09.17.09
Posted in Politics at 12:28 pm by Mina
Tonight this guy will be presenting his let’s-all-be-socialists movie at GCC. Sadly, I have to work, so I cannot follow through with my original plan to heckle and/or pass out literature that points out all the flaws in Mr. Wolff’s reasoning. Which is probably okay, because I’m sure no one in charge of organizing the presentation, least of all Wolff himself, is interested in actual informed debate taking place; it’s just one more little piece of the indoctrination that is the public school system.
The main trouble with Wolff’s criticism of capitalism is that it rests entirely on two easily debunked fallacies, the first being the supposed stagnation of wages in the 1970′s. In fact, no such stagnation occurred; Wolff (and many other socialist economists) do not factor in the value of non-cash compensation to employees, which began to increase greatly in the seventies. Here, here, and here are some facts regarding the myth of wage stagnation.
Wolff uses that initial fallacy, in conjunction with the fact that corporate profits have continued to rise over the last thirty years (this one is actually true!) to argue that employees are not seeing any benefit from the increased profits and are therefore being exploited by their employers. This is demonstrably false: just look around you. It’s impossible not to notice the increase in the standard of living for the average American over the past thirty years. I’m not a particularly well-off person, but I have more luxuries just in this room than I can count. When your average worker has a cell phone, refrigerator, microwave, TV, and computer, well, that’s a pretty good indicator that his actual compensation is sufficient. How exactly could our average standard of living have improved so much if not because we’ve received increased compensation in relation to our increased production?
The second fallacy is that an ever increasing gap between corporate profits and employee wages is a necessary result of a capitalist system, but Wolff provides absolutely no evidence for this claim. In fact, a true free-market system, by its very nature, will always result in increasing wages, as companies compete for the best workers in order to be more successful. The only way to keep wages lower than employee production warrants is through — you guessed it — regulation! While companies in a particular industry may mutually decide to keep wages artificially low, the only way to enforce such a decision is with the help of the government. Without such enforcement, the first smart businessperson to come along will see a great opportunity to snap up all the best employees by offering a higher wage. Any such wage stagnation, if it were to exist, would therefore be a result of the interference with the free-market system, not the system itself.
Okay, so the wage stagnation never happened, and even if it had it wasn’t caused by the capitalist system. But just for kicks, let’s take a look at Wolff’s proposed solution for this inevitable failure of capitalism that did not and could not happen.
What we have to do, see, is all be both owners *and* employees of our places of work. That way we’ll just have to split up all those growing profits evenly! Hey, it worked for some tech guys in California, so it has to work everywhere, right? Wrong. It should be pretty self-evident, first of all, that not everyone is good at or interested in making business decisions. Some people, like maybe music students who are waitressing to pay the bills while they go to school, would much rather go to work, get paid, and spend their free time thinking about things they actually enjoy, like, say, music and video games.
But just for argument’s sake let’s pretend that every worker ever wants to spend time deciding how his company should be run. When are the decisions made? Well, in Wolff’s example, said tech guys did work Monday through Thursday, and spent Friday making business decisions. Okay, but that means no work got done on Friday. Or it means that Friday’s work got smooshed into Monday through Thursday. And don’t even start thinking about the headache of finding time for an all-emplowner meeting when you’re the type of business that actually has to be open for customers in order to make any money.
Wolff’s proposal seems to forget one of the most basic principles of civilization: division of labour. Let the people who are good at making decisions make the decisions, and let the people who are good at making widgets, or who only want to flip burgers, make widgets and flip burgers. We are not little worker-drones who are all exactly the same, and we maximize our production, efficiency, and compensation by realizing and working with that rather than denying it.
In conclusion: Richard Wolff’s “Capitalism Hits the Fan” offers a solution that could not work for a problem that does not exist. I sure do hope *somebody* at that lecture tonight has the brains to call him on it, but I’m not holding my breath.
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09.15.09
Posted in Fluffy Musings, Politics at 11:41 am by Mina
I know it’s trendy to be all “omg those dirty greedy capitalists” these days, but I gotta say, I love it. Not that I’ve ever particularly been in doubt, but this was just brought home to me last night as I looked for sheet music for a piece I’m considering for this semester’s recital. Since there are apparently no sheet music stores in this half of the state, the intarweb is my sheet music resource, and that’s been kind of rough in the past: not very many years ago, my best hope of finding music on the intarweb was if by some chance someone had scanned in the pages in image format. They would be terrible quality, large files, really hard to find, and even harder to legitimately purchase if I wanted to be all legal and stuff. If I *could* manage to find it to purchase, it meant paying a shipping fee and waiting some two weeks before I actually had the music in my hands.
Now, a 2-minute search gets me professionally-prepared sheet music, instantly transposed into whatever key I want, downloaded to my computer so I can print it right away, for a couple bucks. Oh, and if I want an accompaniment track to go with it?I can burn that onto a CD in minutes for only a few dollars more.
I can think of about eighteen billion ways in which capitalism makes my life better, and not a single way in which I or anybody else is worse off for it. Why exactly do we need the government getting in the way of it again?
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07.07.08
Posted in Politics at 2:00 am by Mina
I should really know by now not to bother arguing with hippies. Especially hippies who either work at or frequently visit my restaurant. But sometimes I have a moment of weakness, and tonight was one of those nights. I was asked by some customers to sign a petition to get a question on the ballot for some election or other, and since I don’t really see a problem with the folks who want to vote in town elections having more stuff to vote on, I agreed.
I don’t remember the exact wording of the ballot question in question, but it went something like “We encourage [state representative here] to vote 1) in favor of stuff that will provide government-funded healthcare to everyone and 2) against stuff that enacts penalties for folks who don’t have health insurance.” (Those penalties, by the way, are already in place- but that’s a different rant.) As I was signing the thing I stupidly mentioned that I could get behind the second half of the question but not the first. The lady with the petition thought this was due to the poor wording, and explained to me that the government wouldn’t be *providing* the insurance, just *funding* it. Skipping over the part where I don’t really see the difference, I politely pointed out that “government funded” is the same thing as “funded by my taxes.” “Yes,” she replied, “but it will be better and cheaper!”
I was speechless for a moment. I mean, the fact that it can’t possibly be cheaper than the current $0 I pay for health insurance aside- has *anything* done by the government ever been better and cheaper than the private alternative? Or even just one of the two? On the contrary, I’m pretty sure the laws of physics explicitly say that’s impossible. Or maybe it’s some other law, I dunno. Point is, while crazy anarchist I am not, it seems pretty obvious to me that adding more layers of beauracracy to things makes them less efficient, and by extension more expensive and less, well, good. Do these people seriously not grasp that concept? Or do they just have so much extra money to throw away that they don’t care?
Sigh. I don’t claim to be the smartest person ever, and I know I still have a lot of learning to do, but sometimes it amazes me that people can grow up to be functioning adults without getting this stuff.
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07.05.08
Posted in Politics at 2:56 pm by Mina
Not much I can say about this that hasn’t already been said, but I was very happy to hear about the Supreme Court’s Heller decision. I don’t think anything is more obnoxious than people who don’t understand why we have the individual right to own firearms and why it’s so critical that we fight to keep it.
In related news, my hubby is now looking for a poster of Judge Scalia he can hang on the wall. Should I be a little creeped out about this?
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10.23.07
Posted in Politics at 1:09 pm by Mina
A rather well-known internet and action celebrity has just announced his support for GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Now, while I wouldn’t dare argue with this particular guy (because he could kick my ass without even thinking about it, for one) I have the same trouble with Huckabee as I have with most of the other potential Republican nominees: namely, that they need to keep their fucking religion out of their politics. Okay, you live your faith. Fine. I respect that. But that gives you absolutely no right to mandate the beliefs of that faith into law. Why is this hard to understand? Okay, so you say Jesus doesn’t like gay people. Jesus doesn’t have a damn thing to do with whether or not our government should recognize a committment between two consenting adults. Seriously, this isn’t a difficult concept. L2separate church and state, nubs.
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10.17.07
Posted in Politics at 9:05 pm by Mina
I discovered this channel on my XM called Potus 08, which is all about coverage of the upcoming election. Yeah, the one that’s more than a year away. Now, I’ve never been much into politics, but I sure do hate Hillary Clinton- and, to borrow a term from the husband, that is a “with the red-hot intensity of a thousand suns” sort of hate- so I’ve been paying some attention to it this time around.
I don’t know who I want to be president. I’m not keen on the crazy leftness of the Democrats and I’m not interested in the moral judgements of the socially conservative Republicans, and unfortunately that’s all the major parties we have to consider right now. Rudy Guiliani sounds pretty cool, from what little I’ve looked into him, but I’m concerned that he won’t get enough Republican party backing because he has these crazy ideas like keeping the government’s nose out of what goes on in your bedroom.
Anyhow it’s a nifty station, even if they do go on a bit long about when Iowa’s going to decide to have its caucus. You can find it at XM 130 if you’re interested. 10 points to the first commenter who guesses why they call it Potus.
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