Help I'm Dumb

[DS930]

Specialization is an adaptive advantage for people and markets. You hone your skills as a mechanic or tailor or teacher or whatever and you now have both an investment (of time and effort) and an advantage over those who have not inversted as you chose to. The faster you can adapt the better your advantage, the smarter (or luckier) you invest, the better the rewards of your advantage. Aside from slave labor, every transaction is conducted between two parties in an exchange for value. Never more, and never less. If there appear to be more, then it is really a collection of smaller transactions. Those transactions are made by consent between both sides, even if you don’t recognize it. The workers don’t have to go to the plant and make shoes, they do so because the alternate choices are less appealing to them. If those shoes are worth $50 in the US and they are made for $15 a pair by the employee, they are unrelated transactions. The employee negotiates with the employer for his wage. The employer negotiates with his customer for his profit. The employer bears the investment and market risks. If the employee made 700 pairs of shoes, he got paid for his hours. Yet if the employer cannot sell them, the employee is out nothing. He bears no risk in that transaction, and bearing risk is what an investment is, and why it is made is to realize a gain or profit that justifies taking that risk. If the employer has 700 pairs of shoes he cannot sell, he is out his entire investment. Employees are not “worth” what they produce, they are “worth” what they can find someone to pay them. If you recognize a potential for the sale of shoes in NY and know you can buy and transport them from Brazil cheaper than you can make them in NY, you are the one acting on that potential, not the employee in Brazil. He didn’t decide to make shoes and ship them to NY, if he did then he would be the one bearing that risk and deserve the reward for it. If you are the guy with the boat that transports the shoes, you are likewise a party to a transaction and got paid to move them without having to figure out that they needed to be made and where they needed to be delivered. You don’t bear any risk greater than deciding to buy a boat and learn how to navigate it, so your payment is for what that value has to your customer and your customer will pay as little as he can negotiate for it. If you are the consumer in NY buying the shoes for yourself, you will pay what you personally think is the value of those shoes in that market. If you don’t think they are worth $200 then maybe you’ll buy them off the discount rack a year later when the rage is over and they are worth $50, or maybe you’ll pick them up used from the Goodwill for $1 after someone else derived all the value they wanted from them. They are the same shoes the entire time. In each transaction the value exchange was between two parties.

How would you respond to this?

[Morpheus]

Those transactions are made by consent between both sides, even if you don’t recognize it. The workers don’t have to go to the plant and make shoes, they do so because the alternate choices are less appealing to them

And those alternative choices are shaped by capitalism to be less appealing than being a wage-slave. We must work for someone else in order to survive because we do not have access to the means of production necessary to produce the necessities of life for ourselves. The capitalist class monopolizes the means of production and uses their control over it to their advantage, exploiting us. That originated as a result of coercion - the stealing of land from peasants/indigenous peoples at the dawn of capitalism - and continues as a result of state enforcement of private property. It therefore is not consensual, it is based on the capitalist class's coercive monopoly of the means of production.


If those shoes are worth $50 in the US and they are made for $15 a pair by the employee, they are unrelated transactions.

They are directly related because without the employee making them there wouldn't be any shoes to sell.


The employer bears the investment and market risks. If the employee made 700 pairs of shoes, he got paid for his hours. Yet if the employer cannot sell them, the employee is out nothing. He bears no risk in that transaction, and bearing risk is what an investment is, and why it is made is to realize a gain or profit that justifies taking that risk. If the employer has 700 pairs of shoes he cannot sell, he is out his entire investment.

The worker actually takes a huge risk - if those shoes don't sell they may be out of a job. The worst that will happen to a capitalist is that s/he will lose their fortune and become a worker, the worst that will happen to a worker is that s/he will end up on the streets. Plus, taking risks doesn't produce anything. If I stand on the edge of a cliff I'm taking a risk - should I be paid a fortune for it?


If you are the consumer in NY buying the shoes for yourself, you will pay what you personally think is the value of those shoes in that market. If you don’t think they are worth $200 then maybe you’ll buy them off the discount rack a year later when the rage is over and they are worth $50, or maybe you’ll pick them up used from the Goodwill for $1 after someone else derived all the value they wanted from them.

Actually, what you'll pay depends on the competition and what you can afford, not what you think the value is. If you think the shoe is worth $200 but one company is selling them for $100 you'll go with the $100. If you think they're only worth $100 you may be forced to pay $200 if no one sells them for less, since shoes are a necessity. The alternatives he mentions are bogus comparisons because they are generally of lesser quality (thus reducing what you think they are worth).

See http://question-everything.mahost.org/Soci...capitalism.html (http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/capitalism.html) for a more detailed refutation of capitalism.

[Iepilei]

It sounds as if they want to turn us all into termites, or something. Personally I think there are different breeds of people, and not everyone is a specialist.

Specialism is a bad thing for everyone to be. Leaders will always be those who have a round about knowledge in many things with a firm base in a few particulars. The term "General" isn't just a person who leads a campaign.

[DS930]

Thank you, see I don't know enough about this stuff yet to really be able to argue it (yet).

Here is one dealing with the Labor theory of value,


That's nice as a theory of explaining value as a model, but that is distinguishable from how markets (plural) work. What value does the 10 minutes a surgeon spends restarting your heart have in comparison to the 10 minutes the shoe maker spends assembling the shoe? Both people took ten minutes out of their day and worked for you. One has 28+ years of education, sacrifice and training just to get to the point he can perform the surgery, the other had an entire day of apprenticeship. What value does ten minutes from the world's greatest surgeon hold compared to ten minutes from the guy who barely graduated med school yesterday? What value does it have to the surgeon if they want to place priority on children first and charge adults more for their services or not charge their own mom? Ignoring relative skills, if everyone decided to be cardiac surgeons and no one knew how to make shoes, what value does the shoe maker have then? If the patient has terminal cancer, degenerative dementia and systemic neuralgia (constant, unmedicateable excruciating agony) and wants to die, what value does restarting his heart hold for him? As wonderful as it sounds to think everyone can choose to be whatever they like, some jobs just suck ass. We'd all be teachers and no one would pick up the garbage, but society needs garbage collectors too. So to get people to do a smelly filthy job, we pay them more.

Value is not absolute, it is inextricable from supply and demand. What is worth a lot to you may not be worth much to me. The freedom to contract (inherent in a free market society) allows the person making the exchange to decide the value they wish to assign. If there is no food that cheese sammich may well be worth $3,000 dollars; or if it has the image of the messiah on it it may be worth more; but if they are hanging from trees everywhere and they all look the same, why pay so much? In the socialist model, it places the power to assing value on someone who is NOT a party to the transaction. Your value of a service or product is no longer able to shape the decision, which is why graft and corruption are inescapable in that system. You have cancer, in a capitalist system you'd go pay your doctor to fix it. In a socialist system you'd pay the gov't everything and they'd pay yor doctor to fix it. In the capitalist system, you pay as much as you are willing to for the treatment and get what you pay for. In the socialist you don't pay anything so you can't assign what sacrifice level you're willing to make, so the gov't has power. If you decide to sleep with the doctor, the gov't has no power over that exchange for value, if you hoard wealth and bribe the gov't official to bump you up on the list you get rewarded at the expense of someone who doesn't hoard. The parties to the transaction will ALWAYS act to assign the value THEY impute to an exchange.

Next, changing technology and market plurality. A PC in the US is cheap, but natural holistic food is expensive. In costa rica the PC is expensive and the food is cheap. As the means of production improves or technology advances, the value of the old goods decreases because their costs to produce and market demands decrease. Between any two markets those discrepancies are the source of mutually beneficial exchange for value. So costa rica sends us their surplus holistic food and we send them our old PCs. They have no PCs so even are old stuff is worth more to them, we have no holistic food so what they would let rot as surplus we will pay for gladly. Socialism is SO reguilated that technology advances and market disparity is a disadvantage. A HUGE DISADVANTAGE. A rise in cancer patients results in a corresponding increase in demand for treatment, this is met by more people paying for the limited number of doctors, which leads to an increase in people entering the field because there is money to be made, which in turn meets the need of the increase in cancer patients by reduced costs to get their business which once stable removes the pressure to become an oncologist, and the entire process is self guided. Compare that to socialism, just how would they do the same thing and how would that work? Someone somewhere would have to recognize the increase and reallocate the resources and assign a value and get approval from whomever approves it then push people into place and shuffle things around with constant attention and minute adjustment at all times. As fast as data can be collected it is outdated and they just can't keep up realistically. You, totally removed from the system that decides for you, have to accept how much your cancer is worth to them to shuffle resources for you. In the capitalist schema, the decision is made by you, and the market changes the instant you cast your vote by spending your money, no approval or gov't decisions needed. (and no, I am not a socialist democrat, I am a moderate republican, as contradictory as those terms sound in today's political environment.)

There was a joke about a Bioler-maker that kind of explained this. An oil mogul had a bioler-maker that maintained all of his holding tanks for him for 60 years and finally retired at age 75 to be replaced by a younger tradesman. He knew everything there was about those oil fields and tanks and was greatly admired by the other workers. After he left, everything ran fine until one day there was a leak and oil was spraying everywhere. The mogul was losing millions an hour and the new boiler-maker was unable to stop it, so he called the retired guy and begged him to come fix it, money was no object. So the old boiler-maker came out, looked at it all for a few minutes, went in with a welder and 5 minutes later the leak was stopped. There was $30,000,000 worth of oil left in the tank and if he hadn't stopped it, all of it would have been lost. He turned to the mogul with a bill for $15,000,000.75 and the mogul balked at it, asking for an explanation. The old man said the welding rod cost 75 cents, and knowing where to use it was worth at least what he saved the man, but because he liked the mogul, he had given him a break on the price and only charged half.

...so what does that joke tell you? Is value absolute or is it relative?

[Domingo]

Wow, that is to much reading. Lower it down some before my head explodes.

[Morpheus]

Here is one dealing with the Labor theory of value

Well, I don't believe in the labor theory of value, so a lot of this is irrelevent. What determines price doesn't really matter much, I'm more interested in issues of justice & hierarchy. There is also some underlying garbage in that quote that attempts to justify capitalism, but doesn't do a good job of it.


As wonderful as it sounds to think everyone can choose to be whatever they like, some jobs just suck ass. We'd all be teachers and no one would pick up the garbage, but society needs garbage collectors too. So to get people to do a smelly filthy job, we pay them more

That's not how it works in capitalism. Garbage people are paid much less than sucessful actors, bankers, CEOs, and other jobs even though the job of a garbage person is much more smelly filthy, etc. The capitalist class can make a fortune without actually doing or producing anything at all - they derive money from what they own. Sticking money in a bank and letting it accumulate interest is hardly a "smelly filthy job" yet capitalism allows the very rich to make a living by this means. He's also assuming jobs would exist in communism. There would be a lot fewer tasks in anarcho-communism that "such ass" because there wouldn't be any bosses. If there are still tasks that no one likes to do then several things should be done: (a) consider if the benefits of those tasks are really worth doing it, and if not simply abandon it (b) reorganize things to minimize the labor required for that task and/or to make it more pleasant © automate it, where possible (lots of people enjoy doing things with electronics & robots) (d) equally spread out the task among all members of the community, each putting in our fair share (probably rotating who does it)


Value is not absolute, it is inextricable from supply and demand

And yet his ranting ignores the "supply" part of that statement. Cost of production has a big impact on price.

All his talk about what would or would not happen in socialism is bogus because he's using a model (I'd say misrepresentation) of socialism that I don't support and neither do many socialists. I don't support the existence of money, let alone centrally regulating prices. The whole thing is a straw man.

He also continues to ignore both the hierarchy involved in capitalism (some people are much richer than others) and the coercive conditions under which it occures. His El Salvador example is a good example. All trade with El Salvador is coerced to be in the US's advantage because the US spend over a decade sending Death Squads around the country murdering people who wouldn't go along with the US's dictates.


You have cancer, in a capitalist system you'd go pay your doctor to fix it

Unless your'e poor and can't afford it.


In a socialist system you'd pay the gov't everything and they'd pay yor doctor to fix it.

Not really, but even in that system it would be more efficient because the profits of the HMOs & their investors/corporate bureaucrats would be cut out.


In the capitalist system, you pay as much as you are willing to for the treatment and get what you pay for.

No, then you get ripped off by an HMO. Reducing services to customers, reducing labor costs and increasing how much to charge customers maximizes profit. Under certain circumstances you might be able to switch, but all the other HMOs are doing the same thing for the same reason. They don't want to take care of you, they want to take your money.


The parties to the transaction will ALWAYS act to assign the value THEY impute to an exchange

No they won't. Under capitalism, they'll act to maximize their benefits even if that scews everyone else (especially if it's a corporation). If I can get something for less then I think it's worth then I'll buy it at the lower price. If I can sell something for more than I think it's worth then I'll do that.

[DS930]

I am wondering if I should just invite him here, let him dabate people who know much more. I kinda bite off more than I could chew but he is cool , so I don't really care. I also think it would be much more productive.