Wealth Redistribution or Wealth Return?

[Bomb#20]

And I don't "hate the wealthy", by the way; I am the wealthy,

All this. This first accusation to fly is that those of us complaining “hate the wealthy.” Except, like Politesse, I am the wealthy

More later when I have time, but let's clear this up now. There is no "us". You didn't express hatred for the wealthy; therefore I didn't accuse you, Rhea, of hating the wealthy. I was describing Politesse -- what I wrote was an attempt at an accurate paraphrase of the expletive Politesse wrote in the post I was quoting. If you think Politesse doesn't hate the wealthy, then please answer two questions:

(1) If a Jewish person wrote "Christians. That produce all the things the dip<scatological reference> Jews have neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.", would you deduce that he must not hate Jews because he is one, or that he's a stereotype of a self-hating Jew?

(2) After rereading Politesse's post #114, what do you think is the correct translation of Politesse's scatological metaphor into nonscatological and nonmetaphorical language?​

Outside of some academic ivory tower, in the real world you don't get to call people excrement and still be presumed to be a person having good will toward them. It doesn't work that way.

 

[Bomb#20]

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?
...

What makes you think the working class doesn't understand the manufacturing process? Seems kind of bigoted to me.

Does it indeed?

In the first place, does "Which is why we have.... a working class. That produces all the things the wealthy dip<expletive deleted> class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce." also seem kind of bigoted to you? You didn't comment on that apparent bigotry. Outgroups are like children -- it's different when they're yours.

In the second place, I didn't say the working class doesn't understand the manufacturing process. "The capacity and the knowledge" is a set containing two elements.

And in the third place, it's perfectly normal for a group to lack knowledge that one or more members of the group have. For example, I presume you've heard of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"? Groups have a group dynamic of their own; there could perfectly well be a factory worker who knows what it takes to do all the stuff the workers need managers and owners for, but the others don't know how to identify her and put her in charge.

 

[Elixir]

Outgroups are like children -- it's different when they're yours.

Yes, and if one is aware of that, does it not behoove one to modify one’s behavior accordingly?

 

[Bomb#20]

Outgroups are like children -- it's different when they're yours.

Yes, and if one is aware of that, does it not behoove one to modify one’s behavior accordingly?

It does. If you're hinting you think I've treated an outgroup unfairly, feel free to elaborate...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

Another response that confuses your unfounded beliefs with fact.

More importantly, your argument that manufacturing wages don’t count when showing that wages do not (or do, for that matter) keep with inflation is illogical, because they are wages.

Provide the factual evidence that wages have kept up with inflation to support your view instead of making up bogus criticisms.

And once again you try to derail rather than address the point.

It used to be there were a lot more high skill manufacturing jobs. Now most of the high skill jobs are in other areas. You are treating the hourly wage manufacturing worker as representative of workers in general and that is wildly wrong.

And the request for information that has been provided multiple times in the past is yet another form of derailing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?
...

What makes you think the working class doesn't understand the manufacturing process? Seems kind of bigoted to me.

Does it indeed?

In the first place, does "Which is why we have.... a working class. That produces all the things the wealthy dip<expletive deleted> class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce." also seem kind of bigoted to you? You didn't comment on that apparent bigotry. Outgroups are like children -- it's different when they're yours.

In the second place, I didn't say the working class doesn't understand the manufacturing process. "The capacity and the knowledge" is a set containing two elements.

And in the third place, it's perfectly normal for a group to lack knowledge that one or more members of the group have. For example, I presume you've heard of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"? Groups have a group dynamic of their own; there could perfectly well be a factory worker who knows what it takes to do all the stuff the workers need managers and owners for, but the others don't know how to identify her and put her in charge.

And there probably isn't--that's calling for a lot of skills that it would be unlikely for a factory worker to possess. It's not merely better, but different. Consider one that caught me out just today--my code calculated the "value" of the inventory as a purchase price. Oops, it needs to be what it costs today. Write the code, easy--but I'm not an accountant, I didn't realize what was being done with the data.

 

[laughing dog]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

Another response that confuses your unfounded beliefs with fact.

More importantly, your argument that manufacturing wages don’t count when showing that wages do not (or do, for that matter) keep with inflation is illogical, because they are wages.

Provide the factual evidence that wages have kept up with inflation to support your view instead of making up bogus criticisms.

And once again you try to derail rather than address the point.

It used to be there were a lot more high skill manufacturing jobs. Now most of the high skill jobs are in other areas. You are treating the hourly wage manufacturing worker as representative of workers in general and that is wildly wrong.

And the request for information that has been provided multiple times in the past is yet another form of derailing.

Complete hogwash.

I do not see that the link #Bomb 20 provided us for the median wage in manufacturing. Why do you assume it is the median mfg wage?

But even if it is, non- mfg wages are still wages. If they are not keeping up with inflation, then wages in general are not keeping up with inflation even if some wages are. That is basic reasoning, so please stop with the bullshit accusation of derailing

Of course, even after request, you have presented no evidence to support your assertions. If you have presented such evidence in the past, then you should be able to easily reproduce it. Not every participant or reader in this thread may have seen that alleged data, so asking for evidence is not a derail, Refusing to do so is poor form. And your accusation of derail on that point is offensive and smacks of disingenuousness .

 

[Politesse]

Outside of some academic ivory tower, in the real world you don't get to call people excrement and still be presumed to be a person having good will toward them. It doesn't work that way.

You're the one who characterized my criticism as being of "the wealthy". Wealth is not the problem, I'd be very happy if everyone had the things that make a person "wealthy" in this world. But those who abuse the power they have to devalue and manipulate the labor of their employees, whoever they are, deserve no respect. They're criminals, and not out of necessity but out of greed.

Bomb, would you be more comfortable if I restricted myself to kindergarten-level insults in the future? Those meanie-heads!

 

[Bomb#20]

It strikes me that even if we assume that CEOs have a rare and valuable skill that most people can't match, there remains something to explain about their remuneration levels.

There's a big gulf between "We need someone to organise this huge and complex business", and "We need someone to organise this huge and complex business and we must pay him enough to buy a private jet and a super-yacht and a number of large houses with big staffs of servants and ...".

We need people to do brain surgery, and because that skill is rare, we need to pay neurosurgeons enough for them to become millionaires. But we don't need to pay them enough to become billionaires; Is running a corporation really a thousand times more difficult?

You appear to be assuming that jobs should be paid according to their difficulty; and you appear to be assuming the decision of what to pay them should be made by "we". Shareholders pay CEOs like that because they don't expect offering CEO jobs to people who charge less will result in higher profits. Why do you think shareholders should be making that judgment based on difficulty instead of based on criteria they prefer? And why do you think "we" should be entitled to override shareholders' judgment of what they will spend their own money on?

Or are we assuming that if someone generates new wealth in a technological society with an existing and complex infrastructure, they are entitled to keep most of that new wealth, rather than share most of it with the society that enabled them to create it?

What in god's name makes you think they are keeping most of it and not sharing most of it with the society that enabled them to create it? The source of the wealth generators' income is the new wealth -- the excess of what the product is worth to the customers over what all the consumed inputs were worth to their respective producers. That new wealth gets divvied up among all the people who helped make it happen. Corporate profits tend to be paper thin, because so much of that new wealth is going to the customers, the workers, the managers, the other suppliers, the infrastructure providers, and so forth. All those people carry out their roles in the production process because the new wealth is shared with them. Of course most of the new wealth is shared with the society that enabled the generators to create it.

 

[Bomb#20]

...So people engaging in this sort of rhetoric typically use total output per hour of labor as a proxy for productivity. But it should be painfully obvious that adopting this computational procedure amounts to giving labor 100% of the credit for production. I.e., it's just another way to repeat the Labor Theory of Value's metaphysical premise that the source of all value is labor. A partisan can pick any input he pleases, declare it solely responsible for production, and thereby "prove" the providers of that input are exploited.

Marx even recognized that his system can't produce capital--because he said societies should wait for industrialization before going communist. That only makes sense if he understood the workers couldn't build the means of production.

So, what, the CEO goes out and does the digging? Sure...

The problem is things too big for one person to build.

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy [hated by Politesse] class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?

Obviously, or we wouldn't have them.

That's a circular argument -- you're de facto saying the wealthy class are parasites and the evidence for this is that the wealthy class are parasites. How do you know we wouldn't have those things if a working class didn't have the capacity and the knowledge to produce them?

Workers do not typically choose to produce all that stuff by themselves without the help of the wealthy class; instead they choose to cooperate with members of the wealthy class to carry out processes in which workers and wealthy people produce that stuff jointly. But nobody's holding a gun to the workers' heads and prohibiting workers' co-ops -- if a bunch of workers want to cut wealthy people out of their operation they're welcome to have a go at it by themselves. But instead workers go ahead and produce with wealthy people's help, because they lack the capacity or knowledge to do it without the wealthy people they include in the process. (Or else they do it jointly because if they try to do it by themselves they won't be able to produce as much or to such high standards of quality, which comes to the same thing -- they lack the capacity or knowledge to do it well.)

It is because wealthy people are in fact useful and important to production processes that when idiotic creationist socialists seize control of societies and make workers work without wealthy people's help, production quantity and quality plummet and famines ensue.

But, this system that keeps the super-wealthy classes fat

That metaphor is so past its sell-by date. Capitalist countries are so spectacularly good at delivering food to the masses that obesity is a disease of the poor.

and happy beyond any reasonable definition of need must be redesigned if our nation-state is going to have any hope of keeping up with the other advanced polities and corporations of the world.

By "advanced polities", are you referring to North Korea? Show me one of these "advanced" polities or corporations you have in mind that doesn't keep its capitalists happy "beyond any reasonable definition of need", and that our nation-state is having any difficulty "keeping up with". You're being ridiculous. "To each according to his need" is a recipe for mass starvation.

A socialist is a person who believes the steps in the goods and services origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen.

What "steps" are you referring to? Buying up stocks because your money manager says they're hot today?

The steps socialists most often neglect when they're envisioning their noncapitalist utopias are the motivational steps. Capitalism survives on its ability to deliver win-win solutions. The shareholders' and managers' main role is to collectively see to it that each person cooperating in a production process comes out ahead, so that he or she will have a reason to continue to cooperate. And yes, buying up stocks because your money manager says they're hot today is one tiny one among all those myriad steps that indirectly help manufacture a motivation in the brain of somebody bolting two parts together. Socialists imagine they can get rid of the "buying up stocks because your money manager says they're hot today", along with the rest of the bits of the mechanism that causes that motivation to arise in that brain, and yet still have the motivation. Socialists imagine this because socialists are creationists.

 

[bilby]

Shareholders pay CEOs like that because

They are mostly either CEOs themselves, or expect to become CEOs in future.

And of course "Shareholders" here means those individuals who have a controlling share; Mom and Pop investors are outvoted and have no actual say.

The "Shareholders" making these decisions are part of a small clique of CEOs and other top executives who are in charge of large financial institutions. "Institutional investors" are not represented by a vote amongst the pension fund contributors or other small investors whose money is pooled by the institutions; They are represented by a vote amongst the board members of the institutions.

The decisions might include considerations about what is most profitable; But as long as they don't render the corporation so unprofitable that it collapses, the major consideration could, assuming self-interested behaviour, be personal enrichment.

Do you have any grounds to assume that many (much less most) top executives are public spirited rather than self interested, when making decisions that could lead to them acquiring further wealth?

 

[Politesse]

Workers do not typically choose to produce all that stuff by themselves without the help of the wealthy class;

So you admit that the workers are the party that produces all the stuff? If so, you are now agreeing with my point that you originally objected to.

(With grown-up language censored for your comfort):

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy dumbo-head class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

Whatever the aristocracy provides to the equation, it is not the knowledge or the labor to produce valuable commodities.

That's a circular argument -- you're de facto saying the wealthy class are parasites and the evidence for this is that the wealthy class are parasites.

Made no such claim, and wouldn't do. I favor greater parity between workers and owners, that is certainly true. And it is true that there are parasites in our system and that our economic system as currently constructed favors those who game the system with fraud and financial hijinks more so than those primarily responsible for making it function.

I should make it clear that to my mind, if a manager or CEO is actually doing something useful - manufacturing a good, contributing relevant expertise, etc - that to my mind absolutely makes them a "worker" as well, with no more and no less of a right to the fruit of their labor as anyone else.

Simply having money is not what makes someone a member of the dipsh... well, the dumbo-head class. All dumbo-heads are wealthy, not all wealth is the result of dumboheadedness.

By "advanced polities", are you referring to North Korea?

No, I had Germany and China in mind. We are losing our international weight and influence in a hurry because of our unwillingness to curb legal grift. I know this is very hard for you to understand, but not everyone who is willing to critique the American economic system is a communist.

The steps socialists most often neglect when they're envisioning their noncapitalist utopias are the motivational steps.

The perception (especially if correct) that a worker's labor is severely under-valued, and their rights not guaranteed by the state, is not very motivating in fact. If we continue to pursue crony capitalism as a goal, we're going to start seeing ever-increasing numbers of our best and brightest flee for other nations where their work is more valued and better compensated, and where they can get an education without a tuition weight equal to the value their degree was supposed to give them. I have never once heard a European worker say that they would work harder if only they made half as much money as they do, or if only their vacations weren't paid.

In short: it is only a "win-win situation", as you say, if both parties agree that they are winning. Not just the party in power.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

Another response that confuses your unfounded beliefs with fact.

More importantly, your argument that manufacturing wages don’t count when showing that wages do not (or do, for that matter) keep with inflation is illogical, because they are wages.

Provide the factual evidence that wages have kept up with inflation to support your view instead of making up bogus criticisms.

And once again you try to derail rather than address the point.

It used to be there were a lot more high skill manufacturing jobs. Now most of the high skill jobs are in other areas. You are treating the hourly wage manufacturing worker as representative of workers in general and that is wildly wrong.

And the request for information that has been provided multiple times in the past is yet another form of derailing.

Complete hogwash.

I do not see that the link #Bomb 20 provided us for the median wage in manufacturing. Why do you assume it is the median mfg wage?

I assume it's the median wage in manufacturing because the same data keeps getting regurgitated--occasionally properly labeled. I've already explained this!

But even if it is, non- mfg wages are still wages. If they are not keeping up with inflation, then wages in general are not keeping up with inflation even if some wages are. That is basic reasoning, so please stop with the bullshit accusation of derailing

Of course, even after request, you have presented no evidence to support your assertions. If you have presented such evidence in the past, then you should be able to easily reproduce it. Not every participant or reader in this thread may have seen that alleged data, so asking for evidence is not a derail, Refusing to do so is poor form. And your accusation of derail on that point is offensive and smacks of disingenuousness .

The data about not keeping up was hourly manufacturing. That doesn't say other jobs haven't kept up.

<Beats Laughing Dog with a copy of How To Lie With Statistics>

 

[laughing dog]

I assume it's the median wage in manufacturing because the same data keeps getting regurgitated--occasionally properly labeled. I've already explained this!

Your assumption that something is true does not make it true, no matter how hard you wish it to be nit how often your claim it to be true. At least you admit you are making an assumption.

The data about not keeping up was hourly manufacturing. That doesn't say other jobs haven't kept up.

Your first sentence is an assumption. Assuming it is true for argument’s sake, your comment is valid. But it is up to you to provide evidence to support your claim. Which you have still failed to provide.

 

[bilby]

That's a circular argument -- you're de facto saying the wealthy class are parasites and the evidence for this is that the wealthy class are parasites.

Well, the human condition is that some people in almost any group of sufficient size will want to be parasitic on society; That's not generally a huge problem, but it becomes a problem when we look at the wealthy, because wealth brings with it disproportionate power, and a powerful parasite can order society in ways that reward parasitic behaviours.

Poor people who want to freeload on society are largely prevented from doing so by both the power of democracy, and the power of the wealthy. But when those freeloaders are rich, they are often able to leverage their wealth to the generation of more wealth, without necessarily being productive at all; A certain former US President (the same one who is shortly to face charges relating to the mishandling of secret documents) springs to mind.

There are laws and regulations that are intended to limit the ability of wealthy people to fraudulently or larcenously increase their wealth, but the ability to hire expensive lawyers and accountants goes a surprisingly long way towards undermining those laws and regulations.

The wealthy class, like all classes, contains many wannabe parasites. The wealthy class, however, has a unique ability to enable such parasitism, and so those parasites that thrive are disproportionately drawn from the wealthy class - and of course, any of those from less wealthy backgrounds who manage to thrive will soon join the wealthy class; That's what "thrive" means in this context.

It's not so much a circular argument, as the recognition of a vicious circle.

 

[Bomb#20]

Shareholders pay CEOs like that because

They are mostly either CEOs themselves, or expect to become CEOs in future.

Cite?

And of course "Shareholders" here means those individuals who have a controlling share; Mom and Pop investors are outvoted and have no actual say.

The "Shareholders" making these decisions are part of a small clique of CEOs and other top executives who are in charge of large financial institutions. "Institutional investors" are not represented by a vote amongst the pension fund contributors or other small investors whose money is pooled by the institutions; They are represented by a vote amongst the board members of the institutions.

And? All those pooled small investors allow the board members to make those decisions for them because they don't expect firing them and either switching to direct shareholder democracy or hiring a replacement board will result in higher profits.

The decisions might include considerations about what is most profitable; But as long as they don't render the corporation so unprofitable that it collapses, the major consideration could, assuming self-interested behaviour, be personal enrichment.

And? If the shareholders think there isn't a close enough alignment between their own interests and the self-interest of the CEOs, other top executives, and board members to keep the latter's eyes on the ball well enough that firing the lot of them will increase shareholder profits, they're free to fire the lot of them.

(In case you're about to argue that that's a mere theoretical possibility which doesn't happen in practice, exactly which part of "hostile takeover" don't you understand?)

Do you have any grounds to assume that many (much less most) top executives are public spirited rather than self interested, when making decisions that could lead to them acquiring further wealth?

Do you have any grounds to assume that the economy is secretly controlled by lizard people from Mars?

In fact, do you have any grounds to assume that many (much less most) top executives are public spirited rather than self interested, when making decisions that could lead to them acquiring further wealth? I'm not the one who made that assumption; you are, Mr. "They are mostly either CEOs themselves, or expect to become CEOs in future.", as though being a current or future CEO himself would magically motivate some shareholder to make the public-spirited choice to raise the pay of some completely different CEO for the sake of maximizing the total wealth of CEOs as a class, instead of self-interestedly choosing to keep more of the company's money for its own shareholders including himself.

 

[bilby]

All those pooled small investors allow the board members to make those decisions for them because they don't

have any other realistic options.

It's a rigged system. The pooled small investors have the democratic ability to get the decisions they want from the board, in exactly the same way that the pooled popular votes of Americans have the democratic ability to get rid of the Republican controlled Senate.

 

[Toni]

Just thrrowing something out there: in my job in a high volume clinical ( and reference) lab, everyone possessed certain skill sets that were somewhat specialized. Those of us on actual benches possessed more specialized technical skills. Some of our management teac ( attached to our lab) we’re actually competent to perform some or most of the same testing we did, if somewhat out of practice. Our actual lab supervisor was….qualified to recap samples.

Physicians using the test results from our tests were competent to use those results to understand the patient’ s condition, prognosis and to prescribe treatment. Without some time training, they could not perform the tests I did. I was also competent t to troubleshoot instruments abd assays. We had a couple of specialists who could do more in-depth repairs than I could. Of course there were many different specialists with expertise in regulations, IT, testing development, etc. within our smallish lab that was a tiny part of a much larger health care provider.

I’m mentioning this because we techs regarded our work as fairly similar to factory work —and in some ways, it was. Like any business of more than a handful of employees, different employees, management, and owners have different areas of expertise and different skill sets.

An intelligent and wise owner and/or member of management recognizes and respects that employees have different skill sets, different expertise relating to their jobs—and they are willing to fairly compensate all workers for their expertise and skill.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I assume it's the median wage in manufacturing because the same data keeps getting regurgitated--occasionally properly labeled. I've already explained this!

Your assumption that something is true does not make it true, no matter how hard you wish it to be nit how often your claim it to be true. At least you admit you are making an assumption.

The data about not keeping up was hourly manufacturing. That doesn't say other jobs haven't kept up.

Your first sentence is an assumption. Assuming it is true for argument’s sake, your comment is valid. But it is up to you to provide evidence to support your claim. Which you have still failed to provide.

Repeatedly asking for sources that have been previously provided is derailing. I've addressed this before.

 

[laughing dog]

I assume it's the median wage in manufacturing because the same data keeps getting regurgitated--occasionally properly labeled. I've already explained this!

Your assumption that something is true does not make it true, no matter how hard you wish it to be nit how often your claim it to be true. At least you admit you are making an assumption.

The data about not keeping up was hourly manufacturing. That doesn't say other jobs haven't kept up.

Your first sentence is an assumption. Assuming it is true for argument’s sake, your comment is valid. But it is up to you to provide evidence to support your claim. Which you have still failed to provide.

Repeatedly asking for sources that have been previously provided is derailing. I've addressed this before.

Your belief does not make it true. The data on wages us from the BLS which is for all industries, not just manufacturing That data suggests wages do not keep with inflation. It is up to you to present evidence to support your counterclaim if you want people to your claim seriously. It is clear from the lengths you have gone to avoid preventing evidence that you are unable to support your claim and are hiding behind bogus accusations.