I'm quite happy to pay taxes... because I get... free medical care....
Nothing is free, not least of all when you are obviously paying for it.
There are some things that simply can't be done effectively by the private sector (education, road maintenance, defense, health care)
Assertion without evidence. Correlation is not causation.
I'm very happy to pay the government to do those things
And I'm not. But do I get a choice in the matter?
After all, the government is run by elected officials who (at least in my opinion, and at least in Canada) are certainly more accountable to the public than CEOs of private corporations.
If I don't like the way a business operates, I stop buying its products, and it ceases to affect me. If I don't like the way the government operates, I have to continue paying taxes to it anyway.
What little say I get in the government, a single vote on occasion, is always discarded in favor of the majority opinion. It is not accountable to me at all.
the US federal government, a body worth $66.07 trillion
The U.S. federal government has a negative net worth (specifically, of -$10.6 billion). The number you quoted represents the net worth of U.S. households and nonprofits (currently at $77.2 billion). That is not money that the federal government would have an easy time getting its hands on.
Bitcoin, which is backed by mathematics and some currency speculators.
As opposed to the U.S. dollar, which is backed only by currency speculators? The "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government just means that the government will always accept its own money. It doesn't give anything of value in exchange for them, so really the entire currency is predicated on other people's willingness to accept the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange.
Government-backed home loans enable prices to skyrocket, and property taxes force existing residents out of their homes. There's nothing capitalistic about either of those things.
World War II is a fascinating study of whether secularism is a problem or not with government.
Religion has no explanatory power over the behavior of people. Wars have been fought, peaces have been made, and commerce has variously flourished and foundered without regard to religious affiliation.
If you examine the matter closely, there is really no such thing as religion or secularism. Two people who claim to follow the same religion can disagree vehemently over something, and a militant atheist is indistinguishable in fervor and tenor from a religious fanatic.
There should be no tax exemption for "religious" organizations because there should be no tax on organizations. The government is not empowered to impede freedom of assembly, and it is certainly not empowered to elevate some organizations over others and thus dictate what is and what is not acceptable belief.
It is an idea, and ideas have no power except what people grant to them. What you're saying is that people can't be trusted to hold beliefs. You want control over their minds, and that makes you no better than a Nazi.
Who is this "they" you speak of? Clearly some people don't feel that Nazism ought to be outlawed, as they are practicing it.
nazi assholes are such bad assholes
What makes them bad is doing bad things, and those bad things are illegal on their own.
they should be removed from the streets and put into jail.
If and when they should ever come to power again in Germany, or anywhere else that forbids the freedom of thought and expression, rest assured that they will use this fact to portray themselves as victims.
What comfort it will be to their victims to know it was illegal to be a Nazi once.
What you're saying is that Nazism is so toxic and so powerful that it overwhelms the minds of those it is exposed to, such that they cannot control themselves. If that's what you believe, then you've already lost. No law can save you from such a force.
If we continue developing alternative energy sources sooner, they'll be cheaper than fossil fuels sooner, so the maximum price of energy will be minimized.
This is a very limited analysis of the matter, and a contestable one at that.
First, In order to "develop" alternative energy sources before it is economically sensible to do so, you must allocate some measure of resources to the task which people are not already allocating themselves. This reallocation incurs a cost upon the people from whom the resources are taken. The periodic cost may not be that high, especially since much of it is hidden by debt accrual, but the compounded cost over time can be great, especially when you factor in the debt. So even if you are able to "minimize" the apparent price of the good, you are in the process diminishing the purchasing power of the people who consume it, and thus increasing its actual price.
Second, the allocation of effort to a task does not inherently decrease its costs. Subsidies, excise taxes, and other price manipulations only distort the picture by shifting the costs to other areas. A correlative analysis of select industries does not substitute for a causal analysis of all of them. As has been demonstrated numerous times in many industries, simply throwing more money or more people at a task actually increases its costs. The so-called "economies of scale" only occur when there are high fixed costs and low per-unit costs, such that the price of the unit decreases as the greater number of units are made, and that is only feasible when there exists sufficient demand.
The price of fossil fuels is not likely to increase suddenly any more than the price of alternative energy is likely to decrease suddenly. The slow shifting of the relative prices will naturally create an incentive to develop the latter well before the complete exhaustion of the former. Furthermore, people will have created more wealth in the mean time, thus increasing their ability to afford the change. Intervening in this process actually introduces significant risk, and it is likely that the damage we create will exceed the damage that we are trying to prevent.
I think we should take steps to reduce energy use through more efficient lighting, transporation, and appliances and also continue to develop alternative energy sources, from a purely economic standpoint, even ignoring any effects from global warming, ocean acidification, and air pollution. It boggles the mind to think that so many people are opposed to it for some reason. I suppose that next quarter's fincances are all that matter to some people.
All of what you are talking about have high upfront costs that must be paid before the long-term benefits can be realized. Paying those costs requires great wealth, which developed countries generally have. However, for quite some time our fiscal and monetary policies have been destroying wealth--while at the same time concentrating money--which has made us less able to afford these things. The policies you are lending your voice to support are the same sort as have put us in this position to begin with, and so will only exacerbate the problem further.
You're not wrong, you're just examining things at a surface level. In economics, capital and people matter, the rest is inventions of the mind, useful mental frameworks and abstractions for analyzing complex events. The abstractions facilitate the exploitation of capital to the benefit of people, but they don't become real things just because we can talk about them. You can tax an abstraction, but in "the real world", the tax will be paid by people in the form of capital. That's not drug-induced babble, it's deconstructing the abstractions back to reality.
No, you are arguing that no objective reality exists. You can't talk about "realistic" if you don't accept the notion of reality. If physical existence is irrelevant, then so is physical hardship. Simply imagine all of your needs and wants have been met, and it will be so.
The nominal value of money is declining faster than real costs for consumer goods.
To clarify, I'm saying that the money supply is increasing faster than the economy is growing, or alternately that the purchasing power of a denomination of currency is declining faster than the economy can compensate for the loss.
People pay roughly the same share of their income for essentials (food and shelter) than they did 40, 60 or 80 years ago.
The value of money is not constant. People are making more money, and buying more expensive things. That it all "evens out" in the end just speaks to the monetary policies of the US and the EU, it does not disprove my point.
The modern trend is, in fact, a reversal of a long-term trend
Thousand-year trends are not reversed in 40 years. We are talking about two different scales. If you look over the last few thousand years at small scales, you will find much more variance than the trend would lead you to believe.
Are you trying to just win an argument with cheap tricks? I gave a very specific example just following that.
No, I am not, but no, you did not. If what you meant is that "tax cuts for the rich cause burdens for the poor", then you are saying that not taking is giving, and not giving is taking. That is at best substituting accounting for economics, and at worst it is religious-level worship of the government. You're going to have to explain your argument.
The coal vs. nuclear is also a topic, and it's related, but it's not the same... solar and wind are covering more and more of the energy demands.
While that is true, they still only make up for one-sixth of total energy production in Germany. That's useful during the day and when it's windy, but nuclear and fossil fuels still provide the reliable backbone. It remains to be seen if solar and wind can even become a plurality, nonetheless a majority, source. I will admit that, according to the CIA World Factbook, fossil fuel energy production in Germany has moved from 65% of the total production in 1998 to 55% in 2011 (estimated), although there is also 6% unaccounted for in the 2011 estimate (fossil + nuclear + hydro + other renewable = 94%).
None of this addresses the actual costs of doing all this, of course.
That's total hogwash... companies are people.
The law can say whatever it wants, that does not make it so. I am a person, you are a person (I'll forgo the Turing test), but things which exist only in the imaginations of people are not themselves people. Moreover, the concept of legal personhood (which applies to a corporation, not all companies) is an abstraction, one which is much more nuanced than just "corporations are people too!"
Second, you can make the same argument in reverse, which is a solid proof that it's a null-argument (people don't exist, they only take income from one company and spend it buying stuff at other companies).
Does a company have agency? No. Does it continue to operate without customers or employees? No. People are real things, companies are not. They exist only in people's minds. A company is just one type of useful mental construct for organizing the activities of people.
Third, of course companies pay taxes. How can you base an argument on a trivially obvious falsehood? Heck, I own a small company and darn does it pay taxes.
Does your company engage in counterfeiting money? If not, then where did the money that the company paid "its" taxes with come from? It either came from your own pocket (in which case you paid it) or it came from the money your customers gave you (in which case they paid it). At no point did a non-corporeal entity pay taxes. Don't confuse accounting with economics.
But, again, the current generation is actually the first in a long time that has a lower purchasing power than its parents had. Prices have been rising by about 1% more than average income has for around a decade now.
Indeed, the economy is stagnating. The nominal value of money is declining faster tha
That's a dishonest comparison... progress gives us more for the same.
No, progress gives us new things, and people want those things. The cost for "a family, a house, and a car" plus new things is greater than the cost for just the family, house, and car. Even then, the understanding of what constitutes "a family, a house, and a car" has changed in forty years; people want more educated and healthier families, they want larger houses, they want safer cars, etc. These things all cost more than the alternatives.
If you think that standard of living is what causes that change, then by the same standard, the move up from a medieval family, or in fact a stone-age tribe and the associated changes in standard of living would mean family requires how many working members to sustain? A hundred? A thousand?
The principle at discussion is the purchasing power of a domestic unit. The modern trend of having two wage earners is not so different from the age-old practice of farmers having many children (and farmwives were hardly idle). Wealth increases in spurts and fits, but people's taste for it, while voracious, increases more evenly. So, for example, sudden increases in wealth can lead to drastic reductions in household size, because people's expectations don't change as quickly. When wealth grows at slower rates, however, people's expectations can grow faster than it.
I'm sorry, but your understanding of the term "middle class" is out-of-line with the generally accepted one.
You mean the Marxist one. I'm talking about economics, not socialist fairy tales.
For 20 years now, several successive government have intentionally and openly demolished workers rights,
You said earlier that labor laws have not changed.
cut taxes for the rich
It's funny how people bash capitalism for depending on a small group of people making lots of money, when in reality it is socialism that does.
and shifted the burdens towards the poor
What does this even mean? What "burdens" do the poor have besides being poor, and how were these burdens placed upon their shoulders?
We are doing great with what's called the "Energiewende" - the move towards green, sustainable energy like solar and wind.
No, you are doing great with replacing nuclear energy with coal. Remember that standard of living we were talking about? Even if you ignored everything I said about people's demands for "standard of living" increasing over time, the demands of forty years ago were quite energy intensive. Solar and wind are not economical as a primary source for the energy demands that people actually have.
Common people and small business pays the bill, the companies that use the most electricity don't.
"Common people" always pay the bill. People pay taxes, not companies. To a gross simplification, all a company does is take money from some people and give it to others. If the company is taxed, then its name appears on the checks, but the employees and customers actually pay the tax. The company exists only on paper.
If you're in the upper class, it certainly is - like in the USA, the difference between the poor and the rich has been steadily increasing.
The difference between today's rich and today's poor pales in comparison to the difference between today's poor and yesterday's poor. And the irony of course in this disparity is that it has come in a highly regulated and heavily government-manipulated economy.
But there's a difference between capitalism and cut-throat neo-liberal capitalist exploitation.
Capitalism is a state of nature. People are unequal, and so they have an inherent need to exchange goods and services with each other for mutual benefit
But in 1976 the father could sustain his family and his house and his car, while today father and mother working is the most common family.
In 1976, houses were smaller, fewer had AC, far fewer had color TVs, many still had "party line" phones, none had cell phones, computers, or the Internet, most had one car not two or three, cars were more dangerous and more polluting, cancer and heart disease survival rates were much lower, and fewer families sent their kids to college, among other differences. If people were willing to accept 1976 standards of living today, they would not need two income earners. I'm not saying that anyone has to do that, but turning around and saying that "it takes two people today to do what it took only one to do in 1976" is not accurate.
However, we also have a much smaller middle class than we used to
Median = 50th percentile. Since CPI-adjusted median income has remained stable while the population has grown, the "middle class" is, to a rough approximation, exactly as large by percentage, and much larger by absolute numbers, than it used to be.
Trying to beat China without realizing that none of us actually want to live there.
This is why it's so important to realize that wealth is not a zero-sum game. China can become wealthy at no one's expense. The sale of goods made cheaply elsewhere not only increases your purchasing power, it also increases the standard of living of the workers who made them. You may not want to live in China, but the poverty that drives your interest away will not be eliminated by magic.
In Europe, Scandinavia is a lot better off than central and southern Europe, for example. Education, average income, living quality - whatever your measure, Sweden or Norway beat Italy or Spain in each and every one, and France and Germany in most.
And I'm willing to examine what successful economies are doing differently and adapt accordingly. However, you have to be careful not to let your conclusions become your premises. If Germany, for example, is doing well, then it is perhaps a model to emulate. But when cracks start to appear, it is important to understand why and what can be done about them, rather than saying "it's all someone else's fault, Germany would be a worker's paradise if not for the anti-union forces!" (that's not what you said, I know it's a caricature).
In another thread, someone brought up Denmark. There are many differences between a country like Denmark and the United States. Attempting to isolate just one of them, such as unionization, and saying it is a magic bullet solution is folly. Unions in the US are nothing like their Danish counterparts, and the regulatory environments in the US and Denmark differ drastically, not to mention more nebulous factors like culture and attitudes.
I was asking you to define the premises under which you are arguing, not to defer to some abstract third party.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Median household income in the United States has remained fairly stable in CPI-adjusted dollars since the mid-1970s, but in the mean time the population has increased by over 100 million. In other words, the "middle class" has grown by millions since the 1970s. No one in 1976 owned a cell phone, whereas practically everyone does nowadays, and food prices have generally increased at a slower rate than CPI. Hence, nowadays the "middle class" can afford food more easily, and can afford luxuries that the "middle class" of the past could not. Moreover, these facts are true regardless of the income quantile under discussion.
The existence of high-paying jobs is predicated on the ability to create a lot of value through work. But value is relative, and changes over time. Nowadays, it takes a fraction of the number of people to build an automobile that it did 50 years ago. And there are people outside the developed world who are willing to do it for a lot less money. But even if you try to ignore them and their equally legitimate desire to earn a good living, the unstoppable changes in consumer expectations and efficiency cannot be ignored. The same jobs just aren't as valuable as they were before, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
But there are always new jobs. Focusing too heavily on some idealized version of the past, to the point where you create economic stagnation, only leads to ruin. Every system that tries to set wages and employment levels too far away from market equilibrium increases, rather than reduces, inequality and suffering. Most places have begrudgingly averted such folly despite flirting with it time and again, but some have not: Detroit, as I already mentioned, also Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
Given that definition and my own experiences, I would say that the number of managers is one or two orders of magnitude greater than the number of competent managers. At this point, I think we're just arguing about having different experiences.
I did say that the supply of competent people outstripped the demand and that managers were overpaid, and the problem got worse as you went up the chain. It isn't the same thing.
What I was originally attempting to say is that the existence of a chain in management refutes the idea that there are lots of competent managers. If the managers were in fact so competent, then there would not need to be so many of them. The rest of what we've been arguing about is ancillary to that central point.
I don't know what companies you are referring to, so I can't pick an example and examine it further. But we are circling around to the point I was trying to make about Detroit: you have to consider not only short-term affordability but long-term sustainability. Companies don't do anything in a vacuum. In mature industries, there is little change year-over-year in total consumer demand, but that doesn't mean the relative share of demand satisfied by each producer remains the same. There are still ways for a company in a mature industry to differentiate its offerings such that its market share can grow or shrink. The example of the Japanese auto makers versus the American ones is a key example of what happens when you try to set wages and wage provisions in a vacuum. Yes, it may be affordable for a while, but when it comes time to adapt, change happens far too slowly. Eliminating profit stifles innovation which leads to stagnation. Without viable competition, that leads to stagflation, and with viable competition, it leads to the decline of established players and modes of business. We in the US saw the former happen in the 1970s, and the latter happen in the 1980s. Higher wages come at a cost; sometimes that cost can be borne over the short and long term, but often it cannot. Never mind second-order effects, like unemployment, underemployment, wage inflation, and price inflation.
You're not reading what I write, you're reading what you want to read, and then arguing against that. You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one. There exists a labor market, of which you are not a participant. Actors in that market get to decide on prices, not you. Were you an employer, a manager, a customer, or hell even an auditor, you would get to have a say. You are none of those.
I said management was a hard job, and most people fail at it. You say most people succeed at it, and it's not hard. That doesn't jibe with facts. Most businesses fail. Many large businesses waste money left and right due to incompetence, and then end up failing anyway. Do you dispute these claims? Because I don't see how you can reconcile "management is so easy a monkey can do it" with "most managers suck and lead their companies to ruin".
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I'm quite happy to pay taxes ... because I get ... free medical care ....
Nothing is free, not least of all when you are obviously paying for it.
There are some things that simply can't be done effectively by the private sector (education, road maintenance, defense, health care)
Assertion without evidence. Correlation is not causation.
I'm very happy to pay the government to do those things
And I'm not. But do I get a choice in the matter?
After all, the government is run by elected officials who (at least in my opinion, and at least in Canada) are certainly more accountable to the public than CEOs of private corporations.
If I don't like the way a business operates, I stop buying its products, and it ceases to affect me. If I don't like the way the government operates, I have to continue paying taxes to it anyway.
What little say I get in the government, a single vote on occasion, is always discarded in favor of the majority opinion. It is not accountable to me at all.
The numbers are off by a factor of 1000. Every "billion" is actually a trillion. Doesn't change the point at all, though.
the US federal government, a body worth $66.07 trillion
The U.S. federal government has a negative net worth (specifically, of -$10.6 billion). The number you quoted represents the net worth of U.S. households and nonprofits (currently at $77.2 billion). That is not money that the federal government would have an easy time getting its hands on.
Bitcoin, which is backed by mathematics and some currency speculators.
As opposed to the U.S. dollar, which is backed only by currency speculators? The "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government just means that the government will always accept its own money. It doesn't give anything of value in exchange for them, so really the entire currency is predicated on other people's willingness to accept the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange.
This very expensive automobile has demonstratively failed to meet the needs of people who live north of the 55th meridian.
Nitpick: A meridian is a line of longitude. A line of latitude is called a parallel.
Government-backed home loans enable prices to skyrocket, and property taxes force existing residents out of their homes. There's nothing capitalistic about either of those things.
World War II is a fascinating study of whether secularism is a problem or not with government.
Religion has no explanatory power over the behavior of people. Wars have been fought, peaces have been made, and commerce has variously flourished and foundered without regard to religious affiliation.
If you examine the matter closely, there is really no such thing as religion or secularism. Two people who claim to follow the same religion can disagree vehemently over something, and a militant atheist is indistinguishable in fervor and tenor from a religious fanatic.
There should be no tax exemption for "religious" organizations because there should be no tax on organizations. The government is not empowered to impede freedom of assembly, and it is certainly not empowered to elevate some organizations over others and thus dictate what is and what is not acceptable belief.
It is an idea, and ideas have no power except what people grant to them. What you're saying is that people can't be trusted to hold beliefs. You want control over their minds, and that makes you no better than a Nazi.
Well, that's not what they believe in Germany.
Who is this "they" you speak of? Clearly some people don't feel that Nazism ought to be outlawed, as they are practicing it.
nazi assholes are such bad assholes
What makes them bad is doing bad things, and those bad things are illegal on their own.
they should be removed from the streets and put into jail.
If and when they should ever come to power again in Germany, or anywhere else that forbids the freedom of thought and expression, rest assured that they will use this fact to portray themselves as victims.
What comfort it will be to their victims to know it was illegal to be a Nazi once.
What you're saying is that Nazism is so toxic and so powerful that it overwhelms the minds of those it is exposed to, such that they cannot control themselves. If that's what you believe, then you've already lost. No law can save you from such a force.
We can get rid of the FBI now, right?
If we continue developing alternative energy sources sooner, they'll be cheaper than fossil fuels sooner, so the maximum price of energy will be minimized.
This is a very limited analysis of the matter, and a contestable one at that.
First, In order to "develop" alternative energy sources before it is economically sensible to do so, you must allocate some measure of resources to the task which people are not already allocating themselves. This reallocation incurs a cost upon the people from whom the resources are taken. The periodic cost may not be that high, especially since much of it is hidden by debt accrual, but the compounded cost over time can be great, especially when you factor in the debt. So even if you are able to "minimize" the apparent price of the good, you are in the process diminishing the purchasing power of the people who consume it, and thus increasing its actual price.
Second, the allocation of effort to a task does not inherently decrease its costs. Subsidies, excise taxes, and other price manipulations only distort the picture by shifting the costs to other areas. A correlative analysis of select industries does not substitute for a causal analysis of all of them. As has been demonstrated numerous times in many industries, simply throwing more money or more people at a task actually increases its costs. The so-called "economies of scale" only occur when there are high fixed costs and low per-unit costs, such that the price of the unit decreases as the greater number of units are made, and that is only feasible when there exists sufficient demand.
The price of fossil fuels is not likely to increase suddenly any more than the price of alternative energy is likely to decrease suddenly. The slow shifting of the relative prices will naturally create an incentive to develop the latter well before the complete exhaustion of the former. Furthermore, people will have created more wealth in the mean time, thus increasing their ability to afford the change. Intervening in this process actually introduces significant risk, and it is likely that the damage we create will exceed the damage that we are trying to prevent.
I think we should take steps to reduce energy use through more efficient lighting, transporation, and appliances and also continue to develop alternative energy sources, from a purely economic standpoint, even ignoring any effects from global warming, ocean acidification, and air pollution. It boggles the mind to think that so many people are opposed to it for some reason. I suppose that next quarter's fincances are all that matter to some people.
All of what you are talking about have high upfront costs that must be paid before the long-term benefits can be realized. Paying those costs requires great wealth, which developed countries generally have. However, for quite some time our fiscal and monetary policies have been destroying wealth--while at the same time concentrating money--which has made us less able to afford these things. The policies you are lending your voice to support are the same sort as have put us in this position to begin with, and so will only exacerbate the problem further.
You're not wrong, you're just examining things at a surface level. In economics, capital and people matter, the rest is inventions of the mind, useful mental frameworks and abstractions for analyzing complex events. The abstractions facilitate the exploitation of capital to the benefit of people, but they don't become real things just because we can talk about them. You can tax an abstraction, but in "the real world", the tax will be paid by people in the form of capital. That's not drug-induced babble, it's deconstructing the abstractions back to reality.
No, you are arguing that no objective reality exists. You can't talk about "realistic" if you don't accept the notion of reality. If physical existence is irrelevant, then so is physical hardship. Simply imagine all of your needs and wants have been met, and it will be so.
If all the owners, employees, customers, regulators, and officials ceased to believe in a company's existence, does it still exist?
If I cease to believe in your existence, do you still exist?
These two things are not alike.
The nominal value of money is declining faster than real costs for consumer goods.
To clarify, I'm saying that the money supply is increasing faster than the economy is growing, or alternately that the purchasing power of a denomination of currency is declining faster than the economy can compensate for the loss.
This argument is growing tedious.
People pay roughly the same share of their income for essentials (food and shelter) than they did 40, 60 or 80 years ago.
The value of money is not constant. People are making more money, and buying more expensive things. That it all "evens out" in the end just speaks to the monetary policies of the US and the EU, it does not disprove my point.
The modern trend is, in fact, a reversal of a long-term trend
Thousand-year trends are not reversed in 40 years. We are talking about two different scales. If you look over the last few thousand years at small scales, you will find much more variance than the trend would lead you to believe.
Are you trying to just win an argument with cheap tricks? I gave a very specific example just following that.
No, I am not, but no, you did not. If what you meant is that "tax cuts for the rich cause burdens for the poor", then you are saying that not taking is giving, and not giving is taking. That is at best substituting accounting for economics, and at worst it is religious-level worship of the government. You're going to have to explain your argument.
The coal vs. nuclear is also a topic, and it's related, but it's not the same ... solar and wind are covering more and more of the energy demands.
While that is true, they still only make up for one-sixth of total energy production in Germany. That's useful during the day and when it's windy, but nuclear and fossil fuels still provide the reliable backbone. It remains to be seen if solar and wind can even become a plurality, nonetheless a majority, source. I will admit that, according to the CIA World Factbook, fossil fuel energy production in Germany has moved from 65% of the total production in 1998 to 55% in 2011 (estimated), although there is also 6% unaccounted for in the 2011 estimate (fossil + nuclear + hydro + other renewable = 94%).
None of this addresses the actual costs of doing all this, of course.
That's total hogwash ... companies are people.
The law can say whatever it wants, that does not make it so. I am a person, you are a person (I'll forgo the Turing test), but things which exist only in the imaginations of people are not themselves people. Moreover, the concept of legal personhood (which applies to a corporation, not all companies) is an abstraction, one which is much more nuanced than just "corporations are people too!"
Second, you can make the same argument in reverse, which is a solid proof that it's a null-argument (people don't exist, they only take income from one company and spend it buying stuff at other companies).
Does a company have agency? No. Does it continue to operate without customers or employees? No. People are real things, companies are not. They exist only in people's minds. A company is just one type of useful mental construct for organizing the activities of people.
Third, of course companies pay taxes. How can you base an argument on a trivially obvious falsehood? Heck, I own a small company and darn does it pay taxes.
Does your company engage in counterfeiting money? If not, then where did the money that the company paid "its" taxes with come from? It either came from your own pocket (in which case you paid it) or it came from the money your customers gave you (in which case they paid it). At no point did a non-corporeal entity pay taxes. Don't confuse accounting with economics.
But, again, the current generation is actually the first in a long time that has a lower purchasing power than its parents had. Prices have been rising by about 1% more than average income has for around a decade now.
Indeed, the economy is stagnating. The nominal value of money is declining faster tha
That's a dishonest comparison ... progress gives us more for the same.
No, progress gives us new things, and people want those things. The cost for "a family, a house, and a car" plus new things is greater than the cost for just the family, house, and car. Even then, the understanding of what constitutes "a family, a house, and a car" has changed in forty years; people want more educated and healthier families, they want larger houses, they want safer cars, etc. These things all cost more than the alternatives.
If you think that standard of living is what causes that change, then by the same standard, the move up from a medieval family, or in fact a stone-age tribe and the associated changes in standard of living would mean family requires how many working members to sustain? A hundred? A thousand?
The principle at discussion is the purchasing power of a domestic unit. The modern trend of having two wage earners is not so different from the age-old practice of farmers having many children (and farmwives were hardly idle). Wealth increases in spurts and fits, but people's taste for it, while voracious, increases more evenly. So, for example, sudden increases in wealth can lead to drastic reductions in household size, because people's expectations don't change as quickly. When wealth grows at slower rates, however, people's expectations can grow faster than it.
I'm sorry, but your understanding of the term "middle class" is out-of-line with the generally accepted one.
You mean the Marxist one. I'm talking about economics, not socialist fairy tales.
For 20 years now, several successive government have intentionally and openly demolished workers rights,
You said earlier that labor laws have not changed.
cut taxes for the rich
It's funny how people bash capitalism for depending on a small group of people making lots of money, when in reality it is socialism that does.
and shifted the burdens towards the poor
What does this even mean? What "burdens" do the poor have besides being poor, and how were these burdens placed upon their shoulders?
We are doing great with what's called the "Energiewende" - the move towards green, sustainable energy like solar and wind.
No, you are doing great with replacing nuclear energy with coal. Remember that standard of living we were talking about? Even if you ignored everything I said about people's demands for "standard of living" increasing over time, the demands of forty years ago were quite energy intensive. Solar and wind are not economical as a primary source for the energy demands that people actually have.
Common people and small business pays the bill, the companies that use the most electricity don't.
"Common people" always pay the bill. People pay taxes, not companies. To a gross simplification, all a company does is take money from some people and give it to others. If the company is taxed, then its name appears on the checks, but the employees and customers actually pay the tax. The company exists only on paper.
If you're in the upper class, it certainly is - like in the USA, the difference between the poor and the rich has been steadily increasing.
The difference between today's rich and today's poor pales in comparison to the difference between today's poor and yesterday's poor. And the irony of course in this disparity is that it has come in a highly regulated and heavily government-manipulated economy.
But there's a difference between capitalism and cut-throat neo-liberal capitalist exploitation.
Capitalism is a state of nature. People are unequal, and so they have an inherent need to exchange goods and services with each other for mutual benefit
But in 1976 the father could sustain his family and his house and his car, while today father and mother working is the most common family.
In 1976, houses were smaller, fewer had AC, far fewer had color TVs, many still had "party line" phones, none had cell phones, computers, or the Internet, most had one car not two or three, cars were more dangerous and more polluting, cancer and heart disease survival rates were much lower, and fewer families sent their kids to college, among other differences. If people were willing to accept 1976 standards of living today, they would not need two income earners. I'm not saying that anyone has to do that, but turning around and saying that "it takes two people today to do what it took only one to do in 1976" is not accurate.
However, we also have a much smaller middle class than we used to
Median = 50th percentile. Since CPI-adjusted median income has remained stable while the population has grown, the "middle class" is, to a rough approximation, exactly as large by percentage, and much larger by absolute numbers, than it used to be.
Trying to beat China without realizing that none of us actually want to live there.
This is why it's so important to realize that wealth is not a zero-sum game. China can become wealthy at no one's expense. The sale of goods made cheaply elsewhere not only increases your purchasing power, it also increases the standard of living of the workers who made them. You may not want to live in China, but the poverty that drives your interest away will not be eliminated by magic.
In Europe, Scandinavia is a lot better off than central and southern Europe, for example. Education, average income, living quality - whatever your measure, Sweden or Norway beat Italy or Spain in each and every one, and France and Germany in most.
And I'm willing to examine what successful economies are doing differently and adapt accordingly. However, you have to be careful not to let your conclusions become your premises. If Germany, for example, is doing well, then it is perhaps a model to emulate. But when cracks start to appear, it is important to understand why and what can be done about them, rather than saying "it's all someone else's fault, Germany would be a worker's paradise if not for the anti-union forces!" (that's not what you said, I know it's a caricature).
In another thread, someone brought up Denmark. There are many differences between a country like Denmark and the United States. Attempting to isolate just one of them, such as unionization, and saying it is a magic bullet solution is folly. Unions in the US are nothing like their Danish counterparts, and the regulatory environments in the US and Denmark differ drastically, not to mention more nebulous factors like culture and attitudes.
I was asking you to define the premises under which you are arguing, not to defer to some abstract third party.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Median household income in the United States has remained fairly stable in CPI-adjusted dollars since the mid-1970s, but in the mean time the population has increased by over 100 million. In other words, the "middle class" has grown by millions since the 1970s. No one in 1976 owned a cell phone, whereas practically everyone does nowadays, and food prices have generally increased at a slower rate than CPI. Hence, nowadays the "middle class" can afford food more easily, and can afford luxuries that the "middle class" of the past could not. Moreover, these facts are true regardless of the income quantile under discussion.
The existence of high-paying jobs is predicated on the ability to create a lot of value through work. But value is relative, and changes over time. Nowadays, it takes a fraction of the number of people to build an automobile that it did 50 years ago. And there are people outside the developed world who are willing to do it for a lot less money. But even if you try to ignore them and their equally legitimate desire to earn a good living, the unstoppable changes in consumer expectations and efficiency cannot be ignored. The same jobs just aren't as valuable as they were before, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
But there are always new jobs. Focusing too heavily on some idealized version of the past, to the point where you create economic stagnation, only leads to ruin. Every system that tries to set wages and employment levels too far away from market equilibrium increases, rather than reduces, inequality and suffering. Most places have begrudgingly averted such folly despite flirting with it time and again, but some have not: Detroit, as I already mentioned, also Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
What is wealth, and through what mechanism does "the middle class" produce it?
Given that definition and my own experiences, I would say that the number of managers is one or two orders of magnitude greater than the number of competent managers. At this point, I think we're just arguing about having different experiences.
What is your definition of a competent manager?
I did say that the supply of competent people outstripped the demand and that managers were overpaid, and the problem got worse as you went up the chain. It isn't the same thing.
What I was originally attempting to say is that the existence of a chain in management refutes the idea that there are lots of competent managers. If the managers were in fact so competent, then there would not need to be so many of them. The rest of what we've been arguing about is ancillary to that central point.
I don't know what companies you are referring to, so I can't pick an example and examine it further. But we are circling around to the point I was trying to make about Detroit: you have to consider not only short-term affordability but long-term sustainability. Companies don't do anything in a vacuum. In mature industries, there is little change year-over-year in total consumer demand, but that doesn't mean the relative share of demand satisfied by each producer remains the same. There are still ways for a company in a mature industry to differentiate its offerings such that its market share can grow or shrink. The example of the Japanese auto makers versus the American ones is a key example of what happens when you try to set wages and wage provisions in a vacuum. Yes, it may be affordable for a while, but when it comes time to adapt, change happens far too slowly. Eliminating profit stifles innovation which leads to stagnation. Without viable competition, that leads to stagflation, and with viable competition, it leads to the decline of established players and modes of business. We in the US saw the former happen in the 1970s, and the latter happen in the 1980s. Higher wages come at a cost; sometimes that cost can be borne over the short and long term, but often it cannot. Never mind second-order effects, like unemployment, underemployment, wage inflation, and price inflation.
You're not reading what I write, you're reading what you want to read, and then arguing against that. You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one. There exists a labor market, of which you are not a participant. Actors in that market get to decide on prices, not you. Were you an employer, a manager, a customer, or hell even an auditor, you would get to have a say. You are none of those.
I said management was a hard job, and most people fail at it. You say most people succeed at it, and it's not hard. That doesn't jibe with facts. Most businesses fail. Many large businesses waste money left and right due to incompetence, and then end up failing anyway. Do you dispute these claims? Because I don't see how you can reconcile "management is so easy a monkey can do it" with "most managers suck and lead their companies to ruin".