Once you start following/helping/participating in the labor movement it becomes clear that virtually every company will go to great lengths to stop a union from being formed and winning a contract, they will even break the law. The question for organizers is not "will this company do it?" but "what do we do about it when they do?"
Walmart is infamous for shutting down stores that unionize. This can be particularly devastating to the community because Walmart's whole schtick is to wipe out every other business in the area through "dumping" - flooding the market with stuff sold at a loss until they drive the other companies out of business.
So not only do a lot of people in town / the county lose their jobs, but they lose the only place to shop for a lot of things.
Result? Anyone who talks about unionizing gets reported, or simply ostracized. "Shut the fuck up, Jim. You wanna get the place shut down? We'll all be driving an hour to get our groceries."
Seems like the best game-theoretic strategy for small towns, would be to unionize whatever particular type of retail worker Walmart uses in advance, as a prophylactic to prevent Walmart from ever coming to town.
Most of them will. Some will still try to find a way around them or look for loop holes. But yes, the fact that most of them will respect them is a major win
I remember watching the walmart movie, and they had one part where walmart would not put security cameras in their parking lot. Robbery, rape and murder.
But one store did have cameras in the parking lot - for surveillance of employees trying to form a union.
San Francisco's problems are rooted in extreme inequality. There is no tough on crime policy that can improve the lives of the majority in this context.
I think it's helpful to understand capitalism as a historical process in the real world, and not as a pure idea which society fails to live up to. The state had an important role in the development of capitalism everywhere, it still plays a crucial role, and that's just the nature of the system. It's possible that you just don't actually like capitalism - healthy!
Yes. Agreed. But there is a difference between guidance, direction and seeding (e.g., post fossil fuel energy source); and putting its thumb on the scale to provide favoritism, protect markets that don't need protection, subsidies that have out lived their purpose and so on.
It's ok if we don't have free markets. It's not ok to perpetuate the idea that we do, especially when behind the scenes actions don't seek free markets.
In general, employers do not want to offer higher wages because they predict it will be very difficult to lower them later down the line. They feel if they can weather the current storm, things can get back to "normal" as far as wages go. In places like the restaurant industry, they just carry on with short-staffing, putting more pressure on the remaining employees.
Not necessarily. Even if productivity isn't increasing in your business, as other sectors increase their productivity, the opportunity cost of the labour grows, so even with the same productivity, you would expect the cost of labour to rise, to compete with other more productive things the worker could be doing.
So if your explanation is right, then we should also expect to see only a tiny effect in the practical use of math, reading, writing, etc. between people who went to school and people who didn't. Because only 2 cared enough to pay attention. Right?
Beyond the really elementary things that get repeated often enough and insistently enough for most people to learn them whether they're interested or not -- basic reading, basic writing, addition and subtraction -- yes, as far as I can tell most people don't retain much from school. Not for long, anyway. It's easy to think otherwise if you're (for example) an engineer surrounded by unusually studious people in your day-to-day life, but standardized tests administered more broadly give a less encouraging picture.
Sometimes it's not a retention problem, it's that they never learned the stuff in the first place. You're pretty doomed if you fall behind in school, it's all up to some individual going above and beyond (a teacher, a family member, a friend) to save you, because the system will just keep shuffling you along to adulthood, and then all the consequences hit at once. Take this loan with compound interest you can't understand because you can't multiply, buy a massive depreciating asset with it (car, mobile home...) because you don't know what "depreciating" is...
If you oppose the international community and their leaders, they will oppose you in different ways.
They will sanction, boycott, sabotage, denounce, impoverish and indebt your country... and if none of that works they will invade you. That's the way it has always been.
It's disappointing when I talk about planning the economy, and many technologists who are otherwise quite excited about difficult engineering problems dismiss it as entirely impossible because of something they read once from the 1920s. Clearly, it is possible at some scales. Why are creative people not thinking about how to scale it up? It is a utopian discussion until we actually overcome the resistance of the 1% to such a project, but it would be good to have more programmers on the side of socialism.
I think there's a great confusion, and maybe not just a little ideology, clouding things.
On one level, command vs market is just about what kind of algorithm you use to get a goods allocation that makes the economy run. If the idealized market Turing machine can compute a local optimum to a nonconvex optimization problem in polytime given some inputs, there's nothing prohibiting an explicit algorithm that runs through the same steps from doing so. If finding an equilibrium is in some hard complexity class, then it's hard for the market and the command system both, given the same inputs. The market's computational capacity isn't magic. Most likely the market only finds an approximate optimum and a dedicated algorithm can do better, if it has the same inputs.
That then gets confused with the problem of getting those inputs. Hayek makes a big deal of the local knowledge of the market in contrast to the hierarchical nature of the Soviet planned economy. But that should cut just as viciously against big corporations, and what it really means, I think, is that the system must be bottom-up in some fashion.
You can have bottom-up systems running on top of the market, or on top of some explicit optimization algorithm. But the Austrians have managed to convince people that market = bottom-up and explicit algorithm = top-down. That's where the dismissal comes from.
I meant that under Lenin, the philosophy was to export revolution worldwide so that the Soviet Union would integrate into a worldwide, international socialism.
Under Stalin, the policy of "Socialism in one country" was implemented, and foreign intervention was no longer a priority nor a philosophical goal. Which is why, under Stalin, the USSR attempted to ally with capitalist nations.
There is not going to be a Capitalism 2.0. Capitalism was progressive for a time, but it has gradually created the conditions for its replacement by democratic socialism. Those conditions are highly socialized production processes (not individual crafts) plus a gigantic class of wage laborers with an interest in a collective approach. A democratically planned economy is entirely possible and would outpace the massive waste and duplication of efforts that capitalism requires to function. Even the bureaucratically degenerated USSR grew to an economic superpower. Imagine what genuine democracy in the plan could accomplish in terms of meetings peoples' real needs.
Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale.
Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects.
Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving.
That video is so funny, no one is on their phone! Did they not have smartphones in 1989?
While command economies have numerous documented failures, including actual fucking famine during eg the Great Leap Forwards, crowd-sourcing is a very real phenomenon, enabled by the Internet, even under capitalism. Right now, however, we're witnessing the failure of a free-market economy to provide for their poorest citizens. At least the people that starved under Stalin didn't have a Safeway on their block that was filled with food.
Markets are so efficient that even socialist food banks[0] use a "market" on the backend. That doesn't mean that an infinitely free market is infinitely efficient.
Whatever form of government and economy that arises most directly and naturally from the first principles of land and property ownership, the freedom to work, sell, and buy, and especially that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—which include freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, arms, etc.
Unfortunately, every other large-scale form of government that’s been tried has badly trampled on the personal rights enumerated in the USA’s founding documents. If anything should change here, it should be a dismantling of all the laws and institutions that have grown up like weeds since the late 1700s that are trampling on those rights.
That’s not to disparage some great things that have happened in the mean time: freeing the slaves, illegalizing discrimination by the government, women’s suffrage, etc. But each of those things I’ve named are good because they apply those first principles to areas of government that were lacking application when the country was founded.
