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“If they pay us half as much, then the price will go down by half”
This con has been going on for generations, and apparently they still are getting people to believe it. Just a few years ago I had a coworker who said he would not want a higher wage because of the increase in the cost of products.
These people need to be shamed. Believing something like that is fucking embarrassing.
Some people are just really well (irreversibly?) indoctrinated into the imperial capitalist viewpoint. My goal is to find the people who are compatible and leave behind the ones who aren’t.
You'll hate to know this further detail
that this same guy would show up 2 hours early to work, and start working 1 hour early (unpaid), because he had nothing better to do with himself.
Literally. Everyone’s cynicism magically disappears when talking about porky.
“Poor porky’s hypnotized into being greedy because you mistrust him! Who cares he’s richer than ever!? Give porky a raise and he’ll be satisfied and totally choose to make things more expensive on himself!”
The level of indoctrination to believe that “price controls are totalitarian communism” while simultaneously placing the price of labor in a distinct, non-price, category that must be constrained.
Inflation is nothing but a tax on wealth, so long as wages rise accordingly. And they say that somehow taxes on wealth are unconstitutional. Wealth is protected and sacrosanct, but income is not.
What you’ve already “earned” (almost always by virtue of being born rich) is untouchable and sacred but constraining earnings is a matter of public policy.
The degree of indoctrination is just incredible. And this is Politico. MediafactcheckbiasTM ranks them as “center left”.
Labor must lose earning power so that billionaires and bankers are protected. That’s the center left.
Yeah I have a vivid memory of someone saying years ago that if the minimum wage was raised that prices would go up, “But prices are going up anyways” they had no response.
the current minimum wage is almost old enough to vote
Literally them whining the porks will throw a tantrum and go on capital strike in protest of being told to close their maws, they have enough.
And then they whine when labor strikes crash the economy, but the porks collaborating to destroy the economy to get an even better deal for them? “It’s porky’s property and we have to respect that! Besides, I live vicariously through porky!”
Is this trickledown, reversed edition?
I think that especially in this case, it’s just as likely 40 years of being actively invested into the world as it is. This guy was not rich but he owned his own house and car and boat and stuff, and had raised a family stably enough without obstacles or disasters in life.
To accept the proposition of surplus value theft is to come to terms with the idea that someone has taken advantage of you for a very long time. It’s cognitively easier to tell yourself that there’s nothing wrong with what happened before and the world is fine as it is and the people at the top either deserve it or have no meaningful alternative to their ruling position.
“Could help bring down prices”
Ron Howard voiceover: “It did not.”
Now that you can’t afford avocados, just think of all the money you won’t be spending!
Your diet of beans, rice, and vegetable oils is going to be so cheap. Maybe you can even get a tin of tuna from time to time. Share it with the cat.
Shit, fuck, everyone’s eating beans and rice, now the price is going up
We can now only afford beans or rice.
:riceis: (there is no rice emoji)
This is actually how inflation is calculated. Beef becomes more expensive so they swap it with chicken when calculating typical prices.
Politico authors being shot out of a cannon could be good for them, the sudden release of DMT before death could result in a single moment of clarity in their lives.
They do seem to be getting even worse.
Woah, I just read Value, Price, and Profit. I got this one.
In case anyone still gets caught up on the old argument made against the raising of wages or the one more commonly made argument against having a minimum wage: Marx demonstrated that the value of a commodity is determined by labor time, not wages. Instead of raising prices, increases in wages simply cut into the capitalist’s profits. The money that is paid to the worker in the form of a wage and the profits claimed by the capitalist are both derived from the value created by the worker’s labor. So, when one increases, the other must decrease proportionally.
Value, Price and Profit - Marx
People would be right to doubt this framing without experimental evidence of prices best correlating with labor time. However, Paul Cockshott has thankfully done the work for us and demonstrated empirically that there’s no solid foundation to the law of supply and demand explaining prices except for fast fluctuations, and the baseline of prices being determined by labour theory of value.
Seriously, watch Cockshott’s videos on the topic
Link?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Not shocked at all someone writing in the “finance” section of a newspaper has no idea how economics work in practice.
if i were a business owner though, i’d feel less guilty of underpaying my employees after reading this. oh the things they’d tell themselves.
“Could” doing an absolutely incredible amount of unpaid labor in that headline
Citizen Weston is alive and well in the liberal establishment.
Remember, the belief that prices go up as a function of increased wages is not true. Supply and demand have little effect on anything in the long term. We literally just went through a prolonged period of inflation, it did occur after a moderate increase in wages, but it was extremely well established during that period that most of the price increases (about 55%) were driven by corporate profiteering, with the rest driven by actual price increases caused by war profiteering in Ukraine. None of it was due to demand squeezes driven by consumption. When wages went up corporations realized they could raise prices. That’s it, that’s how the system works.
When workers wages go up, they don’t suddenly start buying insane levels of groceries. Like if my family eats a carton of eggs and two gallons of milk per week, having more money doesn’t mean we suddenly consume twice as many eggs and twice as much dairy. There may be slight increases in consumption in these areas if people who couldn’t afford enough nutritional food can suddenly afford enough. But the effect on the economy, if it causes minor temporary shortages, can be adjusted. Only under capitalist “recession” which is an over production of the means of production, does increasing production to meet human need create a problem.
Actually, the more direct cause of differences in wages is not consumer demand but level of unemployment. This is the real risk of increasing production to meet human need. Ultimately, it would require hiring enough workers to meet it! and then as the labor market becomes less competitive for the worker and more competitive for the employer, the new workers need to be paid more. We also recently saw this go into effect after covid. So many people died from covid that it shrunk the unemployed population in the US by 12%-15%. How did the Federal reserve respond? By raising interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money, putting restrictions on new hiring. They literally said that this is why they were doing it, to drive down wages, in order to lower inflation. Stop hiring new workers, hire them for less money. Rather than do something about corporate profiteering.
And why is that? Not because it is good business, but because it maintains power between classes. Its actually good for business when workers make more money. Workers pay down debt, spend more on luxury goods, vacations, home ownership, all these objectively good benchmarks of a healthy economy improve. But employers have less control over the movement and activity of workers. I can easily find another job in my field for the same or better pay. As a class, the workers get more power, and the owners give up power. That’s how capitalism works. What is good on one side is bad on the other.
We must be absolutely certain not just that raising wages does not increase prices, but specifically why this is the case.
You hit the nail in the head multiple times, wonderful comment. Paul Cockshott explains this really well, how Marx correctly explained the lower boundary of salaries based on the reserve army of labour (that consisting of the unemployed, and additionally the agricultural sector in non-industrialized societies), and gives empirical evidence for this, to the point of the great plague rising salaries in Europe for centuries.
Intuitively, it makes sense: consume more stuff = less stuff to consume. But its kinda like comparing the credit and finances of a single household to the credit and finances of an entire nation. Its an insidious little slight of hand, that tricks people up because its legit just really hard to conceive of national industry.
That’s why I like the groceries example, because it’s just as obvious. Connecting wages to unemployment is kinda tricky still, but like we just went through covid-inflation so maybe that helps connect the dots
The “could” in that sentence is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas.
Im over here having an existential crisis about whether to downvote this then i realize the sub. Ahh yes slop indeed.
Even if we take this seriously as an idea, it’s still gibberish. In this theory it doesn’t matter if wages go up or down, because prices go up and down correspondingly. It doesn’t matter if they go up fast or slow, or stay the same. The “sting” remains constant.
“wage stagnation is actually good” - capitalists keeping prices high and building bunkers on private islands.
if a robot didn’t write this, the human who did has brought great dishonor to themselves and their ancestors.
The robot will bring more nuance. This is an unwashed mind.
I remember my dad describing the 1970s as the worst economy of his life. I don’t think he was old enough to work then, but anyway, i did the math and i think the minimum wage then would have been like $13 an hour. And they got like a 10% increase in the minimum a year later.
In ages past they used to print this horse shit on paper so we could at least use it as insulation or to make silly hats.
politico authors not even entertaining the idea that their food passes lots of hands to get to them
Heh, I use the self-checkout, dumbass
the incentive of not smearing fox poop over lettuce is around nill in pre packaging whole foods facility, if one were inclined (by say, reading politico) to do so
