Warren Buffet nails it on inequality

[untermensche]

Do workers in an auto manufacturing plant own the cars (the fruits of their labor)?

Or are they paid a market wage? In the case of some auto manufacturers a better negotiated market wage.

Are the fruits taken and replaced with a market wage?

The fruits that are contributed by all the expensive machinery, technology, and general business process know-how, and the ones who risk taking a loss and losing money, rightly belong to those who contributed that and took on that financial risk - the business owners.

You don't get to steal on the premise you are taking a financial risk.

That is only capitalist dogma, that the well indoctrinated do not question.

 

[arkirk]

Are workers paid in relation to the fruits of their labor?

If so show me the formula that looks at the overall money taken in by a company and the pay of employees.

The facts are, most people are paid what is called a market wage.

This phrase is, as I said, just a slimy way of trying to put lipstick on a pig.

A market wage in actuality means, most of the time, the lowest possible wage.

Are you claiming the lowest possible wage is theft?

Are you claiming the lowest possible wage somehow magically has a relation to overall money taken in by a company?

The system flows from slavery and in the North, indentured servitude. It is a master/slave system.

And we really see what the system is in the late 1800's before the labor movements forced the capitalists to behave somewhat decently towards workers.

You are continuing to make the basic Marxist mistake of assuming a stable world.

If there were no progress you would see a slow decline like you think will happen.

However, in practice there is another force--innovation. The worker who was underpaid in the static world instead does something new. The more wages are pushed down the more attractive this becomes.

You mean like: stop eating?

We don't seem to be getting along very well in this forum. We don't ever see anybody agree to anything here...even something as basic as whether we should attempt to see that everybody gets fed. Lack of opportunity and unfair competition usually is accompanied by poor educational oportunities, and a poor future doing anything but working for somebody else who started with better everything. Loren and his crew argue the worthlessness of the average man and feel perfectly free to condemn him to a life of want despite hard work. I tend to look at people differently. I don't see our future as in any way assured by a crazy casino market where money spent for spinach can end up getting you rat poison.

When I said Buffet was an accident of the market. I did not mean that he was either greedy or not greedy but that the market had an accident that allowed him to get huge sums of money without working for them. That is the accident. To me, it doesn't matter how brilliant or stupid he might be. He came by his ever increasing wealth by the labor of MILLIONS OF OTHERS. His intellect is not in question here, but that of a society that allows things like him and Berkshire Hathaway to get away with so much loot that should be circulating in the wider society. I don't think these people intend to be parasites and don't think of themselves in that way, but they are.

I do not ever buy lottery tickets, not because I don't want to "support the schools," but because they are simply a money skimming scheme and also because it is a system that induces gambling and makes many poor people even poorer. Wall street is just the same thing with better furnishings and slicker sales forces. For a person to aspire to a career in the financial industry is by its very nature a character weakness in some and a gambling addiction in others. It makes a lot of industrial things happen that NEVER SHOULD HAPPEN. Just saying...why the fuck listen to Buffet?

 

[Togo]

... taking the fruits of labor and replacing it with a market wage (the lowest possible wage) is theft ...

So, the premise underlying your conviction that it's stealing to pay market rate for labor is your conviction that the goods and services employers sell are "the fruits of labor".

Why do you believe they're the fruits of labor? To be precise, why do you believe they're the fruits of only labor?

"Fruits" is a curious analogy. If the goods are olives, and the labor is a worker watering, weeding, pruning, picking, and so forth, would you call the olives the fruits of his labor? They're the fruits of the olive tree. If you want to metaphorically call them the fruits of the olive tree and the labor, that's a fair metaphor. But we shouldn't forget that it's a metaphor -- the olives are first and foremost the fruits of the tree. The metaphor that lets us extend the "fruits of" concept to the labor doesn't play favorites. By the same token, those olives are also the fruits of the soil, the fruits of the weather, the fruits of whoever decided that was a good place for an orchard, the fruits of the merchants who told him they'd buy olives, the fruits of the soldiers who deterred the Spartans from invading and cutting down the olive orchards, and any number of other contributors. Without any of those factors there wouldn't be any olives to pick. So the olives are the fruits of all those things. What justifies your picking out just one of those many factors, rhetorically dismissing the contribution of the rest of the factors, and calling the olives "the fruits of labor"?

If you're really in favour of rewarding all stakeholders in company's success, then I'd be all for that. Are you? Are you suggesting that, contrary to what NobleSavage said, the profits of a company or enterprise are not just owned by the providers of capital?

The key problem appears to be profit retained by capital providers over well over the reinvestment rate.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

It goes back to org development issues and who really has a stake and a voice in how the company functions.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Problem with raising minimum wage instead of raising social welfare support, is that it shifts more financial burden onto companies that employ a lot of workers, and less financial burden on those who do not. Why should big companies who employ fewer workers pay so little into the society in which they operate?

At the end of the day social support comes from tax money, and tax money comes from wealth, and those who benefit the most from society, those with the most profit and wealth, should pay the most taxes. That should include those who hire no workers.

This debate is too often framed as worker vs employer, when it should be framed as employer vs non-employer. Everybody ahoukd have enough to live on, and we should all ne responsible to make that happen, not just those who hire. In the USA you then put the added weight of health insurance on employers, when again that cost should be shared by all of us.

 

[Togo]

@ Jolly_Penguin
I suppose it's because this is a capitalist system, and relies on capitalist mechanisms to make efficient use of resources. On that basis one way to set the price of labour would be a free market. Unfortunately, we are constrained from operating a free market by various moral ideals about people having to work in order to have a place to live, enough to eat, and access to what our society has to offer. Which means that, as a society, we don't consider it acceptable to be unemployed, and instead force people to sell their labour, on a desperation basis if necessary. Whatever you may think on that as a moral stance, the result is greatly distorted market, where the outcome of an obligation to sell is an artificially reduced price. Those with particular skills can still pick up increased wages, but for anyone who's only sellable commodity is the ability to turn up and get trained, the bottom drops out of the market, and they get paid the minimum the employer can get away with. Less than they need to survive in a sanitary fashion. Which is why we as a society then pay them welfare to top up their income.

But if we didn't indulge in punishing the poor, the result could be very different. We could simply pay them a living wage, and employers could either pay that amount or more, or do without their labour. So what would happen?

If the amount was very similar to the existing minimum wage, probably very little. Jobs that offered some form of training, or developed skills, would still be attractive. Abusive employers that treated their employees as a disposable convenience would not. A few employers would be forced to clean up their act, or be replaced by those who did. A certain amount of money would be moved, via taxation and welfare, into demand. That's about it.

If the amount were a modest rise, we'd see a few effects. Businesses who relied absolutely on the lower wage price would close, leaving a gap in the market. Some jobs would be replaced jobs at the higher wage, some by fewer higher paid workers plus automation, increasing productivity and lowering prices. Whether that's good for the economy overall is a difficult question. The overall effect is probably a good one, provided the activity doesn't simply get moved overseas.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I really do think that a basic guaranteed minimum income for all, done as a tax rebate everybody gets, would sort a whole lot of this out, especially if it came along with universal single payer health care. Unlink these things from employment, and employers lose their extreme bargaining power over employees. And then, so long as there were good labour regulations for safety and such, you wouldn't need unions either, and you'd get market pressure against both abusive employees and exploitative unions.

The way it is now, you wind up with people dying or going bankrupt over health care because they have the wrong employer, or people getting paid way too much and others way too little because one has a strong union and the other has none, and you have a market pressure to automate and get rid of employees, since companies with fewer workers aren't paying their fair share into the society that benefits them. If you are looking to "create jobs" then this is the opposite of the pressure you want to have.

 

[ksen]

You merely claim they don't own them because that is how the system is devised. It is carefully devised to prevent the workers from controlling the fruits of their labor.

Again, the carefully indoctrinated fail to ask the crucial question.

Does it have to be like this?

Do we have to have a system where workers do not control the fruits of their labor?

The wage is the fruit of their labor that they earn, and they control what happens with that money in pretty much every respect.

That's like saying the fruit of an apple tree is the fertilizer the owner gives it.

 

[ksen]

Why do you believe they're the fruits of labor? To be precise, why do you believe they're the fruits of only labor?

Which part isn't a fruit of labor?

 

[Bomb#20]

Why do you believe they're the fruits of labor? To be precise, why do you believe they're the fruits of only labor?

Which part isn't a fruit of labor?

The part from 45 degrees to 165 degrees, as measured counterclockwise from the azimuth of the stem. Duh! Good god man, can't you do basic geometry?

 

[ksen]

Let me know when you have a real answer.

 

[NobleSavage]

Why do you believe they're the fruits of labor? To be precise, why do you believe they're the fruits of only labor?

Which part isn't a fruit of labor?

What does it take to make fruit, well you need capital, risk, a good idea, probably some things I'm forgetting, and labor. The labor factor can be big or small depending on the idea. A few smart women, a little capital, some computers... labor may not even be needed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What you are missing is that it's simply two sides of the same coin.

I see, we need slaves.

That's not a rebuttal.

- - - Updated - - -

You are continuing to make the basic Marxist mistake of assuming a stable world.

If there were no progress you would see a slow decline like you think will happen.

However, in practice there is another force--innovation. The worker who was underpaid in the static world instead does something new. The more wages are pushed down the more attractive this becomes.

This is gibberish.

Marx never talked about a "stable world".

I didn't say he talked about it. I'm saying his system only works in a stable world.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The fruits that are contributed by all the expensive machinery, technology, and general business process know-how, and the ones who risk taking a loss and losing money, rightly belong to those who contributed that and took on that financial risk - the business owners.

You don't get to steal on the premise you are taking a financial risk.

That is only capitalist dogma, that the well indoctrinated do not question.

You're the one talking about stealing.

We are simply recognizing that the tools are part of what goes into making those fruits--and they (their owners) get the fruits of their labor.

 

[Bomb#20]

Let me know when you have a real answer.

Let me know when you have a real question.

 

[NobleSavage]

We don't seem to be getting along very well in this forum. We don't ever see anybody agree to anything here...even something as basic as whether we should attempt to see that everybody gets fed.

I think we agree on the general goals. It's how to get there that we debate about. If there was no disagreement this forum wouldn't exist. I don't think anyone here wants people to be hungry, enslaved, or have a shitty life. I don't think any of us want the general destruction of the environment or to kill puppies.

From my perspective you have an out-of-date anachronistic view of the world: the haves vs. the have nots; the capitalists vs. labor, and rich vs. poor. I would agree that equality, to some extent, is a decent goal. I would also agree, to some extent, that inequality has been getting worse in the US for the last 30 years. But, I'm not buying the rest of it. Would you categorize me as an evil capitalist? I have part interest in several businesses. I make less than a lot of my friends from college who got jobs. My parents did not pay for my education. I had one business fail miserably. One business I received a 10% ownership share by trading my free labor. Getting rich is not really important to me, I just enjoy entrepreneurial activities. And the thing is, I'm not alone. There are probably millions of us. There are way more of us than the uber rich on the Forbes list.

 

[ksen]

Let me know when you have a real answer.

Let me know when you have a real question.

That was a real question. Everything is attributable to labor. We would still be a pre-stone age society without the application of human labor.

Capital is just stored up human labor. Of course it's stored up and kept (mostly) by the people that didn't actually do the laboring.

 

[Bomb#20]

What justifies your picking out just one of those many factors, rhetorically dismissing the contribution of the rest of the factors, and calling the olives "the fruits of labor"?

If you're really in favour of rewarding all stakeholders in company's success, then I'd be all for that. Are you? Are you suggesting that, contrary to what NobleSavage said, the profits of a company or enterprise are not just owned by the providers of capital?

I wasn't suggesting anything about who owns what; as far as I'm concerned we haven't reached the moral question yet. I'm challenging untermensche's non-moral assumption about which goods are the fruits of which inputs. Once we establish the underlying "is" we can move on to discussing what "ought" we think we can infer from that "is".

If you agree that an olive is the fruit of a lot of things besides labor and want to move on to the moral question, I have no problem with defining ownership in some way that makes sure the provider of each contributing factor gets compensated, wherever that's reasonable. (I have no interest in tracking down the heir of the millennia-dead inventor of olive oil!) But I'm not sure what you mean by "stakeholder" though -- I'm sure a lot of people could be called stakeholders who had nothing to do with making the olive come into existence. As for who owns the profits, we risk equivocation fallacies here. Do you mean something by "profit" other than "the fraction of the income owned by the providers of capital"? If we compensate the soldiers by saying the guy who planted the tree owns the olive but then we make him pay the government 10% of the price he sells the olive for, does that mean the soldiers are part owners of the profit? Or does that just mean the olive tax is one of the expenses that's subtracted from income in determining the capital provider's profit?

The key problem appears to be profit retained by capital providers over well over the reinvestment rate.

Possibly; but step 1 is identifying what factors the olive is the fruit of; step 2 is identifying the subset of their providers who ought to be compensated for their part in creating it; step 3 is figuring out a reasonable procedure for computing how much to compensate each. We're light-years from step 3.

 

[arkirk]

We don't seem to be getting along very well in this forum. We don't ever see anybody agree to anything here...even something as basic as whether we should attempt to see that everybody gets fed.

I think we agree on the general goals. It's how to get there that we debate about. If there was no disagreement this forum wouldn't exist. I don't think anyone here wants people to be hungry, enslaved, or have a shitty life. I don't think any of us want the general destruction of the environment or to kill puppies.

From my perspective you have an out-of-date anachronistic view of the world: the haves vs. the have nots; the capitalists vs. labor, and rich vs. poor. I would agree that equality, to some extent, is a decent goal. I would also agree, to some extent, that inequality has been getting worse in the US for the last 30 years. But, I'm not buying the rest of it. Would you categorize me as an evil capitalist? I have part interest in several businesses. I make less than a lot of my friends from college who got jobs. My parents did not pay for my education. I had one business fail miserably. One business I received a 10% ownership share by trading my free labor. Getting rich is not really important to me, I just enjoy entrepreneurial activities. And the thing is, I'm not alone. There are probably millions of us. There are way more of us than the uber rich on the Forbes list.

So far you have agreed with me on about everything. The poor do not get poorer without the rich enforcing poverty on them with their choices...choices to not hire, choices to pay as absolutely little as they can and always own everything...choices to let the bottom 98% pay their way and also bail them out when they get into trouble at their casino...cementing themselves in a special cloister of wealth protection not available to anybody else.

Let's see how "dated" my views actually are. The unions are pretty much all busted or compromised into sweetheart territory. When your business failed did your congressman contact you and ask you how he could help you? Rich capitalists get this kind of concern all the time once they get "too big to fail." It costs a lot more to fix one of these bloodsuckers often than to bail out 1,000 other small businesses. When a fellow like Dimon visits the House or the Senate and "testifies," the legislators end up saying, "Let us know what we can do for you." That is a lot different proposition than the mindless slanted questionaires these politicians send to their constituents, fishing for stuff to use in their campaigns. They usually only ask what you are interested in and give a limited number of answers you can submit. The results of their surveys go to their campaign staff for processing into a sales pitch for re-election. This is here and now, Noble Savage, and the transfer of wealth to the capitalists is still in high gear.

I have never presented a utopian view here on this forum because I do not subscribe to the notion that a society can ever be stable and fixed in place by ANY SYSTEM. The best we can hope for is a genuine and sustained effort to make things better. Lacking any evidence to support the feeling anything is getting better, I would say my position on this matter is completely up to date, and it is you who are going back to a well sucked dry from outside your control, with a kind of blind faith in a system of exploitation. Your name and mine too are on nothing our government is doing.

We need to wake up to the reality that this system is producing increasing costs of living and decreasing financial resources for MILLIONS OF US.

 

[Bomb#20]

Let me know when you have a real question.

That was a real question. Everything is attributable to labor. We would still be a pre-stone age society without the application of human labor.

So? I didn't say any part wasn't labor or that anything wasn't attributable to labor. It's all attributable to labor and it's also all attributable to a variety of other factors. Production is synergistic, not additive. There is no "the part from labor" and "the part from X" and "the part from Y". It all comes from all the inputs. If any of them were missing the goods and services wouldn't exist. What justifies attributing everything only to labor?

Capital is just stored up human labor.

Why do you believe that? Because you hear people say it all the time?