2. union help unqualified people. You here stories about teachers who inappropriately touch students, instead of been fired, were put in rubber rooms and paid a full salary.

And I certainly never claimed a lack of a union means abuse is happening. I don’t know how you got that from what I said. Unions form in response to abuse.

Neither of the subsequent arguments you give makes much sense to me. Unionization is hardly a requirement for nepotism; you don’t HAVE to abuse an employee just because there’s no union. In fact, unless the unions themselves are in bed with anti-union politicians they could only be an obstruction to such plans. And the idea that it’s just about receiving money from companies implies that the unions, which are fundamentally political organizations, don’t also have the ability to buy politicians. If so, that means they were extremely weak to begin with. That doesn’t square with the history as I know it, so I’m not sure I understand where you’re coming from.

Anywho, the thing is that the undermining philosophy of the United States that permeates the majority of its citizens is that everybody is taught that the goal is to be Rich and/or Famous.

We’re not taught to regard a dollar as a means to vote for the things we should have in society. We’re taught that a dollar will get us the things we want from society.

So we get people who end up making a lot of money blowing that on hookers and coke completely ignorant that what they’re doing is creating a society where women become prostitutes and cocaine is in demand.

The bottom line is, if this is capitalism, then we’re doing it wrong.

@Brask Mumei
When installing lugnuts 30+ years ago he was getting a car, AC, and healthcare from 30+ years ago. The quality and value of all of those items has gone up significantly since then yet his work has not.

Because lugnuts do not equal spacenuts. Whatever the new product is it takes both and wingnuts and a computer to monitor them. the resources that were previously going to pay 10 lugnut guys being reallocated to pay other guys in order to make a better product. Greater efficiency does not always mean working less, often instead it leads to better outcomes for the same input.

At the same time both average and minimal standards of living should go up over time as some amount of efficiency increases go towards increased production and therefore price decreases. But there are two factors fighting that. First is that the relative value of lugnut workers due to technological improvements is going down faster than the general price drop. Second is the influx of cheap global labor further decreases the value of lugnut workers.

If the market will not require 10 times the space lugnuts. That’s fine because you’re supposed to innovate and advance the state of society beyond mere lugnuts.

The real trouble with firing the 9 lugnut workers (whether via technology or hiring 9 lugnut workers overseas that will do the same work for the price of 1) is that those 9 lugnut workers are also your customers.

When they leave your workplace, they become patrons of the people who are the patrons of people who eventually are buying your lugnuts. Your market shrinks. You are now engaged in a self-destructive cycle that is undermining your entire economy.

People who are in the business of making money simply so it will accumulate in a big, beautiful pile have really no long term vision as to what money really is in the bigger scheme of things. If money represents a medium in which people can be incentivized to act, then the more you’re accumulated, the more you’ve failed to prove people incentive to act.

We then move to space lugnuts, which allow one man to do the work of 10. So, we can fire 9 lugnut manufatcurers and, note this, keep our production capacity the same. So, in the space lugnut world we have the same production as the lugnut world. So why are we crying that we couldn’t afford to give the ex-lugnut attachers the same products they had before?

Greater efficiency, at some point, means that we *have* to work less. Usually, having less work to do is a good thing. Except when economists show up and explain that, because we had a bumper crop this year, the farm hands will have to starve.

(We’ve been working around this problem by inventing endless hierarchies of paper shuffling to provide make-work so we can all feel like we are contributing. The popularity of television, I believe, is largely an outlet of populace which didn’t know anything better to do with their new free time)