Socialists Don’t Understand Wages

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Clarissa

April 18, 2014

Strangely, the Socialist magazine I bought is proving way too conservative for me. To give an example, a review of a book on the globalized economy states that the global economic crisis of the 1970s happened, to a large degree, because the wages were too high.

I’m reading a lot about the economy of the 1970s for my new research project, and I can tell you that it’s a load of stinky, stale baloney. The wages were not “too high.” What happened is that, to counteract the diminishing growth in the productivity of capital in the 1970s, wages were declared an expense and nothing but an expense. Wages started to be seen as part of those pesky production costs everybody wants to minimize.

And if your question is, “But what else can wages be if not an expense?” this just goes to show how profoundly this way of thinking has been interiorized. s

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6 responses to “Socialists Don’t Understand Wages”

anon

April 18, 2014

Well I’ve evidentially internalized that message. So now I’m really curious, if wages weren’t classified as an expense, then what were they?

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 18, 2014
  
  Investment. This is still true for successful small business people. My sister, for instance, clucks around her employees like a mother hen because their happiness, creativity, health and contentment are her assets. Larger companies, however, forget all about that.
  
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musteryou

April 18, 2014

What are termed “socialists”, even by themselves, are often just Christian moralists who want to sacrifice and face austerity because they have a mystical notion that this would help the developing world.

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 18, 2014
  
  More often than not, they want somebody else to face austerity to help the developing world. 🙂 But you are right, this is a VERY religious movement.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    April 19, 2014
    
    In reality I think that pseudo-socialists want to make only themselves suffer. If they can make those around them suffer, that is only of benefit if it influences themselves. making rich people suffer is too much of a trial for the imagination and most peudos are not up to that.
    
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Tim

April 19, 2014

I have seen bosses go even further with wages and divide them into profiting and non-profiting expenses. See, an employee that paints a product costs X euros an hour, but produces n goods for Y euros profit. That is a profiting expense. An employee who does janitorial stuff and repairs lamps and whatever is not involved in the production chain. His wage is a non-profiting expense.

This kind of thinking often comes into play when budgets are planned. Why invest into an department that does not even make you money?!

And of course, this only the horrible and idiotic businesspeople think like this, but I have seen it happen quite often.

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