tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1396682199178122530.post8155424832772293420..comments2023-12-28T22:22:42.307-08:00Comments on Nobody In Particular: Take It Or We Leave ItAaronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128359303310478673noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1396682199178122530.post-9897529722692759782009-07-13T08:58:20.590-07:002009-07-13T08:58:20.590-07:00I agree (post below) that cheap labor is a commodi...I agree (post below) that cheap labor is a commodity. The problem, I guess, is that cheap employees can't really buy expensive products, and the way things are organized these days, various enterprises are requiring Americans to buy their product. But few buyers are getting raises, other than the people who are controlling the pay rates (of course). It can't go on forever that way.<br /><br />It could be arranged, and at different times it has been, that a higher fraction of the wealth is distributed to people working to produce stuff as opposed to those who hold the political claim (which can be perfectly legitimate). (And to parapharase centuries of economic philosophy, there are different arguments to stack the distribution one way or the other, but any set of agreed-upon economic rules is going to end up affecting it.) I tend to think of it as a dynamics problem, where influencing that distribution will lead to one kind of quasi-stable economic state or other. But to paraphrase centuries of political experiment, there are better and worse ways to influence it!<br /><br />I have no positive impression of unions either (although they seem to have gotten my wife a great health plan at her new job), but the Labor movement, creepy as it was, tipped that distribution around toward working bozos a century ago. The results seem to have been salutory to the overall standard of living, in America at least, which did avoid a Labor revolution, but then it's hard to say that for sure. There was a lot of other significant stuff that went down last century too.Keifushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com