Question for those in charge of hiring employees

Well a lot of people get paid by commission, some truck drivers for instance. I find the name you give to the pay they get is more or less irrelevant, it is the amount the person is able to get for that labour.

You say skimming. Again, I find what you call it pretty much unimportant. The question is, why does that person get to “skim?”

Also, by what you just said before, it is not “surpluss value,” as it is contemplated in the final price of the product and/or service.

and also

I don’t see the distinction between “value to me” and “actual value” (or “real, tangible value”). In the water bottle example, it seems like maybe you’re looking for an average value over time, i.e. I’m willing to pay $1000 for it after crawling out of the desert, but only $1.95 when choosing between bottled and tap.

And I think there’s a couple ways to look at this. In one version, your decision to pay $1000 is strictly irrational. Say we replace the water with food, and you’re on the brink of starvation from your time in the desert, and you are offered nutritious but bland gruel for $1, and equally nutritious but very flavorful steak for $1000. If you choose the steak, that’s probably irrational, because if you take the gruel you will survive and you can buy a steak for $12 later. Taking the steak is irrational in the sense that it isn’t consistent with all of your preferences, and you choose it because you’re blinded by hunger and not thinking clearly.

On the other hand, if the steak is the only option, and you die if you don’t take it, then $1000 is a steal, you’ll gladly pay $1000 to avoid death, and that choice is consistent with all your preferences and not a product of hunger-blindness.

In the first case, we should say that the value of the steak isn’t $1000, and in the second it is (or rather, that the steak is more valuable to you than $1000).

The fact that in different circumstances you would choose differently doesn’t mean that the exchange isn’t a real reflection of the actual value. “The” actual value is always just a value to a specific person in a specific situation. And all any transaction tells us is that one party values one thing more than the other, and the other party feels the other way. So, you might actually have been willing to pay $10k, or $1m for the steak, and the person selling it to you might have been willing to accept $12.

So too with an exchange for labor. The only reason the employer is willing to trade money for labor is because she values the labor more. The only reason the worker is willing to trade labor for money is because he values the money more. The actual spread between what the employer would be willing to pay and what the worker would be willing to accept is unknown. But it is known that the employer and the worker disagree about the value of the money and the labor, and that disagreement is what makes the transaction possible. If they both agreed, or if they were prohibited from accepting an exchange at anything but the maximum price the employer would be willing to pay (which is what it seems Promethean is suggesting), the transaction just wouldn’t happen.

Yes, given the constraints that were placed upon them. There were legal restrictions on where they could work, both on them and on employers, which suppressed demand on their labor. Cultural taboos and prejudices also restricted their options, but the legal and quasi-legal restrictions were the more pernicious (by quasi-legal, I mean enforcement of the status quo by groups like the KKK, which were not technically the law but operated with its tacit protection and blessing). Without these, the price of black labor would have been artificially low, and enterprising business owners could take advantage of the suppressed wages, which would work to counteract the prejudice and raise black wages over time (and simultaneously suppress wages of white laborers towards an equilibrium).

That appears to be what was happening, as evidenced by the introduction of minimum wage laws that were expressly advocated as a way to price out black laborers: because racism artificially reduced the value of black labor, requiring that the minimum amount that could be paid be above that value would eliminate competition. But if racism wasn’t creating opportunities for non-racist employers to get comparable labor at below-market rates, such a cartel wouldn’t have been appealing to the racist majority.

I’m not sure how to think of morality in the context of the market. A market economy takes values as inputs, so it seems like the concept of trying to decide our values about such a system generates the messy problems of recursion. What oughts can be offered about a system that takes oughts as inputs and generates is’s as outputs? That is not entirely rhetorical, but it is not something I have an answer for.

Suffice it to say that the market is as morally pluralist as its participants, that most of the outcomes are a-moral, and that rationality for the purpose of economic analysis is scoped to preference self-consistency.

While I agree with the general point that a certain amount of redistribution can improve the information the market generates, I don’t think it’s true that participants needs to be equals in order to generate a ‘real’ value. As I argue above to Karpel and Promethean, there is no such value independent of the participants, and economic exchanges require that the participants value the things exchanged differently. Decreasing inequality will decrease the spread between people, but only up to a point, so there are diminishing returns in terms of information. And redistribution is itself distorting, so significant redistribution to drastically reduce inequality will at some margin eliminate more information than it produces.

There’s a lot of wiggle room in “almost purely”, but to offer a small defense of advertising as a rational and pro-social enterprise: advertising reduces search costs, which benefits consumers by making it easier to find the goods they want to buy. The internet has obviated this a bit by decreasing search costs across the board, but advertising is still a reliable signal of legitimacy, it strengthens brands, which in turn incentivize quality. Where it’s intentionally deceptive, it’s bad, and you’re right that it can encourage irrationality even when it isn’t lying. But it is not without benefit for rational consumers.

I kind of agree with this, and in fact so do many of the most free market people I read. Libertarianism takes for granted that governments will be captured for the benefit of the rich, and proposes the solution of sharply limiting government powers, such that any action that exceeds the limit is immediately recognized as illegitimate. That prevents the rich from buying too much influence by capping the value of that influence.

The problem is that government needs to be the most powerful enterprise, it needs to be more powerful than every company it oversees, or else the rich can succeed in capturing society by capturing the largest companies. But if government is more powerful than every company, then it will always be worth capturing.

But I don’t see the alternatives doing much better here. Centralizing power away from the free market just seems to expedite the process. And other solutions seem to depend on the idea that people just magically won’t do that anymore. I think there is no solution, it’s a balance that must continue to be fought for.

This is an interesting suggestion, not at all what I had in mind but I can see the line of thinking and I think there’s some merit to it. When I think of high marginal utility spenders, I’m thinking of the people struggling to make rent or feed their families. An extra dollar to those people is very, very valuable. An extra dollar to Musk or Gates seems wasted, given how many dollars they’re sitting on. By moving excess dollars that lay idle with the rich (or that the rich use for another car or another vacation or another molecular gastronomy meal) to the poor who will immediately put it to use in ways that will measurably improve their lives, we can increase the effective value in the economy, and get better information about what things are worth.

But it’s true that some desperately poor people will put the money into drugs or gambling, and Musk has at times leveraged himself to the hilt to create multiple enterprises that have immense social good. Still, I think that’s the exception. Most successful people, even when they generally use money wisely, are also comfortable and consume wasteful luxuries. And most poor people, even when they generally make financial mistakes, will use more money in socially positive ways. On average, I would expect the marginal dollar to be more valuable in the hands of the poor than in the hands of the very rich.

See, this is why I think socialists are not as far from “taxation is theft” as you suggest. I would argue, and I think it’s consistent with capitalism (even required by pragmatic capitalism) that even when the split of the profits between two parties is absolutely fair, there’s perfect information and no asymmetry of bargaining power, taxation is still not theft, because the transaction is only possible in a world in which tax-funded institutions support market transactions.

Taxation isn’t punishment, and shouldn’t be thought of that way. As I pointed out to Silhouette above, we shouldn’t be blaming the lucky for making rational choices in the context of their luck. It should be used to price in the cost of market-supporting institutions and to price in harmful externalities (as with carbon and sin taxes), and more generally to raise the funds necessary to fund the commons and stabilize society. That’s not theft, it’s the cost of doing business, and it’s justified even when the business is as fair as it can be.

But both sides of the exchange lack that information. The exchange is labor for money. The employee doesn’t know the complete picture of how that labor will be used to generate profit for the employer, and the employer doesn’t know the complete picture of that money will be used to satisfy the employee’s preferences. Both parties to the transaction lack information. Moreover, they both know they lack information, and they voluntarily engage despite that lack of information. Perfect information isn’t necessary for a transaction to be voluntary.

Let me propose a similar situation that may get on what we actually disagree about. Consider two firms negotiating. One firm is buying services from the other firm. The buyer will use the services to turn a profit, the seller is turning a profit on the sale. They both know this, and they’re both OK with it. They don’t need to open the books to each other to make that exchange fair.

To me, this exchange is comparable to the employer-employee exchange. It does not seem so for you.

By this argument, the market doesn’t determine the price of consumer goods, since they come with a specific price tag and 7-Eleven doesn’t take bids for soda.

This seems to rely on the premise that CEOs don’t do anything, it’s not difficult, and/or the skillset is not rare, and anyone can be dropped in and do a good job. That isn’t obviously the case, CEOs have a lot of power and a lot of trust, the talent pool is small and competition is fierce.

Publicity puts the employer at an informational disadvantage. If CEO salaries weren’t public, hiring a new CEO at a drastic pay cut would be easier. Consider how business often (illegally) forbid employees from discussing their salary with each other. That helps keep wages down, because it lets business price discriminate in buying labor (paying worse employees less), and employees are less motivated to ask for more money because they don’t know they’re being hosed and no one else sees how little they make so they don’t lose face. CEOs know what their peers are making, so they know what a fair package looks like, and they’re motivated to bargain for more because they and everyone can see how they’re valued relative to their peers.

I agree. But to the extent that the argument against capitalism depends on the premise that managers don’t do anything, acknowledging that managers add something of value does weaken that argument and so supports capitalism.

I’m saying that the bottle of water only has the value it was sold to me at because the person who sold it to me is a vicious person combined with the scenario.

No, I’m about to lose consciousness having gone without water long enough to be in danger. The only person who knows I am on this side of the sand dune is a horrible person who sees me as an opportunity to make money. He may not tell anyone I am there so I die. It is rational to buy his water, my money being valueless if I am dead.

As a social mammal I find this idea that the steak has that value bizarre.

It seems to me the context of the discussion with Serendipper is if there is exploitation. If the people setting the market value have contributed to a value they would never have put on the product or labor themselves - if they wanted to buy the product or if they were doing the labor - they are being immoral.

I really do understnad that if money changes hands then people made a choice. It seems to me this is oddly leaving out the core of Serendipper’s context which is a moral one.

But how much of this is just framing? Take the question in a more abstract form: I have an item that you want to buy, and we know that you will get >$1000 worth of value from that item. What’s a fair price to ask of you for that item? Framed this way, it’s much less morally repulsive, and it’s very similar to Serendipper’s question.

But it’s the same question, we’re really supposing as part of the hypothetical that the bottle of water is worth >$1000 to you. So, two people value a good differently, and we’re trying to find a fair price so that the two people split the surplus. If you’re really going to die, you likely value the water bottle at much greater that $1000.

This reframing is not dishonest, it’s only a difference of emphasis. I agree that intuitive morality says we should just give the dying person water, but we might reframe intuitive morality as naive morality.

For example, take price gauging in the run-up to a hurricanes. People have strong intuitions against it, but price gauging in those situations serves a very important function that has positive social spill over. First, it maximizes the supply that will be available in the affected area, by compensating people for the risk and expense of making more supply available. Second, it limits hoarding: without price gauging, cases of water sell out in a few hours, but if they have to pay a price that accurately reflects the value they expect from the water, they will be more careful to buy only what they need and leave more for other people to buy. Price gauging looks opportunistic, but letting prices track value aggregates information and allocates scarce resources efficiently. That’s what the market’s for.

That’s a bit different from a one-off, dying in the desert situation, but it does demonstrate that economic exchanges that are intuitively icky can be socially beneficial. Sometimes our gut reaction is wrong.

What about the people who can’t afford to buy the water at inflated prices?

They die. Their families die.

They depend on the kindness of the “naive”.

Why are there slums in the richest country in the world? Important functions being served. Positive social spill over. Efficiency.

There are no rich countries. There are rich people. Your question should be “why are there slums in the country with the richest people in the world?”

Then the answer becomes clearer.

because it is allowed by law. the dual history of the gradual development of the politics and economics of western civilization involves a hidden pretense that’s really quite brilliant. the idea that ‘government’ and the ‘state’ fundamentally restricts the freedom of people was a philosophical rumor set in motion by the bourgeois. it’s purpose was to persuade the working classes to be suspicious of the ‘state’… which would result in preventing the state from interfering with the acquisition of property and wealth through exploitation. the biggest enemy of the capitalist is not the ‘worker’, but the organized mass of workers - the ‘state’ - which would have the power to radically change and reform property laws. so basically, it’s not that the ‘state’ is some evil, authoritarian entity that wants to restrict the rights and freedoms of the people. it’s that only the state would have the power to control the laws that allow the capitalists their privilege to ‘skim’.

i wasn’t disputing that, and we haven’t been on the same page for a week. this is why i don’t do debates anymore. this discussion has been slowly twisting and turning… so much now that the original argument has been lost. i’m saying:

a) the capitalist does not add anything to the chain of production that wouldn’t be there if he did not exist.
b) the capitalist’s ‘opinion’ that what he does is valuable because he decides it is valuable, is irrelevant.
c) the worker’s value is equal to the value of what he produces. the value of what he produces is determined by the market. the wage that the worker gets in exchange for his labor is always less than the value of what he produces. the difference is the surplus value the capitalist gains through becoming an unnecessary and extraneous intermediary between the producer and the consumer.
d) ergonomically, functionally, the capitalist is quite literally analogous to a parasite.

but before you reply, i surrender. i can’t muster enough interest in this discussion anymore to put the necessary effort into it. that, and i’ve been busy.

“because it is allowed by law.”

Allowed by is not a reason for a thing. It is, at best, a reason the thing is not stopped.

You can do better than this. What is this shit?

Except, of course, the whole chain of production.
Which he started.

Minor detail.

no, he slipped in there… what was already up and running. human beings have been organized producers since they developed opposable thumbs and dropped down from the trees. we’ve been designing and using technologies for eons, long before the ‘capitalist’ was even conceived of by some ruling class philosopher yesman. the only thing the capitalist ever ‘got going’ was wage labor when he evolved from the merchant into the employer and began paying workers to make things. then, as he accumulates wealth, he buys further means of production (factories, tools, etc.), he appropriates what was already in existence and made by workers. he doesn’t start any chain of production. he slips into the mix after it’s already going.

minor detail.

The same thing that happens to everyone who arrives at the store after the shelves are bare. The difference is that prices that track supply and demand minimize the number of people who don’t get water.

I agree that there is something unseemly in deciding who lives and who dies based on wealth. But I don’t think it’s better that more people die so long as the decision is made based on how early they got to the store instead of on wealth (especially because I expect ‘how early they get to the store’ to correlate with wealth anyway).

Promethean, thank you, I understand if you’re busy or over this conversation, please feel free to ignore what follows; I won’t take your silence as disrespect or as a concession on any open points. But my replies are as much for me as they are for you, so I will think through your parting thoughts below. I’ve appreciated our discussion.

I thought you had conceded this point here. In short, my contention is that the capitalist contributes risk-taking, initiating action, and organizing the enterprise.

Also, Pedro made a good point in response to this claim that I missed:

The point Pedro makes, as I understand it, is that the cost of the final good includes whatever amount the capitalist takes for herself. If that’s the case, and if the capitalist adds nothing of value, then a competing good could be produced for less by paying the capitalist less, with the market price settling around the equilibrium of paying the capitalist zero or near-zero. The fact that this doesn’t happen seems like strong prima facie evidence that the capitalist does indeed add value.

This is the crux of the disagreement, but I think we can connect our positions. Take a laborer who makes widgets, which sell for $100 each. Each widget is made by assembling several components using some power tools.

Separate from (a) and separate from the value-to-who arguments I’ve been making, let’s see if we can specify the price of ‘what [the worker] produces’ Call it P(w). It can’t be equal to the price of the widget, because the widget is composed of raw materials that cost money. We’d also need to subtract the pro-rata price of the tools and their maintenance, and the power to run them. So, ( P(w) \leq $100 - (materials) - (overhead) )

I would also subtract the price of coordination (i.e. ordering the materials, paying the electric bill). And I would add in the cost of fronting the money for the raw materials. I think both of these fall under your objection in (a), and I would respond that these are valuable.

So, I contend that
( P(w) \leq $100 - (materials) - (overhead) - (coordination) - (risk) )
and I think you contend that some of those values are just $0.

If that’s right, then we only disagree on 1) whether there are zeros in the equation, and 2) whether the employer has an obligation to pay the maximum amount that it would be willing to spend to obtain the inputs into the widgets (including P(w)). I think the answer to both is no.

There’s the inherent problem of monopolies.

Nobody cares about them anymore.

They make your discussions on capitalism, all of them, mere mental masturbation, and even more useless than that.

Ecamdnu: capitalism is like rock paper sissors, but there is only capital.

Only capital beats capital. But it beats it every time.

the interpretation of what these terms mean and entail is different for the bourgeois and proletarian class, which means there will be an incommensurable understanding of what is defined by such terms. this is to say that such actions as ‘risk taking’, ‘initiating action’ and ‘organizing’ won’t be defined the same way, so they cannot constitute a fair assessment of the value of the capitalist’s involvement in the modes of production. as such, one wouldn’t be able to defend the role of the capitalist in those modes of production by raising such points. here is an example of what i mean:

if by ‘taking a risk’ we mean ‘investing surplus capital’, then this will not be considered by the proletariat to be a legitimate instance of ‘risk’, because by failing (if the capitalist fails), he’s lost nothing, since what he has invested was surplus capital… something generated by the exploitation of workers and not the labor of the capitalist himself. the proletariat simply cannot qualify such as a ‘risk’ that is equivalent to what he understands and experiences as ‘risk’. the proletariat risks his own labor force, his own money, his own time… something that, if he fails at being successful in doing, counts as a loss of direct and immediate resources rather than a loss of surplus resources.

if you found a bike on the side of the road, took it into your possession, and then lost it later, would it be the same kind of loss a person who built a bike from scratch and then lost it, would experience? see what i mean? what is at stake in the former case is not the same as what is at stake in the latter case. this might exemplify how the two opposing classes simply can’t have the same understanding of the meaningfulness of the term ‘risk’. analogy; failing at a business venture and losing money you ‘found’ is not the same as failing at a business venture and losing money you ‘made’.

the same difference of understanding exists for the activity of ‘initiating action’. the capitalist ‘initiates action’ by investing exploited surplus into new modes of production. to the proletariat, this translates into: the capitalist transforms the profit he generated from one exploited worker into another mode with which he’ll exploit another worker, ad infinitem. here, there is no real ‘action’ in the sense that the proletariat understands and experiences it, because the proletariat understands ‘action’ to be labor. this is to say that there is a fundamental difference in the nature of ‘action’ as the two perform it, so there can be no qualification of the meaning of the word as the capitalist uses it in an attempt to defend his role. simply said, the proletariat cannot accept this defense.

‘organizing’ amounts to the same thing, more or less. it’s another kind of ‘action’ that does not involve the same kind of activity for the capitalist and proletariat.

really what this comes down to is something like trying to get two completely different species to come to agreement on words they use and understand to mean different things.

but that’s the point; the market could settle at a lower equilibrium in practice, but not until the private ownership of the means of production is abolished. the fact that the market functions as it does now is something that happens because it has to happen in this particular arrangement. one simply can’t buy something from a private business that is not priced to include the desired profit the capitalist wishes to attain from its sale. but this still doesn’t prove the capitalist ‘adds any value’ to this exchange/interaction between producers and consumers. if anything, he adds cost, not value. to say commodity x is ‘worth more’ because it’s more expensive is a misnomer; this only means that the price of the commodity has been inflated to include a cost that is not proportionate to the labor required to produce it. it means the price of the product is more than all the costs required to produce it.

i dunno man, but you’re still trying to fudge the capitalist into this equation to make him relevant. again, everything involved in the manufacture and distribution of commodities is produced by the worker. worker’s labor made the raw materials, worker’s labor runs the power plant that produces electricity, worker’s labor produced the tools used in the factory, worker’s labor produced the factory, etc., etc. the capitalist does not produce any of these means… he ‘appropriates’, takes up and makes use of what was already there, and does not add anything to the process. so regardless of what is added or subtracted from the ‘costs’ of how and what is produced, everything that ‘costs’ something is produced by the worker, not the capitalist. as such, the capitalist never ‘loses’ a product of his own labor; if he ‘loses’ money, this means he no longer controls the surplus that was generated by the labor of workers… but that surplus belongs to the workers in the first place, so the capitalist cannot be said to have ‘lost’ it.

does this make sense to you? no? okay, think of it like this. capitalists exploit workers to produce goods and services they then sell to each other. capitalist x uses money made from exploiting workers to buy tools from capitalist y, then has his workers use those tools to produce goods he will then sell at a price higher than what it cost him to have those goods produced. he’ll then take that money and invest it in more opportunities to exploit workers.

in reality, capitalist x didn’t buy those tools (‘buy’ is a semantic formality for: use money representative of labor)… workers he previously exploited bought those tools, because it was their labor that produced the money that bought them. likewise, capitalist y didn’t sell those tools (‘sell’ is a semantic formality for: receive representative money of labor)… workers he exploited previously sold those tools, because it was their labor that produced them. the entire exchange takes place through the unnecessary ‘ghost’ intermediary of the capitalist. workers make the means of production and then use the means of production to further produce. they are the source, the organism, of this entire process.

Nonsense. There is no way that a shopkeeper knows enough about the supply and requirements to set the ideal price which minimizes the the number of people who don’t get water.
Furthermore, he is very likely acting to maximize profits rather that distributing water in the optimum manner.

You don’t know that “more people die” in that case. Prices could be kept low and purchase quantities restricted. That could be a better or fairer distribution strategy.

Amazon, Google, and others like them have unbelievable power, not just over their markets but over people’s minds. They can make a monstrous corporation like Walmart look like a victim.

The moral repulsiveness is not affected by the PR. One can frame it ways that sound neutral and inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that something repulsive is not happening.

Absolutely. So the market could probably bear me agreeing that my wife and I get raped so our daughter gets the water. Thats not the value of the water, it is still morally repulsive. And I might choose to be raped over working in a mine for 40 years, and I might do both if my options were filed down to that by people who are repulsive members of what should be a social mammal group - iow with empathy amongst their processes of interaction.

And my example is not one off. Corporations can and do create the desperation, by non-democratic means, influending legislation, enforcement and economic policy in general. It is not, like in your example below, like the weather. They will take us to war for their profits. Trafficked humans, miners who have to shop at the company store, sweat shop workers all have to make choices in situations often partially or even completely created by people who can set market prices.

And those same employers will make damn sure that their labor - or even no labor at all - gets paid at a value they like. They made the financial crisis through making the government pass laws that allowed them to make even more money through not laboring. IOW they can make an incredible market value for having someone else play with derivatives, based on products with little value. And in the process fuck up the whole planets economy and never make the slightest noise about paying anything back for their non-labor getting the value of billions of hours of other people’s labor.

Really? You’re there and you would charge a huge sum of money. I doubt it. You might vote for polices that end up being similar, but face to face with that guy, I truly doubt you would be repulsive.

I am sure some cherry picked examples like this one exist. I would guess there are other ways to prevent the problems, but not coincidentally these benefit the corporations, wherease the others might primarily benefit the people in need.

Of course it sometimes is. But I am not presenting a blanket rule countering yours. I am saying that this idea of the market determining value somehow justifies repulsivness doesnt work.

That bottle of water does not have that value.

I think I can see the issue that you’re pointing out here, and I think the issue can be cleared up by breaking it down a little more.

It’s interesting that quantities, e.g. in math are named “values”. The value of “1”, or any other number is a product of valuing relative “extension” in the world. Extension is independent of opinion or how one feels about it - perhaps the units used reflect something of the kinds of scales that one is interested in, but that’s about it.
This is in stark contrast to qualitative valuations that are much harder to reduce to discrete units: what is “1 consent”?

This is why critics of Capitalism have qualms over the authority of pricing. I would suggest that the market doesn’t take in qualitative inputs or procude qualitative outputs - like a computer it takes in quantities and spits out quantities, but what matters is the qualities that these quantities represent when evaluated by the humans determining the inputs and the outputs. When determining pricing, the price maker’s interests are in setting the price so that when it’s multiplied by the number of people who buy the thing, a maximum value is achieved. The price taker’s interests are in paying the minimum price without having to forego the purchase. To the extent to which the latter is included in the former, the price maker wants the maximum price without the price taker foregoing the purchase - and we see a clear conflict of interest.
The problem I’m posing is the qualitative valuation of foregoing the purchase on the side of the price taker: when this valuation is high enough, both paying the price and foregoing the purchase are not preferable when the price maker can use their power to take advantage of this fact: their power residing in the degree to which they’ll be fine either way. I’ve read you arguing that both sides of any trade “profit”, but this simply isn’t true to the degree that the relative situations of both the price maker and price taker differ.

I’ve not denied the power of the market dispassionately rationing the myriad quantitative inputs that it receives, and I acknowledge that the price makers are dispassionate when rationalising the course of action that achieves the most profit for them. The problem is the price takers picking up the pieces - their situation can be lose-lose in proportion to the inequality in qualitative valuation at either side of the quantitative market mechanism. The lack of qualitative sympathy of the quantitivative market mechanism, and the possibility for price makers to consider nothing more than how to operate the market machinery, is where the immorality lies.

It reminds me of the changes in military training since the world wars where soldiers would suffer from “trigger finger” and become unable to reconcile the stresses of their lives being in immediate and potentially unknown danger, and inflicting the same upon the enemy who they are required to kill whether they are ok with that or not. Since then, soldiers were instead training to reflexively pull the trigger as soon as the proper kind of target revealed itself - bypassing the brain or at least any moral valuation that they would otherwise encounter. They dispassionately operate the firearm as a price maker would the market, and it’s too bad what happens to the target, or the price taker. Drone strikes are an even better example, since the price maker is removed from the consequences of operating the mechanism.

I don’t think there’s any messy recurssion when the situation is broken down as above.

Think of government as just another customer/company. The market itself is nothing but a system of distribution and redistribution - profit itself is redistribution: everyone in the business does their part to bring in revenues that come into everyone in the business, but the employees are contracted to take their standardised share such that there is enough that can be redistributed to the employer in order to make a profit. Government redistribution is just the same as for any other employer, except they can serve to bolster the price-making power of otherwise price takers, which is the whole problem in the eyes of the Capitalist price makers. So long as Capitalists can overpower government, the redistribution effects of the government’s custom tends instead to simply reinforce and justify the status quo for the powerful, or even swing the power even more in favour of the powerful - as you mentioned later on in your post. As such, the information isn’t diminished, it’s just altered just the same as if a huge customer like the government entered the market and disrupted the power imbalance that would otherwise ensue if there was no regulation. A government working in favour of the price takers generates a more real value in that it’s not so influenced by power imbalance - and like you say only up until the point which is this more real value that could otherwise be reached if not for the free market.

I do agree that rational and pro-social advertising in the sense of providing raw information, such as pricing, where to get something, how long it will take etc - quantative facts that can be checked objectively - this is good. Not enforced upon you though, just easily available if you want to look - but equally not present in everyday life if you don’t want to look. Reducing search costs? Fine by me. Branding? This one needs to be broken down. There’s “having a name”, and there’s branding this name into everyone’s brain using psychologically manipulative techniques from simple repetition, through associations encouraged by the company irrespective of the customer’s direct experience with the company, to intentionally tricking potential consumers into desiring a product or service in which they would otherwise not have had any interest. The rationale of the last one is of course “the customer doesn’t know what they want (subtext: so we’ll tell them what they want)”. Let them figure it out for themselves! Proving your company name through quality and reaping the benefits: yes. The use of irrationality in and around this goal? No.

I think we’re on the same page here.

Yeah this is true. Who watches the watchmen?

AI is a third option - surpassing the ability of decentralising power to tend towards monopoly, surpassing the centralisation of power to potentially only expedite the same process, taking the ability for humans to be immoral away from humans. Each has its issues of course.

It’s more natural for humans to think multiplicatively rather than additionally - that is to say that people tend to value proportionally, just how you’re describing. Valuing $1 when you have $1000 just the same as if you have $10 is something you have to learn against your instincts. And even if you do, you won’t find the richest people counting pennies quite like the poorest people - that is, if it’s you who’s making the decision. Certain types of people will defend a cent being taken from them with much the same conviction that they will defend any amount, even if they wouldn’t bend down to pick up plenty of them if they were lying unclaimed on the street with nobody looking.

It’s these contradicting valuations, which are all too human, that get in the way of the obvious utility in “moving excess dollars that lay idle with the rich” as you say.

Plenty of incredibly rich people will put the money into drugs or gambling… never mind the poor!

Investment itself is a gamble, and in that sense capitalism is itself gambling, and the payoff is the drug. It’s the employees who pay the price for the gamble, and who supply the capitalist’s drugs.

Carleas-
cherry picking the hurricane situation doesn’t counter what I am saying. my position is not that the market never reaches an effective or good value for a product, just that it’s radically insufficient. And further there are other ways to prevent hoarding and solve the problems you brought up. They might not give the businesses as much profit, however, since they would help people in need. Those with power can affect the circumstances of those without, in a sense creating the situation of the guy in the desert who needs the water. Whom, by the way, you personally would not charge 1000bucks, but would give him your water bottle if this was no risk to your life. So we have a system that regularly acts against how you would act. In 2008 when a lot of products the rich were selling way beyond their value affected radically the lives of people around the world, the rich made no call to compensate, though they call with great effectiveness when it affects the value of the products of their labor and even the products of their not-labor. In that that’s where the crisis came from. They manipulated democracy to fit their desire to be able to make more money through not laboring and such is their power that they could easily get a democrat to approve this. So they then had other people play with derivatives for them. More value for no product.

They take us to war for their products.

They undermine democracy in ohter countries and have started, since gaining independence form the West, doing this domestically also in more complete ways. Once the type of games they played with the IMF and the third world, where dictators would build up loans and the IMF later forced the gutting of social systems and any protectionist practices, democratically arrived at or not, are now games they are playing in the West.

You are treating the market price’s context as if it is weather, and the price of labor as if it is weather. But it’s not. My one off as you call it is actually a kinder to them example. That guy needing water might very well be an idiot. But when the corporation create the desperate conditions themselves it is even more morally repugnant.

I mean, if the guy in the desert was a dad, perhaps he’d sell his wife to human traffickers so his daughter got the water before he died. I don’t think it makes any sense or is naive,
morally or otherwise,

to say choosing to have his wife turned into a sexual slave

is NOT the value of a bottle of water.

But both parents might very well choose to pay this price to save their child.

It’s apples and bicycles…yes, your framing sounds better.

But it’s still morally repugnant behavior.

Note the irony: they frame the issues allow ‘our’ determining of value to set the price, almost as if we are in control. When it is precisely the opposite.

Anyone with money can take someone else’s idea, employ someone who knows about it and/or someone who knows about setting up a business and/or someone who knows how to manage one and/or some number of people to actually fulfill the business operations…

There is literally nothing inherent in the role of “Capitalist” that necessarily involves adding anything at all to the chain of production, starting/adding the chain of production itself, or even coming up with the idea of the chain of production. The fact that there are examples of Capitalists doing any of these things is “undistributed” where your point is “distrubuted”.

Minor detail.

Your formal fallacy is affirming the consequent (P→Q, Q) → P:
Capitalists in a capitalist society set up businesses, therefore to set up businesses you need capitalists in a capitalist society. Wrong.
Another formal fallacy that fits your thinking is the modal fallacy: a capitalist society is possible, it’s possible for a capitalist to set up businesses, therefore it’s necessarily capitalists who set up businesses and/or you need a capitalist society to do so.
Your informal fallacy is the fallacy of association, where you associate setting up businesses with capitalists, when this is only circumstantial to capitalist society.

Just think of all the people with ideas for businesses, who don’t have the money and/or know how to set up a business and/or have the contacts/credit score to set one up…

Just think of all the ingenuity and creativity that could be present in this world if only you didn’t have to be a capitalist to realise it.