Nobel-prize winners:
Posted on 09/18/2005 9:19:51 AM PDT by Willie Green
Angel Mills worked at GST AutoLeather in Williamsport, Md., most of her adult life. She cut, inspected, packed and shipped leather upholstery until she was laid off in June 2003 as the company scaled back local operations and shifted production to Mexico.
"It's sad. It's scary. I've been a factory worker all my life, and I didn't know what I wanted to do," said Ms. Mills, a 38-year-old Williamsport resident with a teenage son.
But by March 2004 she was taking a half-year course to become a state-licensed massage therapist. A federal program that helps workers who lose jobs owing to foreign competition paid for her training and offered extended unemployment benefits.
In July, she started working at Venetian Salon and Spa in Hagerstown, Md.
~~~SNIP~~~
Mr. Thomas said that for all trade adjustment program workers passing through the consortium, the average wage was $14.36 an hour before the layoffs, while after retraining it was $11.87 an hour, a decline that is common for factory workers who have to restart their lives.
U.S. Labor Department figures indicate that among the retrained, those that find new jobs end up making only 70 percent to 80 percent of their old wages on average.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
It is at very beginning:
For example "promote the general welfare" does not mean promoting the interest of the owners of capital only. General means for every group and every interest including workers. "Establishing justice" - does the word justice means anything to you?
People who approach economy only from the point of the employers/investors and relegate the rest into category of losers or "talking tools" promote the real class warfare where profits are good and wages are evil.
And what is the remaining $ 20 trillion? How real are the "savings deposits", "credit market instruments", "corporate equities", "mutual fund shares", "insurance reserves", "pension reserves"? What backs them up?
No doubt. I'm circling like a vulture. Oops! Does that make me a capitalist, or [gasp] a "free-trader?" If I gratuitously bash Milton Friedman in order to establish my paleo-bloshevik cred, will I be ok?
I see. your opponents quote a Nobel-prize winning economist and you quote poetry and damn 'merchants' for daring to be 'ungrateful' to kings.
"It was the government ie kings and the feudal aristocracy which built the legal order, suppressed the banditry, civilized the barbarians, created the stable money, safe roads, defeated foreign enemies, protected the cities and merchants on the roads."
Er, more likely, it was the kings and lords who created a legal that enabled them to keep the spoils of production and reduce others to servitude, aka serfdom.
The alternative to it is known as Freedom. America decided to get rid of Kings in 1776, and the decision on whether slavery or free labor was the right and just way to organize economies was decided by 1865 .... so your points are a tad out-dated.
The general point that Governments proper roles to "built the legal order, suppressed the banditry, civilized the barbarians, created the stable money, safe roads, defeated foreign enemies, protected the cities and merchants" ... is agreeable to me. Government is designed, as Locke noted, as a civil compact that enables societies to protect the rights of the citizens therein. The government role includes:
1. Build the legal order
2. Suppress bandits/criminals and have safe roads
3. Create stable money
4. protect from foreign enemies
...
These are the kinds of things Governments can do. By itself though it is NOT wealth creation, it is merely creating conditions of stability and safety so that private enterprise can flourish. That's my point ... NONE of these things are about restricting commerce, but about ENABLING commerce. I support such a conception of Government, as does any 'free market' or 'free enterprise' supporter.
"Thanx to the above merchants became prosperous and powerful, removed the king from power and demanded that market becomes the highest standard."
Oh dear, those ungrateful merchants! They should keep the King on high, and let him enjoy the fruits of their labor eh? LOL. and btw, what 'higher standard' is the king upholding?! Violence, despotism, beheading of dissidents?
"Merchants want state to exist only in the aspect of protecting their wealth ie police, courts, prisons and military. The rest of society to be damned."
Man are you a misguided soul... You actually think there is something wrong with rights of property!
Protecting property protects everybody. Property rights are the cornerstone of human rights. Without property rights, no newspaper can exist; without property rights, a man is a serf to the state-owned enterprise to whom his living is owed.
After all your caterwauling against free enterprise, it comes down to this - you hate materialism itself!
Well, you could have cut to the chase and *told* us you have no need for prosperity!
"But it does not work that way, the revolutionaries have seen the opening and the Communism and Fascism filled the vacuum. Merchants are not fit to be the guides for the society, left to their own devices they will wreck it."
Let's review your weak grasp of history one more time:
Communists have taken over in pre-industrial societies and in Russia. In Russia they engineered a coup d'etat against a government that in turn had just taken over from an autocratic monarch. Likewise in China, it was an autocratic regime the communists were fighting... You praise kings, yet it is Kings, Czars, and other despots who inevitably lead to other forms of despotism like Communism and Fascism... In the cases where democracy was murdered, like Hitler did in Germany, it was severe economic distress, brought about by Government mismanagement, NOT the merchant class and not free-market economic policies.
You are simply wrong. You desperately want to believe that we somehow 'need' some useless Government chains and anchors on our economy to avoid some wrose anchors and chains being applied. Hogwash, successful economies like Ireland and USA since Reagan era show that economic freedom begets prosperity and political success both.
You are wrong about your romantic notions of previous eons. In those ages my ancestors had their land stolen by other brutes, lived short lives and were forced to work horribly poor soil. Life was nasty, brutish and short until Capitalism arrived to create the modern world and free millions, nay billions, from drudgery and toil. Now I have time for internet debates.
All these things that capitalism did for you, and what did you do for capitalism? ... Some people can be so .... ungrateful.
As they used to be through the most of US history.
Quote: We send them dollars and they send us goods. They have dollars, not IOUs. They then need to either buy our goods, buy US bonds, buy US stocks or stuff the dollars under their pillows. Tell us why any or all of these options are bad for America?
You left out this one. They can also buy our american companies.
The American economy treats a person's labor as a commodity. That's why a doctor is paid more than a painter. A doctor's time and labor is considered more valuable than a painter's equivalent time and labor, because there are fewer doctors available and more people want their services.
The alternative is a socialist economy -- where doctors and painters are paid the same (according to their need) yet are coerced to work by the state (according to their ability). Is that what you want?
That's the reality. You're inadvertantly calling the American economy evil, and the Cuban economy noble. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by saying it's inadvertant.
and wages are evil.
As a capitalist, I can tell you that a wage is simply the name for the price of labor on the market.
For example "promote the general welfare" does not mean promoting the interest of the owners of capital only. General means for every group and every interest including workers. "Establishing justice" - does the word justice means anything to you?
What is "unjust" with letting people make employment contracts as THEY WISH without Government engaging in restrictions and regulations on them?
Establishing Justice is about getting criminals locked up and protecting peoples rights.
If an employer and an employee sign a particular form of employment contract that you might not think is good, should they be made to be criminals? What about their 'right to work'? Don't you care about their rights and freedoms to do as they wish?
People who approach economy only from the point of the employers/investors and relegate the rest into category of losers or "talking tools" promote the real class warfare where profits are good and wages are evil. ... it's totally unnecessary to divide it at all - this division into classes is Marxist clap-trap. We are all capitalists and we are all laborers, and the interests of both are intertwined. Capital is just stored labor-value and another input to production; any employee is just an entrepreneur who rents his own skills, as a manufacturer rents his factory. Look at the economy from the holistic perspective - that all interests need consideration and the best way to satisfy all interests is to maximize freedom. Indeed, the rising tide does lift all boats; not a mere platitude, but a fact of economic statistics, as the profit margins and share of the economy spent on wages tends to be consistent: So as the economy does well, both wages and profits go up, as the economy contracts, both go down. YOU CAN'T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.
As they used to be through the most of US history.
You mean the protectionist McKinley tariffs that caused the depression of the early 1890s? The Smoot-Hawley tariffs that initiated the Great Depression in 1930? Those tariffs?
Buying the same product at a higher price is an opportunity cost, and results in potential wealth not being created. (I've already explained more than once exactly how and why) Nonetheless, in a free market you're free to waste your money and be poorer for it.
As they used to be through the most of US history.
I'm not a historian, but I'll think of some off the top of my head. Sugar; steel; lumber; beef; cotton? Lets say you impose a tariff on all of these products. The people who profit are the producers of those goods in this country. The people who pay extra for it are every manufacturer who uses these items in their production, and indirectly every single consumer who buys such a product.
It's a tax by another name, and it ultimately results in the net destruction of wealth through opportunity cost.
Did Nike shoes lower their price from $85 for a pair of shoes to $35 when they shut down the memphis TN plant and move to Mexico??
Nobel-prize winners:
A Pole: Setting the minimum wage is a measure of the same type like anti-trust laws.
Hmm, the analogy doesn't compute ... anti-trust laws are designed to prevent monopolization. There is no 'monopolization' involved in stopping certain labor transactions.
"It prevents the market from ruining itself it is not intended to provide jobs."
Well, it does no such thing. If the labor market is healthy it is not impactful; if the labor market is unhealthy it is of no help. At best, it trades slight marginal increases in some low-wage job wages for higher marginal unemployment in the labor pool. Generally, I would think that is a poor tradeoff from a social policy point-of-view.
UK unemployment rate is 10% for 18-24 year olds. Would you call that market 'healthy' or 'ruined'? What do you think unemployed youths end up doing? Do you really think its better to have unemployed youths rather than having starting wages be a bit lower, but getting more of them in the work force?
James Watt used the so-called "flyball governor" to regulate the speed of his steam engines. You free market guys must hate him, Watt wasted so much power, unregulated engine would go much faster!
The Free Market *has* a "governor" - it's called the pricing mechanism... without Government price controls, ALL MARKETS CLEAR. With Government price controls, eg min wage laws, some markets can get screwed up. Worst case, you can create serious unemployment with a badly designed minimum wage law.
Your analogy is an unintended illustration that free markets actually do NOT NEED government intervention to work properly. Long live the pricing mechanism!
Why dont you post the Nobel prize winners in *ECONOMICS*?
And Warren Buffett and the Walton family too.
Raise the level of abstraction one level up: monopolization can be an undesirable result of market competition which undermines competition. Minimum wages laws prevent wages from reaching market equilibrium of subsistence and creating stratified stagnated society.
Both measures by regulating market protect it from itself.
Ummm...that's inbound foreign investment. You know, the damn foreigners are buying our country?
Ummm...what part of "They then need to either buy our goods, buy US bonds, buy US stocks or stuff the dollars under their pillows" did you not understand?
So, now that they've bought American companies, can you explain how that's bad for America?
It's not my argument, it's Adam Smith's - the high priest of capitlism.
Who is to say that a manufacturer's profit would rise if the cost of labor quadruples?
And that's not what he's saying. Perhaps you should re-read the excerpt.
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