Question for those in charge of hiring employees

the value of the labor is equal to the amount paid by the consumer who purchases the product/service. no more, no less. by introducing the capitalist as an intermediary between producer and consumer, you are artificially manipulating the real value of the labor. the consumer might pay 10 dollars for x, and worker might produce x in one hour for 10 dollars per hour, but by involving the capitalist in this exchange, the worker will get less for his work (which is less than the sales price), and the consumer will pay more for the product. the combined differences are the capital, the surplus value, which is essentially an artificial inflation (the price of sale) and deflation (the wage paid to the worker) at the same time.

now why would the consumer and the worker desire to make their exchange through this intermediate dead weight? why would the consumer want to pay more than the product is worth, and why would the worker want to make less than the product is worth?

these are non-problems, so capitalism isn’t ‘solving’ anything here, as you suppose. worker mobility/availability, coordination of productive and distributive forces, and job organization would all be under the administration of the workers themselves. no need for a capitalist to get involved and pretend like he’s necessary.

another non-problem. there would be no ‘on your own’ if there was no capitalist to ‘hire’ a worker. i’m not even sure what you mean here. workers will always be part of organized and interdependent groups regardless of what system they are operating in. unless you mean some guy who lives on a mountain, cures his own bear skins and then goes to town to sell them.

i’ll grant you the phrase ‘i earn more because i’m taking more risks’, even though the word ‘earn’ would be a misnomer. better to call it ‘appropriate’, which means, he’s allowed by law to own surplus value (money) his labor did not generate. also ‘working longer hours’ is a little questionable. the capitalist might stay in the office for more hours than the workers, sure, but his physical work output will always be much less than his employees per unit of time. well i should say ‘usually’. there are some petite bourgeois who do actually work some. but this doesn’t justify or make excuse for the capitalist.

and the capitalist’s ‘time and effort’ isn’t technically worth anything, for two reasons. he doesn’t actually produce anything, so there is no effort to be valued. second, consumers are valuing what the workers produce, and this production does not require the presence of the capitalist to happen. hence, while consumers might be happy that joe bob has a corner store where they can conveniently shop, what makes that shop valuable is the fact that workers fill it with goods.

after the capitalist figures his overhead and decides what profit margins he wishes to obtain, thereby setting the sales cost higher than they would be in the market if he didn’t exist.

lol - ‘charity’. the only charity running here is the charity the workers give to the capitalist by allowing him to control and keep what they produced.

correct. that characterizes the spirit and mechanics of system perfectly. well said.

I too am completely lost by what you’re talking about, so we’re probably not really even disagreeing.

For example, you acknowledge a role for “coordination of productive and distributive forces”, but not for people who coordinate productive and distributive forces? And you acknowledge that business owners bear greater risks, and work longer hours, but you don’t count the work they do (which seems like it could be well-described as “coordinat[ing] productive and distributive forces”) as labor? Why? You seem to acknowledge that someone needs to bear the risk, and someone needs to organize people and things to create complex goods and services, but still assert that the person performing those vital roles “doesn’t actually produce anything”.

When you say that “workers produce” things, I take you to mean that certain people physically pick up the parts and joint them together, etc. And I also take you to be ignoring the very difficult tasks of coordinating those activities, so that the parts to be joined are present in the proper locations and the proper quantities and all the people joining the parts are joining them in the right sequence to the right specification to build something to match plans someone had to design. All of that planning and organizing and initiating action and bearing of the risks of failure is work, productive, valuable, important work. To claim that “there is no effort to be valued” in organizing a productive enterprise, finding all the things and people and places and bringing them together, coordinating their efforts so that each contributes to a larger whole – my best guess is that all the words you’re using are meant with something other than their colloquial meaning. What am I missing?

the strength of the socialist argument isn’t going to come from proving the disequilibrium between the amount of work performed by the capitalist and the proletariat. if the socialist tried that crude approach, he’d get caught up in quibbling over what is defined as ‘more important’ work and would gain no leverage by drawing attention only to the amount of labor performed. a brick mason will burn more calories in thirty minutes than a brain surgeon will burn in a whole day, but this can’t mean that the brick mason is more important. so that approach cannot work.

look at the situation in another way. if the real value of a series of work efforts - planning material deliveries, negotiating with distributors and vendors to sell your product, scheduling factory maintenance, organizing workers and stations, managing payroll, dealing with accountants, etc., etc. - were worth precisely what the market dictated, then the company owner would be worth the same amount as a worker who performed the same tasks. so if stacey lou is making salary or wage x for tasks y (doing all of the above), then so should the company owner who’s doing the same thing. rather the company owner tells himself that when he does it, it’s somehow magically ‘worth more’ than when stacey lou does it.

to get around this pretentious nonsense, you’d deprivatize the company, set up democratic worker managements who would then collectively determine the value of doing these tasks and assign the appropriate salary/wage to that job. and the same factors that determine the value of work/product in a free, competitive market, would still exist in such a setting. say product x isn’t very popular among consumers and sales are low. workers in the factory that manufactures product x will either have to accept that the collective decision was made to pay wage x for the task they perform (an adjustment made because profits are dropping), or request/search for another job at which they can make more. the same forces of demand are here controlling (competitively) the process… only nobody is making money off someone else’s labor and everybody is working.

socialism does not seek to abolish private property, but private business. for an economic system to work, people have to be able to freely choose what material commodities they value, what they buy, since this is the very thing that stimulates material production. the consumer’s values dictate the worth of everything; the products and the value of the labor required to produce them. a communist dictator can’t just demand ‘this is the value of x’ and set a flat price for it. that’s not how it works. the market must be allowed to self-regulate, with the same element of competition to increase one’s marketable skills and/or produce a popular commodity. there is no loss of ‘incentive’ to work here, as we hear in that tired old argument conservatives are always waving around.

but there’s more. much more. you also have to imagine a future in which far less work has to be done by human beings, for two reasons; EVERYBODY is working (instead of just a majority with the exclusion of capitalists and the lumpen proletariat), and machines have become able to provide alternative forms of labor. and this with the same, if not more, quantity of production. imagine that; working less but producing more.

here’s a basic outline for such a plan: anti-dialectics.co.uk/AAA_Socialist_Economy.htm

This is question-begging. The closest we’ve ever had to a free market is the market we have now, and it indicates otherwise. So we have at least one data point that says what you’re asserting is false.

The only evidence we have says that the outcome would be that the people who do the coordinating, planning, initiating of activity, and bearing of risk would be paid significantly more than the people joining part A and part B. Do you think that a competitive market that aggregates information to set prices won’t reveal that running a business is an uncommon skill that produces a ton of value and is very difficult to do well?

I’m not saying we can’t improve the current market, we absolutely can. But those improvements are not had by eliminating this weirdly undefined concept of “making money off someone else’s labor”. Every voluntary economic exchange in a complex economy entails both parties making money (or rather, value) off the other party’s labor.

OK, so say I invent something, and want to sell it. It’s complex and will require lots of materials, suppliers, workers, etc. to get the finished product. The workers aren’t going to spontaneously organize to get all that set up, so I reach out to them. I take out a loan under my name, mortgage my house, and commit to certain orders from suppliers and hire some workers. Do these workers now seize what I’ve organized under my name, under my credit, with my house backing it? Is that what you mean by the ‘abolishment of private business’: the seizure of the products of my labor?

The fourth paragraph talks about shortening the work week in response to innovation. Let’s say I’m a worker, and I’ve got expensive tastes. Some innovation shortens the work week, but I would rather keep working longer and make more money. Can I? Or is the idea that in our socialist utopia I’ve already “changed [myself]” away from my expensive tastes, and would not want to work longer and earn more? What if I just like working? What if I want to work even less, can I work part time and just live simply, or have we all decided to want the same things so that personal preferences for how much we work and consume are no longer an issue to be solved?

That is essentially the question that is already asked in a free market because prices are determined by supply and demand in a competitive marketplace, so the value of the soda is based on what people are willing to pay in a universe of alternatives. In this case, the free market in goods works for the benefit of society by keeping prices cheap and driving innovation to increase efficiency.

Value of employees are likewise determined by supply of workers and demand for them, so if there are many workers, then their wage is cheap; if there are few workers, maybe because of welfare or rich parents, then their wage must be high to compel them into service or else find a means around utilizing human labor. But if not for other alternatives (ie welfare or rich parents), then automation and general population expansion creates a glut of workers competing for the cheapest wage. So in this case, a free market in workers works to the detriment of society by keeping wages cheap and restraining incentive to increase efficiency.

It has nothing to do with nobility except to the extent that it’s addressing the “taxation is theft” argument which is reliant upon the fact that productivity taken without agreement is somehow not stolen.

In my particular instance, I was reliant upon a desperate sort of person whose dire predicament could be leveraged against him to compel him to agree to wages that other people with more options would never have agreed to. In other words, I shook him down; ripped him off; because one can’t defend themselves, that weakness conveys permission to exploit them. So if taxation is theft, then is stealing what was stolen theft?

Now if the person were made aware of the productivity split and agreed to the division, not because he’s starving to death, but because he deems it genuinely fair, then no theft or sleight of hand occurred, and therefore the “taxation is theft” argument may have merit. “No Uncle Sam, don’t take his money and give it to me because I agreed that is the amount of money he should have.” But the exploited work says, “That SOB took advantage of the fact that I have no other options and he exploited me!” The fraud victim says “That SOB took advantage of the fact that I’m ignorant and he capitalized on that.” The rape victim says “That SOB took advantage of the fact that I’m defenseless and he capitalized on that.” There isn’t much difference.

That’s already what happens, but no one can provide a genuine answer because his value is determined by the most desperate worker, just like the value of the soda is determined by the cheapest soda.

I’m not advocating turning the system on its head, but just asking for the acknowledgement that exploitation exists and then that concession being used as ethical justification of redistributive taxation.

Usually those profit-sharing schemes don’t benefit the employee that much. If an employee really had a share of the profit, they’d be motivated to find ways to increase it instead of acting like lazy bums riding the clock. If I had paid a share of profit, then I could expect more than $50/hr in revenue per employee, but I’d also have to pay more of it out.

He is saying that the capitalists are providing jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist if not for the idea that one could get rich by providing those jobs. That is how I justified my own actions: I’m providing a service to the community, only I didn’t realize that I was leveraging desperation against people.

Now the question has to be answered concerning whether I would have started a business in the first place if I had to share much of the profits with people who didn’t have the capability to start and operate a business, and the answer to that depends on just how much of the profit I would have had to share. 50/50? Now way! I’d rather have been an employee of someone else than be an employer myself.

So the prospect of getting rich definitely drives industry which probably wouldn’t exist without such motivation. Carleas has a point there.

I basically agree with this. The market price of human labor will go to zero over time. It’s already happening in low-skill industries, and it’s going to happen everywhere this century. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed (my preferred solution is a Basic Income pegged to revenue from Value Added and Land Value taxes).

OK. I’m not making this argument, and it’s not inherent in capitalism.

So maybe the appropriate alternative question is for the employer to ask the employee to provide an accounting of her expenses: if it only costs you $300 per week to survive, and your work is worth $400 a week to me, let’s split the difference at $350.

I agree that seems absurd. Similarly, it seems absurd for an employee to expect that they can get an accounting of what will be done with the value of their labor as part of negotiating their pay, or to hold that the only way to reach a fair, non-theft, non-exploitation agreement is for both parties to provide this information.

One pretty significant difference is that the employer made her ‘victim’ better off. They may have accepted out of desperation, but they would have been worse off if they hadn’t accepted (indeed, that’s the premise of accepting our of desperation). The same isn’t true of being defrauded or raped.

That’s why employers offer it, particularly to people whose labor has a significant effect on total output (e.g. management and executives).

For low-skilled labor, there are game theoretic limitations on how much it can motivate. One of ten thousand people on an assembly line can’t meaningfully move the needle, so the pay-off to free-riding is likely to outweigh the pay-off to working harder that equity could provide. So you don’t see a lot of equity for low-level jobs, other than in start-ups, which are borrowing against their future by paying in equity.

hmm i don’t think we’re on the same page. what you said earlier was that the ‘work’ that the capitalist performs in managing his business is… wait lemme go find the quote. right here: "I earn more because I’m taking on more risk, working longer hours, and my time and effort is worth more to others.

so if your time and effort is in performing those tasks that stacey lou gets a salary/wage to perform (when she’s hired by someone to do so), why would your time and effort ‘be worth more to others’? what makes the work of performing those tasks more valuable to consumers only when a capitalist does it, and not when stacey lou does it? see where this is going? the total net value of joe bob’s business, the thing that makes it ‘worth something’ to consumers here, is the resulting product it provides to them. and if we divide that product up into all the various kinds of labor involved in producing it, each part of its production would have its relative value. guy running the machine, guy loading the deck, guy sweeping the floor, guy supplying the line with parts, guy stocking the shipment warehouse, guy cleaning the employee bathroom, … and stacey lou, who does all the things the company owner used to do himself before he hired her. each of the parts contributes to the whole process of production and has its relative value. now why and how would the relative value of what stacey lou is doing suddenly be ‘worth more to others’ if a capitalist is doing it instead?

i’m not sure i understand the question. running a business is uncommon because business owners are a minority… not because running a business is an ‘uncommon skill’. you can make just about anyone a business owner if you gave them a calculator and a note pad. nothing to it. and ‘difficult to do well’ is like a hasty generalization. what if bob can do easily what john struggles to do? how do we quantify ‘difficult’?

i don’t think the aggregate information revealed by the market tells us that business owners are a special type of people that possess skills workers can’t have. of course, business and production is incredibly important and often difficult to get right… but what does this have to do with that class of person called the ‘owner’? ‘owner’ is just a word that basically means one has the legal right to control the fate of some material thing. doesn’t mean he’s some kind of special addition to the chain of production that adds value to it. he doesn’t. he’s just ‘there’. stacey lou can do everything he does… and incidentally, for a fraction of the cost… because stacey lou sure as hell doesn’t get as much a capitalist x ‘gives himself’ when he does it instead.

btw, what kind of name is ‘stacey lou’, anyway? did i do that, or did you? i can’t even remember.

holy smokes dude. for a fantastically smart fellow you sure missed one of the simplest of details. profiting from someone else means to pay someone an amount that will be less than the amount made from the sale of what was made. if you are not doing this - which is the very definition of the capitalist - then you are not ‘making money off other party’s labor’.

frankly i don’t know what the reds would do to ya in such a situation. i’m not entirely sure how the transition would be made regarding how and what you get to keep. but along with the seizure of your business would probably come the elimination of much of your credit debts… as these are debts to yet more capitalists. the revolution would literally level the whole playing field and hit the reset button on everything. you wouldn’t be obligated to finish your mortgage because the bank that gave it to you would also be seized. same with all your payments to any other creditors. there carleas would be, a clean slate, nothing owed, and on his way to his job which he absolutely loves on a bright sunny morning. the new carleas, the new work ethic, the new man.

i thought the answer to this would be without saying. there is always something to do; if someone wishes to work more, they’d consult with the worker’s party who would then decide how to best make use of this desire to work. they’d putcha somewhere, believe me. and you’d be able to work your little heart out, comrade.

yeah there’s a grey area here that’s difficult to navigate. there are things that are necessary commodities, and then there are luxuries that aren’t necessary… like the wacky wall walker. remember those? some dude got rich off that idea. however, why couldn’t the state take the same risk and come up with some novel product like this for the same reason? who knows… maybe the people would like to have a spatula that talks to you… let’s try the idea and start making them. if we fail, we’ve lost nothing; we simply re-allocate the resources we use to produce the talking spatula to some other use. but what happens when a capitalist fails at such a venture? a small disaster for hundreds if not thousands of workers.

anyway, don’t think that people need to have the motivation of ‘getting rich’ to come up with marketable ideas. there’s plenty of shit that needs to be made, and plenty of space and time to be used in creating novel ideas which may or may not be successful. only difference is, in a socialist economy, nobody takes a bullet when an idea fails. there is an immediate rebound. none of this unemployment shit and scrounging around for another job. how many people with degrees end up working at mcdonalds because they can’t find a job? in a socialist society, very special attention is paid to your skill set, and you WILL be put where you are most able to perform according to your skills. if you don’t want to do this… then go get a job at mcdonalds. but at least you are given the option to decide, rather than having to take the job because you are not given the opportunity to do what you do best. an astrophysicist working at harris teeter is some bullshit that would only happen in capitalism.

Consider identical twin A and identical twin B.

B is adopted at birth by a financially less well-off couple whose house location and nearby affordable facilities are in line with the state of their finances. The neighbourhood is representative of this.

A is kept by his more well-off biological father who is in construction, and biological mother. The respective education and opportunities of the twins differ in line only with their different environments, until at the age of 18, B is out looking for a job and A is hiring for his construction enterprise that he inherited from his dad, along with all his knowledge and expertise. B has no such background but has the same work ethic and desire to get into construction as A had.

By chance they meet and A offers B a job, paying him 50% of what he produces because this is the going market rate for people of his experience for the job he is doing.

Now consider the question:

The fact is that B does not have the skills that A has, and it’s these skills that are relevant to the task at hand - case closed? They’re essentially the same people, they worked and continue to work just as hard as each other with the same drive and capacity for creativity and ingenuity, only their environment was different - and the damage is done.

A is being rewarded for having been initially more fortunate, and B pays the price.
Simple as that.
Equity of opportunity? Not at all.
But Capitalism has zero problem with this, the free market dictates it and it is done.

More realistically, one’s work ethic, drive, motivation etc. can even be relatively damaged by poor initial environmental conditions - no matter “who you are” genetically. The less fortunate who incur such mental damage are castigated further for their resultant inferior learned disposition, and the loop feeds back on itself. And the more fortunate congratulate themselves and boast about how much more they work and how much more deserving they are because of who they are - the fundamental attribution error. They pass down their advantages to their offspring because they are ever so deserving just as their children are…

As emotionally liberating as it is to feel “free” to trade as you please: taxes be damned, the twin example above illustrates just how consentual each part of any trades can be - the consent diminishes the less powerful your position is. “A” can take or leave the employment of “B”, they have everything going for them already and plenty of other employees to choose from if any at all. “B” is far more limited, and this is all the ethics there is to such “free trades”. But hey, the damage is done, the inequality is just practical! “A” is simply trading an opportunity that he values less than “B” who wants/needs to take it - the profit comes from the difference in valuation - the inequality is ethical!

To turn all of this to the topic of the thread:
As a potential employee you immediately pay a price as soon as you honestly address this situation. How disruptive and potentially damaging to the team spirit you are with your pessimistic attitude! Essentially it’s a violation of perceived obedience: “this is the system, accept the story, play the game, ask the acceptable questions”. The American ideology of “freedom” - as Orwellian as it gets. This is the necessary submission of the mere wage labourer, regardless of the potential that never got to flourish, or any potential still remaining that spills outside of the required mandates on offer. Such restrictions are lessened for those who were more fortunate - and their reward is the possibility to be even more fortunate in future!

The requirement of voluntary trading is just as involuntary to the one who does not find their vocation at the right time. So desperate is the need for everyone beyond school age to have “any job” so long as it is “a job”, so we can all ensure the availability of faster food, branded clothing and jewellery, and reality TV (just note the lack of shop variety at your local shopping mall the next time you go). God forbid it’s their fault or they’re faking it! Better not to take the chance and scrape together what little wealth you can get your hands on, in spite of its incessant trickle up to pool in the hands of those who are to be rewarded for having already been rewarded. Clearly the tactic is to make the poorer feel so grateful to have what little they have that they can’t bear the thought of giving any away, and to gratify the rich so much for having so much and deserving every penny unlike those poor people who just weren’t as good at the core of their being. Fair distribution? Ha! You first, buddy (pincered you there!) Cornered as a result of the system, not all other possible ones - but who has the time and energy to conceive of such indulgences these days?

So Stacey Lou (you invention) isn’t bearing any risk, she’s being paid a salary rather than whatever surplus the business earns, she isn’t the driving factor for the business, she gets her direction from some other person. She isn’t doing what the owner does. Owner-managers add more value than managers.

But your claim is that it’s a better deal to be the owner. If all it takes to avoid exploitation is a calculator and a pad, what’s the problem? Anyone who doesn’t like to be exploited can just start a business and be their own person!

The answer, of course, is that this isn’t true. Business failure rates are high, profits for most business owners are low, starting and running a business takes a lot of work and it’s difficult to do well, and we know that because lots and lots of people try to do it and fail.

Every time anyone voluntarily exchanges dollars for goods or services, they believe they are getting more value in goods or services than they are giving up dollars. And simultaneously, every time anyone voluntarily exchanges goods or services for dollars, they believe are getting more value from the dollars than they are giving up in goods or services. That’s what makes economic transactions happen: both parties believe they will be better off after the transaction.

Silhouette, I don’t see anything I really disagree with in what you’re saying. But I also don’t see you blaming A for paying B what B’s labor is actually worth. There’s no suggestion that it’s unethical that A makes rational choices about running his business, only that it’s unfair.

And I agree, it is unfair. The most unfair part about it is that A’s labor is actually more valuable than B’s. It’s not that A is getting paid more because he’s rich, it’s that because he’s rich, he has human capital that actually lets him contribute more to society. It’s obvious if we turn his parents into doctors who put him through medical school, right? There, he’s got a very clear skill, backed by character traits absorbed from being raised in a financially stable household, likely surrounded by a community of financially stable households, all of which instilled in him habits of mind and character that made it possible for him to focus on studying, invest in education, and come out as someone who can save lives, while B’s precarious upbringing left him capable of factory work.

That’s truly, deeply unfair. But it’s not A’s fault any more than it’s B’s fault, and it’s not best solved by pretending that B’s labor is worth more than it’s worth.

Continuing with the medical school hypothetical, suppose we have A the doctor and B the factory worker, and K the doctor and C the factory worker who are a parallel set of twins. And B hurts his back at work, and needs to go to a doctor. And K has a practice in town, and C also decides, what the hell, to give doctoring a go, despite not having gone to medical school. And so B is looking to employ K or C, who are asking the same price for their services. And obviously even B recognizes that K’s services are worth the price and C’s services are not.

Economic decisions are often seen as moral decisions, but they aren’t, they’re rational calculations. Treating it as somehow unethical to recognize and act as though different people’s time and effort is worth different amounts of money is going off the same fallacy.

[lots of typos fixed]

That’s right, I didn’t blame A for acting rationally within the system he is in. I also don’t believe employers regard their employment decisions as unethical when they are deemed rational.

What say you to the idea that rational choices can be unethical? - in the cooperative sense of morality.
The competitive reality of the Capitalist system requires that the comparative advantage of paying less and getting x amount of tradable productivity is higher than paying more and getting x+y amount of tradable productivity. Does real constraint necessarily permit ethical behaviour? Or is ethical behaviour tempered to apply relatively within real constraints?

The latter is the attitude of pro-Capitalists, in my estimation. Do you agree? I would say that the former is the question of anti-Capitalists.
It may be the case that all the good that emerges from Capitalism in practice outweighs all the good that can emerge from an alternative economic system that is not ethically constrained by the reality imposed by Capitalism. Enquiring minds want to know! So far the alleged and apparent evidence indicate not only that this is the case, but overwhlemingly so - again, in the cooperative sense of morality, which I think it is safe to assume we are all assuming. The push and pull to negotiate how to pursue or abandon further experiments continues…

The key to the conundrum, I find, lies in voluntary trade - as I mentioned it’s an emotionally wholesome notion and one is potentially a fool for arguing against it in the same way that one is a fool to argue against free speech - lest they themselves have their freedom to argue against free speech revoked. But there is less of a contradiction in speaking against action and speaking against speaking - free speech itself is bounded by law to not be free to incite violence: to inspire certain kinds of action. What then of being free to trade, altogether on a different level to being free to enact violence and I find the notion that actions that are not physically harmful are “violence” to be trite.

To then challenge voluntary trade within reason: it is already accepted that trading “rationally” in the purest sense of free trade is ill-advised, lending possibility to practices of defrauding, fooling, scamming others. It is a question of extent: to what degree do we restrict the freedom of trade?

Politically, it seems that a lack of fairness draws a great deal of support - there is attraction to the motivational idea of winning, for good reason psychologically speaking, and there is also attraction to the motivational idea of others losing on a much more tacit level. However, from what I have learned from Zizek’s commentary on ideology, there is psychological value that cannot be overlooked in forbidden pleasures that everybody knows occur, but nobody wishes to explicitly admit. I take a great deal of pleasure, for example, in destroying my enemy in a gaming environment - not least in the knowledge that their means to live are not impacted through doing so. Forbidden pleasures, yes, but to what extent? Yes to the motivational power of competition, but no to extent of it affecting the loser’s means to live - especially when losses are likely to spiral. The allure of equally spiralling gains ought not to override this, not only ethically, but also due to their diminishing returns. It appears to be accepted that “winning” in terms of means to live positively impacts happiness only to a certain point, after which it becomes more of a burden and perhaps an oppressive obsession not only at the expense of others but also at the expense of oneself.

So, rationally and ethically not constrained by the realities of Capitalism, I am looking primarily to the concept of motivation and only consequently well-being - as a whole, but by taking into account the individual as best I can within the context of a cooperative effort. I am not looking to the value of high ideals in themselves: the attractive notion of nobility in the attribution of individual blame and judgment unto people as they are, as though they were islands whose current positions we merely accept without any question other than “what next?”. I believe the latter to be the battle-ground of pro-Capitalists, and I would have the battle-ground expanded.

Yes UBI is the most sensible solution since then no one is forced to work for the profit of another in order to survive and we could then assume that all work is voluntary. Wages could be regulated by the amount of UBI, antiquating min wage laws. UBI should be the amount of money required to at least live a meager existence or else it wouldn’t fulfill its purpose of making all work voluntary.

Only the capitalists make that argument. I don’t see many socialists hollering taxation is theft lol. It’s only the pirates proclaiming pirated loot is proprietary.

But that’s still leveraging someone’s dire predicament against them which is exploitation.

I mean, companies have recent begun hiring felons and druggies in order to escape raising the wage to attract quality employees. They are using someone’s situation as leverage to minimize wages.

A guy I know working for a Berkshire company said there are 30 jobs open perpetually that pay almost twice the minimum wage. I say raise the wage and people will stick. Instead of doing that, he’d rather characterize the people as lazy bums who won’t knuckle-down and work for the peanuts he’s offering. And that same company has stopped drug testing in order to hold wages down.

“What??? No one will hire you because you’re a crackhead??? What fortuitous circumstance be this; no one will work for me because I’m a greedy prick! Welcome aboard!” :evilfun:

Yes it’s unrealistic, but my point isn’t to fix the system, but illustrate what’s going on and how the rich are getting that way.

I suppose that’s true. I paid a fair wage and workers were better off working for me than not, but it still wasn’t right, evidenced by the fact that I had to hide what I made and pretend I was just as poor as they were.

Management and executives are the ones overpaid to start with. They don’t do anything commensurate with their pay which is a disservice to shareholders and society.

For whatever reason, american workmanship used to be the standard of quality, but now it’s a mark of shame that I seek to avoid when making a purchase because I know, for whatever reason, the american worker doesn’t care about quality. Obviously there is no incentive for him to care, and that’s especially true in unions where employees can’t be fired.

It might be a better technique of persuasion if we concede a few points in favor of the capitalists. Running a business is a gigantic pain in the ass! Although, admittedly, most of it is self-imposed. I had to be a jack of all trades just to do one trade. I had to juggle employees who may or may not show up on time, or at all. I had to predict the weather, repair tools, repair damaged property, console customers, learn accounting, insurance, legalities, I was human resources, sales, mechanic, accountant, etc all rolled into one, plus being a worker and it drove me crazy! I just wanted to be left alone and work without dealing with a bazillion variables zooming in random directions, but if I wanted the money, then I had to do it. Not everyone can do that kinda thing. It requires a drive and motivation to get ahead.

My complaint isn’t against the small business owner, but the ceos, managers and executives who don’t do anything, except play golf and fly around in private jets, while exploiting those who do all the work to support their opulence.

I don’t know. Who is the state? On what merit did they come to power? And does that merit convey creative genius?

Doritos used to have more sprinkles. I emailed FritoLay and told them they’re not putting enough flavoring on their chips, so they sent me coupons for free bags of bland chips. To date they still haven’t fixed the problem and I hate the totalitarian control they have over a staple of Americana. But if the gov seized the company, would I have anymore influence than I do now?

That’s a good point.

It’s not to come up with the ideas, but to go to the effort of the pain in the ass of running the business.

The capitalist would say that no one forced anyone to get a degree, especially in something silly like philosophy. They would say it’s a gamble that didn’t pan out.

Makes sense.

consumers who buy things value the things they buy, and couldn’t care less what ‘risk’ is taken by a company or what the ‘driving factor’ is, or who gets what ‘direction’ from who. a consumer is not going to value the broom they just bought more because the owner of the company that made it stayed in the office and extra thirty hours and experienced five headaches.

the capitalist across the street makes brooms too… and he stayed an extra forty hours and experience seven headaches. should the consumers who bought his broom value him more than the other capitalist across the street? no. they don’t care anything about that shit. they care about brooms.

we are talking about the TANGIBLE value prescribed to the market by those who participate in it by buying. what i’m saying is that the REAL value of any given form of labor is worth what it is, based on to what extent it is part of the production of things consumers buy. this means that when capitalist does x, it is no more ‘valuable’ than when stacey lou does it, because x has no tangible value other than what it contributes to production.

what all this means (and this will address your comments too, dipper) is that we are either just talking about capitalism, or creating arguments that are being made to defend and justify it. and the above argument does no such thing. rather it’s just something the capitalist tells himself after a careless and uncritical examination of what ‘value’ means. no special feature is given to the capitalist for all the headaches and struggles and risks and whatever else he has/takes when we are asking about the value of his actual labor… what he actually, physically does in the chain of production. and if any of those things can also be done by a worker, then those things are not special forms of labor that require a capitalist to be ‘done’.

so to say ‘capitalism is necessary because there is a special kind of work that only an owner can do’ is nonsense. and to further say that capitalism is good because it creates a context in which a class of people will exist to be able to do that special work, and be needed to do that special work, is an extension of the same nonsense.

if we are merely describing capitalism, then yeah, these points being made in this thread are fine. but if these points are being raised as some kind of defense for capitalism, it ain’t workin’.

very true, but here’s the difference. and it has to do with how ‘profit’ is defined here. of course, both the wage worker and the capitalist are content with their transaction insofar as each believes it will bring them into a state of greater satisfaction. but it’s the nature of the satisfying thing that is different; a worker cannot buy anything with the happiness he just got from accepting the job… but a capitalist can buy something with the profit he makes from selling the worker’s products. the worker’s profit is the satisfaction he experiences… a mental and emotional abstraction. the capitalists profit is money… a real, concrete thing… that, incidentally, can be used to purchase more forms of satisfaction. but a worker can’t use a mental and emotional abstraction to purchase anything.

different kind of profit.

Silhouette, I lean towards seeing morality as something that flows from reason, so I’m tempted to say that rational choices cannot be unethical. However, that invites a lot of post-hoc rationalizing about how anything that look immoral is really irrational on some other level.

Another way to say what may amount to the same thing is that whenever the market creates outcomes that seem immoral in a utilitarian sense, it’s a market failure, almost by definition. If market transactions are voluntary, the parties are going to be made better off or unaffected – the choice is the evidence. Third-parties can be hurt by transactions, and that is one type of market failure.

But I see the market as primarily about information: it aggregates and disseminates information about peoples wants and the ability to meet them, and that enables the production of significant value. As such, we can learn some things we might not like, for example that people don’t actually value privacy, or that the market for porn is bottomless. In that sense, I take what you call the “pro-Capitalist” attitude: if our ethics are utilitarian, we’re revealing our utility through the market, and we should hesitate to label the outcomes unethical in the absence of evidence that the information is being distorted. And, by the same token, we should hesitate to intentionally distort the information.

That said, we know a lot about certain market failures, certain areas where the market doesn’t accurately aggregate information, e.g. because the people affected don’t get a say on the price, or because the individuals who do affect price are behaving in strictly irrational ways (i.e., their preferences aren’t self-consistent).

To me, the cooperative effort is structuring the market toward the end on minimizing those failures, and maximizing the information processing power of the market. I think this is not quite capitalism, though it often aligns with it. There’s space for things like redistribution, which can improve information by pricing in the common good of a well structured market, and by shifting some buying power from low marginal utility spenders to high marginal utility spenders.

I think making work more voluntary is good, but I don’t think the minimum is survival; I would support a very low UBI. If we can afford that, and we can maintain productivity through automation, all the better, but that isn’t a given. I think it should be about giving people a real dividend of the positive spillovers of a well-functioning economy, and pricing in the value of that cooperative effort.

Well, your boy Daly was a tax protester. Socialism bleeds into anarchism at certain extremes. Given horseshoe theory, I would not be surprised to see a similar sentiment expressed by extreme socialists (though maybe you would not call them socialists).

But in any case, I don’t get the impression that most capitalists make that argument. Capitalism requires a certain amount of market regulation and enforcement of contracts and private property rights, it has to accept some mechanism for funding those things.

And my point is that the question doesn’t really do that. If it’s unreasonable for both the company and the employee to ask for the equivalent information, it tells us more about what’s reasonable for any party to a market transaction to expect, rather than about any inequalities in bargaining power between parties.

Come now, you don’t care about shareholders!

But I mostly disagree. The value produced by management and executives is hard to quantify, but that cuts both ways. I would argue, and the market certainly indicates, that managers are valuable. However, it does seem likely that top executives are overpaid, ironically due in part to a discontinuity in information availability: the salaries of CEOs of publicly traded companies is public, which tends to drive up the price of CEOs! I strongly support making everyone’s income public, though that would need to follow implementation of a better social safety net.

Sure, but the things they buy don’t exist without someone taking the risk. If consumers want things to buy, they also want the people who take the risks to take the risks. They want someone to be the driving force on bringing a product to market, and someone to direct the whole operation to make it run. And so, because those activities result in the things that the consumers buy, the consumers do care, they just don’t know that they care.

There’s a bit of survivorship bias in your argument here. Lost of companies go under, because consumers don’t want what they offer. But what consumers want is an unknown until they are offered things to buy and either choose to buy them or not. You can’t choose to only propose true hypotheses, you can’t only run experiments that will vindicate your hypotheses, and you can’t only create products that are exactly what consumers want. You need the failures to have the successes, and you need people to take the risk to provide both.

This is a weird argument. Workers are literally paid in money.

EDIT: words

Ah but a wage/salary is not a ‘profit’, see. These are agreed upon amounts of money to be paid in exchange for a certain period of performed work or a certain unit of production. And this amount is always less than what the product is worth (what the capitalist gets for it)… so there is no profit being made here. If anything, it’s negative profit. I’m in a burger king at the moment so im’a holla atcha later.

But the relevant ‘product’ here is the labor the worker is providing. And the wage is always greater than the value of the labor from the perspective of the worker. So the worker trades her labor for money, and the difference in value to the worker is the worker’s profit. The employer trades money for labor, and the difference in value to the employer is the employer’s profit. And both the employer and the worker profit because economic transactions are positive sum.

The value of the labor for the laborer, in that moment, perhaps gambling.

I have crawled to the edge of the desert nearly. Yes, I take out my wallet and pay the demanded 1000 bucks for the bottle of water from the opportunist tourist I bump into just before going unconscious. Of course I make that decision and survive.

But was the value to me in that situation the value of the bottle of water?

Was the value of my labor - given I have a family, given the economic situation, given…etc. - the value it was to me given a situation - a situation perhaps encouraged by the firm I am working for - the actual value of my labor?

The laborer is often making a gamble - certianly many miners were, for example - given situations that were shaped to a much greater degree by the people offering them a certain wage for their labor.

Well, you showed up, so that means you are getting what you consider your labor is worth, plus something…

I don’t think that holds.

Did it hold for sharecropper southern blacks?

The options by those in power to make a society with certain characteristics that then in turn allow for very limited choice which allows for wages at a level that is very low.

At what point between sharecropper south and now and in what industries did fairness become the rule?

The first sentence looks like modus ponens, but the distributivity looks like “I form”, and the second sentence seems to be an admission of a propositional fallacy if you try to affirm the consequent.

That is to say, if morality is something that flows from reason, does that mean that immorality cannot also flow from reason? Further, cannot morality flow from something other than reason: say irrationality? Or do you wish to deny the antecedent as well?

This whole area of thought seems to be trespassing on the realm of the Naturalistic fallacy, or the Is-ought problem. However I am inclined to think of certain rational decisions as resulting in something that looks like morality close enough to be taken for it e.g. giving to others because you reason that it will create a better atmosphere, even beyond the direct relationship between giver and givee. Haha, I like that term, “givee”: “taker” seems too tainted by its possible usage as someone who is taking advantage of another’s kindness in a competetive context rather than as part of the event of giving in the cooperative sense. But I also think morality can come irrationally, and that immorality can be both rational or irrational.

So if it were accepted that the market creates outcomes that seem immoral in a utilitarian sense, necessarily, then it is by definition a failure. Not a complete failure though, since not all outcomes are immoral, but when it functions as it does without equity of opportunity, that is immoral.

I agree that the nuanced information that the market provides is a huge strength. And if nothing else, its results do open up social questions that may not have otherwise been given credence, such as your examples of whether people really do value privacy and to what extent they do porn. This is most certainly progress and I would not hesitate to give the market its due for all the good that it does, but it is without ungratefulness that I still ask whether or not we can do better. Computational power, particularly enhanced by AI is an unprecedented injection that is lacking in previous experiments to do without it, and it cannot be overlooked.

However I do think we have evidence that the information that the market provides is being distorted. One way is what I’m intending my argument to convey: that voluntary transactions compromise the degree of consent between the two transacting parties - in favour of the one with more power. If we really wanted to know how much something is mutually worth, both of those transacting must have the same to lose and the same to gain prior to the transaction. As it is, we only learn what it’s worth within the context of prior inequality. There’s an overall correlation between the two, which is why the market is not useless and still serves a useful purpose and provides information that is not without validity.

In large part the market requires complete rationality in order to function optimally in the ethical sense, however it also permits the practice of advertising that operates almost purely to encourage irrationality. So we have at base a system that results in lack of equity of opportunity, in favour of those with more opportunity and against those with less, causing growing inequality, only enhanced by the effects of the advertising industry that it allows. Growing inequality in favour of the powerful tends towards monarchy whether or not it can finally reach it - and I wouldn’t be so quick to say it can’t. So not only does the market result in doing away with itself, it tends towards the centralisation of power. Is that ethical?

Yes, it’s possible to cooperatively minimise the failures of the market alongside Capitalism - but not aligned with it: the opposite in fact. Redistribution directly counters Capitalism and we can improve information and shift buying power from low marginal utility spenders to high, but with the tide against us. Just think how many industries exist whose sole purpose is to allow Capitalism to continue, that nobody would miss if they were removed from the world excepting of their value that exists only because of Capitalism. I am talking not only about advertising, but the financial services, so much admin - all the red tape that is passed off as a result of the enemy of Capitalism, when in fact it would not be necessary if not for Capitalism in the first place. Who is a high marginal utility spender? Someone like Elon Musk (used to be?) or Bill Gates before him when he was helping create the world’s most popular operating system rather than simply renting it like he does now - these are figureheads of bringing technologies that empowered humanity in a very real sense. There have been countless more with less attention afforded to them who have contributed to such successes as these - these are the people that we want to be working. Does the world really need another recruitment agency to drive it into the future, or do these people only have jobs in order to maintain the necessary foundation for voluntary trade: that everyone has a job and can thus warrant money being paid to them? These people are employed to dig holes and fill them back up compared to the real innovators of the world - get rid of them. The free market it becoming more of a crutch than a liberation.