12-02-2020, 09:32 AM
(12-01-2020, 08:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-01-2020, 04:08 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Which is why we need a market -- to smash delusions. One of the worst delusions is that enterprise is no necessity.
And yet the need for labor changes. In order for the elites to gather their ever increasing cut, the economy is producing Unneeded stuff in order that the working man keeps employed enough to maintain a reasonable lifestyle. Labor is not required as much as it once was. Thus, do we need the 40 hour work week and retirement age of 65? Do we have to allocate resources that are getting ever rarer to stuff nobody needs?
With each Crisis Era has come a Great Devaluation. Continental dollars. Confederate currency and the asset valuation of slaves. Real estate and shares of stock in the wake of the 1929 Crash. This time it could be the value of labor while all else becomes fiendishly expensive. I question whether such would be stable.
The most reasonable solution is to reduce the number of hours worked. The alternative is to have more of the toil become translated into economic rent (which includes rent on real estate whose rent has no connection to the cost of initial building or acquisition). Economic rent also includes the reward for monopolization and cartels and the establishment of bloated bureaucracies in Big Business. Note well: bureaucracies do not create wealth; they simply control it and keep the proles in line. They are often the enforcers of class privilege.
I look at the ideology of the American Right and I see an ethos in which the rich have no responsibilities and an entitlement to class privilege while the working people have a duty to serve the super-rich to the extent demanded while the super-rich have no responsibility except to themselves. I am tempted to call that neo-feudal, the "neo" part being the technology of control, enforcement, and personal numbing.
Quote:A lot has to change for the new economy to be built back better. A rethought exchange of labor for necessities is one of them. Rewarding those who put in a little extra in exchange for more than necessities seems necessary.
Markets have their merits in encouraging people to do work itself, to please customers, to operate more efficiently, to take reasonable (but reject unreasonable) risks, to do work best described as pure drudgery if it is necessary, and to not to operate in delusion (buggy whips/elevator operators/mainframe computers/pre-recorded VHS tapes will always be necessary). I have seen a suggestion in a theory of a life-cycle of business entities that bureaucratization is evidence of serious decline in a firm. So workers are paid so badly because profit margins are thin that they are tempted to steal to make ends meet, and the company 'solves' that by having a large bureaucracy to control the inventory from 'inventory shrinkage'. Such explains the retail apocalypse. (Cheap labor is not prosperity; it is misery).
Quote: But agreed the Marxist myth of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, is just that. A myth.
Even the slave-master on the plantation was able to exploit the slave as completely as possible while reducing his upkeep as completely as possible. That was no myth. Obviously some people will need help (children, the crippled, the mentally-handicapped, and the worn-out) who either cannot yet meet their needs, can do so no longer, or will never have the chance to do so again. Whatever system of social organization one has, if it fails to recognize human kindness as a virtue it will become a monstrosity!
This said, human happiness is the only fit objective, and that happiness cannot be restricted to some privileged elite.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
