Or, they can always move companies. This is always an option.
Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can't believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
The thing I personally hate about unions is their political advocacy. The idea that a worker is stuck supporting a politician he might not agree with is one that makes me very uncomfortable.
Also, I think appleiigs summarized it better than I did, with the lack of individuality.
Unions really fight against performance based differences...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/us/denver-teacher-strike....
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/michel-kellygagnon/union-perfo...
As it turns out, union contracts don't just set minimum prices that employees can be paid; they also tend to set pay ceilings that employers cannot exceed without the union's permission--and that permission is rarely forthcoming. Paying the most talented, hardest-working employees more than the average Joe who barely works to rule is not allowed, you see.
Edit: Nobody.
If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).
Who said this should ever be the case? You're assuming I support a right to healthcare. I don't support that, nor do I support most positive rights. Especially if they're not constitutional and are federally implemented.
The obvious solution to all the problems you mentioned is that nobody has a right to anyone else's product or service, which goes back to my original point: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
You mentioned the constitution so you agree that some effort has to be made to enforce it. This effort has to be paid for by tax on your labor. Once you agree on that you only haggle if it is more tax efficient to put someone in jail for stealing a pizza or handing out free pizza. You’re free to take part in this democratic process.
Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.
The latter, and it's the militia clause read together with the elastic clause. Arguably, depending on whether one views health status identification and health maintenance as more essential to training or organization of the universal militia, it may require the states to operate as delivery intermediaries, but it certainly allows federal funding.
The federal government is allowed to dispense it as opposed to anyone has a right to it.
> What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military?
The military clauses would be what authorizes healthcare to the military. The militia is not the military (and the militia clause is not the military clauses), and is universal.
> The necessary and proper execution of which federal power?
The militia power, as specified in the militia clause, hence the “read together with”.
> The federal government no longer calls up a militia,
The militia power expressly is not just about calling up and using a militia, but keeping one in readiness should a desire to call it up be made in the future. (Also, the federal government does calls up part of the militia, what is in current statute defined as the “organized militia”.)
The militia power does not go away just because Congress does not anticipate a near-term need for a call-up.
> Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup.
Arguably, the Constitutional militia is universal, and the statute purporting to limit the scope of the “unorganized militia” (currently to able-bodied males 17-45 [0]) is simply an application of the power to organize the militia based on anticipated likelihood of call ip, and does not alter the Constitutional scope of the militia.
[0] the “males” part being in tension with the recent ruling against the male-only draft registration, as draft registration is also an exercise of the organizing part of the militia power.
First, the point that employees are not always shareholders. They get payed to do a job at a wage accepted by both the company and employee.
Second, the idea of socialism over all. As Marx described it, it's merely a transitional phase: the means of production is taken from capitalists and given to the government to basically hold in custody until it can be passed to the people. Don't believe me that this push is happening? Elizabeth Warren wants workers placed on company boards. The fruits are those produced by someone who works, be it for a company or starting his own. I go out and earn money, and socialism says I must give that money away, not to the government to uphold the social contract. Rather, it says I must give it to anyone who does not have a constantly-changing set of "basic needs", simply by virtue of their existence. It's not encouragement to give to charity (which I already do, as I can), but rather coercion by the government.
Scroll down to the graphic, and look at the massive recent leftward lurch by the Democratic party.
" Even if it's not a full-scale war, it's still a move toward it (and quickly). "
that's just scaremongering. Why use words like "war"?
I used the word war because that's typically how socialist and communist governments have gotten into place.
This whole idea that a company exists exclusively for the owners doesn’t make sense to me. There is a bigger picture to make a society work for all citizens.
Warning about “ socialism “ also doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to choose between the way the US is at the moment and the Soviet Union or Venezuela. There is a lot of room between these extremes.
Exactly, so what is stopping them from using their salary to buy shares? If you believe you are doing such a good job that the company will sustain or do better, it would almost be silly not to. You have domain expertise by virtue of working there. You may even have a solid insider feel for the pulse of the organization.
At a restaurant, a chef is not allowed to have a bite of your meal because s/he is the one who prepared it. That meal is owned by you in its entirety because that is what you paid for.
If a group of employees want a say in the how a business is run, they are free to purchase ownership, whether directly or through shares.
Unions are not an exclusively socialist construct.
I support unions as an anarchist, because I recognize that it is both useful for corporations with concentrated capital to exist and necessary to counterbalance their power with opposing institutions to keep their perverse incentives from directing their behavior unchecked. If all social institutions are set up such that they check and balance one another, no single one of them can safely dominate. Each has a time to be supported, and a time to be undermined.
For now, government institutions and religious institutions have refused to counter commercial/mercantile institutions, so the lowest-energy path to doing so is reviving the unions. Growing a neo-socialist voting bloc now is a longer play, but that one will be beneficial between 6 and 12 years from now, and probably won't become threatening for 20 years. One can never know in advance; democracy is messy.
Socialism is an awful idea in isolation. It's a great idea if your goal is to temporarily undermine those whose power is based on accumulations of wealth and pre-existing social contacts. If you feel that those in power are keeping you from breaking into their ranks, you can promote socialism to clear them out, and then move into their vacated places of power to quash the socialism before it gets out of hand.
As I am not one of the elite, and do not currently have any plausible way to become one, I fully support a socialist political movement. For now.
My personal morality does not compete well against those whose ethics revolve around "might makes right", "them that has the gold, makes the rules", and "F U, I got mine". So I have a newer rule: to suppress my other ethical rules in all situations where those who do not share them are exploiting my respect for them, and any information asymmetries, in order to influence my behavior to my own detriment.
I have no right to the fruits of your labor, but rights are a political construct. They have to be protected by a chain of support, like chess pieces. And right now, someone has sacrificed all of the pawns. The right to keep one's own property weakens in the face of a growing class of people who are somehow completely unable to accumulate significant wealth, even after a lifetime of toil and diligence.
Middle class purchasing power has been stagnant since the 70s. That's more than enough time for all those getting screwed by the system to forget why they ever believed in it, and to raise children who never believed in it, who then decide to replace it with literally anything else. The seeds for the democratic socialist resurgence of 2019 were planted in the 1980s and 1990s. Sow sighs; reap gales.
I can live with socialism for a few political cycles, if it can clear out some cruft at the top. It's dangerous, and difficult to know when to hit the brakes, but I feel ill used by the current system, and I'm not going to go down with it.
I don't have mine, but I hope to some day. Under socialism, that won't happen. Here's a great objection: I want to be rich some day. Very rich. I suspect this is the case with many of us. Under socialism, that can't happen. And so, I will never support it.
Your whole idea is that socialism will clear out the elites in power. It won't. You'll end up with a bastardized version that oppresses everyone but a few.
http://hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com/post/23486952183/comm...
Each time, the socialism did significant damage to the economy... as measured by the elites, anyway.
Nobody, except those who already got it, has gotten theirs since the 1970s. The theory behind trickle-down economics is demonstrably false. When you give rich people more control over resources and production, they keep all the additional profits, because they can, and then use some of those to gain more control over resources and production. Socialists, while incorrect in many (most?) areas of economics, at least realize that the people who do the work should get paid fairly for it, even if their calculations for "fair" are frequently inaccurate. The socialist war is the ultimate penalty for unfairness in the economy.
The system will never find a higher peak without a good, hard kick, off of the local maximum it seems to be stuck on. It doesn't need to be a socialist revolution that does it, and everything would probably be better off if it wasn't them, but they're the only ones that seem to be in position to get the job done now. And once they do, then the non-socialist, non-mercantile-elitist armies may begin to fight, if they have enough numbers, or enough clout with the socialists to steer them away from the cliff peacefully.
You're not going to be rich someday, because your parents weren't rich, and you grew up in the wrong postal code. That's the current regime in the US. Accept that, statistically speaking, everyone that has bucked the trend to achieve extreme upward mobility has been in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, and the right skills, to take advantage of an ephemeral opportunity. Most people still can't afford to be prepared for anything, and also look up from their daily toil long enough to recognize an opening.
You cannot get rich with a lifetime of hard work and wise investments; if you do that, never make a single mistake, and never get screwed, you can retire comfortably, snugly ensconced in hopefully the higher end of the middle class. It's a fine goal, achievable, and not something socialism does well. You can get rich by getting lucky, and buying the right lottery tickets. You can get rich by abandoning your ethics and screwing over those still attempting hard work over a lifetime. For instance, blow a bubble in the mortgages market and erase the majority of net worth for a lot of middle-class families, and then place bets on how many extra defaults and foreclosures there will be because of it. Nobody went to prison for that. It won't be me that does it, but I definitely won't cry if those even peripherally responsible, and those following in their footsteps, ever get shoved up against the wall.
I'm not an elite in this system. I won't be an elite in any system that replaces it, socialist or not. I have accepted that I am a nobody, and will be forgotten before my corpse cools. And I have also accepted that religious fantasies of justice-after-death are bullshit, psychologically crafted to discourage vigilantism and mob behaviors. So when there is an obvious asshole that clearly requires a humility-boosting supplement, for whom the gods fail to send a nemesis, and for whom the prosecutors fail to send marshals, and for whom the helpers fail to send redeeming inspiration, that guy is going to be an exemplar of a strategy for winning the game of life. In the meta-game, successful dickwads encourage other players to become dickwads. I can see the endgame, and I don't win; I don't have enough points, don't have the right cards to play, and I'm not good enough at cheating to not get caught. But I can pick one player that's still in the running, and make it more difficult for them to win.
capitalist are allowed to aggregate in the form of corporations why shouldn't workers be allowed to aggregate.
Socialists ask the same thing of capitalists.
There's no reason to elevate one particular (and historically rare) version of property rights over all others. And there's no particular reason economic organizations should or must be authoritarian dictatorships ruled by "shareholders" instead of workplace democracies.
I'd say most companies are similar. Yes, the worker does a lot. Without the company, it's unlikely one guy manufacturing something could find as many customers, if any. Finally, not everything can be done on an individual scale: the iPhone can't be built by one man.
Also, what do you mean by dictatorships? You can leave any time you want to. The job market is amazing for a worker right now.
The workers get their compensation in the form of benefits, wages, etc. There are companies that are run as co-ops: see REI. Most employees love it their, according to a friend who worked their for a while. If you want to work there, that's fine. If you want to work at a company with stock options, that's fine. But don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
That's authoritarianism.
> don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
Do you think existing corporate management structures don't rely on state violence to maintain themselves? If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace, do you think shareholders would be the ones coming in and cracking heads, or government agents?
You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
So? I do think some people have bad practices. Non-competes, for instance, are often abused. But you can still leave...
> existing corporate management structures... rely on state violence to maintain themselves... If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace
Yes, if there was a workers uprising, I would darn well hope the police would come in and crack heads. You don't get to "enact control" over other people's stuff (including their company). But I do think that crony capitalism is cancer, see Amazon's recent $15/hr push to force competitors out of business.
> You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
You're absolutely right that property rights are the Right and Natural Way for things to Be. If you don't agree, read about the tragedy of the commons. And look at the 100s of millions communism has killed.
We live in a nation founded on the basis of property rights. One of the most basic functions of our government is to enforce property rights. It's impossible to run a civilization on our scale without it. If you really don't like America and the way she's run, you could leave.
And the idea that you can have my stuff just because you want it is plain wrong.
They purchase your labor with the wages that they pay you. You are free to not accept any opportunity offered, and either party can terminate it at any time for any (legal) reason if they feel the deal is no longer to their satisfaction.
Almost everyone believes that they are underpaid. There is a very simple way to prove it by checking your worth in the marketplace.
You are also free to ply your trade on your own if you so wish.
The ethics of capitalism are based on the assumption that the business owner rightfully has final say on all of the property of the business, and that the workers are merely guests on the property, paid to do something with the property, collect a paycheck, and go home. They have no right to it.
But then you can start asking questions like, did the capitalist have rightful ownership of the money to buy the thing in the first place? If you go far back enough, you have things like conquest, homesteading land (which is inherently ambiguous), government grants of land (open to favoritism), etc. The whole foundation can be called into question.
Again I'm not ultimately convinced by it, but I think there's at least a discussion to be had. I feel like I've heard some convincing arguments but they're not coming to me now. But if you have the patience for it (I didn't even finish it), you might check out "What is Property" by Proudhon. He lays out a philosophy called Mutualism that sort of has socialist ethics, but is still somewhat market based in the end. He enumerates all of the assumptions he sees as underlying private property ownership and makes an interesting argument against them.
Would the people who give absolute value to the right of property holders to do what they choose with it support the Soviet Union's right to organize its economy however it so choose, along with controlling the media it owns and the workforce it contracts with? After all, it owns the property, and anyone with credible contrary claims to it would be long dead.
I think the question here is legitimate ownership of property. If you think the Soviet Union stole the property (I do), then it should be assumed that it's homesteaded to those using it. Even Murray Rothbard suggested giving ownership of U.S. universities to students and professors, if I recall correctly. (I think it was in "All Power to the Soviets")
I suppose you believe the capitalists stole the property, which allows for the same appropriation by the workers.
But here's the thing: what then? Could the workers sell their shares? If they can, another capitalist class can emerge just as well, purely by preference of people wanting an earlier payout selling the shares + steady paychecks vs risking being responsible for the enterprise. And if the workers can't make such a choice, in what sense do they really own the share? (EDIT: I think Proudhon actually had a counter argument to this, I forgot what it was)
Having been raised in relative poverty, I have no idea what it's like to have wealthy parents to fall back on. Instead, I spent a decade after high school fighting to get ahead. Today, I find myself, over a decade later still, living what can only be called an excellent quality of life. I, instead, give back to my parents. And I look back at the path that I walked and it makes me less liberal in my politics as a result.
> Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.
I think that most everything we do in life is hard and that the daily challenges of life are exactly what make it worth living.