Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!prls!pyramid!ctnews!ios!garyt From: garyt@ios.Convergent.COM (Gary Tse) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Future Work (was Re: prognostications about expert systems) Message-ID: <971@ios.Convergent.COM> Date: 10 Apr 90 01:14:43 GMT References: <53291@bbn.COM> <3923@plains.UUCP> <1347@anvil.oz> <3994@plains.UUCP> <2692@ultb.isc.rit.edu> Reply-To: garyt@ios.UUCP (Gary Tse) Organization: Raoul Duke School of Journalism Lines: 84 | In article <3994@plains.UUCP> stinnett@plains.UUCP (M.G. Stinnett) writes: | >Labor is just another raw material. | | Labor is human beings. Labor is you and I, our lives. | When you put a price on that you pervert the meaning of our lives. This makes for nice rhetorics, but it is simply not true. If the reason for human existence is labor, then it MIGHT be perversion to place a price upon it. But of course object of living is not labor. Work is simply one of the many things we do. Or are you using "labor" to mean the set of persons who performs work for a business enterprise? This is a nice but unfortunately outdated concept. Look around you. Labor is not exclusively HUMAN labor any more. BTW, why is it perversion to place a value on human lives? Do you mean that you do NOT place a value on your life? If a life has no value, why go on living? | >You can dictate the price to a certain | >extent, but if you go too far you will screw up the demand and everything | >will break down. The new minimum wage probably won't affect too many jobs; | >say a few million teenagers will loose out. Inflation has helped mitigate | >the impact. But if you raise it to, say, $6 per hour, you'll put a lot | >of business and people out of work completely. Then you can expect the | >black market to take over and fill in the gaps, but then you won't get | >the tax revenues to pay for all the other makework programs. | | This cost analysis is beside the main point, but unfortunately | it is the main point to most people today. | Humanity cannot be measured in terms of dollars. Now, nothing you said is strictly false. The cost analysis really has NOTHING to do with humanity. I agree with that, and I think most folks will agree that there is more to life than just dollars and cents. However, you CANNOT invalidate the cost analysis by pointing out its lack of relation to humanity. You have to attack the cost analysis on its own merit. I have yet to see this done. But I have to commend you on your rhetorics again. You really are punching all the correct gut-level emotional response buttons. | >Finally, your comment about those evil corporations enslaving people at | >$4 per hour to flip burgers: You know, no one has to work for McDonalds. | >They are free to sell their labor to the highest bidder. But for many | >teenagers and others, that $4 per hour job is the first step on the way | >to bigger and better jobs. | | If wages are allowed to fall to what the market can get away with, | people working those jobs will not be able to earn a living. | Well, they're free to not earn a living, one may say, if nobody who'll | pay more wants them and the job they have won't pay them more. | Actually, people are not free to just not earn a living. | People must earn a living; that's a constant which conflicts with and | must take precidence over market demands. Hold it. People MUST earn a living? Where does this moral imperative come from? Again, this is a clever sleight of hand. In today's society, a person must earn a living in order to live in a reasonable manner. So indeed you can claim that one has an imperative to work, as it is an extension of the imperative to live. But you are implying something else here. You are saying that one not only has an imperative to earn a living, one also has the imperative to ensure that EVERYONE ELSE also earns a living. This is a much more suspect statement, and its validity and practicality is recently much questioned (re collapse of communist economies). Maybe it is true that I have a moral obligation to pay for my neighbor's daughter's braces. But you will have to prove that to me with a shotgun. | I'm not an economist, and I'm not claiming that our lives are better | with or without a minimum wage. I'm complaining about the | overall way Mr. Stinnett is approching the whole issue of labor. Sir, you may not be an economist, but you should consider a career in politics. May god have mercy on us all. -- Gary Tse, garyt@ios.Convergent.COM || ..!pyramid!ctnews!ios!garyt tse@soda.Berkeley.EDU || ..!ucbvax!soda!tse tse@netcom.UUCP || ..!amdahl!netcom!tse "We are errant knaves all; trust none of us."