What’s a Fair Price? Or: You’re Not Underpaid

This train of thought always strikes me as similar to religious thoughts. "You think what the market does is unfair? But it is the market it can by definition not produce any unfair results."

Any argument about fairness is swiped away by explaining that this is just how the market works. But the chance that the market always produces fair results is very unlikely unless you come in with the presupposition that the market is by definition always fair. I guess if this is your only moral belief this starts to make sense.

EDIT: Use quotes to clarify that a statement does not express my personal opinion.

> 7. If it’s so unfair, change your job

This is not sustainable on society level. Someone needs to do those jobs even if it's not you. If "the market" was going to fix this, it would have happened already.

People are only desperate enough to accept shitty working conditions and wages because they are born poor. So this unfairness in income is just the same unfairness of being born in the wrong household. So then the question is, is it fair that some babies are born rich and others are born poor?

People need to eat, and now all the land is 'owned', they can't just forage, so they'll work for whatever rather than starve. Is that a 'free market'?

Watching nerds puzzle through basic economics theory from first principles - ignoring massive bits of the picture that they have no idea about - over and over again, to try to justify the excesses of consumer corporate late-stage capitalism through profoundly simplistic and naive arguments that fall apart upon any exposure to the daylight of reality, is so tedious that I can't imagine actually going through and rebutting every point. It's like trying to explain how database indexing works to a goatherder.

It's not even worth it as an exercise in convincing anybody else of anything, because you either understand the practical (much less moral and ethical) problems inherent in modern capitalism, or you're probably not terribly bright to begin with, and it's a waste of effort trying to make you understand.

It's much more fun just to point at you and laugh, especially because we're all so trained to regard capitalists and their bootlickers as intelligent that the look of confusion and outrage on their faces when you tell them to go sit at the kiddie table because the grownups are talking is worth its weight in gold.

The article fails to tackle or even acknowledge is that our economic system is nothing like the libertarian ideal free market. The author doesn't examine any practical realities about how wages are formed.

The conclusion, "Stop randomly claiming that people are “underpaid”" is totally unearned.

Perhaps an economist can enlighten me: consider two scenarios, one where an owner keeps 90% of the revenue and pays 10% as wages, and a second where they keep 10% of revenue and pay 90%. Under what conditions is it more advantageous (to society as a whole) for one or the other scenario to be true?

>Finally, by the way, if you think your job is underpaid, then quit

You heard it here working people and single mothers, if you don't like your job just quit and become a libertarian philosophy professor, like the author! Problem solved.

Seriously this is atrocious. I would expect someone in that profession to question his own unquestioned assumptions, yet he boldly states:

" In our world, though, your income comes from other people. The other people start out with money that belongs to them and that they have no obligation to give to you. Your being morally virtuous doesn’t make them obligated to just give you their money. I assume this as obvious; if you disagree, ask yourself how often you have given someone money just for being virtuous."

that's not our world, that's a videogame. In our world people don't magically start out with money, they inherit a lot of it, and who is to say they have no obligation to give it to anyone else? how often do people give someone money above market rates for expressing virtue? All the time. Ethically sourced food, "Buy American!", sponsor an open source project, religious folks are well aware of the concept of a tithe, and so on.

> In most cases, if you find a price unfair, you wouldn’t agree to it, so if someone does agree, that’s evidence that they find it fair, which is evidence that it is fair.

Lol, no? It makes me wonder if the author lives in the real world. Accepting a deal does not happen in a vacumn and is in no way evidence of fairness. 1) it could be there are no other people offering what you need, forcing you to accept an unfair deal 2) it could be a trade union forcing unfair deals on a sector so you really don't have a choise 3) You may find out the deal is unfair after the fact because some new information came to light, and so much more

just curious why this is flagged ? can someone please let me know ? thanks !

> Some people think that there’s a wide class of people, ‘the rich’, who are getting paid way more than their labor is worth, for doing trivial tasks that anyone could do. Think how bizarre it would be if the world worked like that. Why would other people be pointlessly giving them that money?

Because they own the means of production. Nobody should listen to this crap take from someone who clearly hasn’t even read the wikipedia article on Marx. You don’t have to be a full blown communist to understand that the capital/labour lens is incredibly useful when trying to understand economies.

It is all free market and fair capitalism. Yet many offered salaries, do not even cover basic expenses (rent, food, bills). And cheap underpaid workforce must be illegally imported.