Great - not only does he lack the faculty of reason but now he can’t read.
So you think your services as a criminal justice lawyer could be supplied by one of the other McDonalds employees if there was sufficient demand. We could just really really really need a criminal justice lawyer and by force of will - poof - McDonalds workers turn into lawyers instantly and without any time delay or requirement for further training. All those years of flipping burgers made them perfectly competent and knowledgable criminal justice lawyers.
Dude, I hope I never need your services… you couldn’t argue your way into a whorehouse with a hand full of hundred dollar bills.
I never denied the existence of a time delay but i did refute the notion that someone would have to leave their job in order to get a new one,or train for another job. For example I could work at McDonald’s and at the same time i could also be attending law school.
my point is that unemployment does not need to occur in order for workers to switch sectors.
you might never need my services because i intend to be a public defender and work for those individuals who can not afford a lawyer.
they would not have to leave their job in order train for one…that is what i ment.
this all makes perfect sense because manny people are attending college,law school,grad school,and medical school may need to find a job so that they can pay the cost of things like tution,food and so forth. The fact that it cost money to attend these institutions show that individuals may need to find work.
OK, well in that case we face another problem. Imagine that your primary job is not at McDonalds (which was one of the few companies to see their shares go up in value last year) but was instead digging holes and filling them in again - which is to say, imagine that your first job is not profitable… it is loss making to the economy as a whole.
IF that is the case (ignoring any argument about that point for the moment) and you want to keep that job while you’re training to be a lawyer or a teacher or whatever, someone else has to pay for BOTH the salary of your old job AND your training for the new profession. Perhaps you can pay for the training out of your old salary. OK - but in this case you still have a situation where your current (non profitable) employment must be subsidized.
The problem effectively boils down to this: you’re going to need enough people doing profitable work to sustain the people doing not profitable work. How do you propose we differentiate between the two (what is profitable and what is not)?
Typically this task is performed by the pricing system. When companies start up the shareholders put in funds and then they keep accounts recording all their revenues (incoming) and expenses (outgoing). The revenues are an estimate of the value of the goods that the companies provides to the market (as valued by the market). The expenses are an estimate of the value of the goods consumed by the company in order to sustain its operation (again as valued by the market). When expenses exceed revenues, this means the company is loss making - it takes more to sustain its existence than it’s worth - essentially the company is a burden on the economy.
Now, typically when companies are loss making their shareholders call for their dissolution because the shareholders are the ones paying for all the goods the company purchases… consumers only pay for the stuff the company sells - which is to say that shareholders have to wear the losses when the company is not profitable (consumers don’t care - they get a good deal either way - if this was not the case then they simply wouldn’t buy the products).
What you’re suggesting is that the government should step in to subsidize loss making organizations (government and/or private) so that they can employ loss making employees. How will the government choose which organizations to subsidies and which employees to keep and which ones to let go, if it is not to use a system identical to the one I described above (the keeping of accounts to evaluate the profitability or otherwise of their activities)? There quite simply is no other way?
At the moment, a whole lot of companies are going out of business and a whole lot of people are losing their jobs. If the government is to step in and prevent those people from losing their jobs they will not be investing in profitable activities but in loss making ones. And the money that the government uses to fund these loss making activities must necessarily come from profitable ones - thus preventing the expansion of employment in the profitable sectors of the economy.
So my question for you (and the problem you must solve) is how do you propose that the government, initially investing in loss making activities at the expense (and thus reduction) of profitable ones in the economy will bring about the transition from encouraging non-profitable to encouraging profitable activities? The answer is that this is quite literally impossible. From the moment that they start getting involved all they have done is to increase the amount of loss making activity and decrease the amount of profitable activity - thus making the prospect of profitable employment even harder than it was before their involvement. The longer they persist to meddle, the more impossible it becomes for them to climb back up the slippery slope they have started to walk down without provoking even greater unemployment. Everything they do to stave of unemployment in the present merely brings about greater unemployment further down the line.
I’m not pandering to willful ignorance. Stop patronizing everyone here.
To become a teacher (your example) requires at a minimum (assuming you already have a bachelor’s degree) two years of full-time schooling and certification. This is pretty much true, everywhere in the U.S.
Furthermore, due to the uniformity of the school calendar and the miniscule proportion of teachers who die, quit, or retire in any given year, most districts only hire teachers in late summer for the upcoming school year. So, even if you’re otherwise qualified to teach, and you lose your job in September, unless someone dies or gets fired, it’s not likely that there will even be job vacancies to which you can apply, for another 9 or 10 months.
In Michigan, you’re technically not even allowed to hold a job as a 1L student. Some people do, but you’re not supposed to. After that, you’re advised to seek a position clerking for an attorney/judge, part time, with no benefits, while you spend or borrow $20,000 - $40,000 per year taking courses that only prepare you to take the Bar Exam, which depending on where you take it, may not even have reciprocity with other states.
Ummm, if unemployment is high because of lack of demand (this is part of the Keynesian diagnosis, isn’t it?) then where are these people going to seek gainful employment? Just curious.
this thread has been hit by a full on
//OK, well in that case we face another problem. Imagine that your primary job is not at McDonalds (which was one of the few companies to see their shares go up in value last year) but was instead digging holes and filling them in again - which is to say, imagine that your first job is not profitable… it is loss making to the economy as a whole.//
it may not be profitble,but those workers who recieved wages no have money to spend. What happens to the employer who know,but i do not like dealing in realm of the abstract because most people only use it so that they can make up bullshit.
//is how do you propose that the government, initially investing in loss making activities at the expense (and thus reduction) of profitable ones in the economy will bring about the transition from encouraging non-profitable to encouraging profitable activities? The answer is that this is quite literally impossible.//
in the long run somethings are more productive the other things,but it is impossible to know when a certain technology or economic sector will vanish from the face of this earth(the horse and buggy are still around,but it is just not being used in the same capacity as it was before the car).
//Everything they do to stave of unemployment in the present merely brings about greater unemployment further down the line.//
look you already made enough claims without backing them up,and although you did this more then once again i am only going to point to this one sentence to serve as an example.
Seriously, I don’t think I can really help resolve this discussion, but I can’t just sit on the sideline anymore.
Most certainly someone who is currently employed can stay employed while training for a new job. The point, however, was that someone who has lost their job will need time to settle somewhere else. You took the example of an investment banker who had been laid off, and said it is perfectly rational to assume he could train for a new job while staying on as an investment banker. You forgot that you already accepted that he was laid off. How can someone be laid off, AND stay on the job? Please tell me that was a joke, I certainly am amused.
Those workers receive money from somewhere for sure. And since they are in some industry that is not profitable, they are sucking more money out of other things, how is that good?
I think you are right, it is impossible to know when a technology or sector will vanish. I don’t understand your point though. How is leaving the decision up to government as to what technologies to pursue better than leaving it to entrepreneurs?
That whole post was about how the government creates massive inefficiencies in the economy. I guess if we got rid of machinery and all worked by hand in agriculture, unemployment could be lower in the future, but I think the point is that to increase production, unemployment will be necessary later in times of adjustment. Basically, we want production to become more and more efficient as time passes. By sacrificing efficiency for higher employment, we only delay necessary adjustments. I admit that’s not a very good explanation, so maybe I’ll think about it and try to answer any response better. However, for you to say that was a claim without backing is kind of ridiculous because I think it was pretty apparent through the whole post.
Also, it would be nice if you used proper blockquotes here. I think it is js, but if you’re running something like “noscripts” you can use the following:
(quote user=“user name”) quoted passage (/quote)
but replace the parentheses with square brackets.
Jesus Huerta de Soto in Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (http://mises.org/books/desoto.pdf) p. 417, on the central role played by fractional reserve banking in causing booms and busts:
“[T]he theoretical, legal, and economic analysis carried out
here is aimed at demonstrating that economic crises are not an
inevitable by-product of market economies, but on the contrary,
result from a privilege governments have granted banks,
allowing them, with respect to monetary demand deposits, to
act outside the traditional legal principles of private property,
principles vital to market economies. Thus credit expansion
and economic cycles arise from an institutionally-forced violation
of the property rights involved in the monetary bankdeposit
contract. Therefore crises are in no way inherent in the
capitalist system, nor do they inevitably emerge in a market economy
subject to the general legal principles that constitute its essential
legal framework, an economy in which no privileges are conferred.”