Scorpion, you raise good points as always, but unfortunately you overlook a few things that render much of your analysis incomplete and unsatisfactory.
Quote: (07-17-2013 12:35 PM)scorpion Wrote:
Quote: (07-17-2013 09:48 AM)Roosh Wrote:
Saw this article floating around. The question is why should anyone be able to survive on a minimum wage job? Is that a human right?
It's like saying "Man can't get laid doing only 5 approaches a month." Well, he's going to have to do more, or change his approach. He's not entitled to getting laid from a certain amount of work.
I think that anyone who is willing to work deserves to earn enough to support themselves at a reasonable standard of living. The fact that so many of these low-level jobs pay such a pittance is a major reason we have so many people seeking government handouts. If people were actually able to support their families decently through wages, they wouldn't have the incentive to rely on the government.
And what should be considered work? It's a slippery slope - is pissing in a bucket work? Who gets to decide what constitutes work?
Only one person can decide if the labor is worth being paid for - the employer. No one else should or can decide how much labor is worth other than the laborer. Once you take way the power of an employer to charge how much he pays his labor, then it becomes impossible to give an honest evaluation of how much the labor is worth.
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Encouraging a race to the bottom for wages ends up harming everyone eventually. People who don't have a little extra money in their pocket can't spend it. The result is a reduction in aggregate demand that hampers economic growth, which results in economic stagnation across the board. Our economy is based on consumption, and when people don't have the purchasing power to consume beyond the bare minimum, the economy doesn't function correctly.
Money means nothing outside of economy to support it, something I think most people fail to grasp. If money was all it took to make a country rich, then the government could just print trillions and we'd all be rich.
But of course, that's not how it works. Money is relative to the strength of it's economy, but money does not make an economy strong.
![[Image: 1705484662_1368886901.jpg]](http://www.bubblews.com/assets/images/news/1705484662_1368886901.jpg)
Demand side economics is bullshit. Demand side economics is what is putting America deep into a depression. Everyone thinks we need to spend, but the reality is we need to save. We need more savers and more people building capital in order to make wise investments in the future. This is the only way to create additional value.
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The major economic problem of the 21st century will be figuring out how to manage an economy which is not able to employ the entire working-age population. As technology has increased, the need for labor input has decreased. This trend will only continue in the future. Eventually, nearly all human labor will become obsolete. Then what?
Labor is not the same thing as having a job. Jobs are created whenever a person can understand how to get others to pay him money for a good or service. Goods or services do not exist without technology.
People think technology destroys jobs. This is a popular falsehood. If you look at the historical record, what you'll find is that it wasn't until the industrial revolution before people even had jobs on a mass scale. Before the industrial revolution, people just "worked" on farms growing food so they would have something to eat. The lucky elite got to work for their government or owned the few pieces of tech of their day, such as a gold mine or shipyard.
Regardless, most people did not have jobs, they were just laboring in order to survive. For most of human history, people grew food or hunted for food. There was no such thing as employment or unemployment.
Thus it is not the case that technology destroys jobs, but the opposite. Technology creates jobs, and technology is the only thing that creates jobs. Sure, some old jobs get destroyed when new tech is developed, but this is the necessary cycle of creative destructive that drives any successful economy. The only way for an economy to grow is if old jobs are killed. A healthy economy will kill 2 jobs for every 3 jobs it creates. This is a normal, healthy occurrence because without technology we wouldn't be alive right now, as there wouldn't be the mass medicine which kept us alive through childhood (I would have died as a child without penicillin). Either that, you'd be a farmer.
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Now we are able to sneer at minimum wage workers, and look down on their lack of skills as being the reason for their inability to earn a high wage. But what about when everyone's skills are obsolete? When houses and buildings are able to be 3D printed on-site, how valuable are the skills of carpenters and masons? When computers are able to extrapolate physical laws themselves, how many scientists and programmers will we need? Eventually, anything that can be theoretically done by a machine, will be done by a machine. At that point, if we don't have some kind of mechanism that distributes purchasing power by a means other than wages, we will be living in a world where the vast majority of people live in poverty, simply because they have no economic usefulness.
Again, more falsehoods. Although people will not be employed doing menial construction tasks like they were in the older days, they will instead be finding other ways to provide nonessential value to people's lives through things like entertainment or education.
The foreseeable future tells me that as we continue to eliminate menial labor work from the world, that people will find other things to spend their money on. New toys for people to buy, new plays or video games, new artwork, new books, new etc. And I think this is a good thing. The reason our lives will revolve around leisure is because our basic necessities will be provided for by automation.
As things like 3D House Printing becomes the norm, we will not need to pay someone $30 an hour to sand walls and paint them afterwards. This is a loss, that is true. But what we gain is that houses will drastically fall in price, being mass producible, and so poorer people will be able to afford more houses or bigger houses than they could before, even though some jobs were cut from the economy.
Think of the internet as an example - although it killed the post office, how many more tens of thousands of jobs has the internet created?
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Ultimately, we must remember that the economy is an invention meant to serve human needs. Human beings are not meant to serve the economy.
Precisely, which is why it's a bad idea to try and direct the economy through any major interventionist policies. Doing so will only detract from the organic nature of how an economy develops around people's existing needs and distorting prices will adversely effect those who've come to rely on it for survival.
When the economy is controlled by a strong central authority, then people become nothing more than jigsaw pieces to be fit into pre-determined roles. People become nothing more than servants of the economy.
But when the economy is left unregulated, then people are free to manipulate the economy to their own ends. They can take or give to the economic structure as it benefits themselves or benefits others, allowing the economy to serve the needs of people to its fullest.
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I think that the situation will ultimately be resolved by some sort of national dividend or guaranteed minimum income. Essentially, imagine if everyone in the country suddenly received a Social Security check each month. What would happen? Consumer demand would increase across the board, as suddenly people would be spending a lot more money. This would allow for entrepreneurs to create thousands of new businesses to meet this demand. Employers would be forced to increase their wages, since people would be less reliant on taking any job to pay the bills. Older workers would be more likely to retire early and make way for younger workers to take over. This dividend money could also be created by the government itself rather than lent into existence by the Federal Reserve, so there would be no interest owed. This is all getting into fairly advanced economic territory at this point though, so I will end it here. I think something like this will inevitably be the future, however, regardless of how it may rankle our "individual responsibility" attitudes, simply because there is no other alternative assuming technology continues to advance and human labor becomes increasingly obsolete.
The problem with a national dividend is inflation. Merely printing cash and giving it to people will devalue the currency causing prices to rise. As prices rise, people will be able to buy less stuff, which hurts aggregate demand and kills the business model. See Zimbabwe or any other inflation case study. Always failure.
The only way to have a sustainable national dividend is to tax the shit out of everyone, and then return the taxes to everyone in the form of a national dividend each year.
Of course, this would mean equal government handouts for EVERYONE, and not just single moms or large corporate owners who get billion dollar handouts and bailouts, so I cannot see the national dividend ever being implemented. Too many special interest groups in America who want more than their fair share (esp with Social Security and Medicare).
But the problem with a national dividend relying on a tax model is the plight of the commons. That is to say, there will only be a generous national dividend if everyone pays into the system with hard work. It's the problem all socialist policies face.
For example, say the government collects 5 trillion in tax revenue, and your share of the dividend is $15,000 dollars for the year. If people spend that money overseas in other countries, or refuse to get jobs because they can coast on their dividend, then guess what happens? The following year, the government will only collect 4.5 trillion in tax revenue, and your share of the dividend drops to $12,750. Both the economy and yourself have become objectively poorer.
After awhile, the moochers will drag down the workers, and the dividend will probably fall every year until the dividend is so low people must resort to work in order to survive, which is exactly the same outcome had there been no dividend in the first place. Except by this point, the government is poorer and cannot afford a military, or it's court system, or it's police system, or it's firefighters, etc. Thus a national dividend can easily impoverish a nation.
The only way a national dividend could work is the same way a socialist system could survive in a place like Norway or Sweden. A small, homogeneous community that is interested in preserving itself. In a giant multi-ethic state like America? No fucking way. America is already going bankrupt with it's modest social programs. Increased socialist policies will just speed up this process. Capitalism is the only way to keep this country running, despite it's crude flaws.
