Aaaargh. The worker is getting PAID, the customer is getting a product for their money. I'm not saying it's always equitable and sometimes it's bad enough to call it stealing, but capitalism as such is NOT stealing.
Yes, the worker is getting paid, and yes the customer is getting a product.
Capitalism as such is not stealing.
However, profiting by selling something that you have no rights to is theft. The question is - who has ownership of a person's labour?
Marx is just reinventing language and morality to suit his deranged view of life and he's managed to create a nightmare of philosophical abuse of otherwise good minds, an atmosphere of suspiciousness rather than grace and charity and a proliferation of enemies where there are none. Ptui to Marx. He's one of the most evil minds of all time.
I thought that you agreed that where practicable, the worker should be paid in proportion to his contribution to product and you're main concern was that it couldn't be put into practice. Marx didn't reinvent language. You wanted to talk about stealing as taking something that you don't deserve or have rights to. Marx simply had a different view over who has rights to what. Marx thought that a labourer's labour and the fruits thereof belonged to himself.
Where's the abuse? What's all this to do with enemies?
Ya know, it's not really the facts of taxing the rich more, it's the nasty attitude marxism fosters in people toward the whole process of making money that bothers me.
It bothers you that the person's wage should be related to the value they add to the product they produce? What's nasty about wanting to earn what you've earned?
I can't STAND this whole philosophical milieu he's created.
What mileu?
I'm sure there are REASONABLE ways of taxing the rich at a higher rate, but what you usually hear is this sneering judgmental hateful almost drooling vampire talk against "capitalism" as such that is just repugnant especially when the vast majority of capitalism is just small buisness owners trying to make a decent living at something they like doing.
Taxing the rich at a higher rate isn't Marxism. Marx agreed with it, but he agreed with the existence of tables but that doesn't make them Marxist. And I thought I'd include a quote from Adam Smith, one of the most influential voices in the formation of modern Capitalism.
I don't know what you mean by 'the majority of capitalism'. There are a lot of small business trying to make a decent living and more power to them.
It is clearly the case that if the farmer is paying his staff more than the value they are generating, he will lose money because they are basically stealing from him. I appreciate a perfect balance is impossible to practically reach. That does not mean we should give up trying to make the system as fair as possible.
I think we do that by adjusting as we go and the LAST thing we need is the idiotic abstract fantastic unrealistic vaporings of MARX!
Yes we do do it by adjusting as we go. The farmer is incentivised to pay them less than the value they add, and the farm worker has little power to change things on their own. So unions form, and conflicts occur. It takes a long time, centuries even and the wages are still flagging behind value. They have to in a capitalist system!
Marx just suggested that a single workers revolution would be a quicker way to get there rather than have lots strikes, other union actions and little revolts here and there.
As I said it's the sneereing suspicious fingerpointing hatemondering I hate about Marxism which creates a new class of enemies out of ordinary people and undermines all decent human feeling. And it's on this message board. Good grief you'd think Wal-mart was Hitler himself.
The hatemongering is what you hate about Marxism? Heh. There is no enemies being made out of ordinary people in the economic model. I have no idea how its meant to undermine decent human feeling?
I am trying to appeal to the decent human of you, Faith. Is it fair that a person that works hard, should have someone else (who was definitely part of the process, don't get me wrong) decide almost entirely unilaterally, who deserves what.
I agree it's a great system in that it's largely easy to implement - but can you see that even ordinary people might be inadvertently perhaps, depriving someone of the fruits of their labour for profit.
If it's a small business - this tends not to be the case. Inefficiencies reduce the value being created so that even paying staff minimum wage is a daunting prospect. If they were being paid according to Marxist principles, then the business owner might be able to pay themselves a higher wage by paying staff less wages.
And herein is the killer of pure Marxism, and it's a very similar killer to pure Capitalism. How do you avoid small businesses getting priced out completely? So market regulations are added, help to small businesses offered. With things like minimum wage legislation to help prop up the labour market to reasonably comfortable levels, small businesses get hit again.
When Marx was around, there was not the efficiency there is now. The science of industry and then marketing and so on, exploded. A small business in a Marxist realm could easily find everyone on crushingly low wages as the product can't be produced and sold at much of a profit because much more efficient established competitors could just price them out. Again - government regulation would be needed.
You think you know too much about the situation. You think you know motives, you think you know things you have no way of knowing. Marxists talk like that. Fine take them to court. I'm all for justice.
What are you talking about? Court? We aren't talking about unlawful taking of something why would that work? I asked if a factory owner sold something that didn't belong to him, would it be moral to try and force him to give it back (or compensation of equal value) to it's morally right owner?
What's glib about that?
I find this whole paragraph to border on the insane, I'm sorry, it's coming from a very nice fellow as far as I can tell but still all this talk about what one is "entitled" to makes me nervous.
Discussions about ownership rights disturb you? Who do you think owns a person's labour? The person, or the person that provided the means for the labourer to labour?
Why should that make you nervous?
Let me put it this way. If a person works hard to set up a plumbing business and hires some plumbers and gives them the fruit of his labour (eg., tools, parts, business contacts etc) do you think that this person should be rewarded for their contribution to the increase in value of this enterprise in line with the level of efficient work they put into doing it?
Please, all I wanted to do when I started this topic was point out that there was a lot of Communist activity in America in the 20th century and that there is a legacy of that still in America and it has become entrenched in the universities and it may have more of a socioculturalphilosophical presence than an economic one.
And my question is, assuming that you think it is, how is this a problem? What part of the ideas has become entrenched? Why are these ideas problematic?
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