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Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Correlation is not causality. It might have got down that low sooner all by itself. Spending money cutting hiking trails and painting murals is nice, but it's not the kind of productivity that hungry people need.

John

That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire unemployed labor cheap. As other mill owners got into the act, they had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not. The laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new technology.

Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes productivity.

John

Actually, I might move to Nevada. I could buy a bit of land somewhere in the boonies, with a shack on it, for maybe $20K.

John

No. Competition did.

John

You could probably even buy commercial real estate there right now for a song, and get the property taxes assessed at that lower value. Your place in S.F. should still fetch a pretty penny because there's enough people who absolutely must live there, for reasons that completely elude me.

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At the time, the mechanisation of agriculture was decreasing the demand for agricultural labourers in the country, so they moved into the cities to find work.

They didn't have to compete; they could agree to divide up the labourers availalble and pay them the same subsistence rate. Cartels and trusts formalised the process by which evil factory owners conspired to rip off their employees, and employers who upset the apple-cart by offering higher pay could sudenely find that they couldn't buy the feed-stock from which their products were constructed. Why do you think that US first introduced anti-trust legislation in 1887?

If the factory owners didn't reduce wages to reflect the new, lower, cost of living ...

Perfectly true. But it doesn't do a thing to ensure that the benefits of increased productivity are equally shared between capital and labour.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Competition does that, and anti-trust laws make companies compete. Unfortunately, no laws make unions compete. So business reacts logically, by leaving the country or going out of business.

But what would you know about productivity?

John

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No, I don't. Tha Canuckistani "VAT" is paid by the buyer. It shows up on the receipt (which I used to turn in at the borDER for a refund).

That's like saying that our income tax system isn't too difficult because computers do the work. Bull.

Here, businesses do pay sales tax on stuff they consume.

That's what I'd do, were I an AZ politician. "Move your business to AZ from CA special - two years, no taxes - offer good while CA boycott in progress".

;-)

Too late.

The point is that that money has already been taxed. It shouldn't matter if it is used to buy a yacht. Taxing it again is wrong (one reason I don't trust Roth IRAs).

As I suggested, eliminate income taxes and go to sales tax. Then things are only taxed once.

John

You're missing the point. Those millions of people who have saved all their lives will be taxed a second time. They've *already* been taxed on that money.

BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing BS > until that happens.

G > Oh GOODY! =A0 More DEBT! =A0 THAT'LL fix em! =A0 LOL!

BS > The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch of BS > Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what BS > happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history to BS > be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again.

JL > There's a good argument that the government JL > interventions in the '30s created a decade-long JL > depression that otherwise would have been a JL > year-or-so stock market bust.

Wasn't that from the GAO, too? I seem to recall that was not reported by a source that was easily dismissed.

JL > The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has JL > entered our mythology.

Bread and circuses....

JL > It's not as though economists understand any of this stuff.

The Keynesian principles were violated OUTRIGHT for decades and I doubt even the economic catastrophe will force us to honor those reasonable directives.

Storing up in times of plenty to shore up the economy in hard times seems like reasonable advice.

There are people who spend like money burns a hole in their pocket. It seems to happen at all economic strata but more crucially, IN CONGRESS.

BS > Right-wing nitwits are less familiar with history, BS > and correspondingly more enthusiastic about BS > repeating their ancestor's mistakes.

JL > History records that we had stock market JL > bubbles and busts for hundreds of years JL > before 1929, and that the first great JL > government intervention in such a bust was JL > followed by the first Great Depression.

BS > Make no mistake. The Greeks are in the BS > process of reforming their economy.

JL > Beginning with a general strike. JL >

JL > Already public servants are getting 10% JL > lower salaries, and their retirement age JL > has been raised from 61 to 65. There's JL > a lot more =A0of that kind of belt-tightening JL > in the pipe-line. JL >

JL > When "public servants" getting a 10% JL > pay cut has serious effects on an JL > economy, you know that you have way JL > too many "public servants."

Growing up in Minnesota I recall that there was a genuine fear of welfare recipients dominating the entire election process.

Reagan's welfare reform may have actually saved the liberals there, though they would probably never acknowledge that.

Sloman seems to be some kind of idealogue, a sort of cartoon of liberal thought.

What other people might easily recognize as indoctrination and propaganda, he blithely considers to be factual scientific education.

Any idealogical challenge is an assault on his religion.

It seems like when liberals live in very liberal places they start believing their own BS and they get into the "crowd mentality" or "riot mentality" where they presume they are superior and they are large and in charge. Sometimes they get so carried away with this they do outrageous things.

It seems to be akin to "risky shift" in juries or "confirmation bias" in scientific endeavors.

Police routinely whack a few heads and it breaks the mental spell.

Consider Sloman's advice and ""proof"" almost as you would advice on US economics from a Russian Stalinist.

Ask him how he likes capitalism! LOL

On May 14, 10:53=A0am, Martin Brown wrote: [...] MB > I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying MB > stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes.

Yes, and states are quite testy about that!

I'm not a smoker but there are some HUGE differences in state tax on cigarrettes, and there is a cottage industry of truckloads of cigs sneaking from low tax states into high tax states.

VAT sounds like it involves an insane amount of paperwork which would increase the cost of production.

I still favor the FLAT INCOME TAX with all of the thousands of exceptions, breaks and subsidies pared down to mere dozens. (handled by separate sheet or filing for each)

No more logarithmic tax tables, just a minimum, a % and get rid of the left handed peanut farmer tax break, IRS can watch the FEW exception forms like hawks.

That isn't how it worked at all. There were enough starving people migrating to the cities that the mill owners could fix the price they were prepared to pay and anyway preferred to employ children at roughly

The poor were viewed as an underclass to be exploited for commercial gain like beasts of burden and kept poor. They lived in squalour and paid barely enough to stay alive. This "transient" situation persisted until the late 19th century which is how Engles came to observe it.

The blockade of cotton during the American War of Independence led to mass starvation in Lancashire as without raw cotton the mills closed. Like all these things the reality was more complex than the simple anti slavery storyline history that is taught in schools. eg.

And there was cotton available but spivs and speculators were holding it in warehouses waiting for the price to rise even more.

No they didn't. The food was deliberately overpriced by way of the Corn Laws (which misleadingly apply to wheat) whereby rich land owners and the merchants in the cities could rip them off. It was paradoxically the more enlightened of the mill owners who fought back against this particularly nasty exploitation of the poor to keep their wage bills low by forming the anti-Corn-Law League in Manchester in about 1840.

About the same time as the banking system crashed spectacularly as a result of a new cunning scheme by merchant wankers. It was indirectly related to the Mississippi banking crisis but effectively crippled global trade. I think in part triggered by a collapse in raliroad mania. There was even a similar letter from the Bank of England reprimanding the bankers for their "irrational exuberance" aka wild speculation. It led to a campaign against the gold standard.

It seems that the global banking system has major crashes with an almost predictable period of 80-90 years - 1847, 1929, 2008

Increased productivity is good, but only when some of the proceeds are shared with the people who are doing the work. In the Victorian era most of the mill owners were out to exploit the poor for maximum profit. They had enough money to buy the capital kit to enter the market and were determined to keep it that way. The eventual rise of a powerful middle class of managers and administrators eventually broke the deadlock but the workers at the bottom of the pile had little option but to form unions if they were ever to get a fair deal.

Ulitimately it came down to the golden rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules.

Regards, Martin Brown

That was not how it looked to the poor sods that had to work the machines.

But it didn't. The mill owners were small enough in number to form a cartel and fix the wages they were prepared to pay. Anyone that broke ranks by being too generous to their workers quickly found that their raw materials supply became erratic. The quaker firms tended to be the least bad employers but they were limited by the others. It would have stayed that way forever if there had not been some counter balance to the enormous power and influence that the ruling classes possessed.

See the history of Manchester link I posted earlier for a fairly balanced account of what it was like in the Lancashire cotton industry that formed the basis of Engels observations.

And it was frequently the exact opposite of competition. Effective monopolies were created when Pilkingtons, Chance & Hartley who were usually amongst the good guys but teamed up to drive other glass makers with a better process to the wall. Hardline monopolistic practices of undercutting and taking turns to make raw materials unavailable to competitors. Once they had established a monopoly prices for finished goods went through the roof and employee wages were driven downwards.

Regards, Martin Brown

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Comptetion was one of the other mechanisms, once anti-trust legislation had forced the greedy, evil and shorted sighted capitalists to compete rather than conspire.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen