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That's not right at all. Wages are roughly paid according to productivity hence over the last two hundred years real wages have increased as production has.
Minimising costs is certainly an objective of a firm and in terms of labour this is done by maximising it's productivity with investment in capital, increased education, developing skills etc. This drives wages upwards.
The role of financial services is to allocate capital efficiently, not fix the non-existant problem that capitalism can't keep itself going because it continuously drives down wages.
There is definately a big problem with low skilled wages being almost stagnant but it isn't a problem with capitalism it's the simple fact that the the productivity of low skilled workers cannot be raised as easily as a skilled person's. A hoover can only hoover so much while computers double their power every couple of years.
To ISW's comment about consumerism. Money held at the top of society is usually always invested in productive capital. This is what drives production and consumption.
Lay off Marxist economics. It's bollocks.
P.S. If the likes of Calvin finds my opinion predictable, I must be doing something right.
That is, erm, "classic" keynesianism. Not to my liking but if it is for you then you have a lot to look forward to.
Not everyone was shafted. Some remained celibate when the smooth talking, tall dark handsome stranger came calling.
I wasn't disputing that, as I pointed out in previous comment the fact is not that the absolute value of the lowest wage, but the relationship between the lowest and the highest wages.
That's not even the way I formulated the problem; the problem at the moment is not that capital cannot 'keep going' at all (i.e. in the sense that Marx stated, that capital would 'contain the seeds of it's own destruction' - which I don't believe, certainly not in the sense of capitalism inevitably leading to another system) - it is that the gap between the richest and poorest is widening by the day and has been for ages. It is pretty uncontroversial to state that a primary role for all human endeavour is the pursuit of happiness (not the only, but in its many formations certainly one of the most ubiquituous).
Virtually all happiness studies show that the places in which we get the highest indicators of unhappiness are in societies where the greatest inequality occurs; the corrolation is not as strong for stable societies with a low absolute rates of wealth.
Anyway capitalism is not a 'thing' - it is a socio-economic relationship. This 'non-existant problem' is not what I meant, and I believe I have clarified this.
People are not hoovers, is of course the first and most pressing problem with this statement (ethically, if for no other reason). The second is that 'productivity' is a relative term - GDP is not longer linked exclusively to the production of tangible commodities, the finance industry being the most striking example.
Finance investment and banking are of course most fundamentally linked to the idea of supply and demand. But the other obvious thing to mention is that the demand for capital is always the greatest of all, therefore financial services that maximise capital while producing nothing tangible (for example: by packaging up toxic assets into triple A; by offering tax avoidance services such as those leading to the explosive growth of KPMG and PriceWaterHouseCoopers) will always clean up because there is no better product to sell, in a finance driven economy, than capital itself. They produce nothing but creat a ton of surplus on the balance sheet.
The returns for these people are easy to raise because their product is essentially the a priori top one - the level at which this operates however is a tier of society that very few people have access to, and the 'real' value of such work relative to the market returns for it's pursuit are highly dubious.
I'm not disputing your point entirely - I'm not even suggesting that inequality can be totally eradicated; what I am stating unequivocally is that we are currently in an economic system where the excesses of highest relative to lowest are unsustainable, that sectors of the economy are at an a priori advantage simply by virtue of thei location within the realm of finance capital, and also that the value of such work relative to 'real' products and services (those with direct use value) is a big problem.
Yes but production for production sake is not an absolute good, this is plainly ridiculous. Making more stuff, to get more capital, to make more stuff, to get more capital is unsustainable and ludicrous. Further more it directs all energy into greater forms of efficiency towards capital generation, not to serving peoples needs.
This is really getting us nowhere. What the twentieth century taught us, and what (as far as the New Scientist lit review informs me) all studies of complex systems (economic, transport etc.) teach is that an a priori ideal driving a command system of administration (such as the command economy of the Soviet Union) doesn't work, is worse for ecology, and also worse for humanity in terms of the repressive social system that results.
We also know that unfettered production and the pursuit of capital - the magic of the marketplace - will not solve these problems either, and indeed has proved pretty damned disasterous particularly in the least affluent parts of the world. The challenge of this century will be to balance two demands - neither left nor right at this stage in human history has been able to synthesise the prudence and productive insights of free market economics with the equally important ethical and ecological demands of socialism.
What about adults and those children who missed out on the trust fund because they were born too early? Or do they not matter?
And how will they decide whose severely disabled and whose not?
And what about people of working age hit by low interest rates?
You'd end up getting thousands of spurious claims from people who pretend they are disabled, or exaggerate their conditions.
Like the wankers who use disabled blue badges but you see them jogging away from their car, their disability being a simple case of arseholeitis.
We already get that with parents with claim their child has "ADHD" so get loads of money from the government. Meanwhile, they get loads of money because they can't control their child, and blind people can't get any because apparently we were all born like it and should've adapted by now.:rolleyes:
Can I just point out, that not every blue badge holder is the driver, nor is every disabled person a wheelchair user.
Yes, and that's why we have seperate rates of income tax and corporation tax. If you want to invest in the country, you pay the latter. The things that create jobs for society pay less tax. In fact, they pay no tax unless they make a profit. If this is your aim, then you should be calling for cuts in corporation and small business tax, not lower taxes for high earners.
I suggest you look up the criteria for a blue badge.
Read it again. It says it's for other people too.
My point was you often see people misusing them, those who appear perfectly healthy jumping out of a BMW X5 for instance and jogging into a shop.
They sometimes have a knob on their steering wheel to allow them to drive.
What would you suggest for an individual that beliefs whatever one produces is one's to dispose of (or keep) as one sees fit ?
Solipsism and another planet.
Individualism increasingly will not be able to keep pace with the complexity of systems of the modern world, further strengthening the case for interdependence. Ergo, this demand is responded to by having some framework of common institutions to confront common problems.
I'm not rejecting your idea out of hand; there's an important strand in this thinking about freedom and resisting overarching forms of domination, but I don't think that the idea that most people produce things in isolation to the extent that we can opt out of any social responsibility is tenable one.
That sounds like a quote from the Illuminati. I also recall something similar from Mussolini back when he was popular.
There may be individuals who have no desire to keep pace with that runaway train.
People are assessed and taxed individually.
I guess it is fortunate for them that you are not a member of the Law Society who is writing the laws.
I'd say that if their profits are created using a workforce educated by the British education system, and kept healthy by the NHS, and delivered using roads paid for by general taxation, they should be obliged to put some of those profits into those services. I think public wellbeing is higher on the list of moral priorities than people's property.
And what if that individual's workforce consisted of the individual, the individual's partner and their children (their produce !), who are educated by their parents and they all live healthy lifestyles on a piece of ground producing their own food situated in the legal jurisdiction known as the United Kingdom ?
Would you agree that what is produced and earned is theirs to keep or dispose of as they see fit ?
It is in a Government's best interest to make someone a citizen. That is the legal bait and hook.
And whose interests are the governments?
As far as I'm aware, there is no tax on food you produce with your own resources for your own consumption. There is no tax on fixing your own plumbing with pipes that you have made yourself from scratch. The second you try to sell that for money provided by a state-run financial system, you get taxed.
The simplest answers always seem like the most sensible ones lol.
here here
The same as all corporations, I should imagine.