The right seems to want to remove as many protections and rights of workers as they can when a company wants to hire an employee

[Tom Sawyer]

Even though that is the exact plot of the movie I mentioned in this context just a few posts up and though your sentiment is awfully poetic....

For some reason I don't think our hobo overlords have sent down any commandments lately.

Americans kill each other at a higher rate than almost any other country, and that's when things are good. Give us the right motivation and the rich will be looking for a hole in the ground, in the tall grass.

Either that or the rich will find themselves on the receiving end of some really snarky tweets.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's amazing how many guises the mythical infinite pool of profits takes.

You are mistaken if you think repetition of an idiotic meme makes it less idiotic.

Calling it idiotic isn't a rebuttal.

 

[KeepTalking]

You are mistaken if you think repetition of an idiotic meme makes it less idiotic.

Calling it idiotic isn't a rebuttal.

[Citation Needed]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's amazing how many guises the mythical infinite pool of profits takes.

Where is my claim of infinate pools? STRAWMAN!

Since Auxlus has declined to comment, perhaps YOU would care to explain to me how it is possible that Costco employees produce so much more value with their work that Costco can afford to pay them an average of $20 an hour while Walmart employees are so pittifully unproductive that the Waltons can only afford to pay them an average of $12 an hour.

What makes you think that the value that Walmart employees bring to the Waltons is so small? If it happens to be roughly equivalent to the value that Costco employees bring to Costco, then clearly The Waltons are taking a relatively excessive amount of value from their employees and not paying them their share that provides them a living wage if they have dependents.

Look at a checkout line in Costco and look at a checkout line in Wal-Mart.

Compare the average value of the items being bought and the total basket size. Costco makes far more per item, they can afford to pay more for the workers that handle those items.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's amazing how many guises the mythical infinite pool of profits takes.

No one is saying there's an infinite pool of profits. Considering that the Waltons are the richest family in the world however, that pool is Marianas trench deep.

The actual numbers have been presented upthread. Continuing to focus on how much money the Waltons have proves nothing. It also neglects the fact that most of that money didn't actually come from Wal-Mart in the first place, but rather from the stock value of Wal-Mart. Thus it's tied to the expected future earnings of Wal-Mart, it's for the most part not money that Wal-Mart already produced.

 

[laughing dog]

You are mistaken if you think repetition of an idiotic meme makes it less idiotic.

Calling it idiotic isn't a rebuttal.

Avoiding the point is not a rebuttal. The point that you are mistaken if you think repetition of an idiotic meme makes it less idiotic. No one claims that is an infinite pool of profits, despite your persist unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.

BTW, denying that it isn't a rebuttal is not a rebuttal.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Calling it idiotic isn't a rebuttal.

Avoiding the point is not a rebuttal. The point that you are mistaken if you think repetition of an idiotic meme makes it less idiotic. No one claims that is an infinite pool of profits, despite your persist unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.

BTW, denying that it isn't a rebuttal is not a rebuttal.

hehehehehe,

Loren, care to rebut the rebuttal of the rebuttal or non-rebuttal as the case may be?

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Yes, wage-earners are overpaid. Paying them out of PITY = paying them more than they're worth.

The question is, where is the right balance? Is the left's vision of putting in as many burdens, expenses and barriers up as possible on the company when a company wants to hire an employee the right balance here?

I'm not sure where the balance is, but I know what happens when there is no balance and everything falls over.

That is when the poor people get together and storm the rich man's house, kill him and his family, and take all his stuff. It's not right, it's not particularly pretty, but it's reality. It's what keeps the rich and powerful from making slaves of everybody. The rich get to keep most of what they collect, only if they cooperate just enough to keep the rest of us from breaking down the gate of his gated community.

I'm not sure where the balance is, but I know what happens when there is no balance and everything falls over.

That is when the poor people get together and storm the rich man's house, kill him and his family, and take all his stuff. It's not right, it's not particularly pretty, but it's reality.

No it's not reality -- it's a slander against the poor. The poor do NOT storm anyone's house and kill anyone, etc. simply because companies or the powers that be

-- Remove minimum wage

-- Roll back health and safety regulations

-- Remove privacy rights

etc. (reduce the coffee break from 20 minutes to 15? curtail employees from viewing porn sites on company time?)

The vast majority of poor people do absolutely none of this. Rather, there is a minority of labor activists and thugs and derelicts who go on a rampage and commit violence against employers and against other workers who don't join their employer-bashing crusade and against the company's customers.

It is not true that poor people generally are impulsive criminals as implied by "That is when the poor people get together and storm the rich man's house, kill him and his family, and take all his stuff. It's not right, it's not particularly pretty, but it's reality."

Even if it's true that the petty crime rate among the poor is higher than average and that the crime rate is higher during bad times (which is not clear), still, the vast majority of the poor do not go on such a rampage or even come close, nor pose any threat to the rich. And the few who do pose any threat actually pose a greater threat to other poor people than to the rich, because it's mostly in their own poor neighborhoods where they commit their crimes.

But it's interesting that those who want more benefits to wage-earners (or oppose reducing these benefits), and want to impose higher and higher costs onto employers, scapegoating them and forcing them not only to pay workers more than their value but also to be their babysitters, end up finding the ultimate rationale for this by accusing the poor workers themselves of being essentially parasites and pillagers who are so rotten and worthless and savage that that they have to be bought off, like extortionists or protection racketeers.

But these ideologue-crusader-left-wing fanatics are wrong, because most of the poor are not such extortionists who need to be bought off. And those who pretend to speak for the poor should stop doing it by disparaging the poor with slander such as this.

Lumpenproletariat, look at the history of labor unions some time. It wasn't some tiny minority of troublemakers, it was a lot of rank-and-file workers who often joined in. Look at the Blair Mountain Mine War some time. It was a massive revolt.

It was always a very small minority of "the poor people" who ever "storm the rich man's house, kill him and his family, and take all his stuff" or anything resembling such behavior. The vast majority of "the poor people" have never done this, even if they had strong anticapitalist and pro-labor sentiments and thought they were getting shafted by the system or were members of unions. (Though labor union members/activists are usually far above the level that can be called "the poor people," who are more often victims of labor union practices than beneficiaries of them.)

However, I did neglect to mention one further type among those who "storm the rich man's house" etc., in addition to the activists and thugs and derelicts, and that is the small cadre of elitists who drive on the mindless herd with their publications and speeches and propaganda, such as Marx and Engels and Rosa Luxemburg and America's labor leaders, whose preaching and incitements have sometimes stampeded the herd into violence and destruction and even warfare or street battles, such as that of the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg, who succeeded in seizing power, and that of the Red revolutionaries in Berlin who got put down by an even more powerful band of thugs and derelicts.

But the real "poor people" stayed out of this mayhem and did not agree with the proposition that "the poor people" are ultimately a mindless herd which must pillage and destroy and kill someone that the elitist propagandists told them was their enemy.

So it's always only a small minority of "the poor people," only a small band of activists and thugs and derelicts directed by the ideologue (and upper-class) elitists, not "the poor people" generally, who take to violence and "storm the rich man's house" etc.

So the popular cliché that we have to enact the latest leftist elitist labor agenda or else the mindless herd of "the poor people" will go on a rampage and "storm the rich man's house" etc. is a lie and a slander against the vast majority of the poor.

As to "a small minority of troublemakers", I wouldn't be surprised if that's what King George III had believed about the American Revolution.

He would have been wrong if he had thought this was a stampede of "the poor people." There has probably never been any revolution led by "poor" people. But in any case that came close to it, the outcome was always that the revolutionaries were totally smashed and crushed, and the rich overlords emerged from it more powerful than before, and so any warning to the rich that "the poor people" are coming to overthrow them is a false alarm.

Do you believe that you have a right to get everything for free?

No, the consumers are entitled to the lowest possible price for everything in the market, based on competition and supply-and-demand. That's what antitrust law is based upon. If you don't think consumers are entitled to the lowest prices possible in a competitive marketplace, then you oppose antitrust law.

Your perpetual screeching about workers getting overpaid suggests that.

Any artificial propping-up of the cost of business is an assault on ALL consumers. Artificially-high labor cost (driven high by anything other than competition/higher performance) is an assault on all consumers, who are thus forced to pay a higher price without any benefit in return. The consumers are not a charity organization giving freebies to someone out of pity, but are paying a price for which they are entitled to something in return, which has proportionately higher value in return for incrementally-higher price. This rule is violated when wage-earners are paid higher than the market value for their labor, and society suffers a net loss.

I ask you, what would you have thought about plantation slavery if you had been living before the US Civil War?

A free-market free-choice system based on supply-and-demand would have served all consumers better, rather than one where the state dictates the terms of business and/or individual operators are denied free choice, such as with labor laws, which sometimes in the past put a CAP on wages that could be paid. Denying any producers individual free choice is the essence of oppression. (There is nothing wrong with "plantations" -- they have generally served consumers well, as long as it's the free competitive marketplace and free choice among all players that determines the winners and losers.)

Would you have defended it as providing that all-important good, that great end that justifies even the most heinous means, Low Prices For The Consumer?

No, the slave system made consumers overall worse off. The damage took many forms, and probably even the prices were made artificially higher than they would have been in a long-term free market competitive system. Our prices today are lower than they would have been if the slave system had continued and expanded to all the states and remained in place up until today. In a slave system continued up to the present, even for the non-slave consumers the real prices today would probably be higher than they are under our non-slave system.

If not, then would you have been willing to accept higher prices for the consumer as a consequence of abolishing slavery, and would you have been willing to be very loud about that?

For this question to make any sense, we have to assume many things, most of which are probably not true. We also have to consider the possibility of a small elite, maybe only 5%, enslaving everyone else, and then asking if this system might lower the prices for this privileged class of only 5%, and disregard any effect on the enslaved 95%. With the right technology and the experts to operate this technology, it might work to the interest of this 5% to enslave the 95%.

Since there are so many hypothetical scenarios, you'll have to identify which one you have in mind.

For now, without further details of the scenario, it's sufficient to say that the overall cost to consumers, the overall interest of consumers, including that of having lower prices, is best served by a non-slave system, which evolves over a long-term process, like we've had since the 1860s when our non-slave system theoretically began. No doubt there was economic damage from the emancipation which lasted several decades, including higher prices. But in the long term we have LOWER prices as a result of adopting a non-slave system.

What works best in the long term must always take priority. Unless you're a Keynesian who preaches "in the long run we're all dead!" in which case there is no basis for judging what is a better system, other than instant gratification, which is the basis for our ongoing national debt which has to keep rising instead of sometimes falling.

But it's interesting that those who want more benefits to wage-earners (or oppose reducing these benefits), and want to impose higher and higher costs onto employers, scapegoating them and forcing them not only to pay workers more than their value but also to be their babysitters, end up finding the ultimate rationale for this by accusing the poor workers themselves of being essentially parasites and pillagers who are so rotten and worthless and savage that that they have to be bought off, like extortionists or protection racketeers.

Define "worth" of labor.

You already know the definition (not only the worth of LABOR, but of anything that is bought and sold in the marketplace).

It is the competitive market price based on supply-demand. It was all said by Nicholas Barbon more than 300 years ago, long before Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and others more celebrated but less worthy to explain the basics. In his Discourse of Trade, Barbon said:

But the Market is the best Judge of Value; for by the Concourse of Buyers and Sellers, the Quantity of Wares, and the Occasion for them are Best known: Things are just worth so much, as they can be sold for, according to the Old Rule, Valet Quantum Vendi potest.

The Price of Wares is the present Value; And ariseth by Computing the occasions or use for them, with the Quantity to serve that Occasion; for the Value of things depending on the use of them, the Over-pluss of Those Wares, which are more than can be used, become worth nothing; So that Plenty, in respect of the occasion, makes things cheap; and Scarcity, dear. . . .

It is impossible for the Merchant when he has Bought his goods, To know what he shall sell them for: The Value of them, depends upon the Difference betwixt the Occasion and the Quantity; tho' that be the Chiefest of the Merchants Care to observe, yet it depends upon so many Circumstances, that it's impossible to know it. Therefore if the plenty of the goods, has brought down the Price; the Merchant layeth them up, till the Quantity is consumed, and the Price riseth. . . .

There is no fixt Price or Value of any thing for the Wares of Trades; The Animals and Vegetables of the Earth, depend on the Influence of Heaven, which sometimes causes Murrains, Dearth, Famine, and sometimes Years of great Plenty; therefore, the Value of things must accordingly Alter. . . .

The Value of all Wares, ariseth from their Use; and the Dearness and Cheapness of them, from their Plenty and Scarcity.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/barbon/trade.htm

That says it all just fine (but disregard the "'twixt" and other archaic words, also the misuse of commas) -- you can flush Marx and Smith and the others down the toilet.

The only addition to this is the point that labor is one of the "wares" that has value which is higher or lower based on supply-demand, like all else that is bought and sold. There is no logical basis for setting "labor" apart from all the other items bought and sold as if its "value" is set in some way different from the other items.

Every producer, whether a wage-earner or entrepreneur or investor or independent contractor, has an emotional attachment to his production and an investment and engagement with it which the consumer or buyer does not understand and is not concerned with. The buyer has his own problems and has no obligation to feel sorry for the seller or producer and pour out pity on the seller or worker as if the latter is entitled to some special pity because of his personal problems -- no! Either provide what the buyer wants at a price he's willing to pay or get out of the kitchen and leave it to someone else who's up to it, including someone who offers a lower price.

The buyer does not need to hear any sob stories or whining from ANY producer, including wage-earners, about their personal problems. As long as all the operators are free to make their own individual choices and can "quit" whenever they choose, no one has any legitimate gripe against anyone else, or against the society. No one owes them anything except the freedom to do what they can with their individual talents and opportunities. None is entitled to any special pity because they're somehow more important than the others.

The most "downtrodden" or "oppressed" of the producers would be independent contractors which are subject to more abuse than any, so if you want to feel sorry for someone, start with them.

How would you measure it?

The value of anything bought and sold is measured by the supply of it and demand for it. As the demand for that labor goes up, its value increases, and as its supply goes up, its value decreases.

Since you are so deserving of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, you should have no trouble describing how you measure the worth of labor.

It's already measured. So just take the existing wage levels, set mostly by supply-and-demand, and subtract the added cost imposed by artificial factors like labor laws, also pity by employers who have been guilt-tripped into feeling sorry for the workers rather than judging them by their performance, and after subtracting this excess cost or excess income paid to the wage-earners, you'll arrive at a good approximation of their real value as opposed to the artificially-high incomes they receive as a result of these artificial factors that have propped up their wages higher than the real value.


Wage-earners were overpaid in the 1920s.

Here is a further quote to illustrate that wage-earners are generally paid higher than their real value. (I'll quote the whole paragraph, but the sentence in bold is the important part.) This shows that the over-compensation to wage-earners is a practice which goes back to the 1920s (if not a little earlier):

Workers shared in the prosperity of the 1920s, although labor lagged behind business in reaping the benefits of technology. Business supported higher wages as a way to increase workers' buying power. With a shorter workweek (five full days and a half day on Saturday), many workers had more leisure time; large firms such as International Harvester offered employees two weeks of paid vacation a year. But scientific management techniques, first put forth in 1895 by Frederick W. Taylor but only widely implemented in the 1920s, reduced labor's control over the work environment.

America's History; James A. Henretta, W. Elliot Brownlee, David Brody, Susan Ware, Marilynn S. Johnson; Worth Publishers Inc. Page 745.

Why did they pay higher wages? Was it for better performance? increased value produced by those workers? increased benefit to consumers? Forget it! it was to INCREASE WORKER'S BUYING POWER. I.e., it was pity pay, which could just as easily have been paid to homeless beggars on the street to increase their "buying power" -- if we need more "buying power" out there, there's no shortage of needy recipients who would gladly fill that need. Or you could build robots whose function would be to consume products, gulping them down and emitting a loud BURP after each swallow. Surely such consuming robots is now possible with our latest advances in technology.

 

[lpetrich]

Lumpenproletariat, look at the history of labor unions some time. It wasn't some tiny minority of troublemakers, it was a lot of rank-and-file workers who often joined in. Look at the Blair Mountain Mine War some time. It was a massive revolt.

It was always a very small minority of "the poor people" who ever "storm the rich man's house, kill him and his family, and take all his stuff" or anything resembling such behavior.

There's a BIG difference between (1) being meekly resigned to something and (2) actively supporting something.

As an analogy, how many of Britain's North American colonists in the 1750's and 1760's and 1770's had tarred and feathered disliked British government officials? Not very many, I suspect, so by your reasoning, Lumpenproletariat, they all loved King George III's rule and opposed the American revolutionaries. So the American Revolution was TOTALLY illegitimate and the Americans among us ought to accept that Queen Elizabeth II is our legitimate ruler.

Though labor union members/activists are usually far above the level that can be called "the poor people," who are more often victims of labor union practices than beneficiaries of them.

Crocodile tears.

Do you believe that you have a right to get everything for free?

No, the consumers are entitled to the lowest possible price for everything in the market, based on competition and supply-and-demand. ...

A capitalist-utopia fairytale.

Your perpetual screeching about workers getting overpaid suggests that.

Any artificial propping-up of the cost of business is an assault on ALL consumers.

(other foam-at-the-mouth rhetoric snipped for brevity)

I ask you, what would you have thought about plantation slavery if you had been living before the US Civil War?

A free-market free-choice system based on supply-and-demand would have served all consumers better, rather than one where the state dictates the terms of business and/or individual operators are denied free choice, ...

That does not answer the question.

such as with labor laws, which sometimes in the past put a CAP on wages that could be paid.

Given your foaming at the mouth at how "consumers" ought to get prices as low as possible, I'm surprised that you are complaining about that. Because by what you never tire at yelling at us about, uncapped wages can mean higher wages, and thus higher prices for the consumer.

Would you have defended it as providing that all-important good, that great end that justifies even the most heinous means, Low Prices For The Consumer?

No, the slave system made consumers overall worse off.

Evidence presented: lots of empty assertions. Wage-labor plantations never put slave plantations out of business by underselling them or in any other way.

(lots of chest-thumping about "the market" snipped)

The buyer has his own problems and has no obligation to feel sorry for the seller or producer and pour out pity on the seller or worker as if the latter is entitled to some special pity because of his personal problems -- no!

Lumpenproletariat, why this contempt and hostility?

Wage-earners were overpaid in the 1920s.

Here is a further quote to illustrate that wage-earners are generally paid higher than their real value. (I'll quote the whole paragraph, but the sentence in bold is the important part.) This shows that the over-compensation to wage-earners is a practice which goes back to the 1920s (if not a little earlier):

Workers shared in the prosperity of the 1920s, although labor lagged behind business in reaping the benefits of technology. Business supported higher wages as a way to increase workers' buying power. With a shorter workweek (five full days and a half day on Saturday), many workers had more leisure time; large firms such as International Harvester offered employees two weeks of paid vacation a year. But scientific management techniques, first put forth in 1895 by Frederick W. Taylor but only widely implemented in the 1920s, reduced labor's control over the work environment.

America's History; James A. Henretta, W. Elliot Brownlee, David Brody, Susan Ware, Marilynn S. Johnson; Worth Publishers Inc. Page 745.

Why did they pay higher wages? Was it for better performance? increased value produced by those workers? increased benefit to consumers? Forget it! it was to INCREASE WORKER'S BUYING POWER. I.e., it was pity pay, which could just as easily have been paid to homeless beggars on the street to increase their "buying power" -- if we need more "buying power" out there, there's no shortage of needy recipients who would gladly fill that need. Or you could build robots whose function would be to consume products, gulping them down and emitting a loud BURP after each swallow. Surely such consuming robots is now possible with our latest advances in technology.

More and more hostility. Lumpenproletariat, these were *your heroes* doing it. Don't you feel hurt and betrayed by them?