I disagree because the values create a self-destructing system. When producers aren’t sufficiently valued, then the rest don’t have anything to do. That is bad. The skilled worker shortage in America is a result of these misaligned values. Why be a skilled worker and produce something when you can be a banker and produce nothing but earn a higher wage?
Why is it practical for the consumer to pay a salesman more than the producer of the article?
Is this a serious question, or just trifling me?
Seems to me like there is some is/ought fallacy at work here . . .
That’s a distortion because the brewmaster is an employee of the brewing company and the company as whole will make more than $45000/year from producing the beer. If the brewmaster owned the brewing company, he/she would get the profits rather than a salary and it would be more than the sales manager. The brewmaster is a skilled employee but the sales manager is also a skilled individual who gets paid for making profits for the company.
The relationship between producer, merchant and consumer is symbiotic rather than parasitic because all participants benefit. That’s why it has endured.
It isn’t a distortion, it further reflects how messed up the system is. You’ve got owners who do nothing other than own. The producer ought be the most highly valued, that is my point.
Yearh, that’s what the commies also said, and look how that went.
Pretty damned well, actually.
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And that doesn’t even take the early 20th century into account.
…and excatly what should this graph prove/disprove?
You are now inserting another piece into the system. You have added an owner/company which is separate from the worker/producer. I was looking at it as owner/producer ->merchant/salesperson ->consumer/user. The owner/producer gets the maximum return as payment for producing something.
The new relationship you propose is still symbiotic since all participants benefit.
It’s a serious question. This is the Philosophy board, rather than the Thoughtless Acceptance of the Status Quo board. I’m interested. 
I have never said it’s more practical to pay the salesman more than the producer, it is the system that is practically.
If a producer has so much capacity and many customer, he may have too little time to do the sales, why he must have sales staff, that is very basic buisness management, which small children in Denmark understands, why I was confused by the sencerity of your question. If he’s brewery can support other far away cities, he must send wagonloads to that city, but it’s not very practical for a big truck with wagon load to navigate and negotiage narrow streets, why it’s better to unload at a local storage where small lorries/vans can do the distribution.
Sure if you only have a local brewery, you can cut off the sales person and such.
Thank you for the explanation, but I’d managed to work that out for myself. No-one’s argued anywhere that salesmen/merchants are unnecessary at all; quite the opposite. I think you’ve lost sight of the question.
The question is why the salesmen are valued above the producers. Without salesmen, a producer can only sell a limited amount of product. But without producers, salesmen have nothing to sell.
Your stance was that that’s irrelevant as the system works as it is. I don’t think it’s irrelevant, as you could as easily dismiss a noise in running of a car engine by saying “it’s irrelevant, the car still drives”. I would like to understand why it works like that, and whether it could work better under different conditions.
In most buisness areas, there are often heavy competition, and not always do you have a superior product, why a skilled sales person is desired, if he can sell an infeior product better than the competitors, to a superior prise, the he would be higher valued than the rest of the people in the process.
What good is a skilled brewer, if he can’t sell his products? …nothing!
Xunzian I can’t use that graph to anything useable, it needs to show the comparison to how USA or other capitalist countries did at the same time, else the numbers are but meaningless and misleading.
The remuneration of the salesperson is determined by the parties involved. It’s a feedback system.
Producer - wants to maximize profit. Lower compensation to salesperson means fewer sales. Higher compensation will increase sales until price is too high and customer stops buying.
Salesperson - wants to maximize compensation. Too low and there is no incentive to work. Too high and customers stop buying.
Customer - wants to minimize cost of product. Low compensation to salesperson and product is cheap but not available because salespeople don’t bother selling it. Higher compensation will make it more attractive to sell so it will be easily available. When price becomes too high the customer will either find a competitive product or stop using the product.
Actually, the graph is better because we have a control that gets rid of many other factors. We can compare the productivity of any given worker (GDP per capita) in Russia under Communism (USSR) and in Russia under Capitalism (Russian Federation). Other countries have different conditions so it doesn’t make sense to compare them head-to-head.
Please provide any means of comparison, else I have to ignore all of your future post in this thread.