From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Aug 28 2001 - 01:14:03 MDT
Zero writes
> Unrestrained capitalism (think early industrial US) leads to huge
> discrepancies in the distribution of wealth, which leads to social
> unrest (think the early labor movement) and even upheaval (think
> French Revolution).
I don't think that huge discrepancies in wealth are necessarily
bad; it's entirely possible that the more wealthy societies are
(in the large) the greater the exponential increase of the most
wealthy. (I think that we would trace contrary examples, like
some in South America, to other cultural and historical factors.)
I think that the labor movement occurred when it did because
of a lack of entrepreneurs and hence a labor over-supply. Under
such conditions, laboring men in certain industries didn't want
to compete against each other and against all the other men in
the street who wanted their jobs---this would have caused wages
to go lower. So they banded together for collective bargaining
which is all right (unless they then try to use force to prevent
owners from firing all of them, or use politics to keep owners
from getting them to sign contracts, and use politics to keep
those contracts from being legally enforced).
As painful as it would be to be at a market disadvantage (it
happens to employers too when they just can't get enough
qualified people and have to pay extortionate wages for them),
the proper view is to regard such periods as transitory: as
soon as the wages go very low, other entrepreneurs (including
the working men themselves) would have sprung up to take
advantage of the "obscene" profits. That's how it is supposed
to work. Unions, unfortunately, only prolonged IMO the period
during which working men and women didn't earn very much.
Lee
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