Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

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>>No, tolerate a system that works as hard as possible to ensure that selling one's labor for wages is the only option, rather than a right

So you propose the government provide an alternative, by doing what I described, which is effectively to steal from the Ant to give to the Grasshopper, i.e. tax the more productive to provide resources to the less productive.

And the absence of this non-consensual redistribution is what you and Varoufakis absurdly enough, find intolerant to those who value freedom.

Marxism is deliberately obfuscated, to hide what it really advocates.

>>Tolerate a system in which increases in productivity accrue benefits mostly to capital rather than society as a whole. Tolerate a system in which profit is preferentially distributed to the capital that partially enabled it rather than the labor that also enabled it.

Increases in productivity accrue benefits to society at large right now. In the US, there was a small increase in capital's share of national income, but labor's share remains significant:

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

In those regions which witnessed significant productivity growth, wages increased substantially:

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...

It's frankly hilarious that you would jump directly to Marxism as if that was the only alternative. There's that great quote that has been floating around for a decade or two now: people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It has been normalized to the point where even reasonably intelligent and educated people have a difficult time imagining or even being aware of any alternative. That appears to include yourself.

Labor compensation as percentage of GDP since 1950:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

That shows a near 16% drop in labor compensation as a percentage of GDP since its high in 1970.

The CSMonitor article you linked to cites 3 reasons for the dramatic drop in world poverty, with a move to "more market-based economic systems" about the closest thing they offer to "capitalism". Even that is really only half of that particular reason, since they also cite more democratic political systems.

The article is about the global war on poverty - it's about developments in countries far from the US economic order of things. So sure, at some point during the development of a capitalist economy, you will see a stronger correlation between productivity gains and wages. However, that's not the case in the USA since sometime in the late 20th century.

Labor's share of compensation dropped from 0.63 to just under 0.60. That's not 15%.

>>people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Because capitalism is literally people being secure to own and exchange what they produce. The end of capitalism would require pervasive government control to deny that right, and of course I'll assume it's Marxism that's motivating these calls, because it almost always is, and the economist who's being fawned over by leftists in the comments under this post is a Marxist.

>>The CSMonitor article you linked to cites 3 reasons for the dramatic drop in world poverty, with a move to "more market-based economic systems" about the closest thing they offer to "capitalism".

1. "more market-based economic systems" is 100% "more capitalism".

2. Here are two other sources that echo the widely held conclusion that the spread of market institutions, like private property rights, played a pivotal role in the decline in poverty:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

>>So sure, at some point during the development of a capitalist economy, you will see a stronger correlation between productivity gains and wages. However, that's not the case in the USA since sometime in the late 20th century.

That is still the case with the US today:

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

If you look at advanced economies, you see Hong Kong and Singapore ranking number 1 and 2 in economic freedom indices, and having social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP far below the OECD average.

And they massively closed the gap with the Nordic countries in per capita GDP, while leapfrogging them in quality of life metrics like life expectancy.

You see the advanced economies massively increase social welfare spending over the last 60 years:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

And you see both per GDP capita growth and wage growth stagnate over that period.

By all indications, capitalism is the best ruleset for facilitating economic growth, and the experience of advanced economies like the US confirms that.

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