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biccat wrote:Yes, welcome to understanding capitalism. The value of a person's labor is not fixed, instead it depends on the value the person confers by means of his labor. I'm glad you're finally realizing this, insead of insisting that there's some fair labor price that can be controlled

And once you've come to understand that the value a person confers by means of his is dependant upon the system with which he interacts, you would have caught up to economic theory developed in the 1970s. On the one hand, your inability to understand this shouldn't make you feel too bad, because it caused quite a hullaballoo back then as well. On the other, you are arguing against economic concepts established 40 odd years ago, and that's pretty ridiculous.

And no-one is claiming there is an objective. true value for any unit of labour. Don't make up nonsense. It just drags this out further.

But you don't have to "guess" at the value, the market takes care of that problem.

But only if you pretend that the market itself provides an absolute estimation of worth. Which is nonsense.

I offer $5/hour, the guy next door offers $6/hour. Janitors will move next door until his need is met or I raise my offer, because people will work in their own self interests. I'm not "guessing" when I offer a wage, I offer an amount of money that covers my costs and provides an incentive to work for me.

But the system of demand and supply setting the price of labour is an arbitrary game. It's a fairly good game, being an efficient first step in providing resources, but that's all it is.

This is the part where you're creating problems. What are those "well established systemic flaws?" You can't just simply throw out a line like that without any support, especially when it's central to your entire argument.

Sorry, I thought you were aware of some basic economic limitations on markets. If not from undergraduate economics classes, which it now appears obvious you've never taken, at least from the other dozen times I've walked you through this argument.

Information assymetry - the problem that negotiations will not be fair because one person entering deal knows a lot more than the other party. This is a problem where a businessman, who's likely to be very well aware of market conditions, and an employee, particularly a low skilled employee, who is not.
Weakened bargaining position - the problem that one person in negotiations will be under duress, most commonly desperation due to a long period of unemployment, and will not be able to negotiate for his full value.
Non-adaptive resources - while price changes are a positive in most situations as it provides an incentive to produce less in demand resources in favour of more in demand resources, that model assumes resources can be quickly swapped from one thing to another. But training of a person takes years. If a man finds he is no longer of value as a factory machinist, he can't simply start selling his skills as a computer operator.
Externalities - paying as low a wage as possible might be profitable to the individual company, but otherwise harmful to society. An example is that wages are so low that a person is left in squalid conditions, causing health problems for him and his family.

Is it really preferable?

What? I'm left wondering if it is actually possible to have a conversation where one party is willing to question the absolute foundations of the field in question? The question you're basically asking is 'is it really preferable to identify and act to correct market failures?', which is like walking into a brainstorming session for developing new weapons of war and asking 'do we really need to fight wars?'

The answer to both questions is 'yes, fething obviously yes.' It's the core of the question at hand. Just like any new weapons development that left out the idea of actually having to win the war would be an utter nonsense, any concept of economics that left out the idea of 'how do we fix market failures' is just as stupid. Identifying market failures and building systems to account for those failures is what economics is.


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biccat wrote:Are you seriously trying to make the case that government involvement in the economy has decreased in the last 20 years?

The idea that 'government involvement' is a bulk category that can be measured is just nonsense. I mean, on the one hand growing high tech industries have evolved to work with government to develop new technologies in faster and more efficient ways. On the other hand we've seen massive deregulation of finance and international trade, and the dissolution of most industry boards of control. How do you conclude this has across the board has produced more or less government regulation.

The only way that question can make any sense is if you start from an ideological point of view that deals with 'government regulation' almost completely in the abstract, and then proceed to not think about the issue at all.


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biccat wrote:"Trickle down economics" is well understood to be the idea that by providing government welfare to companies the benefits of that welfare

No, it isn't. It's the idea that you leave the rich to get as rich as they can, however they get there. Government welfare might be one source, but it is almost always understood to be embracing laissez faire capitalism.

Your redefinition of it as corporate welfare is a whole new kind of crazy.


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biccat wrote:Under what metric has there been significant deregulation and tax cuts "for the rich and big business"?

In 1991, a person earning $82,150 ($135k in today's money) would pay the top rate of tax, of 31%. Nowadays a person earning that much money will be paying 28%, and would have to earn $174k before he looked at paying more than 28%. This was called the Bush tax cuts. You might have heard of them.


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biccat wrote:Yup. The one with 80,000 pages of Federal Regulations.

It's kind of funny, but mostly sad, that you think regulation is measured by word count, as opposed to actual controls on behaviour.

Without wanting to get into a thesis defense, or to debate the semantics of the term "value", nationwide unions and similar organizations kind of do assign a value to certain jobs and professions.

So, you know, it happens.

Monster Rain wrote:Without wanting to get into a thesis defense, or to debate the semantics of the term "value", nationwide unions and similar organizations kind of do assign a value to certain jobs and professions.

So, you know, it happens.

Well yeah, we give values. Of course we give values. Whenever you get paid for labour you're getting a value for your labour.

The point is that pretending the market always absolutely gives the best value for labour and that we can't question or modify that value is simply wrong.

I'm just saying that in many cases there is a set value attributed to various professions and jobs.

Monster Rain wrote:I'm just saying that in many cases there is a set value attributed to various professions and jobs.

Okay, yeah, I'm with you. Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant.

There certainly are set values attributed to professions, over here we've had a series scaled wages, called Awards, for each job within each industry. So instead of having one minimum wage, we've had a minimum wage for all kinds of different jobs. It worked fairly well, for the most part, as a means of establishing a base pay for certain skill levels. It wasn't perfect, no system of pay probably ever could be.

biccat wrote:

However, the answer is not easy to determine. There is simply no explicit, complete, and accurate way to track changes in regulatory costs from year to year.26 However, a number of measures can illuminate the picture, albeit imperfectly. Together, they may provide a fair picture of what is happening in the regulatory world. Among these are:
Number of Federal Register Pages.
...
Length of the Code of Federal Regulations.
...
Number of Major Rulemaking Proceedings.
...
Cost Estimates.

Thanks for the support.

Ah, I see you've, most cleverly, eliminated any explanatory text in order to affirm your earlier statement. It certainly takes a master of argument to do so in such a brazen fashion given that the relevant portion of said explanatory text has already been posted in this thread, and is easily available via the link provided.

Others might consider this to be a transparent attempt to avoid having to address any criticism, deflection in a word. Personally, I cannot help appreciate this wholly novel approach to the exchange of ideas.

But, to reiterate, I can create a collection of regulations that would fit on a single page that would be significantly more restrictive than the present CFR, which is ultimately why page count is not a useful measure of regulation vs. deregulation. Indeed, the article I linked to points out that, considering only measures of page count, the Bush Administration was significantly more regulatory than the Clinton Administration, but when considering measures that are actually materiel to the results of regulatory considerations the former comes out ahead.

biccat wrote:
If you've got some evidence of deregulation other than platitudes, I'd certainly be interested in hearing it.

I believe the bill was called the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act. It repealed significant portions of the Glass-Steagall Act. It was only one bill, of course, but that would be the purpose of the comment...

Are we now pretending that the number of bills intended to deregulate the finance industry is more important than what steps were actually taken towards deregulation?

...but please, carry on deliberately ignoring evidence that you have explicitly referenced in this thread.

biccat wrote:
I think what you're trying to do is called affirming the consequent.

Not at all. Affirming the consequent would entail something similar to this:

If bill X deregulates sector Y of the economy, then sector Y has been deregulated.
Sector Y has been deregulated.
Therefore bill X deregulates sector Y of the economy.

This is not the argument to which I'm alluding, which looks more like this:

If bill X deregulates sector Y of the economy, then sector Y has been deregulated.
Bill X deregulates sector Y of the economy.
Therefore sector Y has been deregulated.

That kind of differentiation goes over the head of most commenters on news sites.

Then again, people who post on news sites aren't looking for a rational debate...