On Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 4:28:27 PM UTC-7, Gary Harnagel wrote:

It takes poverty and a real or imagined
sense of inability to get ahead. Paying people an adequate wage
as Henry Ford did is indeed a good idea, but mandating wages by
fiat (without producing useful goods in return) is self-defeating.

It may be legitimate for a society to guarantee basic survival for those who
don't work. But that can't be a moral imperative, because through much of
history, people had to work twelve hour days to produce enough for their own
basic survival. Today, we're wealthier than that.

Beyond whatever is so cheap a society can afford to give it away, though, of
course people will be expected to be productive in return for a share of what is
in limited supply.

I believe that some of the things essential to human contentment are in limited
supply.

Thus, where I see there to be something our society could perhaps do on the
"social justice" front that it is not doing is... try to ensure that people have
the opportunity to do productive work.

An Einstein can be immensely productive with just a pencil and paper. Most of us
need more than that to work with.

Basically, I think that such confusing and mistaken ideas as the "labor theory of value" arose because capital is the Rodney Dangerfield of the factors of production - it gets no respect. At least from theoretical social reformers.

Land, resources, machinery, and so on: if there aren't enough of those, it's harder for people to produce useful things with their work. That is the fundamental physical limitation that causes unemployment and its problems; merely economic things, like a stock market crash, can indeed be waved away by government action.

John Savard