give me some examples of proper austro-libertarian arguments to combat this:
"No raises for 6 years but the owner has 3 new cars every year. No money for the holiday party, but the owner has just bought a new vacation home with cash. Profits were only up 8%, so we’ll have to lay a couple of people off. "
the person who made these arguments to me also stated the need for ‘government oversight’ in all manners of the economy. any theory i put forth about marginal revenue product or labor theory of value just went in one ear and out the other and they went back to why the owner makes more money than employees being unfair.
im looking for a good argument to defeat the argument of ‘why cant the owner give us a little of his money so us workers can enjoy a better life and level the playing field.’
If owners/employers have it so good (milk and honey) just save up from your salary enough to start a business of your own and become an owner/employer yourself. You’ve obviously made your choice, so live with it, or simply leave. Nobody is holding a gun to your head.
Aye. If the profit margins are so good (btw, how much does the owner use for personal consumption?) there’s good reason to enter the industry and compete. Exceptions? Legally protected industries such as pharmaceuticals. Again though, there’s high risk involved in the research they engage in, hence high compensation. Liberals are idiots for the most part. People making arguments like that are not exempt from that characterisation…
It’s government oversight that protects corporate executives from competition by making it ever more difficult to takeover a corrupt corporation through a hostile buyout.
A truly free system would reward each worker according to his capabilities and each business according to how successful it were. A good worker treated poorly would no doubt find somebody else willing to hire him for a better wage and better conditions. At the same time a bad business owner would go bust in a very short time: his best workers would soon move to greener pastures and his extravagant expenses would bankrupt the company soon. Banks would have no reason to bail out somebody who cannot run a business successfully.
Most of us think themselves much more important or indispensable than they truly are. Marxism with its old slogan “From everybody according to his means, to everybody according to its needs” wrought infinite damages. Ask this person if he’s a Marxist. Of course he isn’t; he’s an American, he cannot be a Marxist…
i tried alot of these lines of thought, but you all gave me some more ammo.
im looking for the ultimate most bulletproof argument to bring up in our next conversation to shut this down. lots of people try to bring this topic up with me.
simply tell him that his argument (that you qouted for us) was nothing but anecdotal. ask him what theory he brings to bare. i.e. get him to accept that the discussion is about economics and that the parties in the discussion are obliged to become informed about economics and economic concepts. In broad strokes value theory, catallactics, etc…
Remember that large corporations and uber-high salaries are, in large part, a symptom of state interference in the market. By continually raising the barrier to entry to the market via regulations and taxes, the established players command larger and larger profit margins as their less well-politically-connected competitors dry up and wither on the vine. Most CEOs are very plugged into the political orbits. The distinction between “private sector” and “public sector” is artificial since most high-level “public sector” employees have large private sector holdings and/or income and most high-level “private sector” employees (CEOs, board members, corporate consultants, etc.) have large social networks in the public sector.
What does this mean? CEOs of many of the largest corporations probably do earn far above what they would in a free market. But that’s just it, the problem isn’t that the market is too free, it’s that it is too political. In a free market, producers have to compete with everybody who take an interest in producing in their market… entry to the market is free… that’s the “free” in free market. In highly political markets, entry to the market is tightly controlled so that producers only have to compete with established players while government regulators do the dirty work of killing small-time competitors and keeping start-ups from surviving.
The complaints of leftists are usually real. The problem is that their diagnosis and prognosis are pure quackery.
During a recession the stock of productive capital is less than the supply of labor that can be used to employ it. In that case, if one still has a job, it is not possible to find a new employer.
let’s assume everyone has an equal salary and somehow the same amount of goods are produced. everyone has equal bidding power. naturally, more money will be spent on consumer goods. this will drive up their price to prevent shortages. but now consumer goods sellers are making more money. so we confiscate that and dole it back out with equal shares to everyone.
essentially you have destroyed all prices, at least in their relevant sense. no one has any incentive to change prices as their post-tax income is equal no matter if shortages are alleviated through pricing or not. no one has an incentive to start a new consumers good business to compete and produce more of the types of goods that have shortages. no one has any incentive to produce more of what consumers want. everyone would find a job or employ themselves doing whatever they felt like. there will be massive shortages of all goods…unless the government ran the show using violence as an incentive. That’s slavery.
that’s the extreme example. tell him imagine half of that. essentially what he would do is distort prices and produce less of what consumers desired. to some extent this would result in more people dying, and a simultaneous repression of freedom.
REDISTRIBUTING MONEY DOESN’T PUT MORE FOOD ON PEOPLE’S PLATES. IT SIMPLY UNDERMINES THE INCENTIVES FOR PRODUCING WHAT ALREADY IS PRODUCED. It fails on both moral principles of keeping what you freely earn and utilitarian principles.
Why can’t the workers give the business owner a sufficient amount of “capital” first? Then, the workers can receive a return on their investment. Of course, the workers could lose their entire investment if the business fails. So, the worker does not put up the capital, but does not stand lose either. He takes his pay check and goes home. Your friend won’t understand this argument either, because he does not understand the risk involved in being an entrepreneur. But there are many good points already mentioned in this thread you could use.
No one talked me out of socialism. For me, it happened while preparing income tax returns. I saw what the tax code was doing to average people, a husband and wife with children for example. When I saw how confiscatory it was to the typical middle income family, that was the beginning of my “long march” out of socialism. But it still took years to move from “socialism” to “conservatism”, then more years to finally see the light of liberty and reject the left / right spectrum. Your friend will have to figure it out himself. With the economic crisis that’s coming, and the loss of liberties that it will entail, I think he may see the light sooner than later.