What about Ricardo's Law of Wages Stabilizing at Subsistence Level? Or should we follow Milton Friedman's pick and chose methodology?
What about Ricardo's Law of Wages Stabilizing at Subsistence Level? Or should we follow Milton Friedman's pick and chose methodology?
Interesting. From your link:
In a compelling three-part series of articles first published in India, Huck Gutman, a visiting Fullbright professor at Calcutta University, paints a troubling picture of a global economy that increasingly relies on a desperate workforce, which, compelled by circumstance and vulnerable to exploitation, is forced to toil for subsistence wages.
Now, are these desperate workers living under a system of too much (gasp) freedom or too much government control?
Your communist upbringing appears to have you a bit confused. Try reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, might clear things up a bit.
Let's start with some basics: A free society is predicated upon individual freedom. And individual freedom starts with a basic property: the right of self-ownership. Self-ownership means we are entitled to the fruits of our own labor, i.e. that they do not belong to the government. This leads to the right to own property. That, in turn, leads to the right to capitalize that property ownership (i.e. be entitled to the value of one's own property). And for the sake of argument, let's say you decide to build something. You are successful and hire others to build for you. You must decide what their wages will be. Wages are not an arbitrary assignment: doctors earn more than housekeepers because doctors' skills are scarcer, for example. Wages are thus assigned a value by the market, and here's where you begin to get muddled. What is the market? This, again, is where you should turn to Hayek, who pointed out why socialism and the planned economy are always less efficient than the market economy: market pricing.
Why is pricing so important? Because, as Hayek noted and Kirzner added (as is paraphrased here: the coordination of the actions of millions of specialized producers and consumers around the global market is brought about through the price system. Any change in someone’s willingness or ability to supply or demand any product anywhere in the market is registered through a change in the price of the good, service, or resource in question.
Furthermore, such changes are occurring all the time in a world of unceasing change. The resulting changes in market prices due to shifts in supply and demand conditions are constantly creating new profit or loss situations.
A central task of the entrepreneur, Kirzner has argued, is to be alert to these shifts in market conditions and indeed to anticipate them as best he can.
His role in the market economy is to bring about modifications and transformations in what goods are produced, where they are produced, and with which methods of production, so that production activities are continuously tending to reflect the actual patterns of consumer demand.
Through his alertness to profits to be gained and losses to be avoided, the entrepreneur ensures the adjustments to change that are required for a process of continual coordination of market activities, upon which both the existing and an improving standard of living are dependent.
This all comes down to the point that artificially raising and/or lowering prices disrupts the wisdom inherent in the market (which is a process, not a place). Now, if you wish to speak of justice, fairness, morality and the role of the individual worker: then explain to me the morality of protecting the job of one person at the expense of the job of another is inherently moral? Because protectionism WILL lose the jobs of many more potential employees to save the job of one. "Saving" the job of the candlestick maker loses the job of the electrician, the lampmaker, and the light-bulb manufacturer, among others. Equally, "saving" the job of the steelworker loses the job of an autoworker, a washing-machine manufacturer, a refrigerator salesman--because you have artificially raised the prices of those commodities and thus artificially dampened demand.
If you do not believe in free markets, you do not believe in liberty. Period.