"employers would simply be glad to pay them based on their productivity."
I honestly mean no offense, but that sentiment indicates a spectacular misunderstanding of capitalism.
I honestly mean no offense, but that sentiment indicates a spectacular misunderstanding of capitalism.
PS: it looks like the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 [1], not $15. You can become richer.
How? If their productivity is $26 / hour but their market rate is $15 / hour, by paying them $20 / hour you'll just post lower profits than companies that pay them market rate.
At least, that's how it was supposed to work in theory.. Now that we see people out there going for improved wages/jobs in line with good capitalist doctrine, the business owners are all screaming in rage about a "labor shortage"
I still get to name my price. And once you see that I can undercut labor costs due to this, it makes no sense for either you or Bob to continue paying twice as much as I do.
And let's not pretend that if you don't have the very best workers, you can't compete. First of all, you can't identify the best. You hope to get lucky, but in reality, you're going to be paying not the best, but those adequate enough to perform the job reasonably well.
COVID assistance has changed the game. Because before, the choice was to have a job or starve homeless. You'd take almost anything in desperation. Remove desperation and people stop acting desperate.
This is the first time I've ever seen restaurant workers, delivery drivers, etc taking charge of their own careers the same way Silicon Valley tech workers do.
All of our laws and safety nets are designed around the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest and hop jobs when it suits them, but I never saw that actually happening until this last year.
Practically speaking, it's relatively hard to enter into a market and outcompete existing firms for labor without a significant amount of capital to offset the existing assets of the employers you're competing with.
The other downside is that it can initially leave a business more vulnerable to a bad economy in the same way corporations buying back shares can make them more vulnerable. With that said, the solution is to slowly increase wages while also building a sufficient amount of capital to weather an economic downturn.
And at the end of the day, anything that went into business expansion and/or profits could have gone at least partially to higher wages instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy
Capitalism is about the private ownership of the means of production and profits.
But yeah, competition for labor (and other things) via differences in wages are attributes of a market economy.
Capitalism can be a healthy part of this, but sometimes it isn't.
Crony capitalism for instance can provide companies the opportunity to collude so they can artificially suppress wages, which distorts the market economy for labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Outside of small communes, any society that heavily relies on trust doesn't work.
That's not to say that capitalism works well, or that we can't reign in some stuff (public works, monopoly regulation, etc). But a capitalistic base is the only system we've figured out that works at all.
Anyways, your statement is not true. Capitalism absolutely has a moral compass, it had the moral compass of the consumptive patterns of society; if that compass points the wrong way then either we must take a hard look at ourselves, or, think about what policies are twisting consumptive patterns to go the wrong way.... Probably a bit of both.
To make this worthwhile to continue at all, this conversation first needs to clearly define capitalism. Capitalism is not the free market. Markets existed long before capitalism. Capitalism is exclusively paying people less than the value they produce, to create a profit for the employer.
To rectify that economic system's moral compass, you create incentives to moving towards worker-owned enterprise. Instead of the employer/owner running your gas station, the employees that actually work it have 1 share each. To own a share you have to actively work there. That model resolves most issues with capitalism. Worker's unions also resolve it, but in a less ideal way as the tension between employer-employee still exists. Which is just a slightly kinder model as master-slave, or lord-serf.
Not sure about the universe comparison. The universe is chaotic entropy as far as we know, but assigning human misery- that we actively create, to the universe is a bit much.
This is laughably naive. The power, then, devolves to whosoever authority gets to conjure the legal definition of "actual work". How can I be that person, and how can then use my power to enrich my friends and cronies and screw BuckRogers over? After all, all employees are equal, but some employees are equaller, and some are not even employees.
The authority to define what working there is decided upon by the shareholders, it's a democratic workplace. So you couldn't be that person on matter how hard you tried. That's kind of the point. To finally remove the master-slave class tension from the our places of work and replace it with democracy.
In this universe are often high-capital-expenditure endeavours. You WANT the wealthy to take the risk on those, and not the workers.
For example, a co-op of 20 needs a million dollars to create a factory to build widget X. Where does this co-op get the money from?
What happens when widget X fails? Are the losses evenly distributed among the co-op members?
What co-op-ing everything winds up doing, in effect, is either 1) socializing the losses of adventures of politically-connected "wantrepreneurs" who are adept at converting political capital, or 2) making participating in risky ventures only accessible to the economically wealthy.
So in the long run enforcing it is likely to cause more economic disparity, not less.
The majority of businesses actually are proven and stable business models. The local convenience store is pretty much the perfect cooperative opportunity. There’s really no reason for 7-Eleven out of Japan to be owning most convenience stores.
Venture capitalism still has a place in the ideal mixed mode economy.[0] For those risky ventures. But that’s really not what the majority of the economy should consist of. And it doesn’t. We’re just really misaligned in our model for what the majority of our economy is.
Unions did a good job of distributing wealth in a free market way. But those still drive out capitalist businesses to cheaper countries. Cooperatives have every incentive to stay here.