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When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns — the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages — consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.
The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.
Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of the major parties campaigns on it. At most, they’ll refer to it obliquely, as when nativists call for reduced immigration — sometimes they argue that new arrivals take away jobs from the native-born.
Many of the other things that keep people up at night are partly or fully grounded in economic insecurity. Crime and violence are more pervasive in poor neighborhoods; courts are better-staffed and more efficient in wealthy areas. Patients worry about being able to afford to see a doctor and pay for medications at least as much as they do about the quality of health care. Racial tensions dissipate in places and periods of prosperity.
The failure of bourgeois electoral democracy to address the nation’s biggest political issue, economic insecurity, is tailor-made for the agenda of the Left, which historically has been grounded in Marxist class analysis.
Naturally, the ultimate goal of Leftists is the overthrow of capitalism, which centers inequality and monopoly as inevitable at best and laudable at worst, with a socialism that provides equal access to the basic necessities of life and equal opportunity to achieve more. But revolution is not like a cake; there is no recipe to follow. All the conditions must be ripe and, frustratingly to the revolutionist, the determination that those conditions exist can only be affirmed after the fact of success.
One predicate for revolution is a well-organized grassroots movement. There are few better ways to build such a structure than to consistently and relentlessly agitate for improvement in people’s economic living conditions — which are, after all, their biggest problem — in elections, street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, sabotage and other militant actions centered around a Left program that demands improvements in wages, benefits and government safety-net programs.
Never has the public been more predisposed to the argument that government ought to intercede on behalf of those who are having trouble making ends meet, or fear that unemployment might put them into such a position. People’s buying power has been ravaged by inflation, corporations are again turning the screws after a brief period of liberalization driven by the post-pandemic labor shortage, and it has been 60 years since a major party proposed a federal anti-poverty program (Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society).
Some bourgeois political analysts, particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, identify the vacuum in the dialogue space of economic injustice. But neither party can meaningfully address issues like poverty and homelessness for one simple reason: They are capitalist parties. Whatever room existed for the reformist impulse vanished after the postwar period yielded to the beginning of America’s late-capitalist decline. Admitting that capitalism leaves millions behind is unthinkable, let alone developing legislative attempts to fix the problem.
We, the Left, have the signature issue of economic justice all to ourselves, provided that we do not obsess over identity politics to the exclusion of class divisions.
Wages come first.
A day’s work should pay enough to pay for rent, a car and other necessities. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1970, it would currently be $30 an hour. The average worker is twice as productive as 1970, so make that $60. For a full-time worker, that’s $120,000 a year. But 1970 wasn’t a perfect time for workers. We deserve and demand better. The Left should think of $60 an hour as the bare minimum necessary to live decently in the United States, and push for more for skilled labor.
Think that’s unrealistic? If so, you’ve been corrupted by capitalistic propaganda that devalues labor. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are still struggling to raise the federal minimum from $7.25 to $15.00 — that’s what passes for progressive! What a joke! The bosses themselves consider $60 an hour to be the real minimum wage to subsist in the world we live in today; in New York, where I live, you can’t qualify for a rental apartment unless your annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent. You need $120,000 to be considered for a $3,000-per-month apartment; good luck finding anything for less than that. It’s not that landlords want to discriminate against working-class tenants. They’ve learned from experience that people who earn less than $120,000 are far likelier to fall behind on the rent until they have to be evicted, costing building owners and managers money.
Be reasonable. Demand the impossible: $60-an-hour minimum wage.
Next: The Left’s program for economic security.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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Um, no. A real minimum wage is no minimal wage at all.
You forgot, why there is no money, were the money went. In the 1950ies a Californian blue collar worker earned enough to pay house, car, school, etc.
Half a century of Leftist policies! The US have become a Leftist European style state with huge expenses like
bloated government,
inefficient expensive welfare, especially for the non productive people
red tape for senseless green dreams
DIE, mandatory hiring of useless “workers”
costs of ghetto lottery
costs of crime, losses, prisons, courts,
Ted Rall says a lot of idiotic things. This article is another example.
Brandon and his clown circus , three years of democrat liberal buffoonery, homeless tent cities, a massive drug problem, no universal healthcare, no living wage. open borders and ten million illegal invaders, not even an attempt at making live bearable for the American peons.
Just war and decline.
Seriously limiting low-skill and no-skill immigration would have very much the same effect as an increase in the minimum wage, only without all of the pernicious knock-on effects which inevitably attend ham-fisted government interference in the free market.
It’s been at $7.25 for over 20 years. Few Americans will work for that wage so we have a “labor shortage” solved by allowing millions of foreigners to cross over. When the Dems “tried” to increase it to $15 an hour, they failed despite have a majority in both houses. Several Republicans said they would support $10 an hour, but the Dems ignored them because they wanted a “labor shortage”.
Call our immigration service to hear a recording for all “asylum” seekers on how to apply for a work permit. 1-800-375-5283 This will include a social security card that allows government benefit payments and ease of living. This why Wal-Mart recently announced a reduction of wages and higher profits. These millions will also be told indirectly to vote for Biden, or they might get deported. It is illegal, but no ID is required and no questions asked so is never prosecuted.
You think Rall is kidding? How about starting at $50/hr?
Unfortunately for the lower tiers on the economic pyramid, it doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is. It could be $100/hr or $150/hr but PRICES for everything and anything would still be higher than whatever the minimum wage earners were getting. At $50/hr, apartments will be $6k monthly instead of $3k. A haircut would be $100 instead of $30, etc.
And removing most forms of aid including food stamps, apartment subsidies, Welfare and so on. Force people to accept available jobs by removing the free aid they get and we would have a much more realistic economy.
P.S. Same thing in Gaza and the West Bank, where UNRWA has been passing out free aid for 75 years. Gaza was filled with freeloaders who were born into and lived off of the free aid, not having to work a day in their lives. When you incentivize something, you get more it, which in Gaza’s case was lazy, freeloading citizens.
Calling the doc’s office, and right away, to the receptionist, I am the enemy. What did I do? Then given the appointment for a month away or maybe 3 months away.
The minimum wage is always $0.00/hr as many are about to realize. For example, the UAW negotiated a deal via their usual extortion tactics and for a time the auto makers gave in to try to remain in business. Soon, plants will close in the US and pop up in Mexico or elsewhere because the UAW deal isn’t long term viable. Stellantis is rapidly failing in China, the world’s largest car market, and Ford and GM aren’t far behind. Expect these US corporations that were making more money in China than the US to soon report their woes.
The US produces too many people with little to no skill set any employer wants. This is part of the long term plan for the deep state that actually runs the country because they know a huge part of the stupid population will become their employees in the military, police, and other gov’t jobs that are essentially welfare. These people have no choice but to follow immoral orders precisely because they are stupid. The military needs bodies to throw into its wars of choice and morons that will follow orders to make the public fearful every time they see a blue costume and lights in their rear view mirror. It’s a conditioning mechanism, a psychological control mechanism.
Once you realize that the US is and has been a soft military dictatorship since at least when JFK got whacked then things become more clear. The deep state runs elections as part of their media operations to put the best actors into positions so the soap opera can continue year to year.
Don’t worry about minimum wage when the US Dollar is headed for the toilet as dedollarization intensifies. The US Fed Gov is spending like there’s no tomorrow because there is no tomorrow for the US Fed Gov in the long run. They know it and are acting accordingly to strip mine what’s left of the US before the Big Bang.
The reason the US population is failing financially is because the Fed Gov steals too much money for its wars and other clandestine operations so that everything in the US is expensive compared with the rest of the world. People only know prices are rising and have been for decades, but most don’t know why. It’s the currency (not money) printing to fund illicit projects that benefit the masters at the expense of the slaves. Simple really.
The minimum wage will get to $60.
But gas will be $75 a gallon, a big mac $50, a starter home $2,000,000 . . .
See “hyperinflation” for more details. South America has good modern examples we can prepare ourselves to be living like in the future.
This is a classic description of the idiocy which says that laws must be passed and policies must be implemented to correct or overcome the disastrous consequences of previous laws and policies.
Government edicts produced the current state of affairs. Why should we expect anything to be better if more are imposed?
BTW, if minimum wage arguments had any foothold in reality, then no one should be deprived of the goal of attaining wealth. Why stop at $15/hr. or $60/hr.? Why not eliminate poverty everywhere by guaranteeing that everyone receive $75/hr. or $5 million/hr.?
Where does the lunacy end?
A better solution is to eliminate the minimum wage entirely and enact a maximum wage. For salaried workers (including CEOs etc.) normalize the work year at 2000 hours. Then pass a rule that the highest paid employee or contractor of any business may earn no more than 23 times what the lowest paid employee earns on an hourly basis. To make that easy to calculate, ban all non cash benefits and stock grants or stock options, and require all compensation be cash only.
That would fix the problem of wages.
If you want to pay your CEO $23 million dollars, you need to pay your lowest compensated worker $500 per hour. If you want to pay your lowest compensated worker $7.25 an hour, your CEO gets $166 an hour or so, or $333,000 a year in pay.
What about business owners? Require business owners to pay themselves a salary for their actual labor associated with the business.
What about “business profit?” It should be subject to strict capital rules–subject to government control either reinvested in the business, or taxed at a rate of 100% if not reinvested in the business.
Right? Corral people into an open-air prison, deprive them of food and water, then complain about how skinny they are.
What does any of that have to do with what I posted?
The Swiss had a federal constitutional referendum in 2013 on this very issue, titled “1∶12 — For fair wages” [my English translation]. The authors of this proposed amendment put the maximum annual salary at a company at 12 times the company’s lowest annual salary, where salaries included the monetary value of all non-cash benefits; the wages of part-time workers, temporary workers, trainees, interns, etc. at a company would be decided by national legislation rather than by the amendment. On a turnout of 53.63%, Swiss voters rejected this proposed amendment by 65.3% to 34.7%.
Is there a particular reason for your choice of a maximum wage of 23 times the minimum wage?
In jurisdictions without binding referenda, which political parties would support your “1∶23” proposal for as long as it would take to become law?
If it became law, what would stop companies that didn’t like the maximum wage from relocating to jurisdictions without one?
Yep. Zero is the minimum. Can’t argue with that.
And “minimum wage” used to be what you paid teenagers to work.
It wasn’t meant for adults.
Now, if they want to have TWO minimum wages… one for, say up to 20 years old, and the other for older people, no problem.
$60 minimum wage, great idea Ted.
That way the gangsters in DC can step in and deliver the coup de grace to small businesses all across the country and we can finally cement total rule by Amazon and Walmart.
With so few options to participate in commerce, they’ll have a much easier time locking dissenters out of the economy.
One thing about Ted, you can always count on him for brilliant ideas that will definitely improve all of our lives.
Why are you hamfisting Gaza into an article about American minimum wage you stupid moronic shill.
I’m making a comparison doofus.
Nothing can be expected that way.
When Social Security raises the withdrawal by 3%, traders and speculators raise prices by 20%. In other words, all this is part of a complicity between the authorities and businessmen.
And at a global level it is even worse with the Free Lunch that increases and increases exploitation and then millions must be spent to repress the people, to bribe governments and international organizations or send thugs to impose white law.
Certainly, the economic planners have to start thinking about bringing down the cost of production, and that starts with energy. There are hidden technologies that could significantly cut the cost of energy and production for practically all of our industries and businesses, as well as the living costs of average Americans. These hidden technologies need to be considered and the numbers crunched.
Secondly, the Federal government should bring about a two-tier minimum wage based on age, to allow for young workers finding their first employment in small local businesses (small businesses that need to keep their labor costs down), as well as for older workers who need to work these types of jobs for their daily living. Something like $9-10/hr for young persons and $13-14/hr for people over the age of 25. Perhaps this two-tier minimum wage could be further improved by making different 2-tiered minimum wage scales for different regions of the country (not too many, 6-7?).
Thirdly, a proposal by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, should be seriously looked at. It’s an investment account created for every American called the American Equity Fund that gives back to citizens, funded by large corporations and “capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately owned lands, payable in dollars. All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution in dollars and company shares into their accounts, people entrusted to use the money however they wanted.” I don’t know if the 2.5% numbers proposed are the best, but the idea is certainly worthy.
Fourth, the idea of a maximum salary for the executive leadership (as well as a maximum number of shares of company stock for them), implemented for mega corporations, or companies with more than a certain large number of employees, seems like a reasonable one. The money and stock saved could be ploughed back into other useful economic activities by the company.
Finally, jaded people should get over their prejudice against the National Socialist system of Germany during the time of Adolph Hitler, and examine its economic and political policies to determine why they were so successful in competition with the other countries of Europe. Time to put away self-defeating biases.
Exactly. That is why the only solution is a totalitarian state. I’d like to see what would happen to someone who raised prices under a strong totalitarian rule.
This is the quintessence of halfassed shitlib meliorism, a grab bag of picayune programs with no coherent framework – when the framework is a legal requisite for any sovereign state.
If Rall was going to bid on a DoD acquisition, he would refuse to read the FAR or the MILSPECs and write a 400,000 page proposal that begins by reinventing the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever, the screw, and the pulley, and duct tape it all together at random. And because he’s so in tune with his shit-for-brains regime, he would win the full and open competition.
The only “natural” solutions to useless eater overproduction crisis are war,
famine and pestilence (though the Black Death party will never be very popular).
Raising the minimum wage only means the Jew can and will command more
for rent – Marx already realized that (contrary to popular belief if you cannot
afford to live in Marbella there is no “right” to do so – the rich pay a premium
not to have to endure the presence of people like you. Marx also couldn´t
understand why American wages were four times higher than European ones –
the simple truth is that the American worker, if miserable enough, could always
opt for eating bio, wearing expensive fur and knocking up Injun princesses).
The late great philosopher-poet Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi had it right:
It is about the monopolization of the necessities of life …
– food = land
– shelter = housing
– speech = guns
If any of these does not belong to the people it does not matter what you call
your system; the most applicable to non-bedouin societies seems to me the
National Socialist land reform (“Reichserbhofgesetz“), a kind of socialized private
property guaranteed by the state for as long as you do not make undesirable use of it.
The current system is designed to minimize real wages, no matter how you tweak it.
This seems a rather accurate description of both the regime and the remedure
(not to say the average “economist” is much better).
Which economic planners and which hidden technologies are you referring to?
I’d guess that your second suggestion of a tiered minimum wage would have the greatest likelihood of being implemented, but I don’t know how likely that would be to happen.
For your third suggestion, taxing companies and landowners for general redistribution, I’d guess that owners of small farms would be hit hardest by a tax of 2.5% on the value of their land; farming on small plots is rarely a lucrative career.
Your fourth suggestion is similar to Harry Huntington’s (and to the defeated Swiss constitutional amendment).
On your last point, one could look at the Öffa bills from the time of Brüning’s second cabinet (after his withdrawal of the Reichsmark from the gold standard); Öffa bills were the model for Hjalmar Schacht’s Mefo bills. Both were rediscounted promissory notes that were used to stimulate the German economy by financing public works projects (and in the case of the Mefo bills, by also financing rearmament) through indirect inflation of the German money supply. Matured Mefo bills could be exchanged for Reichsmarks on demand, but their maturation period, initially 90 days, was subject to indefinite 90-day extensions. Many years ago I’d read a two-volume book on the economies of multiple countries in the 1930s that claimed that Germany had to attack Poland when it did to avoid a collapse of the Mefo bill system; I don’t remember the book’s title, but I’d still recognize the graphic design of its cover.
On your third and fourth policy suggestions, I’ll ask you similar questions about them that I’d asked of Harry Huntington:
In jurisdictions without binding referenda, which political parties would support these policies for as long as it would take for them to become law?
If they became law, what would stop companies that didn’t like those policies from relocating to jurisdictions without them? (Landowners wouldn’t have that option with their land, of course.)
Make that $120-an-hour for immigrants. Better yet, $220. And, if you hirea foreigner, you have to ensure not just him, but every relative, here and at home, within the degrees of relation the Vatican disallows for marriage. After all, that’s “family”.
Did you know the League of Women Voters refused to endorse a minimum wage law unless it applied to both sexes? The earliest applied only to women. But the unions who backed that law knew exactly what they were doing– and would have applied it to black men as well, were it not for the Fourteenth Amendment.
Imagine if blacks had double the minimum wage of whites. States with such a law would indeed be “places and periods of prosperity” and see “racial tensions dissipate”!
Over-reliance on minimum wage is a reflection of the abandonment of Keynesianism. Keynes viewed job-creation programs as an important tool. Job-creation is always in some tension with minimum wage policies. If effective job-creation programs result in a rising demand for labor, then this may increase wages. But if one simply raises the minimum wage by fiat without taking anything else into account, then this may kill the jobs. It’s a bad policy to emphasize minimum wages without any program of job-creation.
Who is this “we” in “We need a minimum wage? Does he mean “I need a minimum wage” because journalism jobs are disappearing fast? Or, is he still trying to keep that communist dream alive of a Borg-like leftist collective of useless parasites? Does “we” mean a nation torn apart into a Civil War by the leftist intolerance and cancel culture that cancels those of us on the right, under any pretense? Perhaps he can enlighten us by explaining who this “we” is.
Ted, I don’t know if you read and reply to the comments to your articles here, but I’ll ask you a couple of questions in case you do:
To my knowledge, the federal minimum wage that had the greatest purchasing power was the one that began on February 1, 1968, at $1.60/hour. (There were two different federal minimum wages at that time; the jobs that were covered by the 1966 amendments to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act had a minimum wage then of $1.15/hour.) Using the CPI-U (Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers, without seasonal adjustments) as a measure of inflation, the CPI-U for February 1968 was 34.20, and the CPI-U for December 2023 was 306.75. The result of $1.60/hour × 306.75 ÷ 34.20 = $14.35/hour, which would be the equivalent of the February 1968 minimum wage in December 2023 dollars per hour. Which measure of inflation did you use to derive your $30/hour minimum wage equivalent to that of 1970, which was also $1.60/hour?
Additionally, not all labor productivity comes directly from workers. The Office of Productivity and Technology within the Bureau of Labor Statistics divides the contributions to labor productivity into six categories: labor composition, capital intensity, information processing equipment (IPE) intensity, research and development (R&D) intensity, intellectual property products (IPP) excluding R&D intensity, and capital input excluding IPP and IPE intensity. Are you treating all six of these categories as being worker contributions, so that the minimum wage should be raised by the same ratio as the entire productivity gain?
Decent living wages or half the population on life long welfare. Take your pick.
I favor limiting high skilled or allegedly high skilled immigration. I’ve got about 60 tenants White men engineering and computer graduates working at bar tender consulting real estate sales this and that whatever they can find. They’re not recent grads either. Many middle aged Living in a high rent city paying off student loans for a worthless degree.
Meanwhile every accounting engineer computer medical highly skilled job is given to some affirmative action foreigner. Often a foreigner with a dubious degree and incompetent.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and the value of labor is determined by the employer. This whole conversation is completely devoid of that truism.
The value of a person’s labor is set by those who hire that person. This is no different than stating that the cost of any good, regardless as to its nature, is set by the consumer who pays what he thinks it is worth–and not a cent more. People pay what they want to and when the price is set too high, they do not buy. An hour’s labor is exactly the same. When the price of labor is set too high, employers do not hire.
Workers will be hired and paid for the value seen in them until the day when the costs exceed the return and, at that point, the workers will be let go. It does not matter what someone else thinks labor is worth, it only matters what the employer is willing to pay for. Every person has a labor value, but not every person’s labor is worth what do-gooders or the government dictates. Some may be worth only a small fraction of what is deemed an “acceptable” wage and, as a consequence, find themselves unemployed. Whenever it is illegal to pay less than the minimum wage, there will ALWAYS be those who are out of work BECAUSE they are not worth what is ordered.
Ted Rall writes:
Surely Teddy boy isn’t referring to that Socialist shit-hole (otherwise known as the USSA)?
The U.S was indeed a Capitalist country once upon a time (in the 130 or so years leading up from the founding of the republic up until the creation of the ZOG owned Federal Reserve in 1913), and incomes were much more equitably distributed during that period.
In the interim, starting with ZOG sock puppet FDR’s disastrous New Deal, and exacerbated by America’s first Jewish POTUS (LBJ), and his asinine Guns and Butter programme then his ‘War on Poverty’, the income inequality became worse and poverty was exacerbated, as Big Bloated Government got even bigger.
Meanwhile, the following is an excerpt from a Tom Woods newsletter, which explains why the setting of minimim wages ALWAYS causes more impoverishment for those with the fewest skills and thus the poorest subset of the community:
SUMMARY: If a particular worker can only offer, for example, $12 per hour of productivity because he’s straight out of high school and has a non existent skill set, you can’t expect an emploter to hire him if a $15/hour minimum wage is decreed.
Said worker will just get a pink skip and will be thrown on the unemployment scrap heap.
Similarly, low skilled workers NEVER GET THE OPPORTUNITY to get on the first rung of the employment ladder in situations where a minimum wage exists.
The government has NO BUSINESS in deciding what wage should or shouldn’t be enforced.
That is something to be decided between the employer and any potential employees.
If you believe that a particular employer is offering you an exploitative hourly wage rate, you are free to walk away.
NO ONE IS TWISTING YOUR ARM and forcing you to take that job.
Now, no one disagrees with you Teddy, that rents are too high, inflation is running riot and most people can’t make ends meet on their meagre wages.
But WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS Teddy?
Could it just possibly be because a HUGE CHUNK of the private sector’s wealth generation is being diverted to fund:
1) The endless wars on behalf of the Apartheid Israeli state abd ZOG’s agenda?
2) To fund the millions of unproductive parasites in Federal, State and local government that get cushy retirement packages and benefits at the expense of the rest of us?
3) Bail out the corrupt ZOG owned financial institutions after they get into trouble from their reckless speculation and chicanery, as they do every few years?
The men who built industry had only one thing on their minds–the accumulation of wealth but only for themselves–no different than the financial “robber barons” of today.
They were indeed robber barons who almost always slashed wages for those who made their success possible–their employees–always pleading poverty while living grand lives themselves. They cared not one wit about the welfare of their employees–only how much capital they could amass for themselves on the backs of these same employees.
One notable exception was Henry Ford, who KNEW that paying his employees a decent wage would come back to reward him in spades. Although not entirely altruistic, his above-average wages probably did more to forestall support for socialism or communism in the USA than just about any other action. Although Ford’s high wage structure was put in place to reduce turnover, his writings did state that he wanted his employees to be able to afford not only his products but to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
American prosperity did not filter down to the employees of the robber barons until Henry Ford broke the mold, instituting his $5 per day wage, 40-hour workweek and 8-hour workday.
Free trade” is actually a “race to the bottom” which can only be detrimental to the true human condition. Expecting first-world wage rates to compete with third-world wage rates never works.
I would hope that people would start to see that Henry Ford was absolutely correct when he blamed the banksters, vulture capitalists, and wall street types for the economic conditions, not only in the USA, but the world.
People such as “Mitt” Romney whose only expertise is to disassemble viable companies and industries, selling off the assets individually to maximize their “profits” need to be exposed and “run out of town”.
Adolf Hitler’s Germany was successful because labor in Germany was “monetized”–given intrinsic “value”, unlike what the mantra in business is still to this day, that “labor” costs must be minimized and that the “shareholder” is king.
The internationalist banksters have to do something to “nip” the monetization and valuation of labor as it will “upset the (existing) order–just what the “new world order” types want.
Let’s get something straight. No one disagrees that what is happening now is a disaster for the working poor and the middle class.
But what you’re living through now is NOT FREE MARKET CAPITALISM.
Sure, they’re claiming that all manner of allegedly ‘Free Trade Agreements’ like NAFTA are in place, in the same way that they said you were unpatriotic if you didn’t support the Patriot Act in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Similarly, just because the CARES Act came into fruition during Obama’s tenure, it didn’t result in better care for Americans.
In a Free Market there are NO BARRIERS to competition, there are no government enacted regulatory impediments that prevent new entrants (who are more innovative, less greedy, more concerned with providing customer satisfaction), from taking market share away from the established oligarchs.
Simply put, there is a MINE FIELD OF BARRIERS to prevent new entrants taking market share away from the established oligarchs. This entails the consumers get LESS, WHILE PAYING MORE – hence the reason why they can’t make ends meet.
Think about it. In the past in the U.S (and in Australia where I’m from), the man of the house, often times a labourer or lowly skilled worker could, ON HIS WAGE ALONE, afford to pay off the mortgage on his home, own a car and have money left over for a rainy day, while the wife stayed home and looked after the kids.
That was a time when some semblance of Capitalism existed, when ZOG had not yet usurped complete power over government and academia. Not so today.
Now, getting back to Henry Ford’s decision to increase wages to $5 per day, let’s put that in context. It was a rational decision to MAXIMISE PROFITS – no more, no less.
You cannot increase wages in a vacuum – they need to come out of profits. And because Ford was massively investing in capital equipment, THIS INVESTMENT enabled productivity per worker to increase, thus enabling wages to grow while simultaneously increasing profits.
Simply put, you CANNOT increase productivity per worker without that capital investment.
So let me explain the role of CAPITAL INVESTMENT in an advanced economy.
What I mainly refer to is Capital Investment in PLANT & MACHINERY that increases the PRODUCTIVE OUTPUT of that society.
Let’s begin by winding the clock back 100,000 years to primitive hunter/gatherer societies.
As primitive as they were, even they knew to bury their dead – as a rotting corpse left above ground would lead to an outbreak of disease.
Here is a timeline of technological progression :
In recent times, American corporations (either ZOG majority owned or ZOG affiliated), are DELIBERATELY trying to keep wages suppressed while maximising profits. That’s where the present day differs from the past.
Let me leave you with the words of the sage Bill Bonner on why Free Markets (and Free Speech) go hand in hand, and why they yield better outcomes for the working class and society as a whole:
BTW, in another UR thread, I noticed that you posted an ‘Agree’ below some [mostly] dumb comments by someone called Trout, in relation to the 9/11 False Flag.
I replied comprehensively with an evisceration (several comments in fact) of Trout’s nonsense.
Unfortunately my comments were purged by Ron Unz for being off topic – even though nearly everyone else is free to post off topic commentary without repercussions.
I’m curious, seeing as you’re generally a pretty clued up bloke, what’s with the ‘Agree’, seeing as this Trout guy said some inaccurate and easily disprovable things?
You accurately state:
Free trade” is actually a “race to the bottom” which can only be detrimental to the true human condition. Expecting first-world wage rates to compete with third-world wage rates never works.
I would hope that people would start to see that Henry Ford was absolutely correct when he blamed the banksters, vulture capitalists, and wall street types for the economic conditions, not only in the USA, but the world.
People such as “Mitt” Romney whose only expertise is to disassemble viable companies and industries, selling off the assets individually to maximize their “profits” need to be exposed and “run out of town”.
How different the world would be if capitalism followed the Ford model rather than the banking, venture capital, Wall Street and shareholder only value model.