I feel confident in supporting your economic opinions now that I know you’re a mathematics major. Your calculating skills must be useful in terms of understanding economics.
I’m laughing pretty hard right now. I just checked the net revenue of some of these “exploitative companies” and its pretty low.
After expenses, Nike/GAP only get about 10% of every sale… so much for the fantasy that it only costs 1 dollar to make a t-shirt and they keep the other $49.
Wal-mart only gets 3% off each sale…
Compare this to the liberal college student’s beloved Apple Inc which earns 15% off every sale… makes me lol.
(numbers are off wikipedia… net income / revenue. I’m not a stock market guy so maybe this is wrong, but its still pretty funny)
Biased against what? Lies & fallacies?
Yeah, I guess it was pretty bias…
If someone feels some set of workers should earn more money, then the person complaining should open their own factory and offer higher wages. After all, the assumption is that if wages can be raised that there must be ‘excessive’ profit floating around.
So either these profits aren’t there and through competition labor prices have already adjusted to productivity, OR it’s actually not possible to compete for those people’s wages; that situation is only possible through … laws. But you never hear them complaining about those laws. Or about governments sending other corrupt governments money because they have a bad economy, which gives those rulers incentives to keep the economy bad.
Well they kept cutting off and putting words in the mouth of that black chick, which made me feel like they were trying to hide something. Also in the ‘debate’ with the college students, they only showed them getting burned, which they should only be getting burned, its just I doubt that that’s actually what happened. The news correspondent didn’t seem like the sharpest apple in the deck of cards.
It’s amazing to me to see these harpies screeching against “child labour”. They should come on a tour of Africa with me. The typical life-expectancy is in the mid-forties and, in many places, the majority of the able-bodied population is under the age of twenty-one. By demanding an end to “child labour” they’re effectively demanding unemployment for the primary segment of the population most able and in need of work.
If I knew what was being hidden it wouldn’t be hidden would it?
Reasonable conjecture.
Conza you troll [|-)]
Nope, completely reasonable statement considering what you’ve said. I don’t think you got the link, but that’s ok.
Have you taken any undergrad econ classes? You probably should.
I think you did an excellent job. You asked questions. Make them defend their position and just keep questioning their inconsistencies (like you did with the idea of minimum wages). Now, imagine if instead of being the only person in class that understood these things, you moved to New Hampshire with the free state project and had hundreds and thousands of other people around that understood.
@OP:
Sounds like you have a good handle of the topics, good job IMO. It’s fun shocking people with views they’ve never heard, and cannot refute because they’ve been told lies for so long.
Yes. I’m minoring in economics.
That was meant to be for krazy kalu by the way
One last thing.
After this discussion came to an end, we moved right along to knowledge and technology [read: IP]. The official class story is that [classical] liberals necessarily favor IP because they believe in property rights. I just cringed inwardly.
Last year, I had an argument with an economics professor on the gold standard. The entire debate lasted, maybe, ten minutes. I don’t remember why I brought it up (we might have been talking about money, and maybe he was blasting gold). But, he presented two arguments. His first was that, “There isn’t enough gold.” I addressed that, and although he didn’t concede, he recoiled and then switched to, “It would take us back to the barter system.” The second objection, obviously, is completely ridiculous, but then another student intervenes with, “Wouldn’t privatization create a monopoly in money?” (I think I was talking about money, the Federal Reserve and the Austrian credit cycle theory). I guess the professor saw where it was going and decided to cut my response short and continue with the lecture.
I wrote a paper on the Austrian business cycle theory, and he gave me an A (perfect score). But, I don’t think he agreed with me.
You’re lucky your professor wasn’t arguing with you from a micro perspective. I had to deal with that during a microeconomics class, and it was suggested by the book that minimum wage’s consequence of job shortage could be assuaged by spreading hours. I made note that even by spreading hours, the hours lost represents wages lost, and so even if you assume that everybody could keep their job by spreading hours, they would still make that much less money. And, we all know that it never works as evenly as that.
To be fair, education is an investment. To go through education you need to accumulate capital. When the government pays for an education, it just takes someone else’s capital and invests it into a student. This is a perfect example on how a government malinvests. It doesn’t have the information necessary to choose what students should study what majors, and it creates discoordination in the labor markets… which is why we have a disproportionate amount of unemployed people with bachelors degrees. A free-market in labor, including education, would better help coordinate the division of labor. I’m sure many of us would have missed a chance at getting a nice piece of paper and credentials, but these are neither absolutely necessary (especially in a society with less amount of graduates) and if you really want them you can always accumulate capital to pay for your way through an education (or ask for donations, et cetera).
In any case, although this is an example of how government can screw with the market, education (whether intellectual education, or being taught how to use a certain machine) is a form of investment, which necessitates capital accumulation.
Take math classes. Lots and lots of math classes. Or, are you that mathematics major?
Yes, I am a math major, with a minor in economics. I graduate in May.