Obama wins, saves economy single-handedly while defeating economy-hating Republicans

[Whoha]

Good God, Aeson has gone ahead and posted yet another sequence of immense posts that nobody is going to read.

I read it.

Aeson, you are in the right for the best of all possible reasons by the way: No competitor has eliminated you from the market as of yet.

[Aeson]

Thanks Whoha. It's not hard to prove KH's statements wrong now is it?

I do think the issue you touch on is the most likely reason why what I'm doing might be "wrong", as it does open up extra room for a competitor to put me out of business. But then again, if someone is comes here making land and/or workers here more productive than I can... I don't really need to be in business here anyways.

-------------------

I find it funny that HC and KH* aren't capable of speed reading. It's not a hard skill to teach yourself, and immensely useful. A post like that should only take a few seconds to skim at reasonable comprehension rates, especially if you're just trying to find a point or two to argue with rather than deal with all the information at once. Fail on the part of our education system I guess, if the best high school in our country can't produce students with basic reading skills.

*KH is just pretending, because we all know he read it. Drake, KH, and EON... the unholy triumvirate of posters who ignore me, yet read my posts anyways. KH is just the smartest of the group because he doesn't actually put me on ignore and thus have to click the "show post" link every time like a *****

[Elok]

How the hell are long hours an evil?

Well, when they're compulsory and come without breaks...try stitching jeans for fourteen hours straight and tell me it's a humane way to treat workers. I actually don't object to the low wages so much, because crummy as $2.50 a day sounds to us, it apparently goes a decent distance in Third Worldland or they wouldn't take the damned jobs in the first place. To be fair, it's even possible that the local contractors treat them with something vaguely resembling human dignity and don't do all the nasty **** we hear in the horror stories. But, given that the situation puts all the power on the employer side, I'd be astonished if abuse didn't occur. :shrug: Like I said, there's not much to be done about it. I'm just not going to pretend it's not a little skeezy.

And anybody who thinks that gambling is, in itself evil is going to be operating on a different wavelength from those of us who don't see a problem with mutually agreed-upon echanges, no matter how incomprehensible the motives of one or both parties may seem to us.

Are you just now figuring out that I wasn't talking about economics problems? However, as we're clearly not going to see eye-to-eye on this, I have no problem with terminating the discussion or argument or whatever you want to call this.

[Arrian]

From Wiki:

In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic or political environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.

Most studies of rent seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges, such as government regulation of free enterprise competition, though the term itself is derived from the far older and more established practice of appropriating a portion of production by gaining ownership or control of land.

Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity, such as by gaining control of land and other pre-existing natural resources, or by imposing burdensome regulations or other government decisions that may affect consumers or businesses.

I'm a little confused as to what argument you're making, KH. It may be b/c it's Monday morning and my brain isn't firing on all cylinders yet. It may be because I never made it past Econ 201. One can come up with any number of possibilities...

But whaddya say you help me out and spell this out for me? It shouldn't take you long.

-Arrian

[KrazyHorse]

Arrian, the rent being sought is the excess wage being offered. The destruction of value occurs when an individual with higher skill than necessary chooses to engage in a lower value activity because one offers a rent over the other. The same distortion occurs when some activities are taxed relative to others.

[KrazyHorse]

Well, when they're compulsory and come without breaks...try stitching jeans for fourteen hours straight and tell me it's a humane way to treat workers. I actually don't object to the low wages so much, because crummy as $2.50 a day sounds to us, it apparently goes a decent distance in Third Worldland or they wouldn't take the damned jobs in the first place. To be fair, it's even possible that the local contractors treat them with something vaguely resembling human dignity and don't do all the nasty **** we hear in the horror stories. But, given that the situation puts all the power on the employer side, I'd be astonished if abuse didn't occur. :shrug: Like I said, there's not much to be done about it. I'm just not going to pretend it's not a little skeezy.



Are you just now figuring out that I wasn't talking about economics problems? However, as we're clearly not going to see eye-to-eye on this, I have no problem with terminating the discussion or argument or whatever you want to call this.

You have a strange definition of compulsory. Workers are free to vote with their feet...

[N35t0r]

They should all starve to prove a point

[KrazyHorse]

Still not understanding how it opens me up to moral criticism to provide people with choices they previously lacked...

[Elok]

The same could be said of the Titanic lifeboat example I gave. Before I stepped in, all the poor passengers were going to drown. Now they have the option of forking over most of their life's savings, assuming they have such things, in exchange for life. They're free to hold onto their cash and die. I'm just offering them a choice they didn't have before and, if anything, ought to be praised.

[Hauldren Collider]

The same could be said of the Titanic lifeboat example I gave. Before I stepped in, all the poor passengers were going to drown. Now they have the option of forking over most of their life's savings, assuming they have such things, in exchange for life. They're free to hold onto their cash and die. I'm just offering them a choice they didn't have before and, if anything, ought to be praised.

There are other forms of rationing, such as lottery. What you are describing is an entirely different scenario.

[Caligastia]

The same could be said of the Titanic lifeboat example I gave. Before I stepped in, all the poor passengers were going to drown. Now they have the option of forking over most of their life's savings, assuming they have such things, in exchange for life. They're free to hold onto their cash and die. I'm just offering them a choice they didn't have before and, if anything, ought to be praised.

I doubt that a Chinese worker's choice to work in a factory is a life-or-death decision.

[Aeson]

KH just thinks he has the value of everything, and has already determined that third world workers aren't worth ****. If I as an employer don't pay my workers what KH thinks they are worth, but rather what I think they are worth, then it's a terrible welfare destroying thing. Even though he'll use the wage offered to judge the value of the work in most other cases, such as his own job. And even though it's a voluntary exchange on the part of the worker and I, the type of exchange he "see[s] no problem with", except in my case where the worker is poor, then it's an awful thing again. Because some accountant working for a wage they don't feel is ample compensation will "vote with their feet", and seek my employment instead. (Nevermind that the financial firm in his view should be competing for labor, not just having it handed to them on a silver spoon... I mean platter.)

His argument all comes back to something along the lines of, "You can't treat them well, they'll just get uppity".

[Elok]

There are other forms of rationing, such as lottery. What you are describing is an entirely different scenario.

? I wasn't trying to describe something that actually happened, or might have actually happened. It was an impossible situation I pulled out of my arse for a counter-example. If you like, substitute a man offering to smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany in return for all their possessions, or whatever you like in that general vein. Albeit both are more dire than the situation in the third world. My point is, if the default is sufficiently crummy, the person offering the way out obtains an inordinate amount of leverage, and it's my understanding that said leverage is generally exploited to its full potential. While they're not likely to get a better deal, blithely saying "oh, well, they're better this way than they would have been" is overly simplistic.

[Elok]

I doubt that a Chinese worker's choice to work in a factory is a life-or-death decision.

Actually, I'm thinking more of Filipinos, Indonesians, Indians, Guatemalans and the like. I think the situation in China is different, what with the powerful central government. But which worker are you talking about? Third world countries tend to have a lot of people and no welfare. The level of need varies from person to person, but at any given time there are going to be mothers with too many kids to feed, seventeen-year-olds with sick parents who need expensive medicine, farmers up to their eyeballs in debt after bad harvests. And then, of course, there are indeed going to be a number of people who aren't in an immediately bad way, they're just sick of eating beans every damn day, living in a one-room tin shack and having only one shirt. But I didn't mean the Titanic example to be an exact parallel, merely a counterexample which fits the basic requirement HC listed for a sleazy-seeming endeavor to be A-OK: "they're better off with it than without it."

[KrazyHorse]

The same could be said of the Titanic lifeboat example I gave. Before I stepped in, all the poor passengers were going to drown. Now they have the option of forking over most of their life's savings, assuming they have such things, in exchange for life. They're free to hold onto their cash and die. I'm just offering them a choice they didn't have before and, if anything, ought to be praised.

Are you having trouble reading, Elok? The companies that hire third world labor aren't the only ones who can give money to third worlders ("giving them lifeboats"). That's why the analogy is retarded.