You're using fallacious reasoning here, equivocating between what is required to make a profit and the practice of offloading costs of business onto others.
I am? Show your work.
My work was in the following lines, which you have deleted.
No, it was not. Your complete passage was as follows:
"You're using fallacious reasoning here, equivocating between what is required to make a profit and the practice of offloading costs of business onto others. The former is fairly easy - if nothing else you can just steal the money from other people. You make a huge amount of profit, all of which is paid for by others. What is more useful, and the reason why we keep corporations around at all, is that they create wealth. That is they create more value overall as a result of their presence."
All the lines I deleted did was explain the difference between creating wealth and offloading costs of business onto others. They in no way showed that I equivocated between the two, let alone showed that the business practice in dispute in this thread offloads business costs and/or fails to create wealth. I deleted them because they didn't require a response, since they're not a point in dispute and since I and probably all our readers were already aware of the distinction. If you want to show I equivocated between the two you're going to have to point out the place in my argument where you think I did so, not simply assert that I did and expect readers to take your word for it.
The point was that people were willing to accept a high casualty rate then, and they aren't now. That is something demanded by the wider society, yes, but the causalties are being authored by the business, and cost is thus bourne by the business. That's why Rhea was entirely on point here, because the disconnect you're arguing between living wage and the business applies just as well to casaulty rates and the business.
I.e., people used to allow a disconnect between casualties and the business, and they don't now, because people used to be willing to accept a high casualty rate, and they aren't now. That may well be correct psychology. And they allow a disconnect between poor employees and the business because they're willing to accept poor employees. That may well also be correct psychology. And this is something you and Rhea wish to change in our culture because you don't accept poor employees so you don't want to allow a disconnect between poor employees and the business. That's undoubtedly correct psychology.
However, none of this correct psychology has any bearing on the circumstance that the casualties actually were, in point of fact, authored by the business. Irrespective of how anyone feels about it, employers incentivized employees to do dangerous things. And psychological similarities in how people react to A and B don't make the business cause B by sympathetic magic just because the business causes A. For Rhea to have been entirely on point here would require people's unwillingness to accept casualties to be evidence for businesses causing employee injury; i.e., it would require deriving a conclusion about a matter of fact
from a value judgment.
I'm arguing for a disconnect between the business and employee poverty because no one has exhibited a mechanism by which the business causes employees to be poor. That does not apply just as well to casualty rates and the business; a mechanism by which the business causes casualties has been exhibited. The historical shifts in what people are willing to accept make for interesting history but they don't exhibit a causal mechanism.
So you are claiming that if an employee is not paid enough not to be starving, that's the employer offloading the cost of business, actively contributing to starvation, creating a negative externality, and so forth. Show your work.
Cost of employee to society = X (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost to employee to business Y
Where Y < X, society is having to subsidise the business.
Cost of unemployed person to society = Z (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost of employee to society = X (not starving, desperate or creating other externalities)
Cost of employee to business = Y
Cost of employment to business = Y
Cost of employment to society = X - Z.
When X < Z, regardless of Y the business is providing a positive externality to society, to the tune of (Z - X). As you say, it's the
employee creating the externalities if he doesn't receive X. Your math would only make sense if it were the business that caused the employee to exist in the first place.
Simply put, someone has to pay for the employee to be a functional member of society. If the employer is claiming all their labour (the benefit of their presence) but not paying for the cost of their presence, then they are creating a negative externality.
In the first place, the employer isn't "claiming" it. The employee is offering it for sale and the employer is amenable. You're talking as though the employer were preventing the guy from selling his labor elsewhere.
In the second place, you're objectifying the guy as a pure laborer with no benefit from his presence other than his labor. That's just nonsense -- we don't give people "decent safe housing, decent safe food and decent safe healthcare" only so employers can get their labor. We can tell, because calling the policy you're advocating a "living wage" is propaganda to hide an equivocation fallacy -- we actually pay people more than it costs just to keep them alive and able to work. All the nonlabor benefits from his presence that we are buying with welfare payments are benefits shared across the whole community, not received only by the employer.
And in the third place, your claim of implication is a non sequitur. If somebody creates both costs and benefits, and he delivers all the costs to me and all the benefits to you, that does not constitute you creating a negative externality. That's him creating a negative externality.
Employment is an exchange. It consists of two distinct actions. (1) The employee engages in some productive activity that the employer wants him to do. (2) The employer gives him some asset that the employee wants to own. Which one of these two actions is the one that you are claiming creates a negative externality and actively contributes to starvation?
The employer claiming all the productive activty while bearing less than the full cost.
I.e., neither action contributes to starvation all by itself, but doing both together does so? How does that work? Is there a mechanism you can show by which the two activities combine synergistically to cause starvation? Does the gift of the asset perhaps persuade the employee to spend all his time in that productive activity, thereby preventing him from doing some different productive activity that would otherwise have induced some third party to give him more assets that he could have traded for more food?
Or do you mean they combine metaphysically rather than physically, and cause starvation by virtue of the way your accounting methodology applies its cost allocation conventions to define "the full cost" of the productive activity?
So too with employees getting welfare. The employer has to pay for employees. The base cost of an employee is the cost of maintaining that employee to a certain arbitrary standard...
How is it possible for whether an action actively contributes to a physical phenomenon to depend on an arbitrary standard?
The same logic applies to a different yardstick. The only difference between the starvation example and the less than an arbitrary standard example is that society now recognises needs of the employee beyond merely food.
I.e., you're bundling, the same as a cable TV company that will sell you a package of movies and sports, but won't let you buy just the movies even though you don't get any benefit from the sports. You want to make two things -- labor the person can sell, and the satisfaction for him of some arbitrary standard society recognizes as his "needs" -- and making both these things costs you more than making only one. But since there's a ready market for Thing 1 and no buyers for Thing 2, you offer them together as a package deal. And, hoping to cut down on the complaints from your customers about the bundling, you tell them that your entire costs incurred in making both things are "the base cost of Thing 1".
All of which is your option. Hey, you're the seller. But that does mean when you claim the point is that if employers are making a profit and don't pay you what it costs you to make Thing 1 and Thing 2 then they are actively contributing to starvation, you're talking utter bosh.
And distinguishing between such companies by comparing them to a standard you've already stipulated is arbitrary will correctly identify the companies that produce wealth, will it?
Absolutely, it identifies the opportunity cost of employment.
I'm not following. What opportunity is being missed out on as a result of the MW employment, and what is the cost of that missed opportunity?
If the company is not paying for the value of the employees, then it's offloading that cost onto other people.
What do you mean by "the value" of the employees? Do you mean the degree to which somebody values them, and if so, who? Or do you mean the output of some computation that determines their value objectively whether anyone values them that much or not, and if so, which computation?