Comments by "josh fritz" (@joshfritz5345) on "ReasonTV"
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@kimobrien. Labor is a market too. Businesses need to compete for skilled labor. Unskilled labor won't be worth much, but anyone with any kind of actual skills is a rare commodity for businesses who have to pay competitive rates or miss out on highly productive skilled workers. You can see evidence of this in the fact that the vast majority of Americans make above minimum wage, and of those, most are teens and young adults with few skills who will soon move onto higher paying jobs.
There is actually a cost of living crisis in the US, but this is caused by a number of factors. First of all, many things we need (housing, medical care, etc.) are heavily regulated, thus artificially increasing their cost. Zoning laws can limit available housing and result in very high rent for example. The other part is that wages actually are not keeping pace with inflation. This is not explained by steadily increasing greed across all markets, businesses are always equally greedy. Rather, an over-abundance of educated workers has decreased the value of an educated worker.
Too many college graduates has saturated the labor force with so many educated and debt laden young adults that companies can easily bid down their wages due to there being so many young educated people. Evidence of this being a major factor is that career paths that have kept pace with inflation are trade jobs. Trade jobs are seen as "dirty" and undesirable compared to higher education. The hugely disproportionate number of college graduates compared to trade school graduates means that plumbers and electricians are often out-earning college graduates simply due to higher demand for the trades due to less market saturation.
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@kimobrien. Unskilled labor cannot replace skilled labor in many cases. Businesses do what is most profitable. If it is more profitable to use machines than large numbers of skilled laborers, then guess what, someone has to build those machines, run them, maintain them, thus creating more, higher paying jobs. I'm an industrial worker, and I can say that skilled labor is very important in my field, it is literally impossible to replace what I do with unskilled labor. To the contrary, the biggest threat to me is MORE skilled and higher paid workers qualified to run a more modern and capable version of my machine with higher output potential.
Labor is important to profit, but not all labor is equal. Higher skilled labor is worth more, especially in fields with a shortage of skilled workers. Anyone can dig a ditch, but a backhoe operator can dig the ditch faster than an entire team of men with shovels, so that machinery operator can be paid ten times as much as a guy with a shovel because he is capable of doing more than ten times the work.
Also, to be clear, I do not support excessive military spending, or government spending in general. The US is far too militaristic, we waste too much money on both the military and social programs which belongs in the pockets of citizens. Lowering the taxes on the working class would do more good for them than would maintaining the tax rates and spending a portion of those taxes on social programs. Militarism does very little for the average worker, and serves primarily to allow the government to funnel taxpayer money to the weapons manufactures.
I actually agree with you on our need for sound money. The federal reserve is yet another way for the government to control our money by siphoning value away from our savings accounts through inflation. Inflation is essentially a tax on the middle class, since they tend to have most of their savings as dollars in the bank, and thus are hit the hardest by inflation. A commodity backed currency would do the average citizen a great deal of good, but we're unlikely to see that in the near future since the government and corporations who run it benefit from controlling our money. I may have different solutions than you, but many of my criticisms about the government and, to a degree, the corporations, will likely be the same ones you have.
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@kimobrien. No, it's done with the objective of raising the ratio of production to cost. This very often means fewer, more highly skilled and higher paid workers. As I described earlier one skilled worker is worth several unskilled laborers. It is worth paying one skilled worker three or even five times the wage as an unskilled worker because the machinery they operate makes then ten or more times as efficient. This is beneficial to both the employer and the skilled worker since now both are making more money, and everyone else benefits from cheaper products.
Many historians have actually made compelling arguments that slavery was a huge handicap for every society which used it since the abundance of cheap labor negated the need to innovate and industrialize. The Romans invented an early steam engine, but it was a novelty because they got slaves to do the grunt work and had no need for machines. The industrial revolution happened after slavery had largely been abolished in the west since innovators needed a new way to do work cheaply, thus steam engines rose to prominence.
Yes, the path forward is to do as much work with as few people as possible, but those workers who are left will have advanced technical skills and appropriately high wages. A vastly more productive society is beneficial to everyone. If you need half as many people to produce a tire, a T-shirt, or a laptop, that reduced production cost gives competitors more room to bid down each other's prices through market competition. Monopolies do happen, but usually only in industries with very high entry costs, so simple goods that are not heavily regulated tend to fall in price, increasing the buying power of currency by decreasing the cost of goods. This does not account for inflation, which is a government scheme to steal the buying power of people's savings.
The government should stay out of the economy. The largest corporations push for more government regulation and interference in their industries since they can tailor those regulations to suppress competition and allow market monopolies. Small to mid-sized companies are harmed by regulations, leaving more room for the large corporations to squeeze the market.
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