@cicerone imposter,
CI wrote:Oylok, Unfortunately human greed is a poison that has no ethics or conscience. All these CEOs and officers of companies who get stock options worth millions of dollars do not "really" earn that; it's the workers who produce the goods and services - and they're the ones who should be rewarded with higher pay.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I don't exactly side with all the closet Marxists who contend that CEOs produce
no value at all and simply steal surplus value from workers. I do think smart, brilliant CEOs make a huge contribution to the economy. But I don't believe the closet
JBClarkists either, who contend everyone gets back what about he puts in. Corporations have all the power when it comes to negotiating contracts. The answer to the problem of who creates wealth lies somewhere between the two theoretical extremes. (And some CEOs really are just crooks.)
Here's the real reason why workers should be paid more: because they're trying as hard as they ******* can. When you keep a family at subsistence level it is not going to improve itself; it will stay at subsistence. It is not going to lance out and dabble in small-business entrepreneurship. And its members have no time to form social connections that would allow them to find better jobs, because they have no time for a social life.
Quote:Their greed will destroy our country; it's the middle class that spends money to keep our economy ticking.
This sounds a bit like old-fashioned Keynesianism, where the poor pump life into the economy by spending, and the rich kill it by hoarding. I think Keynes's
General Theory has a few holes in it. More on that later, perhaps, but one of the biggest holes seems to be Keynes's idea that whenever Americans spend money, American workers benefit. That ignores the large number of goods Chinese workers are now providing to middle-class American consumers. A lot of our middle-class spending keeps China ticking these days. Obviously it is a complicated problem. I don't see any quick fixes, but the old Keynesian theory is in dire need of revision. America more closely approximated a closed economy back when Keynes wrote the
General Theory.
Quote:Our educational system is also failing our children. Our future looks bleak from not only that perspective, but the fact that our country is no longer creating the number of jobs to employ those graduating from high school and college.
If you forecast a bleak future, it will occur. I have ideas on what to do about those problems, as I'm sure others have as well. For one thing, POM bemoaned our loss of industrial jobs in the 1980s. Well, how about targeting growth in those areas that are likely to provide the steadiest jobs in the post-industrial era? "Targeting" may mean tinkering with the educational system, so that our people (Americans) are the best qualified to fill the safe, high-paying jobs.
Also, Americans may need to resign themselves to lower standards of material consumption as raw materials run out, and we may need to resign ourselves to the fact that our standard of living is probably going to converge with that of the rest of the world, since young minds in the rest of the world are as sharp as ours and, these days, better educated. But that does not mean a descent into a post-apocalyptic dark age.
