Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. This piece appears as a chapter in his book, Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.
PING!
WRONG! The price is what somebody else is willing to pay for it. The pay one receives is pretty much commensurate with their level of ambition. If your ambition is to be a factory worker, then you get a factory worker's wages. If you wish to take on more risk and have the drive and ambition to succeed, you get rewarded for that.
Excellent article. Thank you!!!
Good write; good read!
Darian forgot one thing, though: one of the premises Marx put forth was a twofold comment on human nature. Both sides of the coin Marx got wrong: 1. Humans are born good but the established institutions corrupt them; 2. humans love to work.
If you get human nature wrong, you miss every possible point of social theory.
Fact is, people are born with a sin problem, expressing itself (broadly) as pride and envy. Also, people would rather not work and sometimes work harder to avoid work than they would have if they’d just done the job they eschew.
L = Labor
C = Capital
V = Value
L + C = V
L = V
therefore:
C = 0
The only thing that Marx ever got right was how to pee in the morning. For him, everything went downhill from there. Unfortunately, the SOB knew how to write, and he developed a following that ended up murdering well over 100 million people.
Right. So the Venezueleans should all be rich in oil wealth then.
“Marx said that the price of a product comes from the labor to produce it, and that therefore the laborer, and not the employer, is entitled to the proceeds. “
Marx was an idiot. The laborer did not invent the product, he doesn’t own the factory where its made or the materials from which its made. He only contributes his labor for which he is PAID. How is that exploitation?
Within a generation of Marx, even Marxists such as Eduard Bernstein in Germany and the Fabians in Britain had recognized the flaws in Marx’s labor theory of value.