11-03-2022, 01:01 PM
(11-01-2022, 06:25 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(11-01-2022, 04:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: But I am applauding the trend of people quitting work to make a statement, but it's not contemptuous and not especially social; just that people want to find work doing what they want to do or at least get better pay, which sure is not the case now under minimum wages of $7.25 an hour in red states.
That's easy for you to say. The first half of millennials (and this is one area I have much common ground with millennial democrats) have spent the last 15 years trying to convince people that we're not lazy...and then the second half of millennials and early wave Gen Z came along like "pfft! We never promised we wouldn't be lazy. Tough shit man, we're just gonna live off our parents while you do the real work". A lot of the more reasonable millennial democrats have switched over to our side cuz they're sick of this.
The consumer economy is adequate motivation to get people to work. Harsh necessity is over the top. People tend to vote with their feet to find better lives for themselves and their loved ones, often at great sacrifices of short-term advantage. So Mila Kunis' father chose to be a taxi driver in the USA than a physics teacher in Ukraine (when it was part of the Soviet Union)? Good choice on behalf of her daughter.
Neoliberal economics (basically "sadonomics") operated on the assumption that people could be driven to toil for very low levels of personal satisfaction on behalf of rapacious profiteers as employers and suppliers of necessities (food, housing, medical care, transportation). It is possible to compel people to toil for very little, as slavery (whether the plantation or a KZ-Lager of the demonic Third Reich) has shown. On the other hand, both slave systems failed militarily. Cannon fodder makes lousy soldiers, all in all. Not many become solid NCO's; NCO's win the small battles, but an army that wins lots of small battles can win big wars.
Sadonomics operates on the assumption that price stability is the first objective of a sound economy even to the extent that it requires monopolistic gouging, abysmal wages, and limited opportunity for improvement in personal life. Real wages declined during most of the forty years of Reaganomics, and now we see what happens when the lid comes off.
Every reasoned defense of capitalism depends upon the assumption of "enlightened self interest" as the norm. I have met highly-successful executives and I have met migrant farm workers, and the concept of "enlightened self interest" seems to guide the behavior of most people irrespective of ethnicity, religion, and social class. People may have different resources, but most operate on similar assumptions. Economic realities may be different, but what constitutes rational thought is far more universal (the rules are the same in Beijing, Benares, and Berlin alike). Big trouble comes from efforts to force irrationality and pointless hardship.
So consider the fast-food business. So long as pay was low enough, the business could tolerate as much as 400% turnover among staff. There was little to lose, as people were not developing skills on the job. Still, any employer should reasonably seek to reduce turnover, and many such employers have found that they can best reduce turnover with such employee benefits as free or cheap education. If you want your employees to stick around in crappy jobs for five years or so, then if those people do not have college degrees you might as well offer the carrot of at the least a BA degree that requires one to stick around for four years or so.
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.