jswinghammer

Is there any need for a "plan"? Ultimately having a default option being college is obviously not working all that well for a lot of the people going down that route (dropout rates are high and finding a job in your field isn't a guarantee).

The "plan" would be to take an honest look at yourself and decide what sort of career makes sense for you. That might mean you go to a trade school, it might mean that you go to college, it might mean something I can't think of right now :)

The worst advice is saying just go to college and it will all work itself out.

The basic criticism of the labor theory is that it does not explain all things humans value. Adam Smith discussed this when noticing that water however useful it is for keeping humans alive, it's priced in accordance with its' use.

There isn't necessarily any connection between labor and the things people value. For example, the work that goes into designer purses is often the same as the cheap purses at Walmart or whatever but the former could sell for multiples of the cost of the latter.

In a meritocracy, a contributor is paid in relation to doing the work that their team values most. It could be the case that what they do has no direct connection to their labor performed but rather could involve doing very little work that no one else wants to do (or can do). The business values that labor very highly even if it's in very small chunks.

I'll try to summarize why the LTV is so intrinsic to Marxist analysis. Marx's basic argument in Capital is that labor is what creates value in capital goods. The argument goes like this: if no labor is added to capital goods they eventually rot and become worthless and cease to be a capital good at all. Thus labor is at the heart of what drives value because what gives something value is labor time stored within it. This is at the heart of the exploitation of the workers because the capitalist gets this return without having spent any of their own time to build and develop the capital and they pay less than the value of the capital goods to the workers who made the goods in the first place.

Understanding the employee/employer relationship is at heart of understanding capital and the returns capital receive over time. The employee is paid in advance of sales (most of the time) and thus the employer shoulders the risk of those sales never materializing in the first place. To compensate employers for that risk, employees are paid less than the full output of their labor. As we know wages are not taken back if the product or service they were developing was never sold. It's a mutually beneficial relationship that explains profits in a way that does not involve exploitation but rather mutually beneficial exchange.

If there is no exploitation you don't have Marxism in the first place. This is a very basic summary of "Karl Marx and the Close of His System".

Even if you concede all those points (which I won't) the entire Marxist system relies on the labor theory of value which was smashed by Eugen Böhm von Bawerk in his book "Karl Marx and the Close of His System". No one has really bothered to follow up on it since it was so definitive.

That his theory lives on is a testament to the degree to which people a.) never learn anything ever and b.) the intoxicating nature of what he proposes.

There isn't. If I spend any resources opposing something then I spent money however small doing so. If I drove my car to go vote against gay marriage then I spent resources directly and gave up alternative uses of my time to do so. I don't like that the political process is even involved in this but if it must be then debating issues has to be OK and retaliation against folks who disagreed with you in the past seems unhealthy if you want a free exchange of ideas.

Today you learned that how? Are you unaware that there is a large portion of the population that think that gay marriage should not be recognized by the state?

I think the piece you are missing is that someone could reasonably apply the same logic you are to your politics. If I feel that taxation is theft or that bombing Pakistan with drones is grossly immoral I could ostracize anyone who holds those beliefs under this logic. Maybe even target supporters of those arranging such activities like say anyone who gave money to Obama. You can either deal with opinions you don't like or you can freak out try to target those who hold them. It's your life.

Citation needed.

Given that such a donation would change the matter entirely your point isn't relevant. There is a massive number of people in this country that support his position (note: I'm not one of them). Calling them all bigots is a cheap way out of having actual conversations.

No I don't agree. If the food you eat is making you sick, fat, and tired then it isn't doing much good for you. There's more than enough food without cheap corn. The problem is distribution and perverted incentives-not lack of affordable food. Also what's produced isn't actually all that cheap. It's cheap for the producers of processed foods but the taxpayer pays the real cost, the farmers make almost no real money from their work (unless they're a very large farm who can operate at a massive scale), and the taxpayer picks up the extra cost of the sickness these awful foods create. It sounds pretty expensive to me.

I take a much more spiritual tact on the whole thing. I think giving is good for the giver first and then helpful to the people receiving it (particularly if they aren't just giving it away but investing it in something useful for others). That's been my experience and reflects Biblical teaching on the subject.

This is part of why I'd advocate for limited government. That way if everyone around you is acting foolish then the amount of damage they can do is fairly small.

I wouldn't set it a fixed amount to the giving but I would hope to encourage it. I make giving a routine part of my life and I would encourage it in my children too.

Responsibly managing your money in my world means: spending it wisely, saving and investing it wisely, and giving it wisely.

Responding to these points.

1. A chance but a good one? What promise do you have that bad families want to keep their children home anyway? Even making that choice suggests a lot of love for their children-it is a sacrifice after all.

2. How? Students in the US routinely score poorly and the system continues, teachers aren't fired, nothing changes really.

3. Why is this necessarily a good thing? Just having a degree doesn't make you qualified to do anything useful. I've interviewed enough software engineers with degrees from great schools who can't seem to program at all to say this is true.

4. On what basis? Also shouldn't parents be more aware of than you?

5. Parents can expose their children to that in any number of ways.

I don't homeschool but these arguments are naive at best. My guess is that in Germany the average school is better than in the US but freedom means people potentially make choices that you don't like. That's part of the package.

So if Miley Cyrus doesn't believe in empirical evidence she's a threat to civilization? Damn. We're in trouble.

I meant to say that maybe having public policy that even remotely relates to these topics is a huge mistake.

I know a lot of successful people who don't know anything about the current state of evolutionary biology. I'm guessing you do too. It's totally superfluous to most occupations.

So maybe you want to live in a society where public policy has nothing to do with the age of the universe. Let's do that. That sounds good.

Given that public schools can barely teach reading, writing, or math I don't really worry too much about what they are teaching children about much else. It also does not matter what schools anywhere teach if your children do not attend that school.

I simply pay my kids for the work they do, they store it in a bank, and then I let them spend it. When they get older they will need to put aside some money for saving, some for spending, and some for giving away (their choice on the breakdown but it needs to be something in each).

They keep the animals in unhealthy, unnatural conditions where they will get sick more often. The antibiotics are there to combat that and the side effects of eating corn (in the case of cows) make them very unhealthy and prone to getting sick as well. The whole thing is a mess.

Curiously enough I'd expect meat to get cheaper because its' production would have to get a lot more thoughtful to be profitable. Right now what we have is expensive in direct and indirect costs. The meat is of poor quality and will make people sick so all these government programs pay for these costs on this side of the equation too. Basically the consumer pays for the meat, subsidies, AND healthcare to cover the cost of the subsidies making the meat of poor quality that made them sick.

I'm sure it tastes better and in small doses is probably fine. If the cow is eating enough corn to get sick then you have obviously made a huge mistake.

I realize all that but pulling the cord is the only sane thing to do. The food that gets produced is basically poison anyway so excluding it isn't the end of the world. I would be fine with increasing food stamps before continuing these market distorting crop subsidies.

They can only overcrowed because of corn feeding. Grass fed cows can't really be mass produced and factory farmed.

The basic problem is that one intervention is seeking to fix another. Crop subsidies are the reason why these antibiotics are so widely used. Farmers are encouraged to feed animals food they aren't meant to eat which makes them so sick they need antibiotics to stay alive long enough to be slaughtered.

Just end those crop subsidies and let things take care of themselves. A few agribusinesses will be pissed but the rest of us will be much better off.

Marx was concerned about wages being pushed down but even in his own lifetime it never really happened that way. It's something that seems desirable for the businessman if possible but something that they have no control over. The reason being that other companies will compete for workers and have an easy competitive advantage over firms who are trying to drive workers to poverty.

Markets work to coordinate prices for both consumers and producers. Those who resist the laws of markets pay eventually. Might not happen right away but it happens-always.

My point is that low wages are never good exactly but they can be better if those wages pay for more year over year. It's like getting a raise without having to negotiate or even do anything for it.

Ideally I would abolish fractional reserve lending and the inflation that goes along with it. That inflation of the money supply has a medium and long term effect of raising prices. In a free market prices would drop thus your bad wage gets better even if you can't ever find a better job.

I'm not misunderstanding the nature of how credit works. I'm well aware that reserves follow loans and not the other way around. That money creation cycle is what leads to the business cycle in my opinion (see Austrian business cycle theory for more). The problem is that it creates a pyramiding of debt that eventually will collapse as inflation gets out of hand and interest rates rise.

Yes they can. This is because we can discuss what higher prices do-invariably they cause market actors to seek substitutes. If you push a $15 minimum wage it stands to reason that there would be demand for any machinery that would allow for cost savings. It would be good for the sectors of the economy that would supply these cost savings technologies. Ultimately marginal workers would get hurt even further once these technologies emerged.