Re: Another example of a money hungry Steve Jobs

On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 04:00:53 -0400, ZnU wrote:

In article <pan.2006.07.04.04.51.00.953391@xxxxxxxx>,
TheLetterK <non@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 20:59:15 -0400, ZnU wrote:

In article <pan.2006.07.04.00.07.43.733921@xxxxxxxx>,
TheLetterK <non@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 19:54:26 -0400, ZnU wrote:

In article <pan.2006.07.03.22.43.17.762329@xxxxxxxx>,
TheLetterK <non@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

It turns out, actually, that some wealth redistribution is probably
*necessary* to the continued functioning of a capitalist economy.
Otherwise, wealth increasingly concentrates at the top, and the
market
becomes less and less efficient before finally giving way to simple
oligopoly.

It remains highly efficient even with most of the wealth at the top, as
demonstrated by US industrial output during the height of the guilded
age.
There were robber barons, yes--but 'the market' still functioned very
well. Certainly better than heavily regulated markets do.

By what metric are you saying the market functioned well?

Industrial output, in that context.

I'm not sure how you can really determine that industrial output was as
high as it would have been with more regulation.

The drop in output after heavy regulation was instituted?

It's not that I don't believe you, but... can you point to where that
happened?

http://home.acedsl.com/~znu/real_gdp.png

How did you calculate those figures? It's also difficult to make direct
comparisons between the two, since there were greater technical
limitations back in, say, 1880. You have to compare relatively immediate
results (within 5 years of the introduction of a set of regulations, or
something like that).


Comparison to other heavily regulated economies (say, the Soviet
Union)?

The goal is the *right amount* of regulation; over-regulation is as
much an enemy of that goal as under-regulation.

Under regulation has never harmed production, since companies will
generally try to operate in the most efficient manner feasible (which is
by no means perfect, or anywhere near it. It's simply much better than the
government can manage).


Examination of the results of deregulation efforts?

A very mixed bag.

How so? It seems to improve the quality of goods while decreasing cost,
when applied in a sane manner.


The whole criticism of 'wealth redistribution' in general is based on
an
unfounded assumption anyway... namely, that a completely unregulated
market will always allocate resources more fairly and more
efficiently
than any other system.

It's not a fair system, but it *is* more efficient--provided that the
consumers are not absolutely mindless.

More efficient than what?

Socialism or a heavily regulated capitalist system.

Define 'heavily regulated'.

US-style capitalism. Where the regulation book(s) are larger than a
three-fold pamphlet.

Hmm. I'm not sure the size of the books is the interesting issue. What
matters is what's in them. I could probably fit something close to my
ideal market regulations in a tri-fold... they just wouldn't look much
like yours.

I think people on both the left and the right can agree that all else
aside, overly complex regulations lead to inefficiency. Unfortunately,
neither of the parties that actually gets elected to the government
seems to want to do anything about it.

Having people miss work because they can't afford health care isn't
efficient.

Which is a reason why employers might offer health care benefits.

Thing is, though, this doesn't necessarily hurt individual employers;
they can just fire people who miss work.

It does hurt overall economic output. This is an example of an issue
I've mentioned before. Market-based systems have no way of solving
certain types of problems, because there's no way to structure solutions
such that investors (rather than other individuals, or society at large)
benefit.

It's never been an issue in practice, because people are generally
willing to do what is required to put food on the table. If they get
fired from one job, they'll find another or starve on the streets.

Great. So they keep working despite poor health, until can't work
anymore... at which point society's entire investment in the individual
is lost.

Not really--for your initial investment, you've gotten their contributions
to society. In some cases (completely unskilled labor), it makes no
economic sense to provide health care (society hasn't made much of an
investment in this person), but in other cases (pretty much any
professional sport, for example) it is essential to getting a good return.
It should be up to the the parties involved to determine if health care
should be provided. If your employer doesn't provide health benefits (I'm
assuming that you consider this some sort of necessity) then *don't work
for them*. It's really quite simple.


As for incentive--as you mention, training costs can be substantial,
depending on the work. In many industries, it's cheaper to pay for
health insurance for employees than it is to continually keep
retraining them.

Yet many employers *don't* provide health care.

And it's up to them and their employees to determine if that is
acceptable. It's *not* up to you, me, or anyone else to say that it is
inappropriate. If you're willing to work for a company that doesn't
provide health care, then that should be your right. I should not,
however, be forced to cover the cost of your decision.


[snip]

It could take a couple of years to train employees for more complex
tasks, and then they might decide to quit....

You make them sign agreements for a certain amount of time, in
exchange for the training. "For for us for 8 years, and we'll put you
through school", or something like it. If they breech the contract,
take them to court over it.

This reduces the flexibility of the labor force, of course.

The labor force is generally pretty inflexible anyway.


Anyway, education, particularly at the college level, is not solely (or
even mostly) about teaching people how to perform specific jobs. There
are fairly significant reasons why it's in the best interests of a
democratic society to have many individuals with well-rounded educations.

Those people will be able to move through anyway. Besides, many specific
jobs require a well rounded education to perform adequately. The way we
educate people wouldn't change substantially--just the manner in which it
is paid for, and what people will do after they graduate.


Hell, even the military sees the value in that sort of thing.

*Especially* given the poor quality of public education systems.

Other countries don't have poor quality public education systems. I
wonder if there could be some kind of connection there.

Public education systems, even in countries that have high scores on
various standardized tests, are almost always of poor quality. Most
simply don't test the less capable students in order to promote the
myth of the successful public education system (and if you think
public administrators *don't* try to do this, then I have some swamp
land to sell you).

First off, I'd really like to see some data here. Secondly, what are you
comparing public education systems to? Private schools have the freedom
to pick and choose their students, which makes it fairly ludicrous to
compare them directly.

There's no such thing as a fully private education system, so it's
impossible to directly compare. Where private schools and public schools
coexist, the private schools are forced to maintain a markedly higher
level of quality to be able to compete with the (nearly) 'free' public
schools.


Having people make huge amounts of money by merely manipulating
money isn't very efficient.

It seems to work just fine. Part of 'manipulating money', is putting
that money to work in the places where it yields the most return.
Putting resources where they will do the most good.

Sometimes, and that's a valuable skill... but the question is whether
it's as valuable as the market has determined it is.

Something is always as valuable as the market deems it to be. Even if that
means paying ten million dollars to have someone play football, or
something equally as unproductive.

Try to defend the idea that the market always determines the right value
of something without making a circular argument. I've never seen it done.

Value in a market-based economy is determined by the market itself. It may
seem circular, but that's how it works.


If the last century has demonstrated anything, it is, in
fact, that *well regulated* markets are vastly superior to
either unregulated markets or command economies.

That's certainly not true. The only unregulated markets today
are black markets (see; illegal drug trade) and the occasional
impoverished third world nation. It's a grossly unfair
comparison.

Whether it's an unfair comparison depends on whether which way
you think the cause/effect relationship runs....

The great depression scared people away from full
deregulation--especially when it was combined with growing
discontent among the population at the 'unfair' practices of the
big corporations at the time.

When a society has a lot of money to waste, people seem to think
socialism/heavy regulation is a great idea. When the going gets
tough, however, opinion usually shifts back towards deregulation.

Um... What? New Deal? Hello?

Yes, that was *directly* after a perceived failure of the free
market. I didn't say it was a concrete rule, but it's *generally*
what happens when there is an economic downturn. Besides, the New
Deal programs didn't work. At all.

Some of them worked, some of them didn't.

None of them accomplished what they were supposed to, and they weren't
pulling the US out of the depression. The only reason we got out when we
did was World War II.

Some of the ones that worked are still around today.

It's nearly impossible to kill off a government agency. They usually just
fall under the jurisdiction of another, larger, agency and become
insignificant. The continued existence of a government agency does not
mean it actually performs a useful function.

Some were canceled before we really found out.
And then WWII came along, making it very tricky to figure out which
effects had which causes.

The actual pattern is the very opposite of what you describe. The
laissez faire attitude gets popular when everyone is making lots of
money, and reverses when things go downhill.

Can you demonstrate that? Seems to me that the US went very far
towards socialism in the prosperous post-WWII years. Especially in
the 1960's. When the market went into a downturn in the late 70's, it
prompted a return to the ideas of laissez-faire capitalism (Reagan
and his promotion of the idea of trickle-down economics). That went
on for awhile, until the big market upswing in the 90's, and the
trend towards deregulation reversed. That is, until the market went
into another downswing in the early '00's and deregulation became
popular again (of course, the actions of Enron and the like haven't
helped promote deregulation).

Well, the whole fact that people vote based on things other than just
the economy makes it complicated.

But you could certainly see Bush's victory in 2000 as a turn toward the
right, when things were good. (It's hard to recall now, but one of the
big issues in that campaign was how to spend the surplus....)

The market started to go into a recession during the tail end of Clinton's
presidency. Also note that a surplus does not indicate a prosperous
economy--it means the American taxpayers payed too much.


China is a prime example of this. Look at the profound effect that
even a small bit of privatization had on the growth of China's
economy.

The fact that moving from a command economy to a partially market-based
economy results in improvement is really an irrelevant point. I'm not
advocating command economies

That's what regulation is. Even if it is as mild as what we have in the
US. Any form of regulation is a command economy, even if the command is
'do as you please, save for these things'.

This seems like a fairly nutty way to use the term. It's basically the
mirror image equivalent of claiming the Soviet Union had a market
economy because not *everything* was centrally planned and sometimes
supply and demand had an impact.

They did have a market-economy--the black market, which was flourishing
due to insufficient production and distribution of resources by the
government.


, I'm advocating markets with a certain level of regulation.
Assuming there's an ideal level of regulation for a market, you can
obviously damage the system by having either less *or* more.

And I'm advocating markets with *no* regulation whatsoever. Let the
consumers decide what they're willing to put up with.

Except, history has repeatedly shown, it doesn't really work that way.
In the market, goods become divorced from their origins. Consumers buy
based on how much they value the product vs. what they have to pay for
it... and what they have to pay for it doesn't include costs which
producers can externalize, such as environmental damage or human
suffering.

You might be able to make an argument for environmental damage as a
legitimate economic concern, but how would you justify 'human suffering'?
It was that person's choice to work the job they do, unless you're
claiming that companies forced workers onto the line. Did Ford go out and
kidnap people from their beds then set them to work in the assembly lines?


In other words, the market price of a product does not always reflect
the actual cost to society to produce that product. This results in
inefficiency.

Only if you consider such abstract notions as 'human suffering' to be a
valid cost to society. How would you measure the worth of society anyway?
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Another example of a money hungry Steve Jobs
    ... *necessary* to the continued functioning of a capitalist economy. ... yes--but 'the market' still functioned very ... The drop in output after heavy regulation was instituted? ... Other countries don't have poor quality public education systems. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: Another example of a money hungry Steve Jobs
    ... *necessary* to the continued functioning of a capitalist economy. ... Otherwise, wealth increasingly concentrates at the top, and the market ... The drop in output after heavy regulation was instituted? ... Considering the state of the US public education system, ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: Another example of a money hungry Steve Jobs
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    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
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    ... *necessary* to the continued functioning of a capitalist economy. ... yes--but 'the market' still functioned very ... The drop in output after heavy regulation was instituted? ... Considering the state of the US public education system, ...
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