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I don't think you're an adult until your parents have become transparent to you. Nor are you really a citizen until your nation has become transparent to you. Well, then, I have recently become an adult.
DavidM, some time ago, used to term wage slave at one time, and I forget the context. But I balked at the notion, and argued against it. Well, I was wrong, and this isn't the only thing that he was, in my better opinion, right about. The other thing was his assertion that socialism will be necessary in the United States in one form or another. He and I know what the term socialism means, but the majority of Americans don't. But the key to this opinion, as I've formed it, is that it is by means of jobs that wealth is distributed to a majority of Americans. This, however, isn't an essential feature of an economy, and should even be considered accidental. It isn't even essential to capitalism, as strange as this may sound. But manufacturers have learned well how to keep their production high even while keeping the quantity of labor low. Because of technology, production has become less and less labor-intensive.
This is detrimental to the working class, as can be imagined. But this doesn't produce class war, as some believe, but conflict within the working class itself. Because it seems to me that work, or involuntary labor, has never been something given a great deal of respect. The only consolation for workers that they have to obey someone else for a wage is if everyone else that they meet is also in a similar condition, if everyone else also works. And so you have this new kind of work ethic, that demands that everyone has to work, and this is why the greatest opposition to the welfare system I've seen, against "socialism", is exactly among the working class. The main thing that workers dislike about people who are on welfare is that they don't work, or even that they don't find it necessary to work. The best dispute to this notion is that workers don't feel similarly toward the upper class, where you have whole families that don't need to work because of one financially well-off family member.
This is why, for example, that factions such as the Tea Party exist, and can be influential. It is a consoling view that the reason there are few jobs is because of the government and "socialism". Certainly, an ideology like libertarianism can help, which views the economy in purely mechanical terms, and believes that the only reason that the machine doesn't run well is because some entity "outside" of the machine is blocking it, or monkeying with it's parts. But this is just a compatible view, and it helps that libertarianism prevents the Tea Party from having to asking any incisive questions about the economy. But the energy and vigor of the Tea Party can't be explained as being due to any ideology.
The reason there are few jobs is that few jobs are necessary. We can produce more with fewer workers. But this is simply unacceptable to the working class. The idea that, of all the things that need done, there is a surplus of people ready, and willing, to do them, sounds to them like an absurdity. And this is why the government talks about "jobs" and "job programs" all the time, and this is why the next election will be almost entirely about jobs and the unemployment rate. Of course, if the government does anything to distribute wealth to people directly, this will be called socialism; but if, instead, the government creates jobs itself, this will also be called socialism. But what if the alternative to socialism is that wealth doesn't distribute at all, that the competition for the few jobs increases, and there are no "other opportunities"? What if sections of this country simply dies and dries out? Not to mention that the population is still getting larger...
How would this happen though? Isn't the free market suppose to fix things? Well, I wrote a post about the free market a while back, but I think few people understood the thrust of it. But I don't accept the libertarian notion of the free market, that it is primarily about public versus private. There is no entity "outside" of the machine that can manipulate the machine, it is all a machine. Anyone who has suspected that the government, and politics, can't be excluded from being considered as being a part of the economy, and in no way separate from it, has followed the right intuitions, in my opinion.
In one of his posts about peak oil, davidm also asked an incisive question. He asked what does efficiency in the economy mean if, as a consequence, we reach peak oil, or create cataclysmic climate change? Without knowing whether either of the claims or true or not, but the question can be abstracted from these issues. I think the economy is efficient, but not efficient for any sort of value that human beings have. But when I say "the economy is efficient" it is the same to say "nature is efficient", and when we talk about efficiency, we're only talking about a small part of the whole of nature.
When I say that politics is a part of the economy, I'm extending the notion that others might have had when they ask rather direct economic questions. For instance, many of us understand the role that money plays in our politics. We know that if an organization as efficient as one of our large corporations donates ten thousand dollars to a political campaign, they largely expect to get at least ten thousand dollars of benefit from that donation. These aren't organizations who donate because they have become passionate about a particular campaign, and they aren't organizations who waste money. That is to say, that corporations aren't like individuals, they tend to be smarter.
So it makes sense to ask, directly, "How much is a vote worth in terms of money, in dollars and cents?" It is good to be bold and ask such direct questions, this is a sign of a true intellectual, even if the question, as put, requires some analysis. This is certainly a question I would like to see someone like Nate Silver take up, he's probably the best person to answer it.
But when we talk about the economics of law, we know we're talking about a different sort of economics. The principles of economics should be the same everywhere, but if economists have only studied private industries, this only means they haven't made their principles general enough. It should be construed as a transaction that law can be exchanged for wealth, and that wealth can be exchanged for law. In private industries, we can more or less denote economic value as money, but in public industries this is rarely possible. We actually have to take some time to understand what money represents, and to understand that law represents this too.
Now, back to the conflict within the working class. I think before I rebuked on the notion of "wage slavery" mainly because of my dad, who has worked his whole life, and it was hard for me to understand him as a slave. The same is true of my parents. But now, as I've indicated at the beginning, this has become more clear. It is just that they've rarely spoken of it as such, and they and I have always had a different language for things. They are classic authoritarians, "herd animals" as Nietzsche would put it, and I didn't realize this more than I have recently. I don't mean to dishonor them when I say this, but only to convey.
But even more difficult was to understand myself as a wage slave. But this answers an important question I've always asked. What am I doing? Most of my jobs in the past, in my opinion, have been meaningless. I discussed this with my parents last night, and they didn't understand the question. They said you work because you have to get paid. But I said that then you are only getting paid for doing something meaningless. Again, they don't understand.
Perhaps I've done too many of these service jobs which always involves, as I put it, pandering to customers. It's hard to understand that many of these customers, similarly, have occupations of their own, and spend their time pandering to customers. Of course, I understand, that the economics simply doesn't work if I were to believe that all my customers were themselves service workers. We don't get paid...much.
I told my dad last night that, you do know that "service" or "customer service" are simply polite words for "servitude". But he interrupted me before the end and said, "a polite word for slavery. We're slaves." Well, he knew before I did! Maybe he knew all along, we were just speaking different languages. But he always re-expresses his idea that everyone is a slave for somebody, and this is his way of looking at the world. Maybe, in his mind, it's only okay to be a slave if everyone else is a slave, as long as there are no masters.
But to my mind, slavery is doing anything meaningless. If life is meaningless, then life is slavery. I think that when there was de facto slavery, the slaves were doing what the masters told them, only because that's what the masters told them. So, of course, the work that the slave did wasn't meaningful for the slave. It might even have been against the interest of the master for the slave to find meaning in his work; in the same way that Kant argues that an act is moral only if it was done for no other reason. In either case, the principle of obedience is obvious: you are only legitimately obeying if you follow for no other reason than because you were commanded to do so. The economic term for this is disutility, and it is the sort of thing that they have a hard time accounting for, mainly because economists are usually superficial.
There are people getting paid in this economy who are not slaves, and these are people who do what they are passionate about, and this activity is useful enough to others that they pay them for it. There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary labor, and this is the voluntary kind. I don't know how much society can function on voluntary labor alone, but it seems to me that this army of service workers can only be accounted for because less labor is necessary for society to function, but people are scrambling for jobs and so there is always someone's day that could be made minutely less frustrating if there was someone stationed there for that purpose. That's why there are cart attendants, for example. It's a pointless job, but "someone has to do it"--well, actually not. It's not an important or significant job at all. People can get their own carts out of the parking lot. But, sigh.
Parody of Language, wage slave.
DavidM, some time ago, used to term wage slave at one time, and I forget the context. But I balked at the notion, and argued against it. Well, I was wrong, and this isn't the only thing that he was, in my better opinion, right about. The other thing was his assertion that socialism will be necessary in the United States in one form or another. He and I know what the term socialism means, but the majority of Americans don't. But the key to this opinion, as I've formed it, is that it is by means of jobs that wealth is distributed to a majority of Americans. This, however, isn't an essential feature of an economy, and should even be considered accidental. It isn't even essential to capitalism, as strange as this may sound. But manufacturers have learned well how to keep their production high even while keeping the quantity of labor low. Because of technology, production has become less and less labor-intensive.
This is detrimental to the working class, as can be imagined. But this doesn't produce class war, as some believe, but conflict within the working class itself. Because it seems to me that work, or involuntary labor, has never been something given a great deal of respect. The only consolation for workers that they have to obey someone else for a wage is if everyone else that they meet is also in a similar condition, if everyone else also works. And so you have this new kind of work ethic, that demands that everyone has to work, and this is why the greatest opposition to the welfare system I've seen, against "socialism", is exactly among the working class. The main thing that workers dislike about people who are on welfare is that they don't work, or even that they don't find it necessary to work. The best dispute to this notion is that workers don't feel similarly toward the upper class, where you have whole families that don't need to work because of one financially well-off family member.
This is why, for example, that factions such as the Tea Party exist, and can be influential. It is a consoling view that the reason there are few jobs is because of the government and "socialism". Certainly, an ideology like libertarianism can help, which views the economy in purely mechanical terms, and believes that the only reason that the machine doesn't run well is because some entity "outside" of the machine is blocking it, or monkeying with it's parts. But this is just a compatible view, and it helps that libertarianism prevents the Tea Party from having to asking any incisive questions about the economy. But the energy and vigor of the Tea Party can't be explained as being due to any ideology.
The reason there are few jobs is that few jobs are necessary. We can produce more with fewer workers. But this is simply unacceptable to the working class. The idea that, of all the things that need done, there is a surplus of people ready, and willing, to do them, sounds to them like an absurdity. And this is why the government talks about "jobs" and "job programs" all the time, and this is why the next election will be almost entirely about jobs and the unemployment rate. Of course, if the government does anything to distribute wealth to people directly, this will be called socialism; but if, instead, the government creates jobs itself, this will also be called socialism. But what if the alternative to socialism is that wealth doesn't distribute at all, that the competition for the few jobs increases, and there are no "other opportunities"? What if sections of this country simply dies and dries out? Not to mention that the population is still getting larger...
How would this happen though? Isn't the free market suppose to fix things? Well, I wrote a post about the free market a while back, but I think few people understood the thrust of it. But I don't accept the libertarian notion of the free market, that it is primarily about public versus private. There is no entity "outside" of the machine that can manipulate the machine, it is all a machine. Anyone who has suspected that the government, and politics, can't be excluded from being considered as being a part of the economy, and in no way separate from it, has followed the right intuitions, in my opinion.
In one of his posts about peak oil, davidm also asked an incisive question. He asked what does efficiency in the economy mean if, as a consequence, we reach peak oil, or create cataclysmic climate change? Without knowing whether either of the claims or true or not, but the question can be abstracted from these issues. I think the economy is efficient, but not efficient for any sort of value that human beings have. But when I say "the economy is efficient" it is the same to say "nature is efficient", and when we talk about efficiency, we're only talking about a small part of the whole of nature.
When I say that politics is a part of the economy, I'm extending the notion that others might have had when they ask rather direct economic questions. For instance, many of us understand the role that money plays in our politics. We know that if an organization as efficient as one of our large corporations donates ten thousand dollars to a political campaign, they largely expect to get at least ten thousand dollars of benefit from that donation. These aren't organizations who donate because they have become passionate about a particular campaign, and they aren't organizations who waste money. That is to say, that corporations aren't like individuals, they tend to be smarter.
So it makes sense to ask, directly, "How much is a vote worth in terms of money, in dollars and cents?" It is good to be bold and ask such direct questions, this is a sign of a true intellectual, even if the question, as put, requires some analysis. This is certainly a question I would like to see someone like Nate Silver take up, he's probably the best person to answer it.
But when we talk about the economics of law, we know we're talking about a different sort of economics. The principles of economics should be the same everywhere, but if economists have only studied private industries, this only means they haven't made their principles general enough. It should be construed as a transaction that law can be exchanged for wealth, and that wealth can be exchanged for law. In private industries, we can more or less denote economic value as money, but in public industries this is rarely possible. We actually have to take some time to understand what money represents, and to understand that law represents this too.
Now, back to the conflict within the working class. I think before I rebuked on the notion of "wage slavery" mainly because of my dad, who has worked his whole life, and it was hard for me to understand him as a slave. The same is true of my parents. But now, as I've indicated at the beginning, this has become more clear. It is just that they've rarely spoken of it as such, and they and I have always had a different language for things. They are classic authoritarians, "herd animals" as Nietzsche would put it, and I didn't realize this more than I have recently. I don't mean to dishonor them when I say this, but only to convey.
But even more difficult was to understand myself as a wage slave. But this answers an important question I've always asked. What am I doing? Most of my jobs in the past, in my opinion, have been meaningless. I discussed this with my parents last night, and they didn't understand the question. They said you work because you have to get paid. But I said that then you are only getting paid for doing something meaningless. Again, they don't understand.
Perhaps I've done too many of these service jobs which always involves, as I put it, pandering to customers. It's hard to understand that many of these customers, similarly, have occupations of their own, and spend their time pandering to customers. Of course, I understand, that the economics simply doesn't work if I were to believe that all my customers were themselves service workers. We don't get paid...much.
I told my dad last night that, you do know that "service" or "customer service" are simply polite words for "servitude". But he interrupted me before the end and said, "a polite word for slavery. We're slaves." Well, he knew before I did! Maybe he knew all along, we were just speaking different languages. But he always re-expresses his idea that everyone is a slave for somebody, and this is his way of looking at the world. Maybe, in his mind, it's only okay to be a slave if everyone else is a slave, as long as there are no masters.
But to my mind, slavery is doing anything meaningless. If life is meaningless, then life is slavery. I think that when there was de facto slavery, the slaves were doing what the masters told them, only because that's what the masters told them. So, of course, the work that the slave did wasn't meaningful for the slave. It might even have been against the interest of the master for the slave to find meaning in his work; in the same way that Kant argues that an act is moral only if it was done for no other reason. In either case, the principle of obedience is obvious: you are only legitimately obeying if you follow for no other reason than because you were commanded to do so. The economic term for this is disutility, and it is the sort of thing that they have a hard time accounting for, mainly because economists are usually superficial.
There are people getting paid in this economy who are not slaves, and these are people who do what they are passionate about, and this activity is useful enough to others that they pay them for it. There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary labor, and this is the voluntary kind. I don't know how much society can function on voluntary labor alone, but it seems to me that this army of service workers can only be accounted for because less labor is necessary for society to function, but people are scrambling for jobs and so there is always someone's day that could be made minutely less frustrating if there was someone stationed there for that purpose. That's why there are cart attendants, for example. It's a pointless job, but "someone has to do it"--well, actually not. It's not an important or significant job at all. People can get their own carts out of the parking lot. But, sigh.
Parody of Language, wage slave.
