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From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Wage Rates: Unions, Minimum Wage Laws, and Employer Oligopoly
Message-ID: <63@spar.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Feb-85 04:30:25 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.63
Posted: Mon Feb  4 04:30:25 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Feb-85 06:04:19 EST
References: <811@ratex.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
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First of all, thank you, Daniel, for beginning to post articles in 
something approximating conversational English.  Your earlier postings 
were so swathed in jargon that I had assumed that your intent was to 
impress and to obscure, rather than to inform.  On to the flak:

>      In a Free Economy, wage-rates are established by the Law of Supply and
> Demand.  At each possible wage-rate, employers will have a corresponding
> demand for labour, such that the amount of labour demanded will generally
> decrease as the price of labour increases; this is because
> employers will hire employees as long as it pays to, and it will pay to so
> long as the price of labour does not exceed the MVP (marginal value product).
> (etc.)

This analysis (or at least the acceptance of it as a description of
a reasonable state of affairs) is unfortunately blind to the effects 
of technology on the value of labor.  Someone has put the objection 
far better than I could: (quote courtesy steiny@scc)

    Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present
    situation  if  I say that the first industrial revolution, the
    revolution of the "dark satanic mills," was the devaluation of
    the  human  arm  by the competition of machinery.  There is no
    rate of pay at which a United States pick and  shovel  laborer
    can live which is low enough to compete with a steam shovel as
    an excavator.  The modern industrial revolution  is  similarly
    bound  to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and
    more routine decisions.  Of course, just  as  a  skilled  car-
    penter,  the  skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in
    some degree survived the first industrial revolution,  so  the
    skilled scientist and the skilled adminstrator may survive the
    second.  However, given the second revolution as accomplished,
    the  average  human  being of mediocre attainments or less has
    nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy.

    The answer, of course, is to have a  society  based  on  human
    values other than buying and selling.

			Norbert Wiener
			*Cybernetics*