US Politics Mega-thread - Page 272

On June 03 2013 08:20 coverpunch wrote:

Oh, c'mon, you can see that you are stretching like taffy to make slave = wage laborer, right?

That's not to say Wal-Mart doesn't deserve criticism for its employment practices. Again, large turnover is a sign that Wal-Mart is a pretty bad employer. But, I don't think having the government raise the minimum wage or somehow force Wal-Mart to change is a good solution. You can't help people control their own labor by wielding a bigger whip.

On June 03 2013 08:30 KwarK wrote:

I'm talking purely hypotheticals here, not about Wal-Mart. My point is that given no government distortions and a surplus of labour the competition for jobs will depress wages to the minimum that someone will work for or the level at which further reduction reduces the productivity of the labourer. The minimum that someone will voluntarily work for can be assumed to be basic survival, if given a choice between working and eating and not working and not eating people will choose the former. At this point they have lost all control over their labour, their only remaining exit is death, while the profits of their labour are kept by those who exploit them. The fact that they choose to work each day does not change the fact that it is slavery, they choose it because they wish to continue to live. Cotton pickers chose to pick cotton rather than to rise up, a human body will not do anything the mind does not wish it to, but we still characterise the slavery of blacks in America as slavery because there was no reasonable alternative to the exploitation of their labour.

The free market could conceivably create a scenario in which workers lacked a reasonable alternative to the exploitation of their labour, the reason it does not is because of social improvements, government intervention and the threat of revolution.

On June 03 2013 09:09 coverpunch wrote:

A few points:

-first and foremost, the slavery of blacks was pure slavery. They were treated as commodities to be bought and sold and had no control over their labor. They weren't exploited for low wages, they were enslaved. We don't characterize any period after the 13th amendment as slavery because that's not what it was.

-A free market need to have supply and demand for labor along with competition. You keep blocking in hypotheticals where the choice is to work for a single exploitative employer or unemployment/starvation/death. That is not a real choice or a free market. With competition between employers and the freedom to leave, a person should eventually get the equilibrium wage between what their productivity is worth.

On June 03 2013 09:23 Jormundr wrote:

And you keep typing in hypothetical free markets that have not, and never will exist. Your last sentence is in itself, laughable. It ignores two key things:
1. In the majority of professions, there is not very much competition between employers. Costco isn't trying to steal Wal-Mart's crack cashiers and stockboys. Applebees isn't trying to steal the top chefs from McDonalds.
2. Wages in most large businesses do not trend with what people are worth. Unless you would say that CEOs have become far more valuable in the last 20 years, while workers have occasionally seen wages raised to remain constant when inflation is factored in.

Edit:
You seem to be trying to skirt around the issue of there being a massive discrepancy in power between employer and worker which results in a not-free market. We can argue technicalities over slavery all day. The point still stands, and you have done little to argue against it other than saying "Well if this was a truly free market then they would be free and compensated based on their input."
That's all fine and dandy. But this isn't a free market, the fabled beast which roams the land feasting on the similarly elusive utopian communes, so your point falls kind of flat.

On June 03 2013 09:09 coverpunch wrote:

With competition between employers and the freedom to leave, a person should eventually get the equilibrium wage between what their productivity is worth.

On June 03 2013 10:01 Shiori wrote:

Is this before or after their malnourished corpse is exhumed?

On June 03 2013 10:04 coverpunch wrote:

Does America have an obesity problem or not? You can do better than this.

On June 03 2013 08:30 KwarK wrote:

I'm talking purely hypotheticals here, not about Wal-Mart. My point is that given no government distortions and a surplus of labour the competition for jobs will depress wages to the minimum that someone will work for or the level at which further reduction reduces the productivity of the labourer. The minimum that someone will voluntarily work for can be assumed to be basic survival, if given a choice between working and eating and not working and not eating people will choose the former. At this point they have lost all control over their labour, their only remaining exit is death, while the profits of their labour are kept by those who exploit them. The fact that they choose to work each day does not change the fact that it is slavery, they choose it because they wish to continue to live. Cotton pickers chose to pick cotton rather than to rise up, a human body will not do anything the mind does not wish it to, but we still characterise the slavery of blacks in America as slavery because there was no reasonable alternative to the exploitation of their labour.

The free market could conceivably create a scenario in which workers lacked a reasonable alternative to the exploitation of their labour, the reason it does not is because of social improvements, government intervention and the threat of revolution.

On June 03 2013 10:45 OuchyDathurts wrote:


If people didn't have to eat garbage because their cripplingly low wages at Wal-mart forced them to work 2 or 3 terrible jobs maybe some of the obesity problem might go away? You expect people to eat well end exercise with no time or money?

Also odds are if you're obese you're in-taking no actual nourishment. Just because you put matter into your face doesn't mean its nourishing at all.

On June 03 2013 10:40 Ingsoc101 wrote:
@Kwark

Yes, there is a significant difference between real slavery and so called "wage slavery." The difference is that one is created by the natural order of life, and the other is created by human institutions and laws. Humans can only be held responsible for the institutions they have created, not for the nature of nature.

Poverty is not a human construct, it is the natural order. None of us exit the womb with food, clothing, and a 401k. If you want to blame nature for the fact that you are forced to work in order to survive, go right ahead. Because that is true of every economic system in every country in the history of the world. It was true even in the time of cavemen. If cavemen didn't constantly work and struggle to survive, they would simply die. Who should the caveman blame for his condition? Who enslaved the caveman? Nature, not man. That is how the world works, it is the natural order.

Government sanctioned slavery, on the other hand, is completely different. We cannot change the natural order of existence, but we can change human institutions, laws, and so on. It is incredibly immoral to support a system where humans can own and abuse others with legal sanction.

"Wage slavery", on the other hand, is not abuse. And it is not abuse because in the absence of the job, the person would be even worse off. That is the missing point in the wage slavery argument. With a job, a person is always better off than without a job. Offering work to someone is helping someone, even if you don't like how much they are being helped. Even if you think they should be helped even more, it is still help. It is still mutual benefit. It is not the employer which has made the worker poor, it is the natural order of existence which has made him or her poor. Poverty is natural.

If you want to argue that we have a social right to help people survive now that we have the means to do so, that is fine. But that is completely different from blaming employers or capitalism itself for something that is a natural part of existence. And that is why comparing free markets with human slavery is not just stupid, it is offensive.

On June 03 2013 09:58 coverpunch wrote:

Response to the edit:

Uh what? You seem to have missed the entire discussion, which has been going on for three pages. This is all in the context of a Democratic report that Wal-Mart employees are paid so poorly that they need social benefits, with the conclusion that the government should either lift the minimum wage or somehow force Wal-Mart to pay employees more, such as intervening to allow a union.

I explicitly stated my position over my posts, that I don't think Wal-Mart enslaves its employees and while I think Wal-Mart deserves criticism for its hiring practices (which it gets), I don't think the proper solution is for the government to step in and change the laws so that Wal-Mart changes.

EDIT: What's laughable is to say there is no competition between employers. What do you think a resume is?

On June 03 2013 09:23 Jormundr wrote:

And you keep typing in hypothetical free markets that have not, and never will exist. Your last sentence is in itself, laughable. It ignores two key things:
1. In the majority of professions, there is not very much competition between employers. Costco isn't trying to steal Wal-Mart's crack cashiers and stockboys. Applebees isn't trying to steal the top chefs from McDonalds.
2. Wages in most large businesses do not trend with what people are worth. Unless you would say that CEOs have become far more valuable in the last 20 years, while workers have occasionally seen wages raised to remain constant when inflation is factored in.

Edit:
You seem to be trying to skirt around the issue of there being a massive discrepancy in power between employer and worker which results in a not-free market. We can argue technicalities over slavery all day. The point still stands, and you have done little to argue against it other than saying "Well if this was a truly free market then they would be free and compensated based on their input."
That's all fine and dandy. But this isn't a free market, the fabled beast which roams the land feasting on the similarly elusive utopian communes, so your point falls kind of flat.

On June 03 2013 11:02 Sermokala wrote:
I thought in my lifetime that there would never be someone making the argument that the new deal and the progressive era hurt the common worker at the benefit of the corporations.

This is where Libertarianism gets the bad rap that it deserves. The insistence of theoretical and logical truths to be a practical reality. Libertarians left the republican party so that they didn't have to subject their philosophy to political relevance. That Irrelevance doesn't just go away when the right isn't doing so well right now.

For Gabriel Kolko, the enemy has always been what sociologist Max Weber] called "political capitalism"—that is, "the accumulation of private capital and fortunes via booty connected with politics." In Kolko's eyes, "America's capacity and readiness to intervene virtually anywhere" pose a grave danger both to the U.S. and the world. Kolko has made it his mission to study the historical roots of how this propensity for intervention came to be. He was also one of the first historians to take on the regulatory state in a serious way. Kolko's landmark work, The Triumph of Conservatism, is an attempt to link the Progressive Era policies of Theodore Roosevelt to the national-security state left behind in the wake of his cousin Franklin's presidency. Kolko's indictment of what he calls "conservatism" is not aimed at the Southern Agrarianism of Richard Weaver or the Old Right individualism of Albert Jay Nock. In fact, Kolko's thesis—that big government and big business consistently colluded to regulate small American artisans and farmers out of existence—has much in common with libertarian and traditionalist critiques of the corporatist state. The "national progressivism" that Kolko attacks was, in his own words, "the defense of business against the democratic ferment that was nascent in the states." Coming of age in the '50s and '60s, Kolko saw firsthand the destruction of the "permanent things" as the result of the merging of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. A sense of place and rootedness lingers just beneath the surface of his work.[2]

On June 03 2013 07:54 Sermokala wrote:


Costco would like a word with you on that point.

Insert drunk anti free trade argument based on that the countries beifitng from free trade are the ones with a free- protectionist economic policy resulting in their quality of life going up and ours going down.

Tbh target is the anti union company wal mart is just big enough not to give a shit about the protests.

On June 03 2013 10:57 nttea wrote:

Humans created the laws of property that states you can own something without using/being in possession of it, which is what leads to wage slavery, so nothing about it is natural. The world is an island, you can't just go somewhere else when everything is owned by someone. Any alternative will have it's issues but don't act like your opinions on how the world works/should work are obviously reasonable or just based on poor logic.

On June 03 2013 11:03 farvacola wrote:

That you can look at 1880-1910 and totally divorce it from the Great Depression speaks volumes in terms of your knowledge of history. Even better, that you can look at any single event in US history and wholeheartedly attach all negativities with government and all positives with private investment is just flat out stupid. This is cafeteria history at its worst.