Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by emphryio:
So they can quit. Then what? Many don't dare. They're stuck. Why do they have to work so hard at such mind numbing work? Because that's competition!

????

Suppose Toyota does this. What happens when Ford comes along and offers a bit better working conditions for the better workers? Toyota finds itself with the bottom of the barrel, Toyota cars are crap and they go out of business.

Such bad conditions are the result of having only one real source of jobs around--that's *NOT* competition! I think most libertarians recognize that the government has to intervene in such situations.

Which reminds me of my wife's work place. Someone mailed out letters to everyone asking if they wanted to start a union. If a certain percentage returned the letters with their names, then there would be a vote.

NOBODY would dare return the letters because they were afraid the company actually mailed the letters and would find a way to fire anybody who returned them. (Actually supposedly a bunch of people returned the letters with the name of one particularly hated boss written in.)

Understandable and stupid. Why not direct respondants to some local union hall?

For instance, one lady at this company had a reoccuring cyst forming on her uterus. She had medical insurance through the company. She was costing the company money and missing work because of her medical condition.

They found a way to fire her.

How do libertarian values stop this from happening?

Well, one thing that would help is to get rid of the notion of health insurance as a employment benefit or else force health insurance to go to a community rating system. Any time you couple things like this you set up a situation ripe for abuse.

emphryio

Primarily a "better worker" is someone who will work even longer hours at an even faster pace and preferrably for less money. And so the situation escalates until people are working as much as they can stand. (Which is already about where the situation is at.)

Ignoring that competition will make the situation worse. Toyota does have competition from cars produced in other states. And the workers are free to move, aren't they?

But if you say the government has to intervene in such situations, what kind of intervention?

So a libertarian would say, "It's their fault, too bad." ?

(My wife is yelling at me to get off the internet.)

Thomas Ash

I think this can get dangerously close to romanticising life in the pre-capitalist world. Workers in early factories may not have had a particularly sweet deal, but they did choose to work there, and were hardly ever directly forced (ie. by men with sticks.) They went into a profession which at least gave them a chance to improve the lives of themselves and their children, unlike subsistence farming. I don't see any reason why people should want to be self-sufficient, rather than divide labour and have the option to buy 'commodities' (eg. the computers we're both using) with their wages. I'm not suggesting you're going this far in the romantic agrarian direction, but like I said, I think it's a danger.

thefugitivesaint

Thomas Ash:
But, i am not romanticising a thing. i am merely reproducing a line of thought barely addressed and quickly dissmised by Smith. He could not come to any digestable solution to the problem of "Primitive Accumulation" and so he ignored the question altogether.

Well, again, this is not exactly true. Coercion does not mean that a gun need be put to anyones head. You can just as easily force someone to participate in the market by giving that market a power and scope it did not previously hold in the general population.

Before industrial capitalism you had a society that ran with a smaller market within its framework, supporting specific needs for most people who could not meet these needs directly themselves. Later, after certain restructurings with the assistance of the existing States, you had a growing market that began to consume and overtake the general cultural habits of the people around it. More and more commodities were being placed into and under the operations of the "market." Now, we have a "Market culture" rather than a culture containing a market within itself.

The point being this, many people have been forced to participate in the market as it grew more powerful. Even those who resisted the market and its influence eventually succumbed since they were indirectly affected by the participation (often not voluntary in the Libertarian sense) of those around them who did trade in the newly emerging market.

There is a good deal of evidence going back to hunter-gatherer tribes resisting mass agriculture before the market even truly existed. Many tribes resisted and refused to participate but the growing power of agriculurally based societies was more than most could bear. More commentary about this turn of events suggests that most tribes around the world went into the new age of agriculture kicking and screaming. Wars, conquests and eventual loss of land forced them into a sedentary lifestyle.

Sometimes, the choices of those around you does possess the ability to narrow your given range of choices. Many of these choices involve direct force (in the often stated Libertarian position this is the only form of coercion really recognized) but indirect force is just as prevelant in shaping our decisions. Many people who were affected by the newly emerging markets had no real participation in its creation and merely viewed the process as it reshaped civil society. The process is still continuing and we see the so-called 3rd world doing a great deal of resisting while the elites in this 3rd world embrace the market.

The so-called "free" market is not everthing its sold to be and a great deal of its justification is founded on a falsely constructed history. We are not "economic animals", purely selfish in our behavior nor are we altuistic saints with the best of intentions for one another. We are both but i digress.

i'll check in later.
-theSaint

August Spies

Hey Saint, always nice to read your posts. It seems like every time I wander back here you pop up too.

As for Smith, if you have time id be interested in you reasoning for why he would support libertarians.

Admittedly the argument that he was opposed to economic centralization cause it distorts the market was something I first heard from you befored id read Smith.

or were you merely saying Smith would be fairly happy with today's economy? because my claim was just that he wouldn't agree with LIbertarianism and libertarians should stop claiming him for their own.

Hawkingfan

This would be rather difficult in a socialist society were gun ownership is not allowed, eh?

Hawkingfan

And why is your welfare their responsibility?

Autonemesis

There is nothing about socialism that is necessarily anti-gun. Plenty of statists - who line up under a socialist, democrat, or law-and-order banner - favor gun control or outlawing gun possession. But they are statists first. A socialist state founded on principles of socialist philosophy would resemble anarchy more than it resembles authoritarian regimes.

So it's OK to shoot libertarians.

[ December 18, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by emphryio:
Primarily a "better worker" is someone who will work even longer hours at an even faster pace and preferrably for less money. And so the situation escalates until people are working as much as they can stand. (Which is already about where the situation is at.)

That's union thinking. In the real world, at jobs that require any skill there are differences in workers. Some are quite capable of working at a faster pace, or at a higher quality at the same pace. It's not neccessarily working harder but working smarter. In some fields a low skill guy is of no or even negative value.

Ignoring that competition will make the situation worse. Toyota does have competition from cars produced in other states. And the workers are free to move, aren't they?

It's not Toyota having competition for cars, but rather for workers. Moving can be expensive, but to some extent they do move. After all, people tend not to stay in dying towns.

But if you say the government has to intervene in such situations, what kind of intervention?

Things like worker safety rules.

So a libertarian would say, "It's their fault, too bad."?

I'm saying the organizer was stupid, not the workers.

Friar Bellows

Thank you! And thanks for an excellent post. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />