10 ms·

You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.

vkou 10mo ago
We've also seen collective ruin many many times when societies have embraced economic and market concepts. Seen the rust belt anytime lately?
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions. And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
  - overfeed 10mo ago
    > That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions. Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices. > why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work. > If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China This is literally what has already happened. The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
      - repstosb 10mo ago
        >> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? >Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices. Right, because every executive who pursued offshore manufacturing was thinking, "gosh, how can I deliver even lower prices and better value to my customers?", and not "OK, we've shown the market will pay $X for product Y, how can I cut my costs and free up more money for bonuses and cocaine?" Graphs of price indices (aside from a few sectors such as electronics where it was the core technology that improved, not labor efficiency) and wages over the last 50 years clearly show that the bulk of any offshoring savings were not passed along to consumers or front-line workers.
        AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        > Right, because every executive who pursued offshore manufacturing was thinking, "gosh, how can I deliver even lower prices and better value to my customers?", and not "OK, we've shown the market will pay $X for product Y, how can I cut my costs and free up more money for bonuses and cocaine?" Suppose it used to cost you $1 to make something in the US that you had been selling for $1.50. The cost of domestic real estate and other things goes up, so now to make it in the US it costs you $1.60. If you sell for $1.50 you're losing money and to have your previous gross margin percentage you'd have to sell for $2.40. Meanwhile it still costs $1 to make it in China and one of your competitors is doing that and still selling it for $1.50. Your options are a) don't raise prices, lose $0.10/unit and go out of business, b) raise prices, lose all of your sales to the company who still charges the old price and go out of business, or c) offshore manufacturing. The only way out of this is to get the domestic costs back down, which is a matter of changing the government policy over zoning rules etc. > Graphs of price indices (aside from a few sectors such as electronics where it was the core technology that improved, not labor efficiency) and wages over the last 50 years clearly show that the bulk of any offshoring savings were not passed along to consumers or front-line workers. Are these graphs being adjusted for the increasing cost of things like domestic real estate having to be incorporated into the prices of everything? Even if you make it in another country you still have to pay for a domestic warehouse or retail store.
  - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
    Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense. I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense. You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  It's almost as if there is no silver bullet to these problems and we have to better than rely on dogma like "unions always good"
overfeed 10mo ago
Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.
- seneca 10mo ago
  >Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc. What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
  - overfeed 10mo ago
    > What are you talking about? I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations. > Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms. That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management? There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
kristofferg 10mo ago
Unions are part of a healthy market economy. The succesful suppression of unions is a market failure.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure. Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers. A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica. The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers. If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies? > For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it. > They are the libertarian solution. They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
frmersdog 10mo ago
Helped along by a little clandestine sabotage, of course.
FrustratedMonky 10mo ago
Paying employees is part of the market. Why is the counter argument, that we should not pay employees even a thing these days? Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth. Could it be because literally lives are cheap.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.
piva00 10mo ago
How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal. It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
ozlikethewizard 10mo ago
Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.
lucyjojo 10mo ago
this is actually pretty rare. most case of ruin come from hostile warfare and/or interventions/state terrorism.
DANmode 10mo ago
Wait, which are those again?

vkou 10mo ago

We've also seen collective ruin many many times when societies have embraced economic and market concepts. Seen the rust belt anytime lately?

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions. And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
- overfeed 10mo ago
  > That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions. Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices. > why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work. > If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China This is literally what has already happened. The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
    - repstosb 10mo ago
      >> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? >Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices. Right, because every executive who pursued offshore manufacturing was thinking, "gosh, how can I deliver even lower prices and better value to my customers?", and not "OK, we've shown the market will pay $X for product Y, how can I cut my costs and free up more money for bonuses and cocaine?" Graphs of price indices (aside from a few sectors such as electronics where it was the core technology that improved, not labor efficiency) and wages over the last 50 years clearly show that the bulk of any offshoring savings were not passed along to consumers or front-line workers.
      - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        > Right, because every executive who pursued offshore manufacturing was thinking, "gosh, how can I deliver even lower prices and better value to my customers?", and not "OK, we've shown the market will pay $X for product Y, how can I cut my costs and free up more money for bonuses and cocaine?" Suppose it used to cost you $1 to make something in the US that you had been selling for $1.50. The cost of domestic real estate and other things goes up, so now to make it in the US it costs you $1.60. If you sell for $1.50 you're losing money and to have your previous gross margin percentage you'd have to sell for $2.40. Meanwhile it still costs $1 to make it in China and one of your competitors is doing that and still selling it for $1.50. Your options are a) don't raise prices, lose $0.10/unit and go out of business, b) raise prices, lose all of your sales to the company who still charges the old price and go out of business, or c) offshore manufacturing. The only way out of this is to get the domestic costs back down, which is a matter of changing the government policy over zoning rules etc. > Graphs of price indices (aside from a few sectors such as electronics where it was the core technology that improved, not labor efficiency) and wages over the last 50 years clearly show that the bulk of any offshoring savings were not passed along to consumers or front-line workers. Are these graphs being adjusted for the increasing cost of things like domestic real estate having to be incorporated into the prices of everything? Even if you make it in another country you still have to pay for a domestic warehouse or retail store.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense. I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense. You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
appreciatorBus 10mo ago
It's almost as if there is no silver bullet to these problems and we have to better than rely on dogma like "unions always good"

overfeed 10mo ago

Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.

seneca 10mo ago
>Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc. What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
- overfeed 10mo ago
  > What are you talking about? I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations. > Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms. That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
- autoexec 10mo ago
  The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management? There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.

kristofferg 10mo ago

Unions are part of a healthy market economy. The succesful suppression of unions is a market failure.

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure. Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers. A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica. The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers. If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies? > For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it. > They are the libertarian solution. They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.

frmersdog 10mo ago

Helped along by a little clandestine sabotage, of course.

FrustratedMonky 10mo ago

Paying employees is part of the market. Why is the counter argument, that we should not pay employees even a thing these days? Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth. Could it be because literally lives are cheap.

_DeadFred_ 10mo ago

Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.

piva00 10mo ago

How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal. It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.

ozlikethewizard 10mo ago

Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.

lucyjojo 10mo ago

this is actually pretty rare. most case of ruin come from hostile warfare and/or interventions/state terrorism.

DANmode 10mo ago

Wait, which are those again?