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How the Quakers Became Unlikely Economic Innovators by Inventing the Price Tag (aeon.co)
Belying its simplicity and ubiquity, the price tag is a surprisingly recent economic development, Aeon magazine writes. For centuries, haggling was the norm, ultimately developing into a system that required clerks and shopkeepers to train as negotiators. In the mid-19th century, however, Quakers in the US began to believe that charging people different amounts for the same item was immoral, so they started using price tags at their stores to counter the ills of haggling. And, as this short video from NPR's Planet Money explains, by taking a moral stand, the Quakers inadvertently revealed an inefficiency in the old economic system and became improbable pricing pioneers, changing commerce and history with one simple innovation.
why should hardworking poor people pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their disposable income in taxes to subsidize the luxury consumption of the lazy rich?
Except that you can't haggle over the price of an Uber ride and that both the driver and the rider get shafted.
One of the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends (Friends, to Quakers, but most people call them Quakers) is equality. Another is honesty and others include integrity, truth, and simplicity. Friends believe in doing their best, in other words, not doing shipshod work. If they have an item they have produced for sale, say, for example, a chair, then, as part of their belief in integrity, they will have put their best work and used quality material in making that chair.
With that in mind, at one point, and I don't know if this started with just one Friends' Meeting or how it spread, but the consensus was that if you've worked diligently on a chair and one person comes into your shop and offers you $10 for that chair, but the fair value (considering labor and materials) is $5, then it's being dishonest and acting without integrity to take the additional $5 because that person was not a good negotiator. It's taking advantage of their lack of time or inability to negotiate. On the other hand, if a Friend has put in conscientious work and has to make a choice between selling it for $3 or not selling it, that's not fair to them.
The consensus, for a while, had been on a fair price for a fair amount of work and materials. From there, it wasn't far to go to reach a conclusion that if $5 is a fair price for that chair, then, barring changes in costs for materials (or maybe labor or cost of living), then gaining more or accepting less through dickering is less than fair, to either the shop owner or the customer.
While I know many will say, "Well, if they don't take all they can get for it, they're idiots!" If your focus is on the accumulation of wealth and possessions, then, from that point of view, that may be true. But if your intent in life is not material, but on personal improvement, growth, and following your spiritual beliefs, than there is much more to be gained from turning down the extra money offered than there is in accepting it. Friends are big on fair gains as opposed to grabbing what you can when you can. (Which is why they don't gamble and generally are quite careful in selecting what stocks they will invest in.)
Remember, this may not seem moral or immoral to you or others. That's okay. For Friends, their concern is in doing what they believe is right.
One key to this innovation is to really try to understand the motivation from a personal level. The existing practice required the Quaker store owner to try to haggle with the customer for every transaction - which consists in some sense of an effort of two parties to deceive each other about what one is willing to pay or accept. And the Quakers greatly emphasized strict personal honesty - so this was a frequent unpleasant experience that they wanted removed.
Additionally in a close knit community different people paying different prices is a source of social tension. Shop owners no doubt experienced customers - people of the community they knew - wanting the same price some other person of the community that they knew received. If this happens very often the temptation to simply set the same price in practice becomes strong. And if you do that why not just write it down and save the owner some time, and halt unwanted attempts to haggle.
Talk of "axioms" is irrelevant (and it should be noted that axioms are by their nature arbitrary). Although such an argument could appeal to a modern urban intellectual individualist, it would have appeared bizarre to an 18th Century close knit community devoted to personal moral improvement.
Interestingly the Quakers were also one the prime originators of the anti-slavery movement. Before the mid-18th century the notion that slavery might be intrinsically immoral was an extreme fringe notion. Slavery was generally accepted socially, legally, and religiously.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The 9/10ths of a cent gasoline tax came from a governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s after he campaigned on a promise to not raise a taxes a"single red cent." Since reality (aka the deep state) requires paying for government services, he raised taxes 9/10ths of a red cent.
If you think government is not worth paying any money for, move to government-free Somalia and enjoy all your "freedoms.' Also, Libertarians should note that if Putin wants to actually keep all his stolen money, he wants to keep it in American or European banks, not Chinese or Russian ones.
Reality means government institutions work better over the long run than not having them does.
An excellent idea. At the same time, we can get rid of usury.
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others? It's precisely because as a society we want these things, we allow these things to exist to improve liquidity--to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets or see where their wealth could be used to move goods and profit from the price difference. It's also precisely we realize that that's where most of the extreme wealth comes from that we were, for a long time, willing to charge at a much higher tax rate on that wealth precisely because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either, but that's the problem with using taxes as a means of trying to maintain social justice. There exists no perfect tax code because it's impossible to adequately tax people fairly. A flat amount is unfair because wages for the same work vary by region; it's also unlikely to be payable by many. A flat proportional amount is unfair because nothing about proportionality is fair because neither wages nor costs are proportional by work or region. Nor is progressive or regressive taxation fair. In fact, it's basically impossible to have a fair tax rate let alone one that provide sufficient revenue to any government.
Beyond the fact that, no, let the left doesn't want to tax people at over 90%, I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits--maybe some corporations?--without committing tax evasion. People pay a lot more than income tax and while there are some tax credits that can grant people negative tax rates for a few years, they're not a permanent thing and the accumulation of all taxes is positive.
But you are right in one respect: those who are disabled or are mentally challenged do receive benefits in excess of what they contribute. Generally over the population, there's certainly individuals who have received a tax paid education for which they will never contribute enough in taxes or other economic benefit to overcome their cost. That's basically a universal truth of taxes: revenue is not equally collected and dispersed. In fact, if that's all taxes were, then there'd be no point in taxes. Taxes are inherently a form of wealth redistribution--I'm sure you're a big fan of the prisons and the poorhouses.
You can argue overall that certain people receive too much benefit. either because the class of benefit is unwarranted or the individual is undeserving, but with all the hand waving you're doing, I don't honestly think you even recognize where your tax dollars go or how this "theft" actual plays out. If you really want to avoid "theft", go somewhere without a government or any people.
Found another Marxist (even if you think you aren't, your ideas are borrowed directly from concepts created by Marx, which makes you one by definition, if not by your own identity.)
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
If trading stocks makes you rich, then go do it, and then tell me how it works out for you. (Pro tip: Even the best actively managed funds underperform compared to index funds because their fund managers aren't oracles, and day traders are rarely rich, so keep that in mind before you toss your savings away once the trading bell rings tomorrow.) Even if you do the smart thing and go long on investments, your chances of being rich aren't that great either, unless you've already got a lot of knowledge behind you that you can use to tell you whether something is a good investment or a horrible one (pro tip: Most are horrible, even the ones that look really promising tend to be bad.)
If the lending money makes you rich, then I have to ask: Where on earth do you obtain this money that you can lend out? Furthermore, how do you know whether the borrower will pay you back? If the borrower refuses to pay, then how do you recover your losses (and yes, it WILL be a loss for you, even if you manage to get all the principal amount back from them.) And given you're supposed to get rich form this, then how long does it take for that to happen, and with what amount of money are you starting?
Don't bother answering though: Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual (hence why people who win hundreds of millions in the lottery typically end up poor within a decade) so people don't get rich this way. If they do, there's a lot more that has to occur well before then.
to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets
And this is why you don't understand anything about what makes a rich person, and that what you're saying is just a collection of regurgitated talking points. If you don't understand what I mean by this, then consider my point proven.
because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
This is perhaps the most bullshit concept of our time. Why do I say this? Because people (yourself included) espouse this all the time, and yet wouldn't ever dare follow it (and yes, that includes you as well.) This is derived from Marx's labor theory of value, which is that all labor is worth exactly the same, no matter what it is for. So this means that performing brain surgery is worth the same hourly wage as digging a ditch with a pickax. Another interesting property is that Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei is worth far less than Mein Kampf if Marxists applied that theory objectively.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either
...according to some rules you just made up...
I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits
Actually this is pretty easy to do; your effective income just has to be at or below the lowest 35% of income earners, and your net tax burden is less than zero in pretty much every circumstance. If you don't know anybody who has been this way their whole life, then you've only seen and known affluence.
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
Not because it is immoral, because it requires significant capital to invest. Once you have a few million cash you can basically live well forever on just the return from relatively safe investments, with minimal effort.
That was Marx's point. If you own the factory it is relatively easy to sit back and watch the profits roll in while others do the hard labour, and someone without a factory can't just start sewing their own clothes and hope to compete with that. Owning the only means to generate wealth pretty much ensures that no-one else can get wealthy.
It works in practice too, e.g. companies that encourage employees to own stocks so they have a stake in its future.
Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual
That's a vague and unconvincing statement. The children of rich people clearly have a lot more opportunities in life - better education and health, low cost loans from their parents when no sane bank would lend to them etc. Many of them end up failing repeatedly, but they have that family wealth buffer to protect them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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