Dan Price raises minimum wage at his company to $70,000 a year

[barbos]

Oh this thread again.
There was recent The Daily Show episode where they sent one of their "correspondents" to get people to sign a petition for $13.5K/hour minimum wage (13.5 thousands US dollars and hour). That was pretty funny and somewhat related to this discussion.

I would call that a bad example as people could have overlooked the decimal place. $80/hr would be a better choice for looking for fools.

Nobody overlooked it, "correspondent" made sure they did not.
Otherwise it would not be funny.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Sorry about the delay. What I wrote wasn't a paraphrase; it was a non-paraphrase that showed what you'd have to have written in order for your line of argument to make sense. If you're suggesting the two are roughly equivalent, there's no logical basis for that opinion; they don't magically become interchangeable because of third parties' views about what's proportional to what.

In any event, "charity" isn't a pejorative. There's nothing wrong with charity. Charity is a good thing. People called it charity not to criticize Price but because they're trying to understand the psychology behind his unusual decision and that's what seemed the most plausible to them. "Publicity stunt" is a bit of a pejorative, but again it was offered in an attempt to understand Price's motivation. (And frankly, it was a pretty implausible guess.)

What I said : you'd only drop your prices if additional capital lowers unit production cost by more than price drop. Otherwise you might gain market share (ie sell more units) without any more profit, especially after additional capital expediture and/or interest is subtracted from revenue. Firms and investors take that gamble or not, but "capital flowing in"-therefore more production-therefore more labour consumed- can't be assumed.

You're just repeating yourself without pointing out any error in the counterargument I offered.

Because I wasn't aware of any counterargument.

And -as I also said- additional capital might, equally, reduce labour consumption anyway.

That could be an indirect result under some conditions, yes. But it's unlikely that such scenarios are what the "capitalism groupies" you heard had in mind -- they were more likely talking about direct effects in ordinary situations.

"The comparison of negatives"? I didn't compare negatives. What I compared was something widely but erroneously regarded as a negative with another thing widely regarded as a positive that I figured only an insane person or a slaver would regard as a negative. But you took me by surprise and said you thought the latter was a negative too. So now in order to continue my line of argument I need to find out why you regard it as a negative feature of capitalism for a worker to be able to choose a job that leaves him with more leisure time.

But I don't. The other negative I impute is the employer who can't offer as good conditions being "hung out to dry" (as you put it) by the prospective employee. That is a negative (specifically a negative feature of capitalism, which is what you asked about) but by far the lesser one than the awful alternatives of which you've kindly provided examples.

Oh, I see what you're getting at. But I'm not seeing why you think that's a negative feature specifically of capitalism. An employer hung out to dry is a consequence of there being two jobs people want done and only one person available with the necessary skill set who hasn't already been deployed to higher-priority tasks. How do you figure any other economic system isn't going to run up against the same problem? At least with capitalism the severity of the problem will tend to be alleviated by price signals that will motivate people to try to acquire the required skills.

Both are negative consequences of the labour-capital antagonism inherent in capitalsim which people condemn for reasons that have bugger all to do with "outgroups".

Labor-capital antagonism is inherent in any system where capital goes beyond hand-tools and goats. Any piece of capital that needs two or more people to cooperate in order for it to be used is going to be deployed according to somebody's decisions, and those decisions will antagonize the laborers who disagree with them. It's not as though labor didn't mind being ordered around by Soviet commissars. It's not as though labor didn't mind voting on how to run "their" newly-seized factory while Spanish Anarchists stood around holding guns and observing how each worker voted. Even if factory-seizers somewhere one day improbably selflessly yield up their power and allow the factory workers to vote by secret ballot, it's not as though the outvoted minority of labor won't mind being ordered around by the capital-controlling majority of labor. People condemn capitalism for labor-capital antagonism because they believe in fairy tales. (And when you unroll the fairy tales, more likely than not the reason a specific fairy tale is the one they believe in will turn out to have a great deal to do with outgroups.)

Perhaps you didn't think said employer being "hung out to dry" was a negative, but then WTF were/are you on about?

An employer being "hung out to dry" is an inevitable fact of the post-neolithic human condition. What I do not regard as a negative is the question of which of two employers will be the one hung out to dry getting settled by the criterion of which one leaves a leisure-preferring employee more leisure time. Do you regard that as a negative?

Oh, rubbish. Disagreements over use of given bits of capital don't mean inherent antagonism, any more than does your wife disagreeing with you over lawnmower choice.