DrAwkward wrote:Oh, to live in a utopia where greed is minimal and the public isn't too stupid or lazy to look out for it. Keep reaching for that rainbow, matthew.

Liberal elitism. Gotta love it.

matthew wrote: Besides, if you let the market work (which inherently requires ethical people for it's existence).

clocker bob wrote:

matthew wrote: Besides, if you let the market work (which inherently requires ethical people for it's existence).

So typical. Appeal to liberal sentiments instead of actually addressing the issues.



Anyway, back to the thread......anyone listening to Rush Limbaugh today? He's in good form.

matthew wrote:

Linus Van Pelt wrote:Let's say you have a potential employer and a potential employee. The potential employer values the work of the employee at, say, $15/hr. The potential employee values his time at, say, $3/hr.

Then that employee is an idiot for not doing his homework on the market value of the work he's interested in before negotiating with the employer. Besides, what reasonable person who does knows the market value of a given job is going to tell a potential employer "Oh no, 15 per hour is too much. Give me 3 instead"? LOL.

Just as it is impossible for a state to keep up with the market value of work, it is also impossible for any one person to keep up with how full of shit you are. So I'll just focus on one or two points in particular.

The numbers I chose were arbitrary, but I chose them to illustrate a point, which is a pretty simple, basic point. I shouldn't be surprised that you don't get it, I guess.

Look: every employer will always pay its employees less than what their labor is worth to it, obviously. Every employee will always (unless forced to do otherwise out of desperation) sell his time for more than what that time is worth to him, obviously. If you don't get that, it's no surprise you didn't get anything else I said.

Perhaps you ought to reread that until you get it, and then keep rereading it until you realize you were an idiot for not getting it the first time. Then reread it some more.

(more stuff that's pretty basic)

(more evidence you don't know shit)

An ethical legitimate employer will perform its duties to its shareholders by paying the wage that will maximize share price. Often share price will go up when profits go up. Profits go up when costs go down. Labor is a cost. Therefore, an ethical legitimate employer will often pay as little as he can get away with.

Sure, after all if I'm a business owner I'm risking my own ass by jumping into a competitve market. What's the problem here? Once again, if the market says that an employer is paying below the market value, people will gravitate away from said employer, unless you're a schmo.

There's no problem with that practice, until and unless it harms society.

But society has a problem when employers are allowed to get away with whatever they can get away with. Since you're not concerned with poverty for its own sake (and who says you should be, after all!), you should also consider that poverty is strongly correlated with crime, you should consider that (as Henry Ford figured out) poor people can't buy stuff, which depresses the economy, and so on. And there's nothing illegitimate about the government using its police power to tell people not to do things that are bad for society. They do it all the time - try driving drunk or starting a fight. (There's a federalism argument to be made, that this is properly done by the State rather than Federal government, but given the state of Commerce Clause jurisprudence, I don't think it's a winning one...).

Your point? So the state should prosecute theft. Paying wages below market value is not theft.

Should the state only prosecute theft? Are there other behaviors harmful to society that the state may prosecute, or just that?

matthew wrote:The revenue I make from my business is mine to do what I like with, but if I want to stay in business I have an incentive to hire employees who are motivated to do the work I need done and thus ought to compensate them to the degree that will in turn give them an incentive to do such. If I don't then not many or no people will work for me. Sure you'll say, "well what about those people who DO work for you?" I say leave it up to the employer, because you can't quantify and thus legislate what is enough compensation because it is a market determination as well as a social convention. There's no magical, mystical inherent economic or monetary value to work There's no 11th commandment which says "Thou shalt pay thy employees x dollars per hour"! It's a quasi-Marxist notion to think there is (though a lot of people here are Marxists, so go figure).

Again, you're full of shit. Nobody's saying there's a magical, mystical 11th commandment, or any of that crap. What people are merely pointing out is that there are more than two parties to an employment contract: employer, employee, and state. Or society, if you like. If I contract with you to murder someone, the state won't enforce the contract, and will actually punish us, because despite the fact that that contract might make sense in market terms, it promotes things that are harmful to society. Likewise if I contract with you to buy a horse for 2^n pennies, where n is the number of nails in the horse's shoes. Likewise if I contract with a six-year-old for him to work sixteen hours a day in my factory. And likewise if I contract with you to work for me for $4/hr. Do you not see how the state can use its police power to protect society from contracts that harm society?

matthew wrote:blah blah blah, more bullshit.

matthew wrote:

clocker bob wrote:

matthew wrote: Besides, if you let the market work (which inherently requires ethical people for it's existence).

So typical. Appeal to liberal sentiments instead of actually addressing the issues.

So typical. Take a legitimate example of what happens when markets are free from regulation (which is to say, therefore proving you wrong), and belittle it by calling it a liberal straw man.

What part of "these people were given a long leash and proved themselves to be absolutely unethical," as insinuated by this photo, doesn't resonate?
I think the issue was addressed pretty solidly.

-A

DrAwkward wrote:

matthew wrote:Besides, if you let the market work (which inherently requires ethical people for it's existence) more often it will root out the dishonestly and greed that might exist in businesses eventually,

Hahahahahahahaha...

Oh, to live in a utopia where greed is minimal and the public isn't too stupid or lazy to look out for it. Keep reaching for that rainbow, matthew.

I was about to pick up on that one.

Ahem. No.

Having had exposure to people representing numerous different elements of the financial services industry and the quoted companies that employ them, I am pretty tired of the myth that the market is honest and transparent. It is definitely not.

Excessive greed and dishonesty only seem to be rooted out when it all goes wrong and the wrong people (i.e. the investor institutions and banks) look to lose significant amounts of money due to fraud and incompetence.

matthew wrote:Liberal elitism. Gotta love it.

Matthew, assuming that you are not an invented persona (which I'm not convinced of), you're assurance in stating these fatuous comments is staggering. I am curious to know of what jobs you have had, and how you have got them.

Because those from whom I most frequently hear the "you earn what you deserve" arguments are either tough old mean men who have worked their way up savagely from impoverished beginnings, or, more those who have had an upbringing where they have not had want for need.

And your frequent blanket statements regarding menial workers working for pittance by choice are self-contradictory. I was going to write more on this contradiction, but I have realised that the preceding sentence contains all that is necessary for this argument.

Given that the US and the UK economies are amongst the closest to pure capitalism, the earlier statistics regarding poverty and child deprivation are telling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have blithely ignored these statistics, along with the numerous other hard facts presented that contradict your unpleasant worldview.

matthew wrote:Besides, what reasonable person who does knows the market value of a given job is going to tell a potential employer "Oh no, 15 per hour is too much. Give me 3 instead"? LOL.

Nice reading comprehension. You could not have missed Linus' point by more if you read it in Mandarin.

matthew wrote: besides once they discover they're underpayed they can tell Joe Unethical Employer to go jump in the lake and go find better work.

Well then, let's try and keep them from 'discovering' it, or all hell will break loose. Currently, the underpaid are blissfully unaware of their plight.

matthew wrote: Once again, if the market says that an employer is paying below the market value, people will gravitate away from said employer, unless you're a schmo.

Yeah, they can pack up and move from a trailer park down the road from a Wal Mart in Alabama to a trailer park down the road from a Wal Mart in Mississippi. Wal Mart will never survive such a revolution by the 'schmos'. Sam Walton will be popping out of his hole begging for mercy.

matthew wrote:The revenue I make from my business is mine to do what I like with, but if I want to stay in business I have an incentive to hire employees who are motivated to do the work I need done and thus ought to compensate them to the degree that will in turn give them an incentive to do such. If I don't then not many or no people will work for me. Sure you'll say, "well what about those people who DO work for you?" I say leave it up to the employer, because you can't quantify and thus legislate what is enough compensation because it is a market determination as well as a social convention.

Uh huh... you mean that this 'market determination' of a fair wage can only be deciphered by the business owners?? And if, say, dept. of labor economists fed a bunch of readily available statistics into a computer, they couldn't make an equally accurate 'market determination' and legislate a floor for wages? The market, she is too inscrutable to be understood by economists- we'll let the guy who buys a Chuck E. Cheese franchise determine the fair wage.

matthew wrote: There's no 11th commandment which says "Thou shalt pay thy employees x dollars per hour"!

You gutless hypocritical fake Christian- there is no scripture that says 'treat your workers fairly?? You may want to check on that- I think it was posted to this very thread.

matthew wrote:It's a quasi-Marxist notion to think there is (though a lot of people here are Marxists, so go figure).

Interesting. So when those in control of the market determine a fair minimum wage, are they practicing Marxism, or is it only Marxism when gov't does it?

matthew wrote:However, as I implied both here and previously, the market value of work and indeed a "dignified livelihood" is so changeable and mutable than a state cannot possibly keep up with it.

But the people who actually pay the wages have an incentive to 'keep up with' what a fair wage should be? Talk about letting the fox guard the hen house.

matthew wrote:Social teaching is not binding nor is it infallible, and moreover alot of social teaching in the 20th century has the influence of socialism

Gee, where could they have ever gotten that from?? No chance it's been in the Good Book for 2000 years, is there?

matthew wrote: hell, even the Pope is a bit of a socialist, but that doesn't mean that Catholics must be socialists.

Ahh, now the Opus Dei starts leaking out. Paging Hutton Gibson.

matthew wrote:That said I think what I've said somewhat falls in line with the Catechism actually, specifically this line:

The Catechism wrote:"Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good."

Right, 'remuneration' should guarantee a dignified livelihood. Thanks for proving that you can't even understand books that are supposedly part of your 'expertise'. Care to point out what the Catholic man should do when he finds people living undignified lives because of inadequate 'remuneration'?

matthew wrote:As far as the last line in the excerpt goes, well, if collective bargaining or a contract between an individual employee and an employer is not an "agreement" over the value of wages, then I don't know what to say.

You do know what to say. You're about to say it: that a wage decided between a worker and a boss is an 'agreement', but a wage decided between a union and a boss is extortion. I've been waiting for this- the complete evasion of the minimum wage argument by trying to have an argument about unions instead. And I was hoping matthew would use words like 'mooks', to show us that he is a man of the streets, a real blue collar man from the waterfront or something:

matthew wrote: You think a labor union is immaculate and completely noble and free of greed? Ever had a union job? Ever dealt with union mooks? I have.

matthew wrote: Besides, both sides compromised in a binding agreement, didn't they?

Umm, yeah- why are you praising both sides, when everything you said before is in praise of a worker negotiating with his employer as an individual?

matthew wrote: "YOU AREN'T A CATHOLIC BECAUSE YOU REJECT A FUNDAMENTAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH!!! HYPOCRITE!!!" However I've already addressed the role of Catholic social teaching.....it ain't binding. Do your homework if you think I'm lying or being dishonest........shit.

And now we watch your guilt trip over your own hypocrisy flower into full bloom, as you project back onto yourself all the fear that consumes you when you stare into the abyss inside you where a good Catholic's compassionate soul is supposed to be. If I believed in heaven, I'd advise you to begin putting your house in order, starting yesterday.

clocker bob wrote:Wal Mart will never survive such a revolution by the 'schmos'.

Shmoo's?

sparky wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:

matthew wrote:Besides, if you let the market work (which inherently requires ethical people for it's existence) more often it will root out the dishonestly and greed that might exist in businesses eventually,

Hahahahahahahaha...

Oh, to live in a utopia where greed is minimal and the public isn't too stupid or lazy to look out for it. Keep reaching for that rainbow, matthew.

I was about to pick up on that one.

Ahem. No.

Having had exposure to people representing numerous different elements of the financial services industry and the quoted companies that employ them, I am pretty tired of the myth that the market is honest and transparent. It is definitely not.

Excessive greed and dishonesty only seem to be rooted out when it all goes wrong and the wrong people (i.e. the investor institutions and banks) look to lose significant amounts of money due to fraud and incompetence.

matthew wrote:Liberal elitism. Gotta love it.

Matthew, assuming that you are not an invented persona (which I'm not convinced of), you're assurance in stating these fatuous comments is staggering. I am curious to know of what jobs you have had, and how you have got them.

Because those from whom I most frequently hear the "you earn what you deserve" arguments are either tough old mean men who have worked their way up savagely from impoverished beginnings, or, more those who have had an upbringing where they have not had want for need.

And your frequent blanket statements regarding menial workers working for pittance by choice are self-contradictory. I was going to write more on this contradiction, but I have realised that the preceding sentence contains all that is necessary for this argument.

Given that the US and the UK economies are amongst the closest to pure capitalism, the earlier statistics regarding poverty and child deprivation are telling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have blithely ignored these statistics, along with the numerous other hard facts presented that contradict your unpleasant worldview.

You're obviously a socialist Brit, therefore I have nothing to say to you which has not already been said.

In fact in light of this whole present discussion as well as the ID EVO subdebate about the existence of God, most of you people here (especially Albini) seem to be incorrigibly obstinate when it comes to the way the world really is. Thus, I'm not about to have the same discussion 10 times over here, there or elsewhere in this forum. Consider this my last forum post for at least a very, very long time and possibly ever. Send me a PM if you want to talk one on one though. I won't promise you a response however.

Bye, it was a trip

Matthew G. Wauck.

matthew wrote: Consider this my last forum post for at least a very, very long time and possibly ever.

Yay!