General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Fast-Food Strikes Expand Across U.S. to 50 Cities [View all]Flatulo
(5,005 posts)I'm sure we can agree that time has value, we mortals being allotted only so much of it.
I'm going to intersperse my replies within your post for the sake of continuity...
Every skill beyond the most basic hunting/gathering/primitive agricultural, developed because of and depends on society. Therefore, every skill is required to keep the thing which allows them to exist and develop, society, going and improving. The garbage collector and the neurosurgeon are both necessary to society, and you place a greater value on the neurosurgeon because her skills are so much more specific and difficult to develop.
I almost wish you hadn't chosen garbage collector for your analogy - that job is quite physically demanding and their backs are usually destroyed by the time they're in their forties. But the work is relatively well-compensated. Most trash collectors are unionized and reap a good wage and an excellent benefit package. On the other hand, fast food service just isn't that difficult. I did it for a year as did tens of millions of other young adults back in the day. I understand that many adults now rely on it as their primary source of income. But let's stay with garbage collectors and neurosurgeons for now.
However, if you take two identical civilizations and remove all the neurosurgeons from one and all the garbage collectors from the other, which will collapse? Does that mean that the garbage collector is more valuable than the neurosurgeon?
This line of reasoning implies a reciprocity that just doesn't exist. The neurosurgeon can always pick up the garbage with very minimal training (as long as they're physically able), but the garbage collector cannot perform neurosurgery. The only way to (successfully) perform neurosurgery is to make the investment of time, usually 16 years or so, and money (either one's own or society's) to acquire the skills to do so.
Both the garbage collector and the neurosurgeon are human beings with their one life. On what rational, logical, objective basis do you declare the neurosurgeon's life is worth more than the garbage collector?
I make no such claim, and I don't know anyone who does. If the garbage collector needs medicine or triple bypass surgery, he or she gets it (generally - I know there are exceptions but we're working to close this gap; we should be working much harder). What I claim is that the value of their labor is not equal, or even close to equal. Because the neurosurgeon has made a massive investment of time and/or money to gain his or her skills, the only way that their labor can be equally valued is if both time and money have no value. Do you want to make this claim? As I alluded to in the title of my reply, time is something we all have very little of, and money is something we all wish we had more of. If that doesn't constitute value, than I don't know what does.
After all, society as a whole can exist perfectly well without the neurosurgeon, while it dissolves very quickly without someone taking the trash out.
This is certainly true for what I'll call natural or primitive (I hope this doesn't sound too insulting) societies, and that's a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, but not one that is made so much in large scale these days. I like having modern medical care. I like having a computer and the Internet. I like being able to get about the countryside in my Audi S4. I like that when I flick a switch my 42" TV with 500 channels comes on to entertain me. None of these things would be possible if at least some of us didn't choose to learn math and science and physics and medicine. None of these things would be possible if at least some of us hadn't busted our asses learning very hard stuff. And speaking as one who's busted his ass to learn some very hard stuff indeed, I assure you that I did it at least in very large part because of the promise of a good wage. Everyone I went to engineering school with looked forward to making a good living after 4 or 6 or 8 years of difficult study. I went to a ridiculously difficult and prestigious engineering school, WPI, and we students, coming off of an 12 hour caffein and nicotine fueled study binge, used to joke that if we werent making big bucks by this time next year, someone was going to get hurt. And of the dozens of professionals I've known who emigrated here from Iran, Africa, or former Soviet bloc states, the primary reason they did so was to for the money (some Soviet Jews fled to escape persecution, and some Albanians and Serbs fled to escape war, but they all fled to the West, and the US specifically, because they could command a hefty salary here).
Every member of a society contributes some portion of their life to maintaining and advancing that society, and therefore, each has a claim on that society, and once that claim is recognized by the society, a reviewing of the relative values of skills and contributions is inevitable.
We're in violent agreement here.
This does not demand "equal outcomes"
In fairness to me, I think I could be forgiven for inferring that from your posts.
(a Reich-Wing deflection used for so long, it has become 'common knowledge'), it does demand equal consideration.
Again, we're in violent agreement. I came to DU after a lifetime of more-or-less libertarian outlook because I observed, without any outside influence, that massive and chronic income inequality was going to polarize and ultimately wreck our neat little technological wonder of a society. Some of my earliest posts were rants about the massive compensation packages (I'm talking about $10-20m packages) that were being awarded to people who were actually quite stupid and lazy. I knew these people on a first name basis. Many of them were promoted to Director and VP positions even though they were complete and utter failures as engineers or business people, only because they were kissing this or that ass. They had NOT worked hard to get into these positions. They did not, by any objective standard one can imagine, deserve this level of compensation. There was no shortage of such people that would justify it. In short, it was insanity. It had nothing to do with free markets or invisible hands. It was just greed and connections.
The value of every member of society is not the skills they posses or develop, but the life they contribute in it's function.
This sounds nice, but I'm not entirely certain what it means. I would argue that since we sleep 8 hours, hang out with family and friends 8 hours, and toil 8 hours, that the labors we perform for money are the primary measure of our contribution. Yes, some of us dedicate our downtime, for free, to helping others, but if you put a dollar value on that, then volunteerism becomes a meaningless word.
Enlightened self interest is an interesting idea, it just doesn't exist, and therefore cannot serve as a basis for anything beyond drug fueled debates among those of us that enjoy that kind of thing.
Huh?
Now, this being DU and all, I know I'm going to be completely misquoted, soundly thrashed, told to fuck off and go to F.R., called things that would make a sailor blush, and that's OK, because my psyche will remain intact even if total strangers on an anonymous message board don't love me like a brother. Even so, I do want to make it very clear that I do get income inequality and understand it to be the death of us all. I think we are in need of massive, systemic correction at both the top and the bottom of the wage scale. The bottom is easy - just give people a fucking raise. The top is harder. Since most corporations are publically owned, they have shareholders and Boards of Directors. The Board members set ridiculous compensation packages for company officers, because they in turn are officers of companies on which the people to whom they are ladling out money sit as Board members. It's a good old-fashioned circle jerk. The whole thing is a fucking joke, with no oversight. Then there's the whole issue of compensation packages being comprised mostly of stock, driving corporate officers to make ridiculous decisions (like selling all their technology and assets to the Chinese) based solely on short term gain.
Some of this skulduggery can be fixed with the tax code - for example, bringing back the 50% short-term capital gains tax that I grew up with. Others will be trickier, since the crooks have had 30 years to figure out how rig the outcome. We need to first break the stranglehold that corps have over Congress, repeal Citizens United, etc.