That kinda insults me as an engineer, since we generally abide by physical laws. With financial laws, you're pretty much playing games using other people's rules.... But they don't add any value to the economy... they "multiply" it. And then they can just take "a little bit off the top", because no one will notice.
I doubt that you are an engineer, because engineers actually understand how this works. An iPhone is objectively more valuable and useful than the equivalent pile of raw materials. And if one iPhone is 100x as valuable as the raw materials, then 10 iPhones are 1000x as valuable as their raw materials.
I'd love to invest in actual production... you know, things that add value and subtract costs instead of just "multiply" monopoly money. What options are there for that kind of thing?
Buy stock in a company that makes stuff. It's not a good investment because "stuff" isn't all that valuable anymore to people in the era of 3D printers and rapid manufacturing, but hey, if it makes you happy...
They should learn not to keep all their "investments" in options and other derivatives
Another constant of the universe is that there are always some fools.
However, most people don't touch options or derivatives, and if you want to trade in them, you have to acknowledge explicitly a lengthy explanation of the risks, and that you are competent to deal with the risks.
That's about as much as "they" and "we" can learn from the past.
H1-B is the primary way by which tech immigrants come into the country. It wasn't intended that way originally, but that's how it has worked out, and it's how the legal framework is set up. That's no accident either because it's the way it works in most other countries too: temporary work permit, then permanent residency, then citizenship.
I'm guessing they will seem a lot less valuable to employers here if they have a green card such that they can change jobs without risk of being deported.
Transferring between employers is easy for H1-B workers; the old employer doesn't need to approve and doesn't even find out. So, employers have no special hold over H1-B workers. The only thing that makes H1-B transfers difficult is the government red tape and quotas that surround them.
But beyond just IT, I'm pretty sure most Americans would find increase in income to match the last 30 years of inflation would be a real help. It would also stimulate the economy and boost profits of a lot of companies.
Americans are actually doing quite a bit better now than 30 years ago. There has been some stagnation, mostly under Obama, whose economic policies turned out to be a complete failure, measured against his own predictions and promises.
Of course, we'd be doing a lot better still with more immigration, lower taxes, and less regulation.
If you pass sledgehammer legislation like the ADA, common sense behavior gets replaced with lawyering and bad things happen. And the people who passed the legislation in the first place say that their intentions were good, blame lawyers and blame the people who opposed the legislation in the first place, and finally call for more legislation to fix the problems that the first legislation caused.
Tobin's q uses book value. That can indeed include "good will" and other intangibles. Of course, those numbers are just guesses and there are many motivations for companies to guess high or low. Furthermore, different industries account for these differently. Furthermore, "good will" and other intangible assets often can't be sold. For example, the "good will" towards Nokia changed entirely when they company was acquired by Microsoft. Altogether, the q value seems pretty useless, since its denominator is pretty inconsistent.
If what you say is true, healthcare in Europe should be fantastic for the wealthy and terrible for the poor, and in the US it should be great for everyone. As it is, the actual situation is the complete reverse of that.
Do you seriously believe that the wealthy in the UK have to put up with shitty NHS service? Of course not. Wealthy Europeans go to private doctors, often abroad. Places like Germany even have an explicit two-tier health care system, for the well-off and everybody else.
Unfortunately, the US system actually isn't that much different from European systems: half of it is public, the other half a regulated private system. Relative to population, the US already has a more expensive public system than the NHS, but only manages to cover 1/3 the population with it.
as for you to admit that the US has some serious shortcomings
There are plenty of things wrong with the US, but, unfortunately, nothing that would be addressed by adopting more European political ideas.
But you've already made up your mind, as for you to admit that the US has some serious shortcomings would make you feel bad, as it seems so much of your own self-identity is based on brainlessly loving the flag flying over the ground you were accidentally born in.
Actually, I was born in Europe and emigrated as an adult.
Shortage isn't binary, but it does show signs and symptoms. Those include rising prices (in this case salaries)... In other words, there is an existing under-utilized pool of IT labor in the U.S.
They are "underutilized" because they aren't willing to work for the kinds of salaries they can get from companies and companies aren't willing to pay them more for the skills they have. That's not going to change through restricting immigration.
Restricting immigration does keep IT salaries higher, but primarily for the simple reason that it prevents lower paying IT jobs from getting filled, hence keeping the average high. Companies are not going to raise their salaries for lower paying IT jobs substantially, they are simply going to find other ways of getting the work done, and if that doesn't work, change businesses.
It is the Government's job to protect the economy of the U.S. and that includes making sure the general population is able to maintain their standard of living.
Even if restricting H1-Bs would raise IT salaries, of what possible interest is that to Americans at large? If Apple or Microsoft pay there developers twice as much, it's their customers who pay that money, i.e., prices go up. And since Apple and Microsoft compete with companies in India and China, they may well become uncompetitive altogether, meaning all the jobs are gone.
I don't mind helping the farmers, but the bankers were the architects of their own problems got bailed out anyway and left everyone else holding the bag. Then in gratitude they began a crazy and often illegal campaign of mass foreclosures.
"Good productive farmers and workers. Evil bankers. Government should step in and bring some order into these markets". You should read up on the history of those ideas.
A decrease in the labor supply (a supply curve shift to the left) will cause a shortage, with an increase in required wages to meet equilibrium. If what you and the guest workers said was correct about shortages, then wages would go up - not down.
Yes, wages do go up when you restrict the supply of software developers, I never disputed that. What I'm pointing out is that it also means fewer software developers and fewer software companies.
What you have failed to explain is why that is good for anybody. Even if you buy into the protectionist b.s. that it is the job of the US government to cause prices on software to rise so that software developers can live in luxury, how does that benefit America as a whole? How is that any different from crooked Wall Street traders demanding special treatment and bailouts from the US government?
You continue to reason in nonsensical terms like "actual shortage", as if it were a binary thing.
If it helps, try to think of it as a "shortage of cheap IT workers". You erroneously assume that if companies can't hire cheap IT workers, they will substitute expensive IT workers. A few may, but many will simply find other solutions.
Furthermore, your entire premise is somehow that it is the job of the US government to protect the salaries of US IT workers; of course it is not. When IT workers want protectionist laws, it's no different from bankers or farmers asking for government handouts and protectionism.
"Labor costs" that drop below a sustenance level kill workers, and even prevent the workers from participating in the local economy.
We're talking about a specific job category here, programmers. Can there be an excess supply of programmers? No. At some point, it simply doesn't pay to be a programmer, and people go back to being Baristas instead. Nobody starves, nobody gets killed.
one can certainly have an "excess supply of labor". It's especially apparent in seasonal farm labor when drought or blight ruins the crops, and it was certainly a problem for winter food supplies in harsh climates.
That is not an "excess supply of labor", it's a misallocation of labor. In principle, those people could do lots of other things. In many cases, however, people are prevented from hiring them altogether because government has created large obstacles to hiring them.
Again, I don't know where you're getting these ideas. They're refuted by the most casual reviews of economic disasters, such as the Great Depression in the USA, or famines such as the Irish Potato Famine or the mass starvations of North Korea of the 1990's. There was no "labor shortage", people would work for less than a survival wage or survival diet and starve to _death_ as they struggled to outlast the famines and poverty.
That's not "excess labor", it's too many mouths to feed due to some other scarcity. You can see that those problems have nothing to do with "excess labor" because those people would have starved even if they had all been incapable of work (e.g., children, disabled).
Please, actually work as a farm worker, a fast food attendant, a cab driver, or try to feed a family on a minimum wage before you make such absurd claims,
I've lived on less than minimum wage. What's your point?
According to your stated theory "That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor."
I didn't "state a theory". I pointed out that when people say that increased supply lowers prices, they are neglecting that it also increases volume. Obviously, that only works up to a point. Do such trivialities even need to be pointed out?
This is, once again, complete nonsense. "The town/city" is not keeping the expenses high as a matter of tax or licensing policy. There simply isn't enough street traffic to support so many vendors, especially when modern consumers so easily order goods online from around the world.
Who said anything about "vendors"? The point is that unless your city or the buildings themselves are not viable, there are uses for these spaces, provided they are offered cheap enough. Worst case, turn them into housing for the homeless at $1/night.
We've seen right here on/. about various IT people being displaced by H1-Bs, mot supplemented with.
Yes, what's your point? If they hadn't been replaced with H1-Bs, their jobs might simply have moved overseas altogether. Or they might have had their salaries cut (i.e., not raised).
We wouldn't see lawyers offering employers advice on how to taylor job postings to make sure they get an H1-B.
Given the minefield of legal requirements legislators have created, yes, you need lawyers to hire, in particular to hire overseas, no matter how good your case is.
"Imperfect competition" is a term of art. It specifically refers to oligopolies and monopolies and monopsonies.
Look, if you get your economic education from Wikipedia, at least read correctly:
In economic theory, imperfect competition is a type of market structure showing some but not all features of competitive markets. Forms of imperfect competition include:
Obviously, if programmers were as cheap as farm laborers, their education would have to be as cheap as farm laborers as well.
My point is that artificially restricting the supply of programmers doesn't benefit anybody: even if average programmer salaries went down by importing a flood of programmers from overseas, that average mostly goes down because low-end programmers are added, not because people's salaries are cut. Furthermore, society as a whole benefits from any increase in the availability of programmers.
A private companys is by definition not managing things so that the people get the best use of their resource, it's managing things so that it's owners personal well-being is maximized.
By definition, a private company is managing things so that people get the best use of their resource: they sell the resource to the buyers willing to pay the highest prices, and they are able to pay the highest prices because they are putting the water to the best use.
You seem to think that central planners in Washington have a better idea than the market what to do with the water. If they know that for water, why not for iPhones or hourly rates for plumbers? If the central planners in Washington (or the states) are so brilliant, why not switch to a completely centrally planned economy then? Oh, right, because they never actually work in practice.
It is by definition less transparent then the government because private corporations only have disclosure requirements if they're publicly traded,
It is transparent to the people that actually matter, namely the owners. Whether it's transparent to you or Congress really is irrelevant.
For example, let's say the owners decide that global warming is a great threat to their business, and therefore decide to dramatically cut the water allocation to anyone who is using it to raise cattle. Which will incidentally create a huge allocation that the largest shareholder's tomato farm could use. Depending on the exact wording of the contract the ranchers could lose their entire allocation immediately. They're definitely screwed whenever the next contract is negotiated.
That's a rather contrived example, but let's use it for the sake of argument. You say that as if it were a problem. If the owners believe that global warming is such a threat to their business that they are willing to forego massive amounts of revenue, they must have some pretty strong evidence. That represents rational decision making at its best: clear cost/benefit tradeoffs by people to whom the results actually matter. In contrast, allocating water through the political process means that politicians who have no money at stake get visited by a parade of lobbyists, special interests, and self-proclaimed experts, and then come up with some decision that maximizes their short-term chances for reelection. How is that possibly better?
In fact, in a rational world, many farmers and ranchers throughout California should go out of business right away; their politically motivated water allocations are irrational and effectively highly subsidized by California rate payers.
You've established there's no Federal legislation in this at all, which means Congress can bitch/moan/and actually do jack-squat.
You're missing the context here: labor markets work like other markets in that increasing the supply not only lowers prices but also increases demand.
(As to your point, all markets have some degree of imperfect competition; so, yes, labor markets are no different from other markets even in that regard.)
Except when it doesn't. "Supply increases volume" only when then suppliers _believe_ that there is a profit available, and excess supply often saturates the market.
There is no such thing as "excess supply of labor": if labor is cheap enough, there are always more jobs to be done. If people could hire programmers for the same price as tax-evading dog sitters, half of American homes would hire them to do custom development for their home automation.
Otherwise, all the empty storefronts I see on one block on my way to work would be filled with active hair salons, unlike the three competing salons on that block that are all going out of business.
The reason those store fronts are empty is because your town/city is keeping the cost of doing business high: anything from professional licensing and minimum wage to insurance requirements, business taxes, and real estate taxes. Without those high costs of doing business, there would be plenty of takers for those storefronts. That's the same thing that's happening to the software business as labor costs go up: the number of companies in the business shrinks.
No, it's only 50% bollocks. Labor markets do work like other markets.
The important thing is: Employers often expand their business based on workers available, so supply creates its own demand.
That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.
So, if we only had 100 programmers in the US, they'd be paid better than pop stars. However, we wouldn't have much of a software industry, because most companies couldn't afford to hire a programmer at those salaries; they'd simply not use computers.
On the other hand, if programmers were as plentiful as Mexican farm laborers or nannies, most small businesses and many households could afford to hire them to write custom software for them. The average salary of programmers would go way down, although the 100 programmers at the top would still be paid very well. And society as a whole would be a lot better off.
Yeah, more stem workers = lower pay (supply and demand)
That's kind of true, but not in the sense you think. Increased supply means lower prices, but it also means increased sales volume, for good as much as for labor.
If you limit the supply of STEM workers in the US, the average US salary will indeed go up, but for the simple reason that only high-value positions get filled in the US; the rest will simply not get filled or outsourced overseas.
At an individual level, if my business needs a programmer and he's worth at most $120000 to me, I won't hire a programmer at $150000, no matter how short in supply they are, because I'd be taking a $30000 loss. And if my business really needs a programmer, at that point, I'd sell it and invest my money elsewhere (or outsource to overseas).
A for-profit River authority would be even more subject to lobbying and crony capitalism then the Feds, because you could simply buy the organization and use it to put your rivals out of business.
That's not "lobbying" or "crony capitalism", that's putting your money at risk in a business. The problem with lobbying and crony capitalism is that people get money from the government and tax payers without either working for it or investing their own money.
And if you're concerned about "cornering" or "monopolizing" the water market, there are many potential sources of water, so that seems like a small risk. In addition, consumers pretty much already pay monopoly prices anyway (subsidizing big water guzzling agribusinesses).
And it'd be very hard for anyone who didn't read the actual case law to know the difference between them and a governmental body that happens to be totally unbound by the Constitution.
The differences are simple and profound: private companies are legally liable for the damage and harm they do, officers of private companies have a fiduciary duty to owners, and private companies need to make a profit and can't keep borrowing indefinitely. A government agency can screw whoever they want pretty much without repercussions, it can hand out massive amounts of money to corporate buddies of politicians, and it has neither financial transparency, nor accountability, nor any interest in managing a resource responsibly because nobody's money other than the tax payers' is at stake.
It's no more "mysterious" than a home owner's association.
If it's a for-profit entity you've just sold the water on the Colorado river to a bunch of shareholders, which not good.
I think a for profit would be very good. But in practice, the for profits and not for profits are not all that different anyway.
If it's a non-profit it has to be one with a Federal charter, because it's operating in multiple states. It's got a remit that includes law enforcement actions because it's deciding who gets to use river water. Many, many hated Federal Agencies are not that different in structure then this.
Private ownership is indeed not very different in structure from utilities and public agencies: it has rules, votes, adjudication, and enforcement. Where it is different is in terms of objectives. Public agencies satisfy the needs of special interests and powerful lobbies; private owners can't be influenced that way, they simply do business with whoever has the greatest need for what they are providing.
FBI agents had spoken with Roberts several times, according to the document. They told him that accessing an airplane network without authorization was a violation of federal statues.
Whew, I feel safer already! I'm sure this will prevent anybody from doing anything bad to the flight computer, ever!/sarcasm
No, US is not a civilized country, or rather it's a country where one group after another embraces barbarism.
There is nothing to "give up". From a European point of view, the US has always been "uncivilized", even while Europeans were murdering each other by the millions. European-style civilization is the imposition of the views of elites on the people, and the US, wisely, rejects it.
From various attempts to enforce religious dogma in science class to racially motivated police brutality, the fracture lines of society are getting wider.
Those "fracture lines" are not the result of increasing disunity in US society; the disunity has always been there. Those fracture lines are the result of increasingly trying to impose European-style central mandates on a country that doesn't want it. In a free country, people have a right to teach religious dogma to their children, and in a free country, they have a right to be racist.
Your post marks yet anothe phase in this process of disintegration, where the shame of failure is dealt with by reinterpreting said failures as badges of pride.
Shame of failure relative to what? Europe's failing economies, disintegrating social structures, racism, poverty, hopelessness, and injustice?
Oh well, Enlightenment will find more clients, and the US will go the way every country that rejects it
Ah, but what is Enligthenment? Kant put it quite well: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.
And you're absolutely right: the US should not follow Europe in rejecting the Enlightenment, because if we did, we'd turn into the same kind of basket case.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that you are an engineer, because engineers actually understand how this works. An iPhone is objectively more valuable and useful than the equivalent pile of raw materials. And if one iPhone is 100x as valuable as the raw materials, then 10 iPhones are 1000x as valuable as their raw materials.
Buy stock in a company that makes stuff. It's not a good investment because "stuff" isn't all that valuable anymore to people in the era of 3D printers and rapid manufacturing, but hey, if it makes you happy...
Another constant of the universe is that there are always some fools.
However, most people don't touch options or derivatives, and if you want to trade in them, you have to acknowledge explicitly a lengthy explanation of the risks, and that you are competent to deal with the risks.
That's about as much as "they" and "we" can learn from the past.
Well, yes, basically by wrecking the economy to various degrees. That's of course always an option.
H1-B is the primary way by which tech immigrants come into the country. It wasn't intended that way originally, but that's how it has worked out, and it's how the legal framework is set up. That's no accident either because it's the way it works in most other countries too: temporary work permit, then permanent residency, then citizenship.
Transferring between employers is easy for H1-B workers; the old employer doesn't need to approve and doesn't even find out. So, employers have no special hold over H1-B workers. The only thing that makes H1-B transfers difficult is the government red tape and quotas that surround them.
Americans are actually doing quite a bit better now than 30 years ago. There has been some stagnation, mostly under Obama, whose economic policies turned out to be a complete failure, measured against his own predictions and promises.
Of course, we'd be doing a lot better still with more immigration, lower taxes, and less regulation.
If you pass sledgehammer legislation like the ADA, common sense behavior gets replaced with lawyering and bad things happen. And the people who passed the legislation in the first place say that their intentions were good, blame lawyers and blame the people who opposed the legislation in the first place, and finally call for more legislation to fix the problems that the first legislation caused.
This is the result:
https://regulatorystudies.colu...
Stock markets go up and down. Business cycles exist. Government intervention cannot prevent that. It's not a bad thing.
What else do you want people to "learn" from it?
Tobin's q uses book value. That can indeed include "good will" and other intangibles. Of course, those numbers are just guesses and there are many motivations for companies to guess high or low. Furthermore, different industries account for these differently. Furthermore, "good will" and other intangible assets often can't be sold. For example, the "good will" towards Nokia changed entirely when they company was acquired by Microsoft. Altogether, the q value seems pretty useless, since its denominator is pretty inconsistent.
NO OTHER PLACE, other than real estate, precious metals, art, education for yourself, a private business you start, etc.
Do you seriously believe that the wealthy in the UK have to put up with shitty NHS service? Of course not. Wealthy Europeans go to private doctors, often abroad. Places like Germany even have an explicit two-tier health care system, for the well-off and everybody else.
Unfortunately, the US system actually isn't that much different from European systems: half of it is public, the other half a regulated private system. Relative to population, the US already has a more expensive public system than the NHS, but only manages to cover 1/3 the population with it.
There are plenty of things wrong with the US, but, unfortunately, nothing that would be addressed by adopting more European political ideas.
Actually, I was born in Europe and emigrated as an adult.
They are "underutilized" because they aren't willing to work for the kinds of salaries they can get from companies and companies aren't willing to pay them more for the skills they have. That's not going to change through restricting immigration.
Restricting immigration does keep IT salaries higher, but primarily for the simple reason that it prevents lower paying IT jobs from getting filled, hence keeping the average high. Companies are not going to raise their salaries for lower paying IT jobs substantially, they are simply going to find other ways of getting the work done, and if that doesn't work, change businesses.
Even if restricting H1-Bs would raise IT salaries, of what possible interest is that to Americans at large? If Apple or Microsoft pay there developers twice as much, it's their customers who pay that money, i.e., prices go up. And since Apple and Microsoft compete with companies in India and China, they may well become uncompetitive altogether, meaning all the jobs are gone.
"Good productive farmers and workers. Evil bankers. Government should step in and bring some order into these markets". You should read up on the history of those ideas.
Yes, wages do go up when you restrict the supply of software developers, I never disputed that. What I'm pointing out is that it also means fewer software developers and fewer software companies.
What you have failed to explain is why that is good for anybody. Even if you buy into the protectionist b.s. that it is the job of the US government to cause prices on software to rise so that software developers can live in luxury, how does that benefit America as a whole? How is that any different from crooked Wall Street traders demanding special treatment and bailouts from the US government?
You continue to reason in nonsensical terms like "actual shortage", as if it were a binary thing.
If it helps, try to think of it as a "shortage of cheap IT workers". You erroneously assume that if companies can't hire cheap IT workers, they will substitute expensive IT workers. A few may, but many will simply find other solutions.
Furthermore, your entire premise is somehow that it is the job of the US government to protect the salaries of US IT workers; of course it is not. When IT workers want protectionist laws, it's no different from bankers or farmers asking for government handouts and protectionism.
We're talking about a specific job category here, programmers. Can there be an excess supply of programmers? No. At some point, it simply doesn't pay to be a programmer, and people go back to being Baristas instead. Nobody starves, nobody gets killed.
That is not an "excess supply of labor", it's a misallocation of labor. In principle, those people could do lots of other things. In many cases, however, people are prevented from hiring them altogether because government has created large obstacles to hiring them.
That's not "excess labor", it's too many mouths to feed due to some other scarcity. You can see that those problems have nothing to do with "excess labor" because those people would have starved even if they had all been incapable of work (e.g., children, disabled).
I've lived on less than minimum wage. What's your point?
I didn't "state a theory". I pointed out that when people say that increased supply lowers prices, they are neglecting that it also increases volume. Obviously, that only works up to a point. Do such trivialities even need to be pointed out?
Who said anything about "vendors"? The point is that unless your city or the buildings themselves are not viable, there are uses for these spaces, provided they are offered cheap enough. Worst case, turn them into housing for the homeless at $1/night.
Yes, what's your point? If they hadn't been replaced with H1-Bs, their jobs might simply have moved overseas altogether. Or they might have had their salaries cut (i.e., not raised).
Given the minefield of legal requirements legislators have created, yes, you need lawyers to hire, in particular to hire overseas, no matter how good your case is.
Look, if you get your economic education from Wikipedia, at least read correctly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Not "it must be one of these three".
Obviously, if programmers were as cheap as farm laborers, their education would have to be as cheap as farm laborers as well.
My point is that artificially restricting the supply of programmers doesn't benefit anybody: even if average programmer salaries went down by importing a flood of programmers from overseas, that average mostly goes down because low-end programmers are added, not because people's salaries are cut. Furthermore, society as a whole benefits from any increase in the availability of programmers.
By definition, a private company is managing things so that people get the best use of their resource: they sell the resource to the buyers willing to pay the highest prices, and they are able to pay the highest prices because they are putting the water to the best use.
You seem to think that central planners in Washington have a better idea than the market what to do with the water. If they know that for water, why not for iPhones or hourly rates for plumbers? If the central planners in Washington (or the states) are so brilliant, why not switch to a completely centrally planned economy then? Oh, right, because they never actually work in practice.
It is transparent to the people that actually matter, namely the owners. Whether it's transparent to you or Congress really is irrelevant.
That's a rather contrived example, but let's use it for the sake of argument. You say that as if it were a problem. If the owners believe that global warming is such a threat to their business that they are willing to forego massive amounts of revenue, they must have some pretty strong evidence. That represents rational decision making at its best: clear cost/benefit tradeoffs by people to whom the results actually matter. In contrast, allocating water through the political process means that politicians who have no money at stake get visited by a parade of lobbyists, special interests, and self-proclaimed experts, and then come up with some decision that maximizes their short-term chances for reelection. How is that possibly better?
In fact, in a rational world, many farmers and ranchers throughout California should go out of business right away; their politically motivated water allocations are irrational and effectively highly subsidized by California rate payers.
Good! That is the whole point!
You're missing the context here: labor markets work like other markets in that increasing the supply not only lowers prices but also increases demand.
(As to your point, all markets have some degree of imperfect competition; so, yes, labor markets are no different from other markets even in that regard.)
There is no such thing as "excess supply of labor": if labor is cheap enough, there are always more jobs to be done. If people could hire programmers for the same price as tax-evading dog sitters, half of American homes would hire them to do custom development for their home automation.
The reason those store fronts are empty is because your town/city is keeping the cost of doing business high: anything from professional licensing and minimum wage to insurance requirements, business taxes, and real estate taxes. Without those high costs of doing business, there would be plenty of takers for those storefronts. That's the same thing that's happening to the software business as labor costs go up: the number of companies in the business shrinks.
No, it's only 50% bollocks. Labor markets do work like other markets.
The important thing is: Employers often expand their business based on workers available, so supply creates its own demand.
That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.
So, if we only had 100 programmers in the US, they'd be paid better than pop stars. However, we wouldn't have much of a software industry, because most companies couldn't afford to hire a programmer at those salaries; they'd simply not use computers.
On the other hand, if programmers were as plentiful as Mexican farm laborers or nannies, most small businesses and many households could afford to hire them to write custom software for them. The average salary of programmers would go way down, although the 100 programmers at the top would still be paid very well. And society as a whole would be a lot better off.
That's kind of true, but not in the sense you think. Increased supply means lower prices, but it also means increased sales volume, for good as much as for labor.
If you limit the supply of STEM workers in the US, the average US salary will indeed go up, but for the simple reason that only high-value positions get filled in the US; the rest will simply not get filled or outsourced overseas.
At an individual level, if my business needs a programmer and he's worth at most $120000 to me, I won't hire a programmer at $150000, no matter how short in supply they are, because I'd be taking a $30000 loss. And if my business really needs a programmer, at that point, I'd sell it and invest my money elsewhere (or outsource to overseas).
That's not "lobbying" or "crony capitalism", that's putting your money at risk in a business. The problem with lobbying and crony capitalism is that people get money from the government and tax payers without either working for it or investing their own money.
And if you're concerned about "cornering" or "monopolizing" the water market, there are many potential sources of water, so that seems like a small risk. In addition, consumers pretty much already pay monopoly prices anyway (subsidizing big water guzzling agribusinesses).
The differences are simple and profound: private companies are legally liable for the damage and harm they do, officers of private companies have a fiduciary duty to owners, and private companies need to make a profit and can't keep borrowing indefinitely. A government agency can screw whoever they want pretty much without repercussions, it can hand out massive amounts of money to corporate buddies of politicians, and it has neither financial transparency, nor accountability, nor any interest in managing a resource responsibly because nobody's money other than the tax payers' is at stake.
It's no more "mysterious" than a home owner's association.
I think a for profit would be very good. But in practice, the for profits and not for profits are not all that different anyway.
Private ownership is indeed not very different in structure from utilities and public agencies: it has rules, votes, adjudication, and enforcement. Where it is different is in terms of objectives. Public agencies satisfy the needs of special interests and powerful lobbies; private owners can't be influenced that way, they simply do business with whoever has the greatest need for what they are providing.
Whew, I feel safer already! I'm sure this will prevent anybody from doing anything bad to the flight computer, ever! /sarcasm
There is nothing to "give up". From a European point of view, the US has always been "uncivilized", even while Europeans were murdering each other by the millions. European-style civilization is the imposition of the views of elites on the people, and the US, wisely, rejects it.
Those "fracture lines" are not the result of increasing disunity in US society; the disunity has always been there. Those fracture lines are the result of increasingly trying to impose European-style central mandates on a country that doesn't want it. In a free country, people have a right to teach religious dogma to their children, and in a free country, they have a right to be racist.
Shame of failure relative to what? Europe's failing economies, disintegrating social structures, racism, poverty, hopelessness, and injustice?
Ah, but what is Enligthenment? Kant put it quite well: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.
And you're absolutely right: the US should not follow Europe in rejecting the Enlightenment, because if we did, we'd turn into the same kind of basket case.