved. In the real economy if the 10 workers in the worker controlled company are 20% more productive than the workers in the traditional top down company then they will always be able to sell their widgets because they can always undercut the prices of the traditional companies if they have to.

The worker owned companies that I have dealt with have had managers that decide the direction of the company. The reason that so many worker owned companies fail is not because of problems making decisions but because so many of the new worker owned companies are phoenix companies. That is companies trying to raise themselves out of the ashes of a failed traditional company. And that they typically have to overpay for capital.

Phoenix companies would get their assets on the cheap--they're worth a lot more in a working form than their value on the used equipment market. My old employer failed 6 years ago--there's a large, expensive track still mounted on the ceiling there. The bank didn't figure it was worth taking apart and selling.

Which just goes to show that 'expensive' is not the same thing as 'valuable'.

That track cost a lot; but without the wider context of the task it was installed to perform, it has no value at all.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Phoenix companies would get their assets on the cheap--they're worth a lot more in a working form than their value on the used equipment market. My old employer failed 6 years ago--there's a large, expensive track still mounted on the ceiling there. The bank didn't figure it was worth taking apart and selling.

Which just goes to show that 'expensive' is not the same thing as 'valuable'.

That track cost a lot; but without the wider context of the task it was installed to perform, it has no value at all.

Definitely, especially since a big part of the job of the track was to take time. (The track came down into the spray station, then it meandered back and forth under the ceiling until it came back down in the assembly area. It deliberately took extra time in this process so the material hanging on the track would be dry and ready for assembly when it came back down.) Very useful for it's intended purpose, almost useless for anything else.