[quote]orion wrote:
Sentoguy wrote:
orion wrote:
Sentoguy wrote:
That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. Free markets by their very nature are in direct opposition to human rights.
That is obvious nonsense because all human rights can be reduced to one right, and one right only, the right to own private property.
Really? And by what method of deductive reasoning did you come to this conclusion?
Therefore it follows logically that capitalism is a highly moral system and every interference in the market beyond enforcing property rights is a human rights violation.
Utter nonsense. Logically? So I suppose that you think because something is “logical” that it makes it true huh?
As to your next post, repeat after me:
Wages follow productivity.
Nope.
Wages follow productivity.
Nope.
Wages follow productivity.
Nope.
Have you ever actually worked in a factory or manufacturing facility? I have. I worked in one for 6 years. I busted my ass 40-60 hours a week, week in and week out. Sometimes not missing a single day for years at a time.
My pay only went up when someone else got fired and they needed someone to take their place. Usually I wound up doing the work of two people and the best raise I ever got was 1$.
But I wasn’t the most taken advantage of by far. There were guys who had been there for 40+ years making less than $10 an hour. Guys who had been loyal to the company and were good, hard, consistent workers, always made it to work early, and almost always were willing to work over time (most likely because they hadn’t received a cost of living raise in years), and yet they were getting paid shit for their hard work.
Oh, and the company WAS making quite a bit of money. My boss and I figured out one day that we had done something like 4 million dollars (it was a fairly small business) worth of work in the past year, the company had also severely downsized the workforce and had begun buying materials overseas (because supposedly they could get them for cheaper),
Yet we had done more work that year than the previous year. None of us saw any wage increase as a result.
You might think that this is an isolated case, but it’s far from it. Just take a quick glance at the number of manufacturing jobs in the states over the past 20 years and you’ll notice a sharp decline. Reason?
Because these companies can either get people overseas to do the jobs for cheaper pay, or they can get a machine to do the work for cheaper (and even then the remaining workers don’t wind up getting paid the money of their laid off co-workers).
Maybe for the owners of the company increase productivity always leads to increased wages, but certainly not for the people on the ground floor.
Whatever your ideas are concerning evil corporations, exploited workers, comrades marching in goosestepping unison to right those wrongs,
wages follow productivity,
and it forever shall remain that way.
Again, NO they don’t. I’m sure you’d like to think they do, but they don’t.
You can bet your ass that all of those kids working in sweatshops making Nike shoes are busting their asses and their productivity easily matches that of workers in U.S shoe making factories (if there even are still any). But they’re still getting paid way, way less money.
You know not of what you speak.
Meaning government cannot “protect” peoples wages, period.
To an extent it can. The lifting of all of these trade regulations is one way that the government has allowed these corporations the ability to exploit these foreign workers. The trade regulations were designed to “protect” people’s wages and prevent such practices from being engaged in.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Labor/wm498.cfm
It is tempting to assume that the interests of management and employees are constantly in conflict and that what benefits one, harms the other. One implication of this point of view is the presumption that improved productivity harms, or at least does nothing to help, the interests of workers.
But trends in the manufacturing sector show otherwise. Even in the midst of job losses, manufacturing wages improved and did so at roughly the same time that productivity began to show a marked increase.
Increased productivity means that labor itself is more valuable?the same number of workers can produce more goods or produce the same goods at lower cost. Either way, those same employees are in a position to call for increased wages, and their employers are in a better position to give raises.
That other manufacturers might be struggling does not necessarily change this happy state of affairs for the firms that are doing well.
Consequently, while less productive firms struggled and closed down facilities over the last three years, more productive firms were still in a position to thrive and spread the spoils to their own workers?hence the sharp gains in compensation in 2002 and 2003.
So if you have understood what was written above, you also know now that productivity in f.e. India is NOT the same, because they lack the machinery to be as productive as American workers, therefore they get paid less.
Then, yes I truly believe that logic is superior to wishful thinking.
Further, you brought up human rights.
Human rights are a natural rights idea, meaning everyone is born with unalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There are some others like freedom from injury, unlawful incarceration and freedom of expression and all of those have in common that you own yourself and can therefore do with yourself whatever you want as long as you do not harm others,
In other words these are property rights.
Since you cannot be free or even alive without owning property it follows that the right to own private property beyond your body is also a natural right.
Therefore, to produce whatever you want and trade with whomever you want is highly consistent with the human rights idea, in fact it is a mere expression of those rights.
If you interfere with those action, than you start denying those rights to people.
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Here is a list of Human Rights that the UN wrote up (this treatise was approved by 48 of the 56 member nations in 1948 when it was written)
http://www.un.org/rights/50/decla.htm
Look at “Article 23”. Sweat shops are in direct violation of this article.
There is nothing wrong with your logic, but that still does not mean that the only true human right is the right to own property.
