EPTI think that is what Sermolaka is trying to say: that people trade their labor power for wages and even if the surplus value is accrued to the employer they end up net positive. But it's hard to tell because he's treating labor power like some commodity in a simple barter system and conflating market exchange values with use values.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7093
| Forum Index > Closed |
Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
|
IgnE
United States7681 Posts
I think that is what Sermolaka is trying to say: that people trade their labor power for wages and even if the surplus value is accrued to the employer they end up net positive. But it's hard to tell because he's treating labor power like some commodity in a simple barter system and conflating market exchange values with use values. | ||
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 12:15 IgnE wrote: It might shock you to hear this but I don't actually think an economic system where people have to sell 16 hours of labor every day in order to not be destitute when they retire is a good one. This isn't about "literally disagreeing with hard work." I think hard work is valuable, and I think human beings seek meaningful work even without the threat of poverty looming over them. This is about the limits of the possible. Let's put aside for a moment your assumption that the highest goal in life is for people to create more "value." If you tell a thousand people "just learn a second language at night when you come home after you put your kids to bed" and 1 or 2 do it you have to wonder what these other 998 irrational idiots are doing right? They must be either idiots or lazy under your schema. And then you wonder why conservatives don't want to take care of these lazy idiots. Something is wrong here, Kwark. Few issues here. Firstly you're making a wild straw man, comparable to the kind of idiocy where people say "if tax rates were 100% then nobody would work so clearly raising taxes is always wrong" with that 16 hours shit. You should feel ashamed of yourself for that. Secondly, people who have the capacity to improve their lot and don't do so often are lazy or idiots. Some people have valid reasons, of course, but an awful lot of people just don't give a fuck. From the guy I helped with his taxes who deliberately chose a smaller refund so he could use it as a deposit on a truck he couldn't afford sooner to the large numbers of renters who each month choose to spend their rent money on other shit and incur late fees. And I absolutely empathise with the conservative outlook of "why should I work harder so that other people can choose to work less hard". I'm working full time, going to school three quarter time and still pulling odd jobs for secondary income streams on the weekends and I'm supposed to want to share with people who have the same ability to provide for themselves as I do? I believe in redistributive taxes because I understand that it's the only way the world can work because for whatever reason the other "998 irrational idiots" don't seem to get it. Hell, half of people eligible for the EITC don't even claim it because apparently it's not worth their time to do so. Regardless of whether or not the economic system we have is a good system, it is the system that we have to work within. If you're living within that system and you go "if I want to retire comfortably as a multimillionaire I'll have to put in an extra 3 hours a week, fuck that" then that's a choice you made. You can blame the economic system for narrowing the choices available to you, it'd be great if the only choices we ever had to make were between good options and better options, but what you cannot do is abdicate responsibility for the choices you do make the way you are trying to. By all means vote for a better system when you get the option, but in the mean time if you don't do what you can to help yourself you don't get a free pass just because the system isn't perfect. I mean hell, this is something I learned as a child in the kitchen when my mother said "you can have what we're having or you can skip dinner" and I said "can I cook myself something?". I could have spent all night bitching about political inequality in the household regarding meal planning and blaming my choice to go hungry on anyone but myself but I still would have been hungry at the end of it. There are structural issues with the system but a great deal of the day to day functional issues is just user error. Politically I'm at the point where I think "fuck it, we can't fix the users, we have to reform the system to coddle them" but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. Nor does it mean I have to deny reality and insist that there is no way the users could be better. I'm mad that I appear to have some kind of special futuristic space brain that allows me to connect cause and effect and use my understanding of the relationship between them to create desired effects through properly executed causes while other people cannot. It pisses me off to no end that apparently when I work harder than others I need to share some of that with those who won't follow my lead. I get that it has to be that way because apparently I expect too much of others, but I'm never going to reach your point of insisting that expecting it is wrong. If someone chooses not to create any value they shouldn't be too surprised when they don't have any value to exchange with other people. They are, and they hold themselves hostage in the certain knowledge that I'd rather share what I have than let them suffer from their stupidity, and I accept that I can't fix all of them. But I never "wonder why conservatives don't want to take care of these lazy idiots", it's because it sucks. | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 13:03 WolfintheSheep wrote: Well, okay, now you're basically saying there's an infinite amount of work available and infinite demand for value... ...After arguing that people are spending beyond their means and can be wealthier if they stop spending frivolously. Ah yes, if I am saying that there is more that could be done than is currently done then clearly what I mean is that there is no limit and therefore if you say that available work is not infinite then you have bested me. Well done. However I am proposing that the amount of work that could be done is a positive finite number. Your move sir. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
But your answers simply do not scale at all on a macro scale. We could go on and on about the economic principles that you're ignoring, but those points clearly don't lead anywhere. So the simplest way to put it is: If everyone could stop being poor by working 50% longer hours, why are there still poor working class people in China and Japan? | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 13:05 Aquanim wrote: It is not obvious to me that it is possible for a large proportion of the "poor" to create more value, or that if they did that the benefits of that value would accrue to them. Your arguments to date have not convinced me of either of those points. (As an observation, it is far easier to make money if you already have money.) It's easier to make greater numerical sums of money if you're already rich. After all Bill Gates can make a million dollars more easily than I can. But proportional increases go the opposite way. I can double my net worth more easily than he can. As for ways in which the poor can create additional value, if they increase the value of their labour by improving upon their skillset then their contributions to the economy will increase and the overall economic output of society will increase. This stands to reason, it's why we educate the population as a matter of national policy. A nation of illiterates is a poor nation, we mandate that children are educated because it dramatically increases their ability to interact with and contribute to society. If there were large numbers of illiterates employed doing basic manual labour that could be done by machines for pennies a day then nobody would be arguing against them learning to read so that they could take more technical jobs such as cooking fast food orders as they appear on the tickets in McDonalds. And yet when I say that we might ask that they don't stop there and consider getting some of the free computer software certifications available online or improving their language skills etc then suddenly it's crazy to think that that might too increase their economic output. The status quo is not sacred, it's not the product of some well ordered design, it's just where we are. I feel like you folks would be preaching the innate virtues of a strong peasant class if public education wasn't mandated and insisting that it would be absurd to think that the plough pullers could generate greater value from their labour if they were literate. | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 14:50 WolfintheSheep wrote: Again, Kwark, I doubt many people would argue with you if you were speaking on a micro scale, in which an individual can change their own situation. But your answers simply do not scale at all on a macro scale. We could go on and on about the economic principles that you're ignoring, but those points clearly don't lead anywhere. So the simplest way to put it is: If everyone could stop being poor by working 50% longer hours, why are there still poor working class people in China and Japan? Consider the inverse. How poor would the poor in China be if they cut their hours down? Again you're insisting that the status quo is a natural state of affairs from which all deviance is wrong. Your argument is essentially The Chinese working class work a lot. The Chinese working class are pretty poor. Therefore working a lot doesn't help you become not poor. Because the current level of poor is the natural level of poor and therefore additional work should be reducing how poor they are in addition to their current level, which it has not done. Also reducing their hours wouldn't make them poorer because their current level of poor is the natural level. It's nonsense. If workers in China worked half as much and the Chinese economy produced half as many products then they would be considerably less able to purchase consumer goods. The correct conclusion from the Chinese example is that the Chinese workers considered working 40 hours a week but they couldn't produce enough value from those 40 hours to have the lives they wanted, ie they were too poor. But when they increased their hours to 60 then they became less poor which is what they wanted. They're not super rich because they live in fucking China and the global economy doesn't give a shit about their labour, but they still increased their economic output effectively through increasing the amount of their labour. | ||
|
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:08 KwarK wrote: The correct conclusion from the Chinese example is that the Chinese workers considered working 40 hours a week but they couldn't produce enough value from those 40 hours to have the lives they wanted, ie they were too poor. But when they increased their hours to 60 then they became less poor which is what they wanted. They're not super rich because they live in fucking China and the global economy doesn't give a shit about their labour, but they still increased their economic output effectively through increasing the amount of their labour. You must be trolling now. | ||
|
Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On March 10 2017 13:26 LegalLord wrote: Didn't he fail miserably out of his governor position? Probably a bad call. He had a good few months taking on the Democrats with absurd majorities in every part of Sacramento. Then he caved and did the slow RINO fade-out. I'm oversimplifying a little here, but he's no hero to CA GOP. Land where your two choices for the Senate seat were both democrats. Yep, Republicans didn't even make the general for contention. | ||
|
Aquanim
Australia2849 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:01 KwarK wrote: ... The status quo is not sacred, it's not the product of some well ordered design, it's just where we are. I feel like you folks would be preaching the innate virtues of a strong peasant class if public education wasn't mandated and insisting that it would be absurd to think that the plough pullers could generate greater value from their labour if they were literate. I would say that it is absurd to think that you can just wave your hands and say "all of you go and get literate". The structure of society had to change for that to be possible. EDIT: That being said, I am no longer interested in having this conversation with any of you. Sermokala saying to me "I misunderstood what you said so I'm going to assume that you don't understand how exchanging one object for another works" is my limit in terms of pretending that this discourse is productive. | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:23 Aquanim wrote: I would say that it is absurd to think that you can just wave your hands and say "all of you go and get literate". The structure of society had to change for that to be possible. And what structural barrier prevents literate individuals with iPhones and wifi from watching MS Word tutorials on YouTube? Serious question. What do they need that they don't have, beyond a will to do it. | ||
|
Aquanim
Australia2849 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:26 KwarK wrote: And what structural barrier prevents literate individuals with iPhones and wifi from watching MS Word tutorials on YouTube? Serious question. What do they need that they don't have, beyond a will to do it. Get an answer from somebody else, I'm done here. | ||
|
{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) suggested Wednesday that one reason Republicans are unhappy with the Affordable Care Act is because men must pay for health care plans that cover maternity services. The congressman’s comments came during a lengthy markup session in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the first steps House Republicans took to advance their bill to repeal and replace the health care law. During the hearing, Rep. Michael Doyle (D-Pa.) asked his colleague Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to explain what he meant when he said premiums were “skyrocketing” in his state “because of the mandates from Obamacare.” “What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?” Doyle asked. “Certainly not with pre-existing conditions, or caps on benefits or letting your child stay on the policy until 26, so I’m curious what is it we’re mandating?” “What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus replied. “Is that not correct? And should they?” Doyle appeared confused by Shimkus’ comment. “There’s no such thing as a la carte insurance, John,” he said. “That’s the point,” Shimkus replied. “We want the consumer to be able to go to the insurance market and be able to negotiate on a plan ...” “There’s not a single insurance company in the world that does that,” said Doyle. “You’re talking about something that doesn’t exist.” Committee members then turned the hearing back to the amendment under consideration. Shimkus’ press secretary didn’t immediately return a request for comment. Source | ||
|
Danglars
United States12133 Posts
Well maternity care went from an option to mandatory. So before Obamacare, no policy was forced to have maternity care, now every policy must (and women are no longer charged higher premiums than men). So like, let's admit he's basically correct, and then quibble that he should've launched into a discussion of essential health benefits i.e. plans now are forced to have a higher actuarial value. | ||
|
LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
| ||
|
{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Donald Trump was unaware his former national security adviser Michael Flynn was working as a “foreign agent” when he gave him the job, according to his press secretary. “I don’t believe that was known,” said Sean Spicer, when asked by reporters at his regular press briefing on Thursday. Flynn resigned in February after just four weeks as national security adviser when it came to light that he had misled the vice-president, Mike Pence, about phone conversations with the Russian ambassador about sanctions in December. The resignation came after a flow of intelligence leaks revealed that he had secretly discussed sanctions with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and then tried to cover up the conversations. On Wednesday, it was revealed that from September to November last year, while he was working as a top adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, Flynn was lobbying for a firm linked to the Turkish government, earning $530,000. He and his company Flynn Intel Group Inc filed retroactive documents with the Department of Justice two days ago to register as a foreign agent. Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, US citizens who lobby on behalf of foreign governments or political entities must disclose their work to the justice department. Willfully failing to register is a felony, though the justice department rarely files criminal charges in such cases. As part of Flynn’s lobbying for Inovo, a Dutch firm linked to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Flynn penned an op-ed calling for a “radical” cleric (whom the Turkish government wants to extradite) to be booted out of the US. After Flynn joined the Trump administration, he, like other incoming officials, agreed not to lobby for five years after leaving government service and never to represent foreign governments. Flynn’s newly disclosed lobbying would not have violated that pledge because it occurred before he joined the Trump administration in January, but the pledge would preclude Flynn from ever doing the same type of work again. Spicer was asked whether the president would still have hired Flynn as his national security adviser if he had known he had been working as a foreign agent. “I don’t know ... That’s a hypothetical,” said Spicer. “I don’t know what was discussed prior to the appointment in terms of his background, his résumé, his client base.” “From what I’ve read, he has filed appropriate forms with the Department of Justice ; ask them and subsequently him if you have any questions about the filing,” said Spicer. Spicer also said he was unaware whether Flynn was involved in any discussions about foreign policy regarding Turkey. “I don’t know. I don’t have anything on that,” he replied. Opaque answers and the reply of “I don’t know” are now regular features at Spicer’s daily press conferences, which have been memorably lampooned by the actor Melissa McCarthy on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. On Wednesday, Spicer confused reporters by initially saying “we need to find out” if Trump was the subject of an investigation by the justice department into Russia’s involvement in the US election, then clarifying that he had “no reason” to believe that Trump was. “I just want to be really clear on one point which is there is no reason that we have to think that the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever,” he said eventually on Wednesday, possibly after looking down at a message on his lectern. “There is no reason to believe that he is the target of any investigation. I think that’s a very important point to make.” On Thursday, reporters returned to the topic, asking the press secretary to clarify whether the administration did or did not know for sure if the president was the subject of a DoJ investigation. “The assurance I gave you was that I’m not aware. That was 100% accurate,” said Spicer, who then seemed frustrated at the close attention paid to the exact wording of his statement. “‘I’m not aware’, ‘I don’t believe’, you could look up in a thesaurus and find some other ways ... I don’t think there’s a distinction there that’s noteworthy,” said Spicer. “The answer is, we’re not aware,” he concluded. “I don’t know how much clearer we can be on this.” Spicer’s frustration continued when he was quizzed about the British politician Nigel Farage’s visit to the Ecuador embassy in London to see the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Was Farage, the staunchest UK political supporter of Trump and one of the leaders of the Brexit movement, visiting Assange at Trump’s behest? “This is silly. I don’t think asking where random foreign leaders are and whether they are there ... I don’t keep his schedule,” said Spicer. “I have my own concerns here keeping track of what everyone is doing. I generally don’t worry about what’s going on across the pond,” Spicer said. Source | ||
|
GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
As for ways in which the poor can create additional value, if they increase the value of their labour by improving upon their skillset then their contributions to the economy will increase and the overall economic output of society will increase. Couldn't they also increase their exchange-value by affixing a higher value to their labor than society currently does. Like DeBeers did with diamonds for example? I mean the details would be different, but the general premise may hold. For instance, couldn't there be a campaign to increase the exchange value of the poor's labor from a social perspective, not just within the constraints of the use-value of said labor? Said another way, is it possible that the exchange-value of the most wealthy has already underwent a similar transformation? | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
Given that you ask me to believe that you in good faith attempted the argument "the economic output of an individual cannot be infinite and if it cannot be increased infinitely then it cannot be increased" I don't think you're in good shape to accuse anyone of trolling friend. You keep falling into the trap of assuming that the status quo is a perfectly optimal allocation of labour and that value output has already been maximized. This leads you into weird places like claiming that Chinese workers working long hours don't create additional value in excess of what they would if they worked shorter hours or that a more highly skilled population couldn't possibly have a greater economic output than the current one. I imagine if I described to you any other moment from human history and asked if the value of the economic output of the individuals at the time could be increased you'd immediately say yes, identifying that skills in animal husbandry, land management, the construction of basic machinery such as water/wind powered grindstones etc all would have dramatic impacts. But if I ask about today it's suddenly "there is no reason to suppose that a worker that improves his skills might produce more". | ||
|
Amui
Canada10567 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:45 GreenHorizons wrote: Couldn't they also increase their exchange-value by affixing a higher value to their labor than society currently does. Like DeBeers did with diamonds for example? I mean the details would be different, but the general premise may hold. For instance, couldn't there be a campaign to increase the exchange value of the poor's labor from a social perspective, not just within the constraints of the use-value of said labor? Said another way, is it possible that the exchange-value of the most wealthy has already underwent a similar transformation? Isn't that just raising the minimum wage? Assuming a majority of poor people work at, or very close to the minimum wage. | ||
|
KwarK
United States42782 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:45 GreenHorizons wrote: Couldn't they also increase their exchange-value by affixing a higher value to their labor than society currently does. Like DeBeers did with diamonds for example? I mean the details would be different, but the general premise may hold. For instance, couldn't there be a campaign to increase the exchange value of the poor's labor from a social perspective, not just within the constraints of the use-value of said labor? Said another way, is it possible that the exchange-value of the most wealthy has already underwent a similar transformation? Yeah, this would be an approach that would deal with the way that society as a whole is structured, and would be long overdue. Unionization, an end to top down class warfare, a more re-distributive tax code, greater penalties on capital gains etc would go a long way. We've come a long way to get to where we are, of course, although we've gone backwards a little since WWII, but there is more to be done. But until such a time as people aren't forced to choose between watching The Big Bang Theory or having a funded retirement still believe that we should expect them to make the right choice. IgnE's argument that the world isn't the best possible world and therefore we shouldn't ask that people try to make better choices is both absurd and arbitrary. I question whether there is any level of redistribution at which IgnE will say "okay, now it's okay to ask that people be accountable for their own decisions" or if it's pure sophistry. After all, we live in a country that already has a large amount of redistribution in the form of guaranteed housing, food, welfare and so forth. In an alternate universe without those alternate IgnE would most likely be arguing that if only they existed it would be fair to expect that people save a little for their own retirements. | ||
|
IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On March 10 2017 15:26 KwarK wrote: And what structural barrier prevents literate individuals with iPhones and wifi from watching MS Word tutorials on YouTube? Serious question. What do they need that they don't have, beyond a will to do it. What the fuck are you even talking about? You accuse me of shameful strawmanning about 16 hour work days and you are acting like watching MS Word tutorials on Youtube is going to help someone make a significant amount of money? On March 10 2017 14:41 KwarK wrote: Few issues here. Firstly you're making a wild straw man, comparable to the kind of idiocy where people say "if tax rates were 100% then nobody would work so clearly raising taxes is always wrong" with that 16 hours shit. You should feel ashamed of yourself for that. Secondly, people who have the capacity to improve their lot and don't do so often are lazy or idiots. Some people have valid reasons, of course, but an awful lot of people just don't give a fuck. From the guy I helped with his taxes who deliberately chose a smaller refund so he could use it as a deposit on a truck he couldn't afford sooner to the large numbers of renters who each month choose to spend their rent money on other shit and incur late fees. And I absolutely empathise with the conservative outlook of "why should I work harder so that other people can choose to work less hard". I'm working full time, going to school three quarter time and still pulling odd jobs for secondary income streams on the weekends and I'm supposed to want to share with people who have the same ability to provide for themselves as I do? I believe in redistributive taxes because I understand that it's the only way the world can work because for whatever reason the other "998 irrational idiots" don't seem to get it. Hell, half of people eligible for the EITC don't even claim it because apparently it's not worth their time to do so. I bolded the part where we have incompatible interpretations of what's really going on. I get that you deal with a lot of people who are idiots. But what are you going to do? Write off the half of humanity with less than mean IQ as lazy idiots that you only ruefully give handouts to? Our economy doesn't only suffer from wealth inequalities, it also suffers from a surfeit of meaningless work that chews up the idiots who are lucky enough to have any work to do at all. My entire point at the beginning of this conversation was that we need to reframe what we mean by "have the capacity to improve their lot." Kind of as a tangent, since you seem to love the idea so much, I really dispute this notion that selling your plasma is a simple trade of "3 hours" a week. Selling that much of your plasma for essentially the rest of your life is a serious stressor on your body. It's a vampiric transaction that will take a toll on your health long term if it becomes an essential weekly occurrence. This stressor is to be added to the already significant stress of simply living in poverty. That's just one graphic example of you seriously underestimating the real costs involved. Glibly suggesting that people could learn another language on top of a full time job while taking care of a family is another. You want these people to go from zero to fluent enough to quickly and reliably translate things as a part-time internet gig for a few extra bucks? For someone that dropped out of community college? What? | ||
| ||
