Which is better than the alternative where people don't term their items unbreakable, and no one tries to break them, and we might be tempted to think they are unbreakable because they've never been broken.
I'm not following. Please explain how buying only American goods is good for the foreign consumer.
It lowers demand for foreign goods. The foreign consumer does not have to compete with the american consumer for foreign goods. Imagine a factory in china producing widgets to sell to America for $100 each. This means that a chinese person will not be able to buy it for less than $100 if someone can make $100 selling it to someone else. If America drops out of the foreign market, now there is less demand, for the same supply, so the price drops.
This isn't correct. Keeping the money within the country accelerates the economy without leaking funds externally, and so funds American salaries, resource recovery, care and so forth. In a closed economy, especially one as large as ours, there is a lot of room for competition, and so costs should settle out to reasonable values in most cases without having to depend upon the workers living in despicable conditions, as is the case now.
The presumption here is invalid. The Chinese workers that make iPads live in dormitories, eat poorly, and earn very little income. They don't consume on an equal level with a US worker/consumer; they cannot do so. Likewise, the children that manufacture some of our clothing, etc. The equality you posit simply doesn't exist. And that, of course, is the basis for the lower cost of an offshored job.
I didn't say that a chinese worker consumes at the same amount as a US worker. I am saying that isolation doesn;t benefit any workers of any nationality where they produce and consume the same amount as themselves (i.e. a chinese worker producing the same amount he/she is consuming)
Yeah it keeps money in the economy. It also keeps goods out of the economy. If isolating economies is good, maybe California could benefit from isolating itself from the rest of the USA. They could keep their own money in california, and keep salaries high without importing the products of cheap labor from states with lower cost of living. Do you honestly think this is a better system?
Further, since within our own economy we can regulate activity at all levels (as we cannot in foreign economies), we can avoid monopolistic behavior, price gouging, unacceptably low wages, unacceptably long hours and so forth if we simply choose to do so.
By leaving the foreign market, we remove choices from those foreign workers. They get paid even less when the demand for them is lower.
Finally, for American tech workers who now have jobs, where those jobs were previously offshored, their roles as consumers are hugely improved, as well as their contribution to our economy (as compared to money going offshore and then into a foreign economy/)
And now the whole country has to pay higher prices for technology to benefit the workers in 1 industry. Cutting ourselves off from the world economy doesn;t boost our own economy. The money that was "going offshore" was in exchange for goods, that we can now no longer get. It's like we are imposing sanctions on ourselves. Russia is trying to pretend they are better off now that they are isolated, but their economy is falling apart. No thanks.
Some are nearly 100% resource based, such as anything coming off of a fully automated production sequence.
Show me an exmaple of something that is 100% resource based (i.e. 0% labor costs due to automation), and I'll show you a bunch machines that had to be designed manufactured using labor and purchased. I'll show you a bunch of materials that had to be cultivated/harvested/mined by people or machines that also had to be designed and manufactured using labor.
Buying a bunch of materials and machines and saying "I don't pay any labor costs", ignores the fact that the cost of your machines comes from the labor it took to make them, and the labor it took for the whol
1) investors drive equity prices up for companies that lay off.
Investors deserve to lose money for driving bad financial decisions or investing in companies who make bad financial decisions. That said, layoffs are not always a bad financial decision.
Executives are compensated in stock options.
Stock options (unlike stocks) are only worth anything if the stock price of a company goes up.
2) they are being excellent owners by today's standards. offshore jobs- save money, focus on core business model, profit your self for 2 years and then move on to the next company and do it again.
Sounds like you'd make a killing in the stock market. You've got it all figured out. It's so easy.
3) This is a very naive statement. Turn it around- what conditions beyond your control *could* force you to work those hours.
Aside from living in a 3rd world country or going through another great depression, I don't think anything could, especially now with obamacare. We have labor laws in this country. Hourly people aren't even allowed to work past 40 by law.
Have you taken every precaution to prevent being put in that situation. Do you live on half your salary? Do you have multiple years of income saved? (I did).
I do indeed live on less than half my salary, and after doing that for 10+ years, I do indeed have multiple years of income saved up.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with what I said.
4) Companies hire people who have a job. Companies do not hire people who worked a long time at one place (even if they have good skills on paper) and are currently unemployed.
So why doesn't anybody go hire all the desperate and overqualified unemployed people? They could hire them at a discount, and get very high quality labor for lower cost. Seems like a great way for entities that only care about profit to succeed. Maybe all the companies out there are dumb. If you became an entrepreneur, you'd murder all your competition because only you can see this golden opportunity that no one else can.
Drop the negative semantic shit like "cushy" and "coast". It's dumb and it's keeping you from seeing reality.
anyone over 40 has a house and (many) kids in college. You are just trying to get down the road at that point. --you
I learned it from watching you dad.
Yes those people were unwise. I agree. Unlike me, they really didn't believe they'd become unemployable at the age of 50. I realized that when I was 28 because I saw it happening even back then.
What I am saying is that people aren't unemployable at 50 because of their age. People are unemployable at 50 when they "are just trying to get down the road". Half the people I work with are over 50, and I know which ones are just coasting, and I wouldn't hire them either if it were my money paying their salary.
I'm trying to show you the road ahead waiting for you and you are blinding yourself to reality. You won't win if you stay blind. You'll do the same thing everyone else does.
I'm doing just fine. thanks.
Futhermore, most of my post was about why our current system sucks and some better ways of increasing the efficiency of everyone's labor. You ignore all that and call me naive and blind for not seeing reality?
I was trying to have a discussion on economics. I was not asking for advice from you. And I don't buy this bullshit that older people (i.e. you) have more insight. Even in your own story you talk about how you outsmarted everyone when you were 28.
Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
Wow so it seems like a company could stand to make a lot of money hiring all these super qualified people who are now out of a job (i.e. instead of foreign workers). They should theoretically get more work done that's of higher quality and for less cost. This seems like a golden opportunity that any smart entrepreneur seeking a profit would jump on.
So your advice is stop being our best.
I'm really not sure how you came to that conclusions from anything I've said, even if we assume your other claims are true.
If you feel like you can't compete with people less skilled than you, then I don't know what to say, other than "Don't be a motivational speaker".
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest?
If people are willing to hire less skilled people than you to do the same job, I can only guess that maybe you aren't as skilled as you think you are. STEM is really not a field where doing a shitty job leads to usable products.
I would tell my children that a STEM career is definitely a good career choice. But I would be sure try to discourage them from thinking they are better than other workers simply because they are not foreign.
If hell really does freeze over and bad engineers are more valuable to employers than good engineers, I would suggest becoming a business man, hire all the unemployed good engineers (at a discount), and destroy your competition.
But being the negative person you are, I'm sure you'll find some reason why this won't work, and you are destined to fail competing against mediocrity.
I don't view it as "giving up" our jobs. I view it as a mutual benefit to both societies.
I am a software engineer. Until about 6 months ago, I washed my own dishes. Then my wife hired cleaners to clean the house every 2 weeks. They started doing the dishes. They took a job away from me, and I let them. It probably only costs me like $5 or something (part of a $100 total cleaning bill). They are willing to do this job for cheaper than I am. I now purposely don't do the dishes if I know the cleaners are coming soon, because I'd rather they do it at the cost they are willing to do it for. It helps them and it helps me.
If you see yourself as a dishwasher, then someone willing to wash dishes cheaper than you is a threat. I think this is the wrong attitude in a global economy, especially if you live in a place with so much opportunity. All the cheap shit you can get at walmart means that it is cheaper to live at a certain quality of life while you are getting a college degree or learning a new skill.
We shouldn't be competing with foreign labor by trying to exclude them from the market with laws. We should be competing with foreign labor by trying to acquire skills that are easier for us to acquire than it is for them. My housekeepers don't speak english. My wife has to communicate with them via google translate. They are more than happy to be doing dishes. I probably would be to if I were in their position.
It's not that we should charitably give up our jobs to them. It benefits both of us if we let them do those jobs that they want to do more cheaply than we do. It gives us more freedom to do other things and it helps them as well.
1) Well shall we say it was less profitable than it would have been otherwise? (i.e. I as a potential investor might have paid a very high stock price expecting a certain level of profit, but would not see a positive ROI given that the company is under-performing)? While the company may have been profitable (i.e. it netted > $0 profit), it may not be profitable for the new owners (i.e. If you spent $1 billion on a company that you thought would net $100 million per year, and it actually nets only $1 million per year, you have essentially just incurred a huge loss)
2) So the owners (i.e. the new owners) were just not very good at being owners of a company. They allowed bad managers to run the company they owned (and possibly profit as the company was harmed). As far as I can tell, those owners deserve to lose their money in a capitalist system. It would be nice if the bad managers didn't make off like bandits (i.e. because that presents a moral hazard), but I'm not sure there exists any system that eliminates fraud entirely.
3)I don't consider working 70+ hours (i.e. a ~40% hourly pay reduction) for 2 years for the reward of 6-8 years of job security (at a company that frequently forces employees to work 70+ hours) to be a good deal.
My company sometimes gets in a jam and they need us to work about 60 hours a week for maybe 4 month stretches (3 or 4 times) over 10 years, but they pay us for the extra hours we work.
I think the mindset of people over 40 just wanting to coast is not very healthy. I am 35, and I am constantly learning new things. I don't anticipating just wanting to half ass trying to be useful once I hit 40 (even with my mortgage and supporting my wife and kid). You can just coast if you want, but I think you should be aware that you are in fact less valuable if you don't care about maintaining usefulness.
Should a company have loyalty to the workers who have put in a lot of time and just want to coast to retirement? Only in the same sense that workers should have loyalty to their company regardless of how shitty they are treated. Basically I believe companies and workers should be loyal to each other on the condition that their loyalty is deserved.
Even if we want a system where workers were only required to be useful during the first part of their career and were allowed to just drift off into mediocrity as they aged, the economically efficient system would be to simply pay workers exactly as much as they are worth at every step in their career evolution. If they are super useful when they are young and energetic, then they should make more money at this phase to compensate for when they are less useful and making a lower wage (i.e. similar to saving for retirement). If workers can not be trusted to save for their own retirement, then you can have companies simply pay into a trust fund (e.g. like a retirement account), to ensure that workers don;t suffer from a loss in income as they become gradually more useless.
My point is that it makes no sense for companies to pay relatively useless workers a high wage just because they were useful in the past. If anything it means they should have paid them more in the past and less now. It doesn't do us any good to pay workers high wages merely out of loyalty. It causes our economy to be less efficient and it forces older workers to be stuck in jobs that they no longer care about. Under my proposed system you could make all your money when you are young, and then just retire earlier when you no longer give a shit, and make some space for more new young go getters.
4) If you really need to switch jobs every 5 years to forcibly prevent yourself from becoming complacent, then by all means do that. But logically you really shouldn't have to do that. If you have the will power to switch jobs every 5 years even though you don't want to, then shouldn't you have the will power to stay employable even if you have a cushy job?
My mom sets her clock 15 minutes fast so she is never late. But she know
I don't agree that all land owners are "rent-seeking" in the economic/political sense, even if they are literally seeking rent in the common sense. We should have the goal of stopping economic rent-seeking done by anybody (not just property owners). Otherwise I don't think there is anything inherently harmful about trying to get a return on investment into property.
The land itself was available without initial work, even if it may take work to use the land in various ways. We must be careful to distinguish between real physical assets, real physical work, political control of resources, and virtual fiat financial assets when doing this sort of analysis.
So why not just view the price of land as the cost of making the land useful rather than the cost of the land in some abstract sense which is defined to be $0 since it always existed? I'm not saying that there aren't people who profit (from anything) undeservedly. Aside from literal "land" (i.e. the thing that existed with no labor), every other form of property has labor costs associated with. Some property turns out to be a good investment (i.e. good ROI) some turns out to be bad (i.e. low or even negative ROI). That is the nature of investment. You can look to the worst examples of people making ridiculous undeserved ROI and conclude that investment in general is basically unfair, but what is not as readily apparent is all the failed investments.
And I don't even want to give the impression that I believe owning land is morally righteous or anything. I just don;t think it throws my calculations that the vast majority of costs end up ultimately being related to labor directly or indirectly (which I think is much higher than most people realize).
If you are of the view that no one has a right to own land or any personal property, I think that is a perfectly rational point of view with merit, but it is just not one that is easily reconciled with living in a capitalist system.
I also don't mean to claim that capitalism is fair. I think it is useful at efficiently (albeit not fairly) allocating resources to maximize the production of wealth. In this respect I think that government regulations to account for externalities can play a very useful role to that goal. I also don't think it is unreasonable to have social safety nets (i.e. I don't think wealth creation should be the only metric for success).
What I am trying to convey is the idea that actions designed to achieve a certain outcome often don't have the desired effect and/or have lots of undesirable side effects, and I think artificially inflating American labor prices is one such thing.
I was planning to make the point about past vs. present labor, and I am glad that you already brought it up. So in that respect doubling current wages would not properly capture the fact that past labor wages aren't doubled (making any investments based on past costs and future returns disproportionately profitable) . But if we kept this system long enough, the system would eventually converge to where we would be if past costs where doubled somehow too. (e.g. we aren't still significantly profitting from investments into R&D performed by cavemen... at least I don't think we are).
In short. I can respect the arguments that people don't deserve the benefits of owning things that were not ultimately the products of their labor (or purchased with money that was the product of their labor), but I still think prices would roughly double if wages doubled, with some variations thrown in for factors like the ones we discussed, given enough time for past costs to be flushed out of the pipeline of current manufacturing costs.
And if I am a member of congress, then an activist judge is one that makes decisions that undermine the laws I make (even though we are part of the same government).
I'm not convinced that Americans making less money would significantly better the lives of people in other countries.
It's not that the fact of Americans making less money *causes* the lives of people in other countries to be better. It's that having a free market causes both of those things to happen.
If Americans can find a way to make more money without restricting markets, it would not necessarily have any negative impact on anyone else, in fact it would probably be a positive impact by creating more total wealth in the world economy.
Opening up jobs to the whole world that would otherwise be limited to only Americans, gives foreign workers more opportunities. It increases the demand for labor worldwide. If the supply of labor remains constant, this shifts the supply-demand equation into creating upward pressure on wages worldwide.
Think about it in terms of cheating on taxes. Let's say some billionaire is cheating on his taxes, and he makes billions of dollars doing it. Let's say we catch him and repossess all his assets and throw him in jail. Does the general population benefit from this? A little bit. Maybe each person gets to pay $10 less in taxes on average. But when you multiply these $10 over the whole population, it adds up to the full $2 billion that the tax cheat lost.
So the tax cheat might think, I may as well just keep this money, look at how much it benefits me. If I give it back, everyone else will only get $10 which is not that much at all. This completely ignores the fact that it's a *lot* of people getting a small benefit which adds up to a large benefit overall that is being stolen.
if they add too much to the end user's cost, competition will see to it that they regret it.
Yes, if only apple was forced to do this, and their competitors were not, it would seriously affect apple's profit's maybe even threaten their position as a market leader. But my example wasn't meant to single out apple. Imagine if every technology company in America was forced to either use domestic labor with higher wages, or be excluded from the American market entirely, this would certainly raise the prices of goods in America. Not only would Apple's competitors would not be able to make Apple regret it's decision to raise prices.they would no doubt also be fored to raise prices themselves.
I don't want to get into the debate of whether Apple products are overvalued. The fact is that the market has decided to put a premium on apple products, rightly or wrongly, meaning they can charge a certain premium over competitors products. I am personally an android person, but I don't think Android is superior in every way, it's just superior in the ways that I most care about. Other people care about different hings.
My point is that if we forced all companies to pay higher wages (i.e. American wages), the prices of their products would be higher across the board. If you can believe this claim, then I would further suggest that this imples that we are in fact currently benefiting from a price discount due to the manufacturing of these products happening in countries with cheaper labor.
Should we all be forced to pay the costs of a destroyed economy because you want cheaper widgets and don't give a hoot about the working and living conditions of those who perform the labor of creating these widgets for you? What you're arguing for here is great advantage for you, while the producers of the very things that give you your advantage have no access to the very benefits you so obviously covet.
Buying only american goods is good for the american worker and the foreign consumer, but bad for the american consumer and the foreign worker.
What I am saynig is that the american consumer and the american worker are basically the same people, and the chinese consumer and the chinese worker are also the same people, so it doesn't really benefit any person of any nationality that produces and consumes the same amount. It only makes the markets less efficient to isolate them meaning that it costs more labor to create the same goods due to the loss of economies of scale.
The point of making twice as much, regardless of what things cost, is that you can purchase twice as much as you could otherwise.
My point being that if we force higher wages we will also be increasing costs by roughly the same amount.
However, as others have pointed out, for manufactured goods, labor costs are not the only factor that sets prices,
No, but they are the most important factor if you actually count the labor costs that get lumped into things like mining, refining materials, and building the infrastructure that facilitates the manufacturing in the first place.
nor is the amount of labor required to create widget A necessarily equal to the labor required to create widget B, nor, in fact, are these costs certain to be constants inherently not amenable to reduction.
I am unaware that I claimed all widgets have the same costs.
The premise you're implying here -- inherent double costs -- isn't supportable at all.
I am not saying that the price every good and service will *exactly* double (i.e. to the penny). I am saying that these 2 things (wages, and the costs of goods and services) are very strongly correlated. I am saying that if we doubled everyone's wages that everything would roughly cost twice as much.
Yes this is a generalization. It is an experiment that can't practically be performed. It should also be obviously true that the general idea is sound. Like if we actually did this experiment and prices *didn't* roughly double, then we'd have to figure out what went wrong with the experiment, or what's wrong about our economic theories that we thought were true for the past couple centuries.
So it seems like your argument is "iPads are already expensive, there is no way that they could be more expensive".
Let's say we passed a law forcing Apple to move it's factories to the USA, and pay all it's workers much higher salaries. Are you saying that Apple would *not* raise the price of it's products?
I am also ignoring costs due to fraud, theft, etc.
Yes there are some people who profit from owning capital, which is not strictly "labor" in the sense that these people do not actually work very hard. But I believe this is a red herring.
Consider the case where someone inherits a valuable piece of land, and merely profits from renting it out (i.e. not working). Another person (one who did work very hard for their money), could buy the land, and rent it out for the same price. Now the money is going to someone who did have to labor to get it. The price of rent is determined by the market, and it is the same regardless of whether the person receiving the rent labored very hard, or simply had everything given to him as a birthright.
Consider the case where someone telecommutes to his job, only he doesn't actually do any work. It turns out his father actually does all his work for him. The costs of this company to produce it's products is the same regardless of of whether the father or the son does the work. There was a cost to getting this work done, even if the person benefiting didn't actually do any work, but someone still did it.
Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks.
I agree with government regulation to account for externalities, towards the goal of charging the true cost of things, and making the market more efficient.
I am very dubious about using government regulation to solve the problem of "spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth".
It seems like the obvious solution is to remove the government's power to facilitate rent-seeking rather than trying to give it more power for the purpose of regulating itself.
Yes, you can imply a lot of misleading, yet technically "true", things with statistics. It is not important to determine if the claims made in a political ad are technically true or not. It is important to become informed and know what the truth is (e.g. by verifying whether what is implied by a political ad is true).
Furthermore, there are websites that are nonpartisan that will make a lot of their fact checking public. How do you know the fact checkers are truthful? Well it turns out you can't, but luckily for us this isn't some amazing web of deceit. Politicians literally just hope you won't do the 10 minutes of research it takes to find the truth.
So to me this sounds like this company is probably not profiting due to poor decisions made by upper management. It seems the owners of the company (the shareholders if it's public), have made poor decisions in appointing/properly incentivizing the upper management, and do not deserve for their poor decisions to be rewarded with profit.
As for the workers, it sucks for them, but rather than working 70+ hours for a poorly managed company, it may have been a better decision to get a better job, or improve their skill set to qualify them for a better job.
I am not trying to blame the victim, but I do think there were probably clear warning signs that could have lead to better outcomes if they were recognized. Being forced to work 70+ hour work weeks for 2 years being one of them. For one thing this is effectively a 40+% hourly pay cut.
Yeah it's evil to profit from deceiving others. But we need to be guarded against this sort of thing. We need to assume that when a company asks you to work 70+ hours a week, that they aren't looking out for your interests. We (as shareholders) need to assume that executives who want 6 figure severance packages plan to use them.
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
I would call it allowing the price of labor to reach it's true market value. Excluding a huge chunk of labor force that's willing to work for less money is artificially raising the cost of labor in the US.
It's like if congress passed a law that said you are only allowed to take your car to the dealership to have it repaired. This would increase the price of car repair for those who follow the law by excluding those willing to do the job for less money.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
It has nothing to do with charity. As a consumer of goods and services, I benefit when the cost of those goods and services can be lowered (e.g. by hiring workers at a lower labor price).
If congress passed the law requiring all car maintenance to be done at dealerships, one might say "We can't repeal the law, because it will cause a lower quality of life for those currently benefiting from their privileged position." My point is that it is not anyone's duty to maintain the privileged position of others.
Buying cheap Chinese stuff rather than expensive American stuff *is* looking out for yourself (i.e. finding the best bargain). Buying expensive American stuff even thought he cheap Chinese stuff is just as good (or even better), is the act of charity (i.e. spending more money than necessary to help out your neighbor.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
They shouldn't even have to lie. The fact that there are lots of workers willing to do the same jobs for less money is a fact. Yes they are trying to cut costs by cutting wages. They are corporations and they are trying to make a profit. That doesn't mean we don't benefit from it. We benefit from being able to buy goods more cheaply.
We don't benefit when our cushy jobs are shipped overseas, but it's a two way street. We can;t have both cheap prices and guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries. My point is that there is no benefit to having guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries if the price of the goods is inflated due to the high cost of paying high salaries.
You forgot the fact that the cost of goods and services will never drop in half to match the salary drops. That equals profit. Why would they drop the profit?
Let me ask a different question. Why doesn't Apple just double or triple all their prices tomorrow? Wouldn't that increase their profit? They would if they could (i.e. if there was enough demand for the market to bear these price increases), but they can't. The prices are what the market can bear right now. And those prices are based on supply and demand.
Does apple drop the cost of the goods because they use cheap slave labor instead of making the products in the expensive US?
The price of the goods already includes the slave labor discount. The inverse of your question is "If Apple moved their manufacturing to the US and had to pay hire wages, would they increase their prices to compensate?" That's a complicated question, but the short answer is yes, especially if their competition were also forced to move manufacturing back to the USA.
How do you think the cost of materials are determined? Every step from procuring the raw materials to refining the materials at various stages incurs costs in the form of the labor of the people doing the procuring and refining. The cost of the machines used in these processes come from the labor costs of the people who supplied the materials for the machines and the machines that made those machines.
It's easy to split up production costs into labor and materials if you don't dig any deeper than that, but almost every material cost is derived from someone's labor or return on a risky investment. Materials don't dig themselves up and refine themselves.
Increasing the wages of everyone in the supply chain, from the person designing the car in a cad program, to the person mining the steal, to the person selling the car, etc, would raise the price to 60K, as that accounts for 100% of the cost.
If you really believe that doubling wages doubles the price of goods, you don't know much at all about manufacturing.
How do you think prices are determined? Where do you think costs come from?
And then, your imagined response just reeks of white guilt. Or Karl Marx maybe. I understand that you didn't earn your 'privileged class' position. Your great-grandparents did that.
Except I'm not white nor a communist. I am actually a free market capitalist. Did you read my whole post?
Apparently the quote sort of comes from Joseph de Maistre who wrote in 1811 "Every nation gets the government it deserves.", but that's just not as catchy nor does it exactly capture the same sentiment.
Maybe Americans who are apathetic about voting deserve republicans and democrats. Maybe the north korean people deserve a government that rules with an iron fist and brainwashing while letting them starve. The misattributed de Toqueville quote seems to highlight the ease by which a democracy could fix itself if it cared enough as compared to a tyranny.
It's like comparing a person who drops out of college because their parents died and they need to work to raise their siblings, and a person who drops out of college because studying was too hard with all the frat parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is better than the alternative where people don't term their items unbreakable, and no one tries to break them, and we might be tempted to think they are unbreakable because they've never been broken.
Well they are all turing-complete languages, so ultimately they can all do the same stuff.
I'm not following. Please explain how buying only American goods is good for the foreign consumer.
It lowers demand for foreign goods. The foreign consumer does not have to compete with the american consumer for foreign goods. Imagine a factory in china producing widgets to sell to America for $100 each. This means that a chinese person will not be able to buy it for less than $100 if someone can make $100 selling it to someone else. If America drops out of the foreign market, now there is less demand, for the same supply, so the price drops.
This isn't correct. Keeping the money within the country accelerates the economy without leaking funds externally, and so funds American salaries, resource recovery, care and so forth. In a closed economy, especially one as large as ours, there is a lot of room for competition, and so costs should settle out to reasonable values in most cases without having to depend upon the workers living in despicable conditions, as is the case now.
The presumption here is invalid. The Chinese workers that make iPads live in dormitories, eat poorly, and earn very little income. They don't consume on an equal level with a US worker/consumer; they cannot do so. Likewise, the children that manufacture some of our clothing, etc. The equality you posit simply doesn't exist. And that, of course, is the basis for the lower cost of an offshored job.
I didn't say that a chinese worker consumes at the same amount as a US worker. I am saying that isolation doesn;t benefit any workers of any nationality where they produce and consume the same amount as themselves (i.e. a chinese worker producing the same amount he/she is consuming)
Yeah it keeps money in the economy. It also keeps goods out of the economy. If isolating economies is good, maybe California could benefit from isolating itself from the rest of the USA. They could keep their own money in california, and keep salaries high without importing the products of cheap labor from states with lower cost of living. Do you honestly think this is a better system?
Further, since within our own economy we can regulate activity at all levels (as we cannot in foreign economies), we can avoid monopolistic behavior, price gouging, unacceptably low wages, unacceptably long hours and so forth if we simply choose to do so.
By leaving the foreign market, we remove choices from those foreign workers. They get paid even less when the demand for them is lower.
Finally, for American tech workers who now have jobs, where those jobs were previously offshored, their roles as consumers are hugely improved, as well as their contribution to our economy (as compared to money going offshore and then into a foreign economy/)
And now the whole country has to pay higher prices for technology to benefit the workers in 1 industry. Cutting ourselves off from the world economy doesn;t boost our own economy. The money that was "going offshore" was in exchange for goods, that we can now no longer get. It's like we are imposing sanctions on ourselves. Russia is trying to pretend they are better off now that they are isolated, but their economy is falling apart. No thanks.
Some are nearly 100% resource based, such as anything coming off of a fully automated production sequence.
Show me an exmaple of something that is 100% resource based (i.e. 0% labor costs due to automation), and I'll show you a bunch machines that had to be designed manufactured using labor and purchased. I'll show you a bunch of materials that had to be cultivated/harvested/mined by people or machines that also had to be designed and manufactured using labor.
Buying a bunch of materials and machines and saying "I don't pay any labor costs", ignores the fact that the cost of your machines comes from the labor it took to make them, and the labor it took for the whol
1) investors drive equity prices up for companies that lay off.
Investors deserve to lose money for driving bad financial decisions or investing in companies who make bad financial decisions. That said, layoffs are not always a bad financial decision.
Executives are compensated in stock options.
Stock options (unlike stocks) are only worth anything if the stock price of a company goes up.
2) they are being excellent owners by today's standards. offshore jobs- save money, focus on core business model, profit your self for 2 years and then move on to the next company and do it again.
Sounds like you'd make a killing in the stock market. You've got it all figured out. It's so easy.
3) This is a very naive statement. Turn it around- what conditions beyond your control *could* force you to work those hours.
Aside from living in a 3rd world country or going through another great depression, I don't think anything could, especially now with obamacare. We have labor laws in this country. Hourly people aren't even allowed to work past 40 by law.
Have you taken every precaution to prevent being put in that situation. Do you live on half your salary? Do you have multiple years of income saved? (I did).
I do indeed live on less than half my salary, and after doing that for 10+ years, I do indeed have multiple years of income saved up.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with what I said.
4) Companies hire people who have a job. Companies do not hire people who worked a long time at one place (even if they have good skills on paper) and are currently unemployed.
So why doesn't anybody go hire all the desperate and overqualified unemployed people? They could hire them at a discount, and get very high quality labor for lower cost. Seems like a great way for entities that only care about profit to succeed. Maybe all the companies out there are dumb. If you became an entrepreneur, you'd murder all your competition because only you can see this golden opportunity that no one else can.
Drop the negative semantic shit like "cushy" and "coast". It's dumb and it's keeping you from seeing reality.
anyone over 40 has a house and (many) kids in college. You are just trying to get down the road at that point. --you
I learned it from watching you dad.
Yes those people were unwise. I agree. Unlike me, they really didn't believe they'd become unemployable at the age of 50. I realized that when I was 28 because I saw it happening even back then.
What I am saying is that people aren't unemployable at 50 because of their age. People are unemployable at 50 when they "are just trying to get down the road". Half the people I work with are over 50, and I know which ones are just coasting, and I wouldn't hire them either if it were my money paying their salary.
I'm trying to show you the road ahead waiting for you and you are blinding yourself to reality. You won't win if you stay blind. You'll do the same thing everyone else does.
I'm doing just fine. thanks.
Futhermore, most of my post was about why our current system sucks and some better ways of increasing the efficiency of everyone's labor. You ignore all that and call me naive and blind for not seeing reality?
I was trying to have a discussion on economics. I was not asking for advice from you. And I don't buy this bullshit that older people (i.e. you) have more insight. Even in your own story you talk about how you outsmarted everyone when you were 28.
Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
Wow so it seems like a company could stand to make a lot of money hiring all these super qualified people who are now out of a job (i.e. instead of foreign workers). They should theoretically get more work done that's of higher quality and for less cost. This seems like a golden opportunity that any smart entrepreneur seeking a profit would jump on.
So your advice is stop being our best.
I'm really not sure how you came to that conclusions from anything I've said, even if we assume your other claims are true.
If you feel like you can't compete with people less skilled than you, then I don't know what to say, other than "Don't be a motivational speaker".
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest?
If people are willing to hire less skilled people than you to do the same job, I can only guess that maybe you aren't as skilled as you think you are. STEM is really not a field where doing a shitty job leads to usable products.
I would tell my children that a STEM career is definitely a good career choice. But I would be sure try to discourage them from thinking they are better than other workers simply because they are not foreign.
If hell really does freeze over and bad engineers are more valuable to employers than good engineers, I would suggest becoming a business man, hire all the unemployed good engineers (at a discount), and destroy your competition.
But being the negative person you are, I'm sure you'll find some reason why this won't work, and you are destined to fail competing against mediocrity.
I don't view it as "giving up" our jobs. I view it as a mutual benefit to both societies.
I am a software engineer. Until about 6 months ago, I washed my own dishes. Then my wife hired cleaners to clean the house every 2 weeks. They started doing the dishes. They took a job away from me, and I let them. It probably only costs me like $5 or something (part of a $100 total cleaning bill). They are willing to do this job for cheaper than I am. I now purposely don't do the dishes if I know the cleaners are coming soon, because I'd rather they do it at the cost they are willing to do it for. It helps them and it helps me.
If you see yourself as a dishwasher, then someone willing to wash dishes cheaper than you is a threat. I think this is the wrong attitude in a global economy, especially if you live in a place with so much opportunity. All the cheap shit you can get at walmart means that it is cheaper to live at a certain quality of life while you are getting a college degree or learning a new skill.
We shouldn't be competing with foreign labor by trying to exclude them from the market with laws. We should be competing with foreign labor by trying to acquire skills that are easier for us to acquire than it is for them. My housekeepers don't speak english. My wife has to communicate with them via google translate. They are more than happy to be doing dishes. I probably would be to if I were in their position.
It's not that we should charitably give up our jobs to them. It benefits both of us if we let them do those jobs that they want to do more cheaply than we do. It gives us more freedom to do other things and it helps them as well.
1) Well shall we say it was less profitable than it would have been otherwise? (i.e. I as a potential investor might have paid a very high stock price expecting a certain level of profit, but would not see a positive ROI given that the company is under-performing)? While the company may have been profitable (i.e. it netted > $0 profit), it may not be profitable for the new owners (i.e. If you spent $1 billion on a company that you thought would net $100 million per year, and it actually nets only $1 million per year, you have essentially just incurred a huge loss)
2) So the owners (i.e. the new owners) were just not very good at being owners of a company. They allowed bad managers to run the company they owned (and possibly profit as the company was harmed). As far as I can tell, those owners deserve to lose their money in a capitalist system. It would be nice if the bad managers didn't make off like bandits (i.e. because that presents a moral hazard), but I'm not sure there exists any system that eliminates fraud entirely.
3)I don't consider working 70+ hours (i.e. a ~40% hourly pay reduction) for 2 years for the reward of 6-8 years of job security (at a company that frequently forces employees to work 70+ hours) to be a good deal.
My company sometimes gets in a jam and they need us to work about 60 hours a week for maybe 4 month stretches (3 or 4 times) over 10 years, but they pay us for the extra hours we work.
I think the mindset of people over 40 just wanting to coast is not very healthy. I am 35, and I am constantly learning new things. I don't anticipating just wanting to half ass trying to be useful once I hit 40 (even with my mortgage and supporting my wife and kid). You can just coast if you want, but I think you should be aware that you are in fact less valuable if you don't care about maintaining usefulness.
Should a company have loyalty to the workers who have put in a lot of time and just want to coast to retirement? Only in the same sense that workers should have loyalty to their company regardless of how shitty they are treated. Basically I believe companies and workers should be loyal to each other on the condition that their loyalty is deserved.
Even if we want a system where workers were only required to be useful during the first part of their career and were allowed to just drift off into mediocrity as they aged, the economically efficient system would be to simply pay workers exactly as much as they are worth at every step in their career evolution. If they are super useful when they are young and energetic, then they should make more money at this phase to compensate for when they are less useful and making a lower wage (i.e. similar to saving for retirement). If workers can not be trusted to save for their own retirement, then you can have companies simply pay into a trust fund (e.g. like a retirement account), to ensure that workers don;t suffer from a loss in income as they become gradually more useless.
My point is that it makes no sense for companies to pay relatively useless workers a high wage just because they were useful in the past. If anything it means they should have paid them more in the past and less now. It doesn't do us any good to pay workers high wages merely out of loyalty. It causes our economy to be less efficient and it forces older workers to be stuck in jobs that they no longer care about. Under my proposed system you could make all your money when you are young, and then just retire earlier when you no longer give a shit, and make some space for more new young go getters.
4) If you really need to switch jobs every 5 years to forcibly prevent yourself from becoming complacent, then by all means do that. But logically you really shouldn't have to do that. If you have the will power to switch jobs every 5 years even though you don't want to, then shouldn't you have the will power to stay employable even if you have a cushy job?
My mom sets her clock 15 minutes fast so she is never late. But she know
I don't agree that all land owners are "rent-seeking" in the economic/political sense, even if they are literally seeking rent in the common sense. We should have the goal of stopping economic rent-seeking done by anybody (not just property owners). Otherwise I don't think there is anything inherently harmful about trying to get a return on investment into property.
The land itself was available without initial work, even if it may take work to use the land in various ways. We must be careful to distinguish between real physical assets, real physical work, political control of resources, and virtual fiat financial assets when doing this sort of analysis.
So why not just view the price of land as the cost of making the land useful rather than the cost of the land in some abstract sense which is defined to be $0 since it always existed? I'm not saying that there aren't people who profit (from anything) undeservedly. Aside from literal "land" (i.e. the thing that existed with no labor), every other form of property has labor costs associated with. Some property turns out to be a good investment (i.e. good ROI) some turns out to be bad (i.e. low or even negative ROI). That is the nature of investment. You can look to the worst examples of people making ridiculous undeserved ROI and conclude that investment in general is basically unfair, but what is not as readily apparent is all the failed investments.
And I don't even want to give the impression that I believe owning land is morally righteous or anything. I just don;t think it throws my calculations that the vast majority of costs end up ultimately being related to labor directly or indirectly (which I think is much higher than most people realize).
If you are of the view that no one has a right to own land or any personal property, I think that is a perfectly rational point of view with merit, but it is just not one that is easily reconciled with living in a capitalist system.
I also don't mean to claim that capitalism is fair. I think it is useful at efficiently (albeit not fairly) allocating resources to maximize the production of wealth. In this respect I think that government regulations to account for externalities can play a very useful role to that goal. I also don't think it is unreasonable to have social safety nets (i.e. I don't think wealth creation should be the only metric for success).
What I am trying to convey is the idea that actions designed to achieve a certain outcome often don't have the desired effect and/or have lots of undesirable side effects, and I think artificially inflating American labor prices is one such thing.
I was planning to make the point about past vs. present labor, and I am glad that you already brought it up. So in that respect doubling current wages would not properly capture the fact that past labor wages aren't doubled (making any investments based on past costs and future returns disproportionately profitable) . But if we kept this system long enough, the system would eventually converge to where we would be if past costs where doubled somehow too. (e.g. we aren't still significantly profitting from investments into R&D performed by cavemen... at least I don't think we are).
In short. I can respect the arguments that people don't deserve the benefits of owning things that were not ultimately the products of their labor (or purchased with money that was the product of their labor), but I still think prices would roughly double if wages doubled, with some variations thrown in for factors like the ones we discussed, given enough time for past costs to be flushed out of the pipeline of current manufacturing costs.
And if I am a member of congress, then an activist judge is one that makes decisions that undermine the laws I make (even though we are part of the same government).
I'm not convinced that Americans making less money would significantly better the lives of people in other countries.
It's not that the fact of Americans making less money *causes* the lives of people in other countries to be better. It's that having a free market causes both of those things to happen.
If Americans can find a way to make more money without restricting markets, it would not necessarily have any negative impact on anyone else, in fact it would probably be a positive impact by creating more total wealth in the world economy.
Opening up jobs to the whole world that would otherwise be limited to only Americans, gives foreign workers more opportunities. It increases the demand for labor worldwide. If the supply of labor remains constant, this shifts the supply-demand equation into creating upward pressure on wages worldwide.
Think about it in terms of cheating on taxes. Let's say some billionaire is cheating on his taxes, and he makes billions of dollars doing it. Let's say we catch him and repossess all his assets and throw him in jail. Does the general population benefit from this? A little bit. Maybe each person gets to pay $10 less in taxes on average. But when you multiply these $10 over the whole population, it adds up to the full $2 billion that the tax cheat lost.
So the tax cheat might think, I may as well just keep this money, look at how much it benefits me. If I give it back, everyone else will only get $10 which is not that much at all. This completely ignores the fact that it's a *lot* of people getting a small benefit which adds up to a large benefit overall that is being stolen.
if they add too much to the end user's cost, competition will see to it that they regret it.
Yes, if only apple was forced to do this, and their competitors were not, it would seriously affect apple's profit's maybe even threaten their position as a market leader. But my example wasn't meant to single out apple. Imagine if every technology company in America was forced to either use domestic labor with higher wages, or be excluded from the American market entirely, this would certainly raise the prices of goods in America. Not only would Apple's competitors would not be able to make Apple regret it's decision to raise prices.they would no doubt also be fored to raise prices themselves.
I don't want to get into the debate of whether Apple products are overvalued. The fact is that the market has decided to put a premium on apple products, rightly or wrongly, meaning they can charge a certain premium over competitors products. I am personally an android person, but I don't think Android is superior in every way, it's just superior in the ways that I most care about. Other people care about different hings.
My point is that if we forced all companies to pay higher wages (i.e. American wages), the prices of their products would be higher across the board. If you can believe this claim, then I would further suggest that this imples that we are in fact currently benefiting from a price discount due to the manufacturing of these products happening in countries with cheaper labor.
Should we all be forced to pay the costs of a destroyed economy because you want cheaper widgets and don't give a hoot about the working and living conditions of those who perform the labor of creating these widgets for you? What you're arguing for here is great advantage for you, while the producers of the very things that give you your advantage have no access to the very benefits you so obviously covet.
Buying only american goods is good for the american worker and the foreign consumer, but bad for the american consumer and the foreign worker.
What I am saynig is that the american consumer and the american worker are basically the same people, and the chinese consumer and the chinese worker are also the same people, so it doesn't really benefit any person of any nationality that produces and consumes the same amount. It only makes the markets less efficient to isolate them meaning that it costs more labor to create the same goods due to the loss of economies of scale.
The point of making twice as much, regardless of what things cost, is that you can purchase twice as much as you could otherwise.
My point being that if we force higher wages we will also be increasing costs by roughly the same amount.
However, as others have pointed out, for manufactured goods, labor costs are not the only factor that sets prices,
No, but they are the most important factor if you actually count the labor costs that get lumped into things like mining, refining materials, and building the infrastructure that facilitates the manufacturing in the first place.
nor is the amount of labor required to create widget A necessarily equal to the labor required to create widget B, nor, in fact, are these costs certain to be constants inherently not amenable to reduction.
I am unaware that I claimed all widgets have the same costs.
The premise you're implying here -- inherent double costs -- isn't supportable at all.
I am not saying that the price every good and service will *exactly* double (i.e. to the penny). I am saying that these 2 things (wages, and the costs of goods and services) are very strongly correlated. I am saying that if we doubled everyone's wages that everything would roughly cost twice as much.
Yes this is a generalization. It is an experiment that can't practically be performed. It should also be obviously true that the general idea is sound. Like if we actually did this experiment and prices *didn't* roughly double, then we'd have to figure out what went wrong with the experiment, or what's wrong about our economic theories that we thought were true for the past couple centuries.
So it seems like your argument is "iPads are already expensive, there is no way that they could be more expensive".
Let's say we passed a law forcing Apple to move it's factories to the USA, and pay all it's workers much higher salaries. Are you saying that Apple would *not* raise the price of it's products?
I am also ignoring costs due to fraud, theft, etc.
Yes there are some people who profit from owning capital, which is not strictly "labor" in the sense that these people do not actually work very hard. But I believe this is a red herring.
Consider the case where someone inherits a valuable piece of land, and merely profits from renting it out (i.e. not working). Another person (one who did work very hard for their money), could buy the land, and rent it out for the same price. Now the money is going to someone who did have to labor to get it. The price of rent is determined by the market, and it is the same regardless of whether the person receiving the rent labored very hard, or simply had everything given to him as a birthright.
Consider the case where someone telecommutes to his job, only he doesn't actually do any work. It turns out his father actually does all his work for him. The costs of this company to produce it's products is the same regardless of of whether the father or the son does the work. There was a cost to getting this work done, even if the person benefiting didn't actually do any work, but someone still did it.
Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks.
I agree with government regulation to account for externalities, towards the goal of charging the true cost of things, and making the market more efficient.
I am very dubious about using government regulation to solve the problem of "spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth".
It seems like the obvious solution is to remove the government's power to facilitate rent-seeking rather than trying to give it more power for the purpose of regulating itself.
Yes, you can imply a lot of misleading, yet technically "true", things with statistics. It is not important to determine if the claims made in a political ad are technically true or not. It is important to become informed and know what the truth is (e.g. by verifying whether what is implied by a political ad is true).
Furthermore, there are websites that are nonpartisan that will make a lot of their fact checking public. How do you know the fact checkers are truthful? Well it turns out you can't, but luckily for us this isn't some amazing web of deceit. Politicians literally just hope you won't do the 10 minutes of research it takes to find the truth.
So to me this sounds like this company is probably not profiting due to poor decisions made by upper management. It seems the owners of the company (the shareholders if it's public), have made poor decisions in appointing/properly incentivizing the upper management, and do not deserve for their poor decisions to be rewarded with profit.
As for the workers, it sucks for them, but rather than working 70+ hours for a poorly managed company, it may have been a better decision to get a better job, or improve their skill set to qualify them for a better job.
I am not trying to blame the victim, but I do think there were probably clear warning signs that could have lead to better outcomes if they were recognized. Being forced to work 70+ hour work weeks for 2 years being one of them. For one thing this is effectively a 40+% hourly pay cut.
Yeah it's evil to profit from deceiving others. But we need to be guarded against this sort of thing. We need to assume that when a company asks you to work 70+ hours a week, that they aren't looking out for your interests. We (as shareholders) need to assume that executives who want 6 figure severance packages plan to use them.
Maybe, if Australia has "activist judges" like in America :)
You could have always have been raped, but now you can at least leave a bad review.
I think people like to root for an underdog especially when they can put up a good fight.
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
I would call it allowing the price of labor to reach it's true market value. Excluding a huge chunk of labor force that's willing to work for less money is artificially raising the cost of labor in the US.
It's like if congress passed a law that said you are only allowed to take your car to the dealership to have it repaired. This would increase the price of car repair for those who follow the law by excluding those willing to do the job for less money.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
It has nothing to do with charity. As a consumer of goods and services, I benefit when the cost of those goods and services can be lowered (e.g. by hiring workers at a lower labor price).
If congress passed the law requiring all car maintenance to be done at dealerships, one might say "We can't repeal the law, because it will cause a lower quality of life for those currently benefiting from their privileged position." My point is that it is not anyone's duty to maintain the privileged position of others.
Buying cheap Chinese stuff rather than expensive American stuff *is* looking out for yourself (i.e. finding the best bargain). Buying expensive American stuff even thought he cheap Chinese stuff is just as good (or even better), is the act of charity (i.e. spending more money than necessary to help out your neighbor.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
They shouldn't even have to lie. The fact that there are lots of workers willing to do the same jobs for less money is a fact. Yes they are trying to cut costs by cutting wages. They are corporations and they are trying to make a profit. That doesn't mean we don't benefit from it. We benefit from being able to buy goods more cheaply.
We don't benefit when our cushy jobs are shipped overseas, but it's a two way street. We can;t have both cheap prices and guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries. My point is that there is no benefit to having guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries if the price of the goods is inflated due to the high cost of paying high salaries.
You forgot the fact that the cost of goods and services will never drop in half to match the salary drops. That equals profit. Why would they drop the profit?
Let me ask a different question. Why doesn't Apple just double or triple all their prices tomorrow? Wouldn't that increase their profit? They would if they could (i.e. if there was enough demand for the market to bear these price increases), but they can't. The prices are what the market can bear right now. And those prices are based on supply and demand.
Does apple drop the cost of the goods because they use cheap slave labor instead of making the products in the expensive US?
The price of the goods already includes the slave labor discount. The inverse of your question is "If Apple moved their manufacturing to the US and had to pay hire wages, would they increase their prices to compensate?" That's a complicated question, but the short answer is yes, especially if their competition were also forced to move manufacturing back to the USA.
How do you think the cost of materials are determined? Every step from procuring the raw materials to refining the materials at various stages incurs costs in the form of the labor of the people doing the procuring and refining. The cost of the machines used in these processes come from the labor costs of the people who supplied the materials for the machines and the machines that made those machines.
It's easy to split up production costs into labor and materials if you don't dig any deeper than that, but almost every material cost is derived from someone's labor or return on a risky investment. Materials don't dig themselves up and refine themselves.
If you really believe that doubling wages doubles the price of goods, you don't know much at all about manufacturing.
How do you think prices are determined? Where do you think costs come from?
And then, your imagined response just reeks of white guilt. Or Karl Marx maybe. I understand that you didn't earn your 'privileged class' position. Your great-grandparents did that.
Except I'm not white nor a communist. I am actually a free market capitalist. Did you read my whole post?
Apparently the quote sort of comes from Joseph de Maistre who wrote in 1811 "Every nation gets the government it deserves.", but that's just not as catchy nor does it exactly capture the same sentiment.
Maybe Americans who are apathetic about voting deserve republicans and democrats. Maybe the north korean people deserve a government that rules with an iron fist and brainwashing while letting them starve. The misattributed de Toqueville quote seems to highlight the ease by which a democracy could fix itself if it cared enough as compared to a tyranny.
It's like comparing a person who drops out of college because their parents died and they need to work to raise their siblings, and a person who drops out of college because studying was too hard with all the frat parties.