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Tell us all about this “unequal exchange.” Tell us how someone sells their labor for $10/hour when it is “actually” worth $100/hour. And make sure you tell us which of the crackpot Marxist theorists you’re paraphrasing.
Worth to whom? Is there a machine assigning value to everybody? Nope. Owning class assigns value to the peons according to their ideas about work place hierarchy. There is no formula just a rough sketch of a pecking order. According to the crack pot right wingers, who naturally fall in love with Econ 101 because of its social Darwinian undertones, that pecking order is a force of nature that appeared shortly after the Big Bang. It is not. All humans are time and health limited creatures. This sad fact propels humans to parasitize other humans in order to get a boost to the only two things that matter. Free humans do not normally exchange their time, health, sanity etc. at highly unequal rates of exchange. Modern humans do it all the time. Getting from F to M was a long bloody story and it is not over yet.
If you, Chicago School of Economics faculty, Heritage Foundation luminaries, Fox News anchors and fortune 500 CEOs will end up at an uninhabited island it will take substantial number of corpses and cracked skulls to set up an economy with measly 1:10 labor exchange rates forget 1:1000+ exchange rates which are the norm today. Cracked skulls always precede Econ 101. Btw practical Marxists did not differ much from practical capitalists as far as their reliance on universal wage slavery, but eventually the ruling comrades got tired of 1:10 income differential +/- and decided to join civilized world where sky is the limit.
Worth to whom? Is there a machine assigning value to everybody? Nope. Owning class assigns value to the peons according to their ideas about work place hierarchy. There is no formula just a rough sketch of a pecking order. According to the crack pot right wingers, who naturally fall in love with Econ 101 because of its social Darwinian undertones, that pecking order is a force of nature that appeared shortly after the Big Bang. It is not. All humans are time and health limited creatures. This sad fact propels humans to parasitize other humans in order to get a boost to the only two things that matter. Free humans do not normally exchange their time, health, sanity etc. at highly unequal rates of exchange. Modern humans do it all the time. Getting from F to M was a long bloody story and it is not over yet.
If you, Chicago School of Economics faculty, Heritage Foundation luminaries, Fox News anchors and fortune 500 CEOs will end up at an uninhabited island it will take substantial number of corpses and cracked skulls to set up an economy with measly 1:10 labor exchange rates forget 1:1000+ exchange rates which are the norm today. Cracked skulls always precede Econ 101. Btw practical Marxists did not differ much from practical capitalists as far as their reliance on universal wage slavery, but eventually the ruling comrades got tired of 1:10 income differential +/- and decided to join civilized world where sky is the limit.
Refusing to answer a simple question, while re-posting your previous diatribes, does little to further the discussion. So, I’ll try again:
Quote:
Tell us all about this “unequal exchange.” Tell us how someone sells their labor for $10/hour when it is “actually” worth $100/hour. And make sure you tell us which of the crackpot Marxist theorists you’re paraphrasing.
Be specific. Help those of us that don’t possess your superior intellect to understand what you’re saying. . .
Because, deep down, there is a desperate narrative at work in these people. Based on the posts I've read on this thread, it seems to go sort of like this:
"I am incredibly smart and talented. So why don't I have the kind of success that those people over there have? I am obviously smarter than they are, so there is something wrong here. They must have taken shortcuts. They must be bad people. If they are bad people, then they have become wealthy through immoral means. Therefore it is up to me and my preening intellect, as an arbiter of what is good and valuable in our world, to strip those undeserving people of their unearned wealth.
"I don't care if they worked hard and navigated their companies to the tops of their respective industries, because any idiot can do that. I don't care how much they sacrificed, because people who work around the clock in pursuit of their dreams are chumps. I don't care if they hired people and paid them a good wage. Whatever they made, they did so by dishonest means, unlike me. They obviously don't deserve it because I don't have as much money as they do.
"So I will use terms such as slavery to characterize them, even though it is a completely dishonest way to describe them. I will dehumanize them into lazy stereotypes and assume that all they care about is filthy lucre. Why? Because in order for me to have more money, I have to take money from them, and that means stripping them of their humanity. The means justify the ends after all. I can't wait to smirk at that darned Todd at our 20th class reunion, Mr. Most-Likely-To-Succeed and National Merit Scholar. Him and his Audi convertible and gorgeous wife (Who turned me down for Senior Prom, the uppity cow) and nice house and vacations in Italy. Him and those precious little articles about him in Bloomberg and Fortune that make me want to vomit.
Yeah, that Todd. I'll love it when people like me take people like him down a peg. I'll fix his little red wagon. Right after I get off my shift as the assistant manager at Arbys. I'm still ticked off that I was passed over for promotion to Manager. That Juanita must have slept with someone to get the job over me. I'm going to get even with her, too."
I mean, need a clue about the mentality of the article's author? Look no further than the photograph he uses: A large yacht. You can almost hear the envy crackle through every syllable. It's almost as if he says, "Yeah. That guy's having way too much fun in life. He's having more fun than me. I have a moral duty to keep him from having fun." Like some half-pint Puritan or something.
Good post. The combination entitled/victim mentality some people have is bizarre. I'm amazed that article even made it into a mainstream paper, it reads more like something you would see in the
"Daily Worker."
Refusing to answer a simple question, while re-posting your previous diatribes, does little to further the discussion. So, I’ll try again:
Be specific. Help those of us that don’t possess your superior intellect to understand what you’re saying. . .
I gave an elaborated answer on the primeval origins of "worth" you mentioned. If it contradicts your firmware to the point you do not view my reply as an answer it is ok with me. I believe you have enough of instinctive imagination in you to imagine what would happen if Econ 101 fan club will try to set up 1:10000 labor exchange rates after getting stranded somewhere remote. It will not be pretty. But again your imagination contradicts your firmware so you choose no entiendo route to fight cognitive dissonance.
Last edited by RememberMee; 02-16-2019 at 07:20 AM..
You have zero understanding of economics. Just a grab bag of resentments. You can't even form a coherent thesis.
Logical fallacy 101 - an argument from authority. You refusal to look at the coercive foundation of Econ 101 does not constitute lack of understanding on my part. You talk about how the prison operates and assigns worth to different classes of inmates and I was mostly referring to what it takes to build a prison.
But Dave Ramsey has a program/plan that can make anyone money, into the thousandaire, millionaire and conceivably billionaire.
Live below your means, save your income and invest it.
We have a lower income, and are late to the party, but in just 10-15 years, we too, will be plus millionaires.
Had i not had serious medical issues years ago, I'd already be a millionaire on my way to billionaire status.
Invested money IS money put to use.
Taxing billionaires WON'T enrich poor people who make poor choices with money. Those who have hefty tax refunds blow it all in a month after getting it. Rarely do poor choice people put their tax refunds into investments. Rarely do they have anything to show for it a year or even 6 mos later. They also apparently dont know how to fill out a w4 so as to keep that money throughout the year. It comes down to poor money management.
Most lottery winners are dead broke in 10 years time from winning. They still make poor choices and blow their winnings.
ANYONE, ON ANY INCOME can spend less than their earn, save 15% of their income lifelong and INVEST FOR THE FUTUREAND become wealthy.
GIVE a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. TEACH a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime.
Oh, ok so it's the government's place to steal money from people if they decide that person doesn't really need it? Who appointed the government the judge of what someone else needs? I'd rather INDIVIDUALS decide what they need, and if they earned their money legitimately, they're entitled to every dollar they make. It's not a question of "what's good for society," it's a question of individuals being protected from overreach by governments. Wealth redistribution is not a government's job whatsoever and it baffles my mind how anyone can think that.
Beyond that, it's shocking how naive people are that they think if someone is worth $2 billion, that money is magically just sitting in some bank account and they're really not even using it. You don't really think that, do you? You realize that if someone is worth $2 billion, most of that is probably EQUITY in a business they own, don't you? My paper net worth makes me seem like a very wealthy man, but I don't have much cash. I have a comfortable amount, I'm doing fine, I can eat out whenever I want reasonably speaking, I can buy myself a new video game or go watch a movie in IMAX and not sweat it out. But I live a more upper middle class lifestyle because my investments are for the future, they are capital assets, they're not just money sitting in a bank somewhere. In fact, those assets employee a LOT of people! The money IS invested.
Where do you think wealthy peoples' money is? I know a lot of people with net worths from $50 million to $400 million and some of them are hilariously broke on a day to day basis. Don't get me wrong, they live wealthy, but when you take extravagant vacations, and most of your equity is in your own company, then the "wealth" they've created is paper wealth, it's not liquid cash. I've seen a guy who is worth at least $200 million need a $10,000 loan because he didn't have the cash until later in the week. It's not always so easy to take distributions from your own company, not only because there are off years, but because you want to reinvest capital to continue to grow the business. I've had some large payouts before that I put immediately back into other investments in hopes of a brighter future. The capital is being used, trust me, it's not sitting somewhere.
Do you think Jeff Bezos just dives into a big vault of his $87 billion or whatever it is? That value is almost entirely his Amazon stock holdings, and if he were to be taxed on his actual wealth, i.e. have it taken away, he'd have to sell stock, which would inundate the market with Amazon stock, sending the price plummeting. It's things like this where I really think we need some better education in this country of how business and economics works.
Yes it is, thats what Rome did for thousands of years, we pretend like this is some magic place that does not follow the rules of history. What exactly do you think people fight wars over other than religion? If all this money is being invested so well we do we live in a age of mass lay offs, it seems like there are mass lay offs going on constantly and year after year, thousands of people constantly loosing GOOD jobs to thrust into the mcjob economy.
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