A week ago, Zero Hedge reported on a study that Seattle’s minimum wage law is costing workers their income and jobs.
…boosting pay in low-wage jobs by about 3 percent since 2014 but also resulting in a 9 percent reduction in hours worked in such jobs. That resulted in a 6 percent drop in what employers collectively pay…
The report also estimated that there are about 5,000 fewer low-wage jobs in the city than there would have been…
But St. Louis workers face better times. The Missouri legislature passed a pre-emption law to invalidate that city’s hike.
Preemption laws are becoming increasingly popular in GOP-controlled states as cities – typically bastions of liberal sentiment – try to raise minimum wages above statewide minimum levels…
…at least 17 states have preemption laws that stand in the way of local minimum wage legislation, according to a recent study by the National League of Cities…
Sadly, MO Governor Eric Greitens, who is a gun-toting conservative hunk of delicious beefcake, was less-than-bold about it:
Fearing the political backlash…Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens wouldn’t affix his signature to the bill; Missouri’s constitution stipulates that bills that go unsigned by the governor automatically become law.
What happens in general, when wages go up too far, too fast? China has the answer.
Manufacturers, squeezed by rising labor costs and a paucity of skilled workers, are fueling an unprecedented boom in the adoption of automated technologies to cut down on the number of workers needed on factory floors, according to the latest findings of the China Employer-Employee Survey.
Ironically, the Communist Party’s willingness to support unprofitable businesses is compounding problems for Chinese workers, as many manufacturers are barely profitable to begin with.
Remember that video of China’s parcel-sorting robots? Or, closer to home, we could talk about McDonald’s replacing its cashiers with kiosks.
WOWZA!! Now THAT is a smokin-hot guv right there!!
Regards,
Peter H.
Eric Greitens? Those teeth could eat some corn.
Reportedly, he was previously a Democrat. So, he’s going to obviously be way left of center right. I’m sure he must go both ways.
🙂
He has really nice policies!
I don’t typically follow the video links, but Yum.
Eric Greitens, oh yeah.
I see that lots of smugly superior Democrats have ridiculed the Greitens campaign video linked to above, proving once again their utter failure to understand the electorate.
Pro-“Trump’s” America, Pro-life, Pro-2A, Pro-free markets, Anti-minimum wage:
http://imgur.com/a/bgXGO
Pro-Venezuela “a la sauce Chavez” (*), Pro-Abortion, Pro-gun control, Anti-free markets, Pro-minimum wage:
http://imgur.com/a/e7iyj
Take your pick, my friends.
(*) until circa 2011, anyway
Yes, the minimum wage is zero but without a floor on wages, we’d be back to owing our souls to the company store.
It’s tough to read stories like this and not feel for the proletariat:
http://takimag.com/article/haul_of_injustice_steve_sailer/print#axzz4lqPH5HpF
Scumbags in snappy suits sat in conference rooms and cooked these schemes up. Our sainted entrepreneur class will screw its labor with a smile given half a chance.
I’ve no answer but there’s a big problem when idle hands “earn” more money than busy hands. IQ isn’t the only trait distributed along a bell curve and there are a lot of people that, in the absence of old-time factory jobs, can’t do much better than a minimum wage job.
There have been more than a few stories over the years of employers counseling employees to sign up for welfare. As we all agree that gov’t is stupendously inefficient, it follows that $100 from wages is less costly than $100 passing through Leviathan’s bowels.
I’m willing to pay an extra $1 for a meal if it means more people keeping out of trouble and not living on EBT cards.
And one other thing, KCRob. ILikeCapitalism dislikes the minimum wage–and it makes sense to do so if you have a perfectly competitive product market. But the analysis becomes questionable when talking about oligopolistically organized industries like the shipping container industry. It might be why crane operators make $200,000 a year as a unionized job. The trucking industry looks competitive, with the model you describe being due to the race to the bottom since cargo owners want the lowest prices they can get. Workers be damned. If you look up the Sweezy Kinked Demand Model, you can see that as wages increase, increasing costs, and lowering profits, output is unchanged–so there are NO employment effects and no efficiency effects, just a transfer of “economic” profits from companies to their workers. You can argue that minimum wage laws hurt competitively organized industries–agreed, but the story is less sanguine for ILikeCapitalism’s views for oligopolistically organized ones… If you want to add in monopsonistcally organized industries that demand labour–the same thing applies (one industry town–“company store” as you would say. The answer there is to allow for a bilateral monopoly to contest the profits)
And your evidence for that, KCRob, is….. what? Because logic and experience show the opposite.
Logic and experience show that every labor market has its own supply and demand of laborers. The interaction of the two always produces a meaningful wage. If it’s too low, people won’t want to do the work; they will have alternatives. If an employer truly needs the people for something useful, she has to pay more – and will be able to – and will.
Minimum wage laws had NOTHING to do with America’s great periods of economic growth that created the great American middle class. Remember Henry Ford introducing unheard-of high wages. No law prompted him. And no union. And no sense of charity.
As to peonage: Oh, please. Like slavery, it’s anti-capitalist; that is, it’s impossible for it to exist without government intervention (oppressive laws). Next, you’ll be bringing up slavery.
No Cas, I don’t dislike it. Rather, I object to it based on morality, facts, logic and experience – the same way I would object to slavery or peonage.
Just as government has no business prohibiting 2 consenting adults from having the sexual relationship they want to have, it has no business prohibiting them from having the economic relationship they want.
That’s what minimum wage laws are: a PROHIBITION on certain jobs. If you set it at $12, guess what? You just outlawed the jobs that can only pay $10 or $8 (because in the real world, they just don’t do enough for the employer to afford $12).
The higher you set it, the more jobs you prohibit. Result: Workers suffer. Lost income, unemployment. As Seattle just proved – yet again.
KCRob, you’re always going on about unemployment and the plight of the worker. Great. Then you, of all people, should oppose minimum wage laws – because of the way they cause worker suffering and unemployment.
Want to know why I oppose them? That’s the reason. I’m pro-worker. (Plus the moral principle, that government has NO moral right to prohibit consensual, victimless acts of employment.) Shouldn’t you be pro-worker, too?
Unfortunately, there’s going to be a demographic of people on the Right who agree with the Left that their employers are responsible for supporting their lives & health. Even though, at least morally, an employer is just hiring you for a job. Period. Any contract you can gain that’s beneficial, any good salary that you might enjoy, is great but that’s because you decided to KEEP the job instead of finding one that’s better.
I support ILC in all this. The market decides. You choose. If you find yourself in a job that you love but you’re not making what you need to make, you find another job, however & whatever that entails. It’s not a difficult topic but it’s one that EVERYONE used to understand. It’s the concept that made our country great & created wonderful jobs.
We don’t live in a world that naturally accepts, one for all & all for one. It has nothing to do with the greater good, or even teamwork. There is no democracy in the workplace. There is no freedom of speech in workplace. Those concepts exist in society at large. If an employer wants an employee, he offers a job with a certain salary hoping to attract good help. A salary needs to fit the job. Otherwise, why else seek education or training? It doesn’t take an einstein to be a garbage man & he shouldn’t be making a hundred thousand a year.
Gays who happen to be wait staff are the worst when it comes to feeling entitled, IMHO (& I’m only generalizing). I think the sheer weight of the public & the stress ruins their perspective of individuality & personal responsibility.
No one is being cruel, because they refuse to put another burden on large & small businesses. Only Socialists from Commies on down to Social Democracy twits believe that society at large needs to support the individual. It’s why they promote big government, The Man & the Establishment. They want government to force commerce to support the individual, not understanding that when someone outside a society pays for that, the individual becomes just a drone. Literally.
If you think you’re on the Right & you support a minimum wage, you are not on the Right, you are not a Conservative & you’re not even center Establishment or left of center right. You’re a mercenary & a selfish opportunist learning to be a Liberal. Your fears have mistakenly lead you to believe you’re on the Right. Sorry, but that’s the way it goes. I’ve seen it over & over in the past few years as the Left’s damage & polarization has uncovered the best & worst of society.
Some of the earliest proponents of minimum wage laws were precisely aiming at denying job opportunities to some people.
Apparently, they knew better about basic economic principles, and knew exactly what they were doing: distorting the market’s perception for its own supply vs demand equilibrium.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong: of course it was wrong, because they intended to use coercion, the force of law, to achieve their plans.
The m.w. artificially raise the barrier to entry to the labor force for low skills or temporary jobs. Who in their sane mind would have the sole ambition to be content with getting the minimum salary for a career?
The 16 year old who can mow lawns for $1/hour/acre may or may not be interested in toiling at *that* for more than a few weeks — but that ought to be his choice only: whether or not to accept $1/hour or to try to find someone else paying better.
In any case, he certainly isn’t planning to do it for the rest of his life — even if at a $15/hour imposed by an obscure bureaucrat paid at $100k/year and not caring for the least of what are the actual forces and stakes at play on the market he is grassly paid to regulate.
Wishing for a minimum wage on labor because of some type of task is tantamount to wishing for a maximum amount on individual’s retirement savings because of some type of use for those savings.
It’s the exact same thing, only seen thru a duality lense, to help expose how absurd and dangerous it is on the long term.
The m.w. defenders today (who unlike their predecessors have complerely forgotten the point) think it is a generous thing to do for low skill worker.
The maximum savings defenders by analogy would probably think it’s a good thing to do to prevent some old schmucks to waste their savings of an entire work life.
In both cases, it is not only morally indefensible (who are we to presuppose how much others are willing to toil and earn before spending their earnings and in what?) it is also economically unsustainable : for, in the end the market always prevail and whichever amount of distorsion *will* have to get corrected anyway, just in unexpected painful ways.
Just a pointer, among others:
The racist history of minimum wage laws
https://mises.org/blog/racist-history-minimum-wage-laws
Jeffrey Tucker, gives even more insights:
From “The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage” (2015)
https://fee.org/articles/the-eugenics-plot-of-the-minimum-wage
“[…] Consider the minimum wage. How much does racism have to do with it? Far more than most people realize. A careful look at its history shows that the minimum wage was originally conceived as part of a eugenics strategy — an attempt to engineer a master race through public policy designed to cleanse the citizenry of undesirables. To that end, the state would have to bring about the isolation, sterilization, and extermination of nonprivileged populations.
The eugenics movement, as an application of the principle of the “planned society,” was deeply hostile to free markets.The eugenics movement — almost universally supported by the scholarly and popular press in the first decades of the 20th century — came about as a reaction to the dramatic demographic changes of the latter part of the 19th century. Incomes rose and lifetimes had expanded like never before in history. Such gains applied to all races and classes. Infant mortality collapsed. All of this was due to a massive expansion of markets, technology, and trade, and it changed the world. It meant a dramatic expansion of population among all groups. The great unwashed masses were living longer and reproducing faster.
This trend worried the white ruling class in most European countries and in the United States. As John Carey documented in Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), all the founders of modern literary culture — from H.G. Wells to T.S. Elliot — loathed the new prosperity and variously spoke out on behalf of extermination and racial cleansing to put an end to newly emerging demographic trends. As Wells summed up, “The extravagant swarm of new births was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century.”
The eugenics movement, as an application of the principle of the “planned society,” was deeply hostile to free markets. As The New Republic summarized in a 1916 editorial:
Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks.
To counter the trends unleashed by capitalism, states and the national government began to implement policies designed to support “superior” races and classes and discourage procreation of the “inferior” ones. As explained by Edwin Black’s 2003 book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, the goal as regards women and children was exclusionist, but as regards nonwhites, it was essentially exterminationist. The chosen means were not firing squads and gas chambers but the more peaceful and subtle methods of sterilization, exclusion from jobs, and coercive segregation.
It was during this period and for this reason that we saw the first trial runs of the minimum wage in Massachusetts in 1912. The new law pertained only to women and children as a measure to disemploy them and other “social dependents” from the labor force. Even though the measure was small and not well enforced, it did indeed reduce employment among the targeted groups.
To understand why this wasn’t seen as a failure, take a look at the first modern discussions of the minimum wage appearing in the academic literature. Most of these writings would have been completely forgotten but for a seminal 2005 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Thomas C. Leonard.
Leonard documents an alarming series of academic articles and books appearing between the 1890s and the 1920s that were remarkably explicit about a variety of legislative attempts to squeeze people out of the work force. These articles were not written by marginal figures or radicals but by the leaders of the profession, the authors of the great textbooks, and the opinion leaders who shaped public policy.
“Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics,” Leonard explains, “believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the ‘unemployable.’”
At least the eugenicists, for all their pseudo-scientific blathering, were not naïve about the effects of wage floors. These days, you can count on media talking heads and countless politicians to proclaim how wonderful the minimum wage is for the poor. Wage floors will improve the standard of living, they say.
Back in 1912, they knew better — minimum wages exclude workers — and they favored them precisely because such wage floors drive people out of the job market. People without jobs cannot prosper and are thereby discouraged from reproducing. Minimum wages were designed specifically to purify the demographic landscape of racial inferiors and to keep women at the margins of society.
The famed Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was as blunt as anyone in his 1912 article “The Economic Theory of the Minimum Wage”:
Legal Minimum Wage positively increases the productivity of the nation’s industry, by ensuring that the surplus of unemployed workmen shall be exclusively the least efficient workmen; or, to put it in another way, by ensuring that all the situations shall be filled by the most efficient operatives who are available.
The intellectual history shows that whole purpose of the minimum wage was to create unemployment among people who the elites did not believe were worthy of holding jobs.
And it gets worse. Webb wrote:
What would be the result of a Legal Minimum Wage on the employer’s persistent desire to use boy labor, girl labor, married women’s labor, the labor of old men, of the feeble-minded, of the decrepit and broken-down invalids and all the other alternatives to the engagement of competent male adult workers at a full Standard Rate? … To put it shortly, all such labor is parasitic on other classes of the community, and is at present employed in this way only because it is parasitic.
Further, Webb avers: “The unemployable, to put it bluntly, do not and cannot under any circumstances earn their keep. What we have to do with them is to see that as few as possible of them are produced.”
Though Webb was writing about the experience in the United Kingdom, and his focus was on keeping the lower classes from flourishing, his views were not unusual. The same thinking was alive in the US context, but race, not class, became the decisive factor.
Henry Rogers Seager of Columbia University, and later president of the American Economic Association, laid it all out in “The Theory of the Minimum Wage” as published in the American Labor Legislation Review in 1913: “The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support.”
Isolation and sterilization of less desirable population groups are a form of slow-motion extermination. The minimum wage was part of that agenda. That was its purpose and intent. The opinion makers of 100 years ago were not shy about saying so. The policy was an important piece of weaponry in their eugenic war against nonelite population groups.
Princeton University’s Royal Meeker was Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of labor. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,” Meeker argued in 1910. “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
Frank Taussig, who was otherwise a good economist, asked in his bestselling textbook Principles of Economics (1911): “How to deal with the unemployable?”
They “should simply be stamped out,” he stated.
We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.…
What are the possibilities of employing at the prescribed wages all the healthy able-bodied who apply? The persons affected by such legislation would be those in the lowest economic and social group. The wages at which they can find employment depend on the prices at which their product will sell in the market; or in the technical language of modern economics, on the marginal utility of their services. All those whose additional product would so depress prices that the minimum could no longer be paid by employers would have to go without employment. It might be practicable to prevent employers from paying any one less than the minimum; though the power of law must be very strong indeed, and very rigidly exercised, in order to prevent the making of bargains which are welcome to both bargainers.
Legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes.These are but a small sample and pertain only to this one policy. Eugenics influenced other areas of American policy, too, especially racial segregation.
Obviously you can’t have the races socializing and partying together if the goal is to gradually exterminate one and boost the population of the other. This goal was a driving force behind such policies as regulations on dance clubs, for example. It was also a motivation behind the proliferation of marriage licenses, designed to keep the unfit from marrying and reproducing.
But the minimum wage is in a special category because, these days, its effects are so little understood. One hundred years ago, legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes and the undesirables, and thereby to disincentivize their reproduction.
A polite gulag.
[…]”
A brief on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
Self-Interest and Sympathy/Empathy; Morality and Prudence: 1) We have a natural drive to look after ourselves = self-interest. 2) Self-interest = prudence. 3) As social creatures we develop sympathy/empathy = Morality. 4) Morality = what is acceptable and unacceptable in the social setting.
Justice and Beneficence: 1) We have to work out how to live with others without doing harm = justice. 2) Justice = a minimal standard for a cohesive society. People may choose to go beyond justice and do “good” = beneficence. 3) Justice is required/demanded or a cohesive society, beneficence is not.
Virtue: Prudence, Justice, Beneficence = self-command. Self-Command is the seat of true virtue.
Emotions: We feel pleasure when we approve and displeasure at harm and things that bother us. We try to temper our emotions to be in sync with the emotions of others in order for empathy to be effective. 1) Empathy = Pleasure. 2) Behavioural Rules = Morality. 3) Morality = Punishment and Rewards. 4) We reward acts that benefit society and 5) shun and punish acts which harm society. 6) Our “appetites” and “ aversions” = an Invisible Hand which guides the individual and the society.
Conscience: = self-criticism. Self=criticism = acknowledging that other people are important/valuable too.
Conscience and Moral Standards: = the invisible hand = our Compass for living in society.
The Virtues = Prudence which moderates the individual’s excesses; Justice
Which limits the harm we do to others; Beneficence which promotes happiness of others; and Self-Command which moderates our passions and suppresses our destructive tendencies.
The Preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America is one of the greatest expressions of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments ever written: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Now on to “The Real Minimum Wage is $0 —-
…… that would be true if we did not have entitlements and welfare. Entitlements and welfare crushed the knuckles of the invisible hand and swept the Theory of Moral Sentiments (the basis for understanding Smiths The Wealth of Nations) out of the self-command of the individual and into the responsibility of the state.
So, for a single woman with two young, dependent children living in Pennsylvania on entitlements and welfare, the minimum wage is $29 per hour. Prudence, morality, justice, self-command, conscience and morality have nothing to do with her minimum wage. She attains it by “right” for merely creating the circumstances which intersect with a state algorithm.
What is her’s by “right” has nothing to do with empathy or a cohesive society. The inherent conflict of living off of the state by “right” is what happens to one’s conscience. If you get $29 an hour by right, you cease to understand that those who work to pay your $29 are compelled by law to provide for your self-interest and are commanded to feel empathy for you as a matter of statist beneficence.
If the Lord helps those who help themselves, then the state says “fie on the Lord” and takes on the role of Robin Hood. Then whole sections of cities become welfare ghettos where the very core of self-interest is the opposite of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
So, we have a welfare consuming underclass of morally challenged, largely unskilled and poorly educated people and no jobs to sick them in. Machinery has largely replaced the shovel. Horse apples no longer litter the streets. Whitewash has given way to superior paints.
Picking crops, plucking chickens, slopping dishes, changing beds, flipping burgers, etc. are about that is left. Even if we industrialize anew, robots are the far better “employee.” (A new robot which replaces knees is about to hit the general hospital surgery.)
Meanwhile, we pretend that we have a surplus of labor that is unemployed. Unemployable is the better term. Even McDonalds would rather have a slow grandma as an employee than a bunch of unreliable misfits who have attitude eruptions.
I really believe that every bleeding heart liberal should be sentenced to working with Offender Aid and Restoration candidates until they encounter the glaring light of an epiphany: you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear no matter how much your own heart bleeds to make it so.
We have increasingly warehoused unproductive people at government expense until they are spilling out of the ghettos and into the streets where prudent people have to ignore their pathologies.
Now on to Cas ……
…… Sweezy Kinked Demand Model ….. could anyone but Cas parody herself with a better example? Who the heck cares about yet another arcane theory meant to rejigger the dismal “science” of economics?
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” implicitly relies upon the application of moral sentiments. Beneficence, doing good, is a moral “imperative” only to the extent that it is prudent in order to reward self interest. Until Cas and a growing population of seething, entitlement addicted takers get a conscience and begin to choose morality over amorality, the mechanics of how more money, more money, more money can be spent on welfare is a moot point.
The wives of the often married Donald Trump all got a healthy chunk of his fortune. They live in relative splendor without any financial care. Bill Gates has enough billions to buy whole states and countries out of debt. Ditto Jeff Bezos. Why don’t the underclass take their tales of woe and pity to these men and demand their “just” compensation from them? It is not that they wouldn’t try, it is because they are too busy seething about “inequality” to come up with a plan.
Why deal with the fundamentals and basic principles when you can promote the Sweezy Kinked Demand Model on a blog site, instead.
“Rather, I object to it based on morality, facts, logic and experience – the same way I would object to slavery or peonage”
OK, ILikeCapitalism, I think “hate” would be a better word!
As for the argument, I have no problem with your claim–for COMPETITIVE industries. But I note how silent you are when I mention industries with MARKET POWER. Why is that, ILikeCapitalism? Economic profit is a return in excess of what is needed to bring those resources (land, labour, entrepreneurship, and capital) to bear to make the good. Firms with market power have economic profit unless they are regulated. Such firms are economically inefficient. Competitive firms make normal profit–a normal rate of return.
Why shouldn’t workers get a share of those above normal returns? Why must they accept less pay? Because it offends your sensibilities? I don’t think that is a good enough reason. In the old days, unionism was much more common than it is today; workers could contest for a share of those above normal returns–as they do currently in the container industry. One doesn’t even have to believe in widely & historically discredited concepts like the labour theory of value that Smith and Marx believed in to get to that point, right? If you don’t have unions, then why would minimum wage laws in oligopolistic or monopolistic industries necessarily be unjust? Individual workers in these industries have no ability to contest in the system that you desire, ILikeCapitalism. How is that just? KCRob’s point still stands in principle.
Sorry ILoveCapitalism. For some reason, I have been calling you ILikeCapitalism. My bad.
Cas the Marxist:
Why should workers get a share of those above normal returns?
Because it offends your sensibilities?
I don’t think that is a good enough reason.
Following your sensibilities, why shouldn’t the State practice enforced beneficence and move welfare people into “private” homes with extra space? Why does anyone “need” more than 600 sq. ft. of living space? Why does anyone “need” a swimming pool to themselves? Why should a private plane be allowed to fly at less than full capacity? Why should a geezer drive a car with an empty back seat? Why should there be steak when there is hamburger?
Do you really think that you can sucker ILoveCapitalism into a cat fight over who has the better “sensibilities?”
Run along, little Marxist, your “moral” sentiments are better used in Venezuela where they are crashing and burning.
Hi ILoveCapitalism,
Your silence is telling.
Cas, Heliotrope nailed it – I don’t have all day to spend on you. It’s just never productive. Instead, I spent 4 hours pondering Syria and then generating a post on it.
I have replied to your Sweezy blather before. In a nutshell: For you to think you can legislate or administer various wage outcomes from a model (better than letting people work it out with each other in the market) is just nuts. The persistent lack of realism reveals your (and most economists’) deeper agenda, which is: to control others. Simply to be in power; to have people forced to listen to you and accept your word (justified from the model, of course) and your rule. Slightly longer statement at comment 13, here: http://www.gaypatriot.net/2017/04/19/serves-them-right/#comment-1215660
Cyril, Helio – Very interesting, thanks!
Hi ILoveCapitalism,
And do you use–in your words–“Blather about models”? Your argument against the minimum wage is based on a simple S & D analysis that you probably learned in high school? I used the same framework (and agreed with you up to a point), just extended a bit with some different assumptions–you know, like market imperfections. Things that we see in real life every day.
It is odd to me that you cannot own that. Being told things that go against your beliefs should be a moment to actually think about what you believe, especially when you don’t have a clear path of reply. I have had to do that on a number of occasions when I conversed with you and others on this site. You could do the same if you wanted–because at the moment–you still do not address the issue that I raised and that KCRob also raised (in the case of monopsonies).
And I answered your #13 at comment #15. Again, you left that thread unable to support your claim. Your call, ILoveCapitalism, but I do feel for you. It is hard to love capitalism whilst also turning a blind eye to the implications (e.g., market imperfections like monopolies & oligopolies) of your own analysis that work against it. That takes a lot of energy.
Cas the Marxist keeps blathering about “economics” as if it is a science rather than a set of assumptions, probabilities, casual and less than casual causations and a whole lot of trying to assess what happened after the barn burns down.
In a pure barter “economy” supply and demand settles price, quality and access at any given point of exchange. Period.
Marxism is NOT and economic system. Cas the Marxist hisses at ILoveCaptialism thusly:
Well, cry me a river. Tell me again about market imperfections like monopolies & oligopolies in: Venezuela, life on the dole, in Greece, among Muslim “refugees” huddled up in no-go zones.
Capitalism is NOT a form of government. Socialism IS a form of government from A to Z.
Cas the Marxist hisses at ILoveCaptialism in the same way atheists refuse religion until they have total proof that God exists coupled with an insistence that God must meet their demands for the right to be God.
Cas the Marxist can not bring herself to let go of her arrogant narcissism which requires ILoveCapitalism to kiss her ring when she poses a query – be it stupid or otherwise.
This petulance is typical of Trolls who will not concede that their silly, convoluted superiority dance is well past its expiration dance.
“WHILST” I am at it, I will also note that the United States wandered into a “mixed economy” under President Franklin Roosevelt and we have been trying to figure out how to pay the runaway entitlement bills ever since.
Cas the Marxist can not point to any successful blueprint for Socialism at work in the world today. That is because, even people who are nearly illiterate in math can understand that you can not maximize two dependent variables simultaneously. That shoots the ground out from under the whole “greatest good for the greatest number.” Any country which has worked out a sustainable socialism has to play games with capping either the greatest good or the greatest number.
So, Einstein Cas the Marxist take your socialism and peddle it to jealous peasants who will kill a neighbor over access to a can of soup.