RE: Give 'Em Hell, Bernie
May 5, 2015 at 9:09 pm
(This post was last modified: May 5, 2015 at 9:15 pm by nihilistcat.)
(May 5, 2015 at 8:19 pm)IATIA Wrote:(May 4, 2015 at 8:01 pm)Brian37 Wrote: The rich ARE NOT what keeps the economy going, workers are.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Workers may do the actual work, but workers can be easily replaced. The infrastructure of a thriving economy is a different story. That is not easily replaced.
This is a question of obvious moral significance, and how we answer this question relies almost entirely on our ethical perspective. Workers are only easily replaced if the society they work in views human beings as expendable. This is where economics and morality intersect.
Moreover, it also requires a certain type of economy. Capitalism benefits from surplus labor, because it makes it easier to bargain down the cost of labor. Workers have less leverage, and thus, they're forced to take what they can get. On the other hand, command and control socialism has been an abysmal failure (lacking the ability to efficiently allocate resources and perform adequate economic calculation), and in the US, what passes for social democracy is usually debt financed spending to support our bloated bureaucracy to compensate for the jobs we keep bleeding because of all the horrible trade deals our plutocrats keep force feeding down our throats.
We need something new, and it won't come from democrats or republicans. I suppose regardless of how job creation is done, someone has to do it. However, there's certainly no law of nature that says it must be rich people. It could be communities, we could have public banking (ran at the local level) to finance local projects that put people to work, we could care more about our workers and increase the minimum wage, provide for ways for employees to buy out their employers (rather than allowing these jobs to go overseas), we could have border adjustable taxes for carbon, to compensate for the weak worker protections of many of our trading partners, etc.
Moreover, products need customers. So one could argue that it is indeed the worker who creates jobs, by creating the demand that precedes most investments in productive resources. Sometimes innovators create the demand, but this is a special case (the exception, not the norm).
