Atlas Shrugged is an excellent fictional homage the the "Men of the Mind."
Excellent!
Nice article.
In my experience talking with Marxists I have found that they think (wrongly) wealth is like energy, it cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. (They would never say it this way, having taken no science.)
In this world view, if someone has wealth, they must have gotten it from others. Those others are the workers.
They tend to argue that they should be able to hire the “thinkers” at a “fair” wage to design the computer and the plant. That fair wage may even be slightly higher than the workers wage, but not appreciably higher, and that the thinkers would just happily fill their role in society. Voila - Utopia!
They totally drop the concept of risk, reward, incentive and human nature. In fact they want to change human nature to achieve their socialist goal. They will go so far as to kill you if you don’t want to play in their happy little utopia.
Did Marx not recognize the value of intellectual labor?
Excellent post, well worth the read. Bumping back to the top.
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we’ve decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don’t you just go on and get lost.”
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well, how about this, let’s say we have a man making contest.” To which the scientist replied, “OK, great!”
But God added, “Now, we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.”
The scientist said, “Sure, no problem” and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, “No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!”
Both pure socialism and capitalism are unpleasant extremes and has never existed. A well balanced system is between it, but it has to be much closer to capitalism. Think of 1950s America as close to ideal.
The true source of wealth is the unfettered human mind. When this is joined to a political system that encourages new ideas you get an economy that is capable of extensive and prolonged growth.
Why is this so strongly discouraged by multiple political forms? IMHO, no established politician in any political form likes instability. It scares them beyond belief. A read of history since the American Revolution shows an unending list of boggy men that are violent threats to the established order. I don't think that I have to enumerate the worse examples of the 20th Century.
Our earliest agrarian forebears recognized the utility of harnessing oxen to pull carts and plow fields. If brute strength and exertion of labor were all there was to it, our ungulate brethren would have long since surpassed us.
P4L
actually it’s not a failure of what passes itself for socialism. they have outer party workers, the proles, for 85-90% of the brute labor, and then 5-10% in the inner party to do the thinking and guard and apply the knowledge to get the brute labor to dothe tasks needed to make things.
but all the secrecy and hush-hush of the big brother state, combined with no real upside helping others with what you know, makes progress go very, very slow.
I told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I will give you and your laborers as much as you need. The only restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel, land, silicon - in their crudest forms. It is up to you to assemble these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make me my computer. She thought for a few seconds, and responded "but I can't - I don't know how. I need someone to tell me how to do it" And that is the heart of socialism's failure. For the true source of wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital, but the mind. The mind creates new technologies, new products, new business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything that creates wealth. Labor or capital without a mind behind it is useless.That puts me in mind of the episode mentioned in an excellent book:During the run-up to our entry into WWII FDR, was desperate to get America ready to produce war materiel. He was afraid, for example, that Churchill was right about what would be done with the Royal Navy if Britain were to be forced to yield to Hitler. So he asked the one man he trusted to get such a vast project organized - Bernard Baruch. Whom he had learned to trust during WWI when, as under Secretary of the Navy he saw America fail to deliver any war materiel before Armistice Day. Baruch told FDR that he was too old for the job, and recommended Bill Knudsen - who had left Ford and joined a failing auto company in 1920, and built its low-price auto division into the success known, then and now, as Chevrolet. Having been told of the gravity of the situation, Knudsen became a “dollar-a-year” man getting industry organized for the task.
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur HermanUnionist Walter Reuther showed up with a couple of men who he introduced as toolmakers, and argued for his demand that his union be given a factory and contracts for making aircraft engines. FDR was of course sympathetic. Knudsen “agreed,” and gave Reuther the blueprints for an obsolescent aircraft engine and told him to make it. A little later Reuther said the blueprints weren’t enough, that they needed to see the production line. Knudsen dismissed him out of hand, and explained that anyone who needed to be told how to do the job could not possibly organize others to do it efficiently.
Even that understates the difficulty of the problem which the leftists want to assume away. Apart from command mandates, the first problem is to determine what to build. The unionist wants that to be a given. But that can only be a given in a static, controlled economy - meaning, to the exclusion of progress.
I read a socialist-promoting book, provenance long forgotten, in which the author argued that a committee of workers could figure out whether to build steam or diesel locomotives. I laughed, because not only was the question of steam silly, but worrying about locomotives was so behind the times - we were figuring out personal computers, and there were those unionists, trapped in amber, worrying about locomotives! But if unionists ruled the world, we would never have gotten to the point of making locomotives at all - steam, or any other kind.
Capitalism is progressive, and unionism is reactionary. There is no other way to put it.
The thing about the profit motive is that it is very sensitive. Profit is the difference between income and expenses, and in most businesses both income and expenses are very much larger than the difference between them. The consequence is that profit can be extremely sensitive to small changes in either income or expense. And that makes the entrepreneur very aggressive in promoting income and in curbing expense. The entrepreneur can’t afford to have a nine-to-five attitude. Those that do, go out of business.
Another restriction in the example would be the silicon wafer manufacturing facility has to be located in the PRC, right?
ping
BTTT!