Thomasio

That's true, but that doesn't make it socialism, because true socialism is actually based on about everything being private property, i.e. factories owned by the workers working in them, rather than factories owned by super rich individuals who serve nobody but just take most of the profit their workers generate. Bashing socialism because some idiot claims his state capitalism to be socialism serves no purpose. Call it what it is and then bash the state capitalism.

I can't help thinking, you're blaming the wrong thing. Venezuela just like Russia are running a deeply corrupt state capitalism. That definitely doesn't work, there are countless examples throughout the world, but calling it socialism doesn't make it socialism, it is and remains state capitalism. Real socialism you find even within capitalism and it's thriving. http://techworker.coop/ The "trick" is, they don't call it socialism, because the word by itself due to the abuse from state capitalism got a bad taste. Richard Wolff has a pretty good comment on this, when he says: "I don't care what they call it, if only they do it."

The best, shortest and most obvious argument against creation I know of is: The throat being one single intake for air as well as for food means, humans can choke on food. If that was a created design, the designer would be downright dumb.

Thanks for your comments. I guess all the arguments have been discussed in detail already, so let me give you one additional point. Take a wild guess, why literally ALL of the gigantic corporations are in favor of abolishing trading barriers and tax laws? Do you honestly believe that's because they have the well being of American citizens in mind, or can you imagine they want that because they expect to increase their profits? What makes you think corporations would leave small business any chance to compete? What makes you think fulfilling the wishes of the richest people in the world would have an advantage for you? Do you honestly believe corporations want to terminate the state because that would give small business a chance and create more competition for them, or can you imagine they want that because it would make it easier for them to eliminate competition?

There is nothing wrong in letting machines work for us, but there is a lot wrong in letting machines replace half of our jobs while not decreasing the working hours for the people because that leads under all circumstances to insane wealth for the owners of the machines, very low wages for the half of the workers that still have a job and plain poverty for the other half. The common argument, if such a machine was generating so much wealth, then everybody could build such a machine and get rich is the same nonsense as claiming everybody could get a job in a 40 hour week. We have in fact seen a gigantic wave of such enterprises popping up on the market, which has led us to the ridiculous situation where now a huge over supply of products exists, but half the people do not have the money to buy them. In Spain they have used the boom the EURO has created to build 100s of 1000s of houses, but those are nearly all empty today, because nobody has the money to buy a house, most people don't even have the money to rent an apartment which is why even investors aren't interested in buying such a house for investment. At same time there are 100s of 1000s of people in Spain homeless and daily a huge amount of foreclosures increases both, the amount of empty houses as well as the amount of homeless people. Now you MIGHT think it's the fault of the people who didn't manage to make a living and make enough money to buy or rent a house, but if you look at the situation as it is today, you see the error in that thought. Empty houses nobody cares for are falling apart up to a point where the owner has to pay for demolishing the leftovers and clean up the place, so owning an empty house costs the owners more than giving it for free to some homeless people, because at least you could make it part of the contract that they keep the house intact, still nobody is willing to do that, in most cases they can't even do that, because giving the house to homeless people means admitting the money for building it is gone, while the empty house currently has a nominal value which most of the owners have to have to backup the loan they took to build it in the first place. Even though it's a 99.99% probability that these houses will never bring a single cent of rent for the owners but will cost them even more money in the end, the pressure their banks puts on them for their debt doesn't allow them to do the right thing and at least get some poor people off the streets. The same holds true for everything else. We produce absolutely ANYTHING in way bigger quantities than humans could possibly consume, but half the population doesn't have the money to buy anything, therefore roughly 1/3 of all produced goods can't be sold while at same time half the population can't afford anything at all. There are two ways out of this: 1) Decrease working hours per worker until almost all people have a realistic chance to earn a living. That would give a gigantic boom in production, it would allow for even more insane profits for the rich, because instead of not being able to sell 1/3 of their products and competing with ever lower prices against each other, they would see a need to invest, increase production and increase prices to keep demand under control. 2) Decrease production or throw away 1/3 of all new products. That's not only a gigantic waste of resources, it leads to a spiral downwards, where more and more competition with lower and lower prices leads to lower and lower wages, which leads to less and less consumption, which leads to less and less sales, until nobody produces anything because nobody can buy anything. I for one highly prefer option #1.

On first view that's correct. The problem arises, when this machine is operated by one single worker, where this one worker with the help of the machine produces as much as 100 workers would produce manually. In this case you have one owner of the machine, able to dictate one worker a minimum wage, for the reason there are 99 others outside starving who would all be willing to take the job for a lower wage. As long as there is a growing need for other products the machine helps society, because it enables 99 other workers to work on something else, but in this case the employer wouldn't be able to press wages down, because there are no unemployed people willing to work for less. As soon as ALL production in the world is covered by machinery, there begins a gigantic suppression of workers, due to the simple fact, there are more workers needing a job than there is work to be done, which enables the owners of the machines to press down wages. But the advantage for the employers of producing at lowest possible costs backfires big time, when the lower wages aren't enough anymore to buy the goods produced by the machines, because then they discover that lower wages lead to less consumption, which leads to the simple fact, with less and less consumption, more and more of the goods produced can't be sold anymore. But then, as long as the idea of our world is ever harder competition, no employer can afford to pay higher wages, because he would be overtaken by all the others instantly. Wonder how close we get to the point where nobody sells anything at zero wages, before the rich discover they are destroying themselves. For the moment it surely looks like the richest of them have enough power to press the losers of the competition down into the unemployed area and they aren't interested in stopping the downfall.

It's OWNED by the workers, that's the point. It has grown too large to be run the way they started, so they had to select some managers, but most of those are former workers, elected by the workers and they don't get paid more than max 9 times the wages of the lowest worker in the company. The fact workers own the place prevents greedy managers from outsourcing production to China. If you wanna see how these companies start up, how many examples do you want? Ask Google for "TechCollective", you'll find 37000 hits all over the US and Canada.

It's not a precise quote and I don't remember exactly who said it, but I've heard something similar in a public debate between some religious people and some atheists and I liked it so much right away, I shortened it to this and never forgot it again. Without guarantee, I believe it's either from Christopher Hitchens or from Richard Dawkins.

Are you serious? Religion is the opposite of morality, has ever been, will ever be. In old times it was topics like slavery and wars like the crusades, nowadays it's a pope that finds the use of condoms worse than spreading AIDS. In virtually ALL cases society had to force religion into moral behavior, in all cases religion has always fought to the very last moment against it and only after religion was completely outnumbered by an overwhelming majority of moral people, religion has adopted morality. The claim that morality originates in religion is one of the biggest lies I know of. Morality exists today, despite heavy resistance from religion.

They do exist and their sizes as well as their numbers are growing. They run into heavy resistance from big capital and many workers haven't discovered the advantages of the idea yet, but wherever they manage to get started, they are near unstoppable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation They are in fact the only thriving type of business in countries like Spain during times of deep depression, still paying low skilled workers 13% above minimum wage, simply because they do no allow salaries of top managers going off the chart.

I'm not really sure why you're arguing about coercion and effects of capitalism. The answer to the question from the title of this topic is far easier. The original idea of socialism was bringing democracy into the work place, have the workers decide what a company should be doing, rather than a board of directors. The plan of how to achieve that was to capture government, either through elections or through revolution, make the laws neccessary to transform the work place and go from there. The big mistake was, all alleged socialist parties throughout the world, whether in Germany, France, Russia, or anywhere else, once they had captured government power forgot the second step. They kept themselves in power, but instead of converting to socialism they became state capitalism. While in Europe at least they kept democracy, in Russia they even abolished democracy and called their dictatorial state capitalism then communism. They couldn't have gone any further away from the original idea, the outcome couldn't be any further away from the meaning of the word "commune" and that's why it failed. The really fun part is the latest development in silicon valley, where recently a few smart developpers and programmers have left their job at Microsoft and the other huge corporations, launching startups they call "TechCollective". If you ask them, they will express how happy they are with the great success of their new capitalistic company, while in fact they run a plain socialist system, they only don't call it socialism, because nobody remembers what socialism was actually supposed to be.

Thanks, I did enjoy the discussion and yes, I got some insight out of it. What I read or listen to, you'll have to leave up to me, but if you want to know, I'm always listening to both sides of an argument before I make up my mind and I almost always find my personal view of things somewhere in between, simply because if there are two opposing extreme opinions, usually neither of them is right. In fact, not only have I red a load of books from both sides, I've actually written one myself. It won't help you any, because it's in German, anyway, here's the link to my homepage including a short introduction to the book in english. http://www.piranhazone.com/index.php?language=1&page=wohlstand Best of luck to you as well. I assume you're younger than me, so you still have to build part of your life and after I'm through with that already, I know how hard that is.

Ok, I give up, you truly believe in your libertarianism, you truly believe in infinite growth in a finite world and you truly believe in superior intelligence of the rich. I respect your belief, after all it's a human right for anyone to believe whatever they want, but other than that there's nothing I want to say anymore. ....... ummmmm maybe there's still one thing were we could find common ground? Even though you want to abolish the state, I guess you will agree that for example the Bush family enjoys high education for all their offspring, getting all of their family members extremely well paid jobs, up to becoming president of the US, not limited to politics, but also in big business outside of politics. I assume as a libertarian you can't be very religious? Any halfway logic thinking person will discover what an utter nonsense any kind of religion is, as soon as they take their first lessons in biology, therefore even though I respect the constitutional right of believing whatever you like, I consider any adult believer downright stupid. Given the fact that about ALL political posts in the US are given exclusively to religious people who ALL enjoyed a higher education, how can you think you're giving preference to the smart ones?

Just one more point I missed to answer (might appear before moderators approve my long answer). If you believe a company cannot cover sick leave of a worker doing 10 hours a week, then you didn't understand the whole point. Do you honestly believe it's easier to replace the one and only highly specialized surgeon in a hospital doing 60-80 hours a week, than to cover one of 8 surgeons doing 10 hours each? Under full employment finding a worker depends on the wages a company is willing to pay, so it's reversed from today, not companies setting the value of a worker to as little as the poorest of the unemployed is willing to work for, but workers set the value and it will near automatically balance on a level where workers get paid as much as their work is worth for the employer, simply because the worker will request as much as he can, but the employer cannot pay more than the worker produces in value. And then, 10 hours a week is not a fixed value, such a system has to be flexible. It could be an annual decision, newly set every year or so, depending on supply and demand of work. If new branches of products are invented and more work is required, the hours per worker can be increased anytime, same as they can be further reduced if more production gets outsourced to the far east. If a specific profession lacks workers, there could be an exception made for that profession for a couple of years, under the condition that instantly more people are trained in that profession and if you cannot find enough people willing to do the job, this profession has to get an increase in wages until enough workers are willing to learn the job. If one profession has too many workers while another has not enough, wages have to be adjusted until both professions are covered.

>> If they are selling all they are producing that must mean the demand for that is high and the supply is low therefore they need to make more. Car manufacturers produce 30% more cars than can be sold, any increase in production can be sold only through pushing another manufacturer out of competition. Roughly 30% of all food produced in the western world is thrown away, there is virtually no shortage of anything, no need to produce more of anything. A lower entry point means workers earn less, subsequent they buy less, subsequent less products can be sold, subsequent less workers are needed. >> If they are not selling everything .... they need to expand to other areas or go out of business. Expanding to other areas means nothing else but pushing others out of business in some other area. Whether one company goes out of business or another, from a global point of view it makes no difference, fact is we have too much production, which causes ever harder competition where everybody loses in the end. Trying to make more jobs to let even more companies produce even more only makes the problem worse. Unless a company comes up with an entirely new branch of products, there are no jobs created, just one worker in one company replaced by a lower paid worker in another company. Of course my farmer friend would love to hire a bunch of workers and farm all his land, but doing that is not a question of wages, it's a question of finding demand for products on the market. Wages for unskilled labor in Italy are in fact by now low enough and prices in supermarkets are in fact high enough, he could afford hiring workers for his fields and arrive at the market with lower prices than supermarkets, but there's a gigantic over supply of food, meaning if he would hire and offer his products cheaper, supermarkets would lower the price until he is out of business again. This predictable situation compared to the fact he managed to make a living on his own now let's him stay away from hiring. We've had that in the past, selling prices below cost of production, that's how supermarkets pushed small companies out of business, that's why in capitalism exclusively the biggest companies win the competition, simply because they have the money to survive 10 years or more without profit. In Germany they have a law and they enforce it, saying you cannot sell something below the cost of production, that's why in Germany farmers do much better than in Italy and prices of products in Germany are far cheaper than in Italy because supermarkets have the continuous competition of farmers they aren't allowed to push out of business by plain money power. >> the opportunity for more working hours ...... to make more money There is no such thing. A single company might become more competitive, might be able to hire more workers, but while the total demand for products doesn't increase simply because the population as a whole doesn't consume more, any hiring in one company is always causing other people to lose their jobs. That's again the title of this topic, any company can grow, but not all of them. It's what the Germans and the Chinese do, they create a gigantic export surplus which does nothing else but export their unemployment. The idea especially the European Union came up with now, requesting that all countries now have to become more competitive to follow the German example is absolutely absurd, even the dumbest kid in first grade can tell that not all countries on earth can have an export surplus, if someone exports, someone else has to import, the surplus of one country is the deficit of another. Under all circumstances lower wages equals less money going around in the population, leading to less products sold and/or lower prices, leading to deflation and depression. >> what happens when people work more even upon 100% tax? Easy. For a single month or in case of emergency, no problem, but if a company forces their workers frequently to work more than the cap, on top of the 100% income tax for the worker, the company will have to pay an additional tax equal to the wages they would have had to pay for the extra worker they didn't hire, and if that still doesn't make them obey the law this will be doubled as often as necessary, until they do. There is no possible punishment for companies other than charging fines that exceed the advantages they have from abusive behavior. I for one wouldn't have charged Citygroup 7 billion for their fraud, I would have charged them 7 trillion, I would have closed their business, confiscated all their property including the private property of all their managers, to reimburse the people they cheated. >> Surgery that requires more than 10 hours ... custom coding jobs .... If someone works 40 hours in one week and then doesn't work for the rest of the month, where is the problem? You could work 480 hours in one month and then take the rest of the year off, still no problem. You could keep the working hours at 40 hours a week and reduce retirement age to 40 years, still no problem. Below a given level of hours it's way more efficient to let everyone work several days or weeks in a row followed by a long vacation, than everybody working just a few minutes a day. As far as I know they are currently doing something similar on offshore oil drilling platforms, 6 months of work, followed by 6 months off. All it takes is switching from a few specialists drowned in work plus a bunch of unemployed to enough trained personal. It just can't happen that some job can only be done only by one specific individual. If that one has an accident and dies while there's a demand for his job, what will you do? Someone else has to take over, so it makes way more sense to train enough people instead of insisting on a specific individual for the reason that there are no other qualified people. >> college graduates .... have a higher intelligence ... That's as close to racism as you can get, you're only not separating by race, but by wealth of parents, that's birthright, otherwise known as feudalism. Do you honestly believe children of rich parents are in general more intelligent than children of poor people, or how else do you want to justify the fact that in 2013 a total 77% of children from top income families earned at least a bachelor's degree by the age of 24, while only 9% from the low income bracket did the same? There a literally billions of people in Asia and Africa never given the slightest chance to get anywhere, often dying before the age of 6 due to lack of medical care. I bet you anything you like, in the last 50 years there have been several dozen children smarter than Einstein who died because nobody cared about their intelligence, because rich people find it more important that their plain dumb offspring gets a degree from Yale. Of course studying isn't limited by hours, because someone studying doesn't take away the opportunity to work from someone else, just the opposite, the more people study, the more jobs there are for teachers. >> Are companies expected to have dedicated trainers? If a company has specific requirements, where schools and universities can't provide the necessary training, of course a company wanting a specific job done will have to train workers for that and since trainers would do only 10 hours a week, of course they have to train more people and need more trainers. But training isn't working, meaning training of workers within companies isn't limited, as long as you don't define burger flipping a training that requires 3 years of learning, companies could hire people, have them work their 10 hours, pay them and use the rest of the week to train them further. You might say all the training may result in 40 hours for everyone again, but that's no problem, as long as training isn't abused to hide additional production, the workers needed in production still equal full employment. While ALL companies have to do that, where is the problem? If costs increase for all companies to pay more trainers, competition is the same either way. For the population as a whole there is no difference between paying higher prices for the products and paying food stamps for the unemployed. I know, companies like the Koch brothers want to terminate all social programs and let poor people depend on charity, but whether it's done through charity or public financed food stamps, the total cost remains the same, unless you want to let poor people die. >> ... wouldn't companies having to hire more people than they can afford cause infinite inflation? I believe you might not be aware what causes inflation. I'm aware the Austrian school teaches inflation is generated by money supply, but if that were true the near infinite money printing of the FED in recent years would have caused a gigantic inflation already, even worse in Japan, where they have printed money like crazy for over 20 years by now. But there is no inflation, not in the US and in Japan they have had deflation throughout these 20 years, simply because the money supply doesn't have any kind of influence on inflation. Yes, I know, there's inflation in investment objects, such as houses, but that's an artificial bubble created by rich people who don't know what else to do with their money while there is no profit to make in every day products. Giving credit to workers, which is what banks around the world have done in the last 50 years or so is equal to a temporary increase in wages, but that backfires big time, as soon as workers reach the limit of their credit, because then they fall back on their initial low income and have to pay interest out of that instead of buying products. In general inflation is the increase in wages minus the increase of productivity. If companies manage to produce 5% more, without any other factor in the game, this obviously means, prices have to decrease by 5% or else the extra 5% of the products can't be sold, that's deflation. If companies manage to produce the same with 5% less workers or if wages are cut by 5%, that's even worse, because in this case not only do you get 5% deflation, but instead of not being able to increase production, companies have to decrease production, meaning you get depression on top of deflation. If net wages increase by less or less workers are hired than productivity increases, the system remains in deflation, regardless how much money is printed. If an increase in wages isn't a net increase because taxes are raised, or if taxes are raised upon steady wages, that's the same as lowering wages, it leads directly into deflation. If upon 5% increase in productivity net wages increase by 5% or 5% more workers are hired, inflation remains precisely at zero. Only if wages increase more than productivity, the difference will result in inflation. Why would hiring more workers force companies to increase prices, besides a small increase for the costs of extra trainers? Upon full employment all the money currently spent for social services such as food stamps plus all the expenses from criminal activities arising from poverty wouldn't exist, all taxes could be reduced big time, the police force could be reduced big time, all people could make a living out of less money and for companies it makes no difference at all, whether they save on wages or save on taxes and people could easily afford increased prices from their saved taxes. >> Italy and the free market Well, I can tell you Italy is one of the best examples for free market, only beaten by Greece. The tax laws in Italy have been way beyond affordable for decades, a corrupt government is working into their own pockets and whoever can find a way for it, will circumvent paying any taxes. As a result of that we do already have some kind of free market, not because it's a good system, but because our government has weakened itself through state debt so much that they just don't have the resources to control anything anymore. I live in the north where things are still halfway ok, but there are entire regions in southern Italy where organized crime rules, where the police force has become part of the organization, where anyone trying to do anything against the entirely lawless evolution of crime gets shot in broad daylight. Poverty in these regions is unimaginable, because the rich squeeze the very last cent out of the poorest, the formerly flourishing tourism has entirely collapsed because nobody dares going there anymore and nobody can sell anything because literally nobody has any money. (Italy has no social security like Germany has). The currency of those regions are cigarettes and drugs, smuggled from eastern countries and over the Mediterranean and the only "jobs" available in these regions is the illegal sale of smuggled cigarettes and drugs. There are entire towns where there is not one single shop, not one single registered business, not a single bar, plain nothing, because dealing cigarettes and drugs has become the most profitable business and outcompeted any other form of business by so much that nobody even considers doing anything else. Food is exclusively sold in street markets, where anyone who would dare to ask for taxes would get shot right away. You will say that's the result of too many laws, too much state and I agree with you, that's the fault of the state, increasing taxes above a given limit, feeding the rich as much as possible and suppressing the poor as much as possible until the people find their way around it. But I believe this lawless state of organized crime is what you would also get if you eliminate too many laws and since I have seen the situation in southern Italy first hand I'd rather have something else. I very much believe a modest but strong state caring for the people rather than for the rich is the only solution, because in a lawless environment people can be as diligent and as honest as they want, they will always be outcompeted by a few criminals. Of course those Chinese would move on to other criminal activities, but if that wasn't even considered criminal or if a stateless society didn't have the means to stop them, who is going to prevent them from taking over society in whichever way they want? If I'm not mistaken, the whole idea of government at least in the US originates from the situation in the wild west, where at first people paid someone to be the Sheriff, then someone to write the laws the Sheriff should enforce, and so on and so on, simply because without laws the stateless society was ruled by outlaws. Maybe you could see it like this: The world right now is already producing more than all the people need. If we would spread out the amount of work over all the unemployed and switch competition from the battle of having a job at all or be unemployed to competing for how much you earn through your skills, everybody would work less, everybody would pay less in social services and/or charity, all prices would drop and we would all have a much better life, while competition for the better job would still make sure the diligent ones are better off than the lazy ones. (Yes of course I mean only the ones in the work force, children, elderly and handicapped people would still have to be covered by social services.) Right now we have the absurd situation where the richest people own way more wealth than they could ever use for anything and the only thing they use their money for is to increase their wealth further which leads to bubbles in prices of houses and the stock market. I mean the Koch brothers own over a dozen private properties worth 10s of millions each, they occupy huge amounts of land with their private properties just so they can live in there for a week or two per year. Now let alone that being absurd already, that's a matter of a couple of 100 millions, so what could possibly the advantage for our society be, or what further advantage could the Koch brothers themselves get out of an increase of their wealth above the estimated 75 billion they currently own? You believe in a free society and/or upon more wealth they would care for charity? Ummm, nope, not really, they are actually doing the opposite already, they are killing people because they prefer to make more profit through dumping hazardous waste into the ground water and they use the profits they make there to buy themselves the politicians they need to let their behavior go unpunished. Now from your point of view, is living in some place where the Koch brothers might open a factory one day from start the wrong choice and the fault of those people and if so, where would you advise people to move to? Keep in mind, in a free society the Koch brothers might decide to drill for oil anywhere, even on the sea right outside of NY, and imagine how much you would like an oil spill in front of your door where the polluters deny any resposibility? Last remark, just because it's something I invented myself, or at least I haven't heard it from anywhere else yet: It may still take a while, but I believe the world will discover the downsides of capitalism when Koch Industries is taken over by Walmart. It's only a matter of time until the richest is big enough to destroy the 2nd richest and when that happens, when the Koch brothers discover, being the 2nd biggest is from a libertarian point of view still "the wrong choice", once the world is governed by one single family, that's when even the billionaires will get the point.

I believe the answer comes naturally even to religious people, if you slightly alter the question. Simply ask anyone, whether he believes it's a good idea to indoctrinate children with a religion other than his own one (if he has any). Ask Christian people, whether they believe it's a good idea to indoctrinate children with Islam and ask Islamic people, whether they believe it's a good idea to indoctrinate children with Christianity. You'll get answers where near 100% will say "no". Once you got that consensus, you ask, if not indoctrinating your own children with your religion (if you have any) also ment no other religion would indoctrinate their children with their religion, and given the fact that ANY religion is shared only by a minority of all people on earth would you think it's better not to indoctrinate children at all? I believe this would give such a huge majority consensus, you could make it a law without causing much protest in the population. Only problem is, while everybody believes other religions will not stop indoctrinating their children, everybody keeps doing it to their own children for the reason the others do it as well.

Yes @LibertarianSocialist, you're right as far as most governments currently seem to believe that a load of unemployed people is better for them than full employment. But once you make it clear that full employment has advantages for everybody, you'll get support for it. Once large corporations discover that people can only buy as much as they have money to spend, meaning increasing profits are possible only through reducing costs of unemployment and supplying the population with enough money to buy all products, you'll get the desire to achieve it. It's just a question of how low economy has to drop before even the richest people realize that lower wages equal less production. Maybe they realize it only when they reach zero wages and zero production but sooner or later they will.

I've got a bit of spare time today, so don't worry about the length of your post, my reply will be even longer, I hope you take the time to read it. First thing I have to note is: For your own company you need highly trained and experienced specialists, but (if I got that right) you're not training anyone, meaning you take the training someone else paid for, you use it to your own advantage and then you claim everyone has to work 80 hours a week because there is no trained personal. Or in other words, you create a shortage in qualified workers by not training anyone and then you wonder why you don't have trained personal. I believe in an entirely free market, your company wouldn't exist at all, because the trained personal you require wouldn't exist, because nobody would pay to train someone to the advantage of someone else. Even among entrepreneurs, most of them got their business because they didn't know what else to do with the skills they got from somewhere else, but nobody would find it a good idea to train for a job that then requires 60-70 hours of work a week, so you would never be able to even start such a business. Second thing is, a lower entry into the labor force does not create the need for more working hours, it gets the work done for less money, but still in the same time. Why would a company hire additional workers while they don't need more production? They would simply produce the same as before and pay less. You might argue that lower wages and therefore better chances to compete on the market will increase the success of the company, it will grow and hire more workers to expand, but that's a relative concept, whenever one company expands, another has to shrink or close down and in the end, the total hours of work required are the same. From your point of view the expanding company did it right and won the competition, from my point of view everybody loses. Lower wages means companies would pay less taxes, the state would have to cut social services, overall sales of every day products would drop, because the people buying them have less money to spend, but I believe you don't want any social services, so let's leave that aside and look only at the rest. Workers would earn less money, which even without social services reduces sales of every day products, so with or without social services, you get a spiral downwards, companies would be forced to cut production or outcompete each other so that one after the other closes down, fire workers they don't need to produce less, which again reduces sales and so on and so on, until in the end everybody produces nothing at zero wages. There is one exception of this, where new inventions create entirely new products, good examples have been computers or mobile phones, where a newborn branch of industry creates new jobs, but unless there's a continuous stream of an exponential increasing amount of ever more new and useful products, increasing automation in production will require less and less human work. Also all these new inventions cause loss of jobs elsewhere, computers have replaced literally millions of jobs, so even if you could come up with continuous new inventions, they give a short lived boom followed by depression. Furthermore, as you surely are aware, production of almost all these new inventions is moved almost instantly to the far east, where giant factories produce millions of mobile phones at wages of $30 a month. Within existing products, lowering the amount of money someone earns for doing the work does not increase the total amount of work, just the opposite, increasing automation permanently decreases the amount of work needed. So again we're back at the title of this topic. Anyone can find a job and make a living, all it takes is the will to work for less than someone else and be content with lower living standards, anyone can become self employed and run a company, all it takes is the right idea, some talent in organizing and the will to work harder than the competition. But not everyone can make it, because at 40 hours or even more per week and worker there just isn't enough work to do. No matter how hard everyone would try, at best someone can outcompete someone else, but at any given time the amount of work required remains the same. The only question is, at what bottom level of wages and poverty will competition result in civil war. Now let me answer your questions: - how would I enforce limited working hours? Answer: 100% income tax on every hour worked above the given limit. Controlling this will be the same job, by which the state is today able to calculate everybody's tax rate. - what about professionals? Answer: We need to educate more people and train them to become the professionals we need. Letting a tiny amount of highly trained experts work 100 hours a week, while 1000s of teachers and potentially talented youngsters remain unemployed only costs money for food stamps and makes no sense at all. - what about entrepreneurs? Answer: In today's market anyone trying to set a limit to the amount of work he does, would near instantly be outcompeted by someone else, therefore nobody can afford to reduce the amount of work he does, not because his company wouldn't function with less work done, but because someone else would overtake him. If everyone was forced to reduce the amount of time he spends working, there is no overtaking by someone who works more, there is no problem, only more leisure time for everybody. If you have to hire more workers to get the work done, so do all the others. The only thing not possible in this environment anymore is replacing lack of skill by more hours, the skillful and talented ones would win the competition every time, but to my mind that's the whole point of competition. Last but not least, let me tell you a real example from my own experience. Happened today in the afternoon, so the impression is very fresh. I live in Italy and here in town we have a street market. Long ago this used to be once a week, where farmers came to town, selling their products, which were usually cheaper than the shops in the streets and even if not, all the stuff was very fresh, homemade, without industrialized production and without chemical additives one can't even pronounce. As supermarkets got bigger and cheaper, while at same time people had less and less money in their pockets, these farmers weren't able to sell their high quality products anymore, so the farmers were replaced by Chinese guys selling all kind of cheap junk, usually cheating on their taxes big time. Towards the state they argued, they can't pay more taxes, because business is just too bad. Mostly they sold cheap clothes, like jeans for $10 or so, so it wasn't a miracle that a short while later nearly all shops in town selling jeans went out of business, the shop assistants lost their jobs, they couldn't afford things like the hairdresser anymore, they bought less of everything, causing further businesses to close down. By today about 1/2 of the center of my town is empty shops for rent that nobody would take even for free and the other half is changing owner on average every 6 months, because not one single shop can sell enough to make a living for the owner. Even the real large corporations (not sure which ones you would recognize) who used to have shops in about every town in the country have closed down and left, because there isn't enough profit to make out of the little money the unemployed population has left. A few years ago the town ruled, there will now be two street market days a week for those Chinese guys plus one additional day a month for the farmers. I guess they were hoping twice the opening hours would sell more, but how could it? The total amount of shops will never sell more or less than people have money to spend, regardless how many hours they are open, they only compete one against the other, where the one with the longest opening hours will get a bigger piece of the cake but overall, all it does is force some workers to work longer hours while pushing others into unemployment. Obviously twice a week and one a month fall on the same day every now and then and today was such a day. I've taken a walk through the center with my wife, curious what's all for sale there, we even had planned to buy a few things if we saw something nice or useful. The whole center of the town was packed with people, everybody walking around, looking at things. But after I while I noticed, nobody was buying anything, people were standing like half a meter away from all boots and stalls, just looking, talking about things, once in a while someone asking one of the sellers some questions, but I saw nobody actually buying anything. Then I took a closer look and I discovered why nobody was buying anything. The Chinese didn't have cheap jeans anymore, the prices of Chinese clothes now exceed the prices regular shops would have charged in the past, meaning you now get junk quality for the price of high quality, simply because the Chinese have managed to push their high quality competition out of business. The farmers prices for fresh food are ...... how shall I say? ....... outrageous is an understatement. By coincidence I recognized one of these farmers and I knew him good enough for a little private chat. He explained to me how these prices come to be. Since 90% of the people can't afford to buy anything anymore, he has to make enough money for himself out of 1/10 the customers. Since that still doesn't work, he restricts the amount of customers even further. He asks 25 times the former price, up to a level where ONE single customer a day gives him enough profit to survive. This allows him to run his farm all by himself, 10-12 hours per day of his own work will do, 90% of his land lies fallow and he has fired all his former workers. Only because the top 1% of the richest people now finds it attractive to shop on the street market, where they find exclusive products nobody else can afford, he still finds the one customer he needs, so he has managed to survive, but he agrees with me, the rest of the country is going down the drain. In the end my wife and me went home and even though we would have had money to spend, at THESE prices we kept our money and as far as I´m concerned, I won't even look at the street market anymore in the future even though it's a real pity to lose such a lovely old tradition.

You bet I enjoy this. I find nothing wrong in people with opposing opinion discussing the topic, even if neither side "wins" the argument, talking about it can never be wrong. Not sure why I got a -2 reputation for this topic? Sorry if I missed some of your points, I got a bit lost in long posts that require moderator approval and short posts showing up right away. Aside of that I´m on the way installing my software on my new computer (that's a ton of stuff), so I'm only reading and writing while some installation is running, until next reboot. If there's a real important thing I missed, that would change this discussion big time, point me to it again please. I believe, we have gotten into so many details, always including all of that in every answer would result in way too long postings. The busy half of the population I'm talking about are the ones that have a job or are running a business. Those are busy competing against those who don't have a job, they keep them from entering the labor force by making sure they can get all the work done with less and less workers, lower and lower wages, never considering giving the others a chance. I believe that's the main problem of an entirely free market, because a lower entry point into the workforce wouldn't give any more poeple a job, just the opposite, it would make the ones who have a job work even more, compete even harder, produce even more, meaning in the end we would have more unemployed while the few who still have a job work for lower wages.

Ok, let's see. The world is producing 30% more cars than there are sold, if all car manufacturers were to reduce production by 30% customers wouldn't notice the slightest difference in availability of cars, only 30% of workers in the car industry would notice when they get fired. About any other kind of supply gives you the same picture, whether food, computers or whatever else from specialized doctors down to paperboys, there is a vast supply and less demand. How on earth could a lower entry into the labor force, meaning a cheaper way to produce even more cause anything but lower wages for everybody, even less demand, followed by increasing unemployment? There is no shortage of supplies, there is no shortage of labor force, there is only a shortage of demand, simply because the half of the population that produces will not buy more bread and they are too busy competing to spend their wealth in leisure time.

Do you believe that's because 89% of the world earns a living on their own, or is that maybe because huge taxes and donation funds (where donations can be deduced from taxes) redistribute supplies? Do you expect this to remain as it is in a stateless society where nobody pays any taxes and all wellfare is based exclusively on donations nobody can deduce from his taxes?

labmatth2 got it right, free competition in an industrialized environment where 1/2 the population is sufficient to do all the work means, the other half has no chance of entering the labor force. A single person will always be able to enter and make it, but he will always push someone else out and under all circumstances 1/2 the population will be starving. You might say it's the fault of the losers, because they didn't work hard enough, but given the fact you will always have half the population unemployed that's not the answer to the problem. @Koroviev Your example with the two surgeons is correct, as long as there is only one talented surgeon. Make it a bit wider, say there are 4 surgeons, two good ones and two bad ones. The bad ones will be kicked out sooner or later and may go flipping burgers at McDonalds, the two good ones can share the available work in the hospital and take good care of the health of the population. All good, all fine, two talented surgeons making a lot of money and two low skilled workers at McDonalds earning a small life, that's unequal but fair and nobody is starving. Now there are two ways how you could mess this up: 1) One of the two surgeons decides, he can work twice as much, he can do all the work and he offers double work for less than double money. The hospital will fire the other talented surgeon, and the problem evolves. The fired surgeon may come back and offer to work twice as much for less money, then the hospital will switch and fire the one who started it, he comes back and offers to work for less, and so on, and so on, until one of them gives up. 2) The hospital decides they want to cut expenses by lowering wages. Both surgeons will try to work more hours to keep their income stable, a little bit later the hospital will find out they can do with just one surgeon, fire one of them and the problem evolves the very same way as in case 1. In both cases the talented surgeon losing the battle of more hours for less money in the hospital will then apply at McDonalds, he'll work double hours to make at least a bit of a life and push both the untalented ones into unemployment. If that's not enough, in the end the remaining talented surgeon will be under a gigantic amount of stress, he will make mistakes and he will do no better job than the untalented ones would have done on start, after which the hospital might decide to fire the talented one and hire one of the untalented ones, because he does the same quality of work for less money, after which you don't have any good health service anymore, one untalented surgeon working around the clock, one talented surgeon working around the clock at McDonalds and the other two unemployed regardless of skills. Either way, even if one of the talented surgeons keeps the job at the hospital, there is only one winner in this game, that's the hospital, while all workers lose and even the population depending on the health care lose.

There is nothing to say against that, until you see the ultimate effects of that. Let's make it a very small scale. Let's say there are 300 people, there are 3 companies producing all these 300 people need, each employing 100 people. There are $900 in currency going around, which is enough to buy all the products these 3 companies produce and each worker earns $3. If you apply taxes or people save some of their income, you're already doomed and forced to print more currency to adjust for the money leaving the circulation, but let's assume the ideal case where taxes are given back to people in benefits and savings are sooner or later spent. Now let's see how it works if you apply entirely open competition. Imagine one of the 300 workers starts to work twice as much for twice the money. The company fires one of the others and produces the same as before, paying the same wages as before. Now you have one guy starving, one guy saving $3 that he doesn't need to finance his life and only $897 going around to buy all products, meaning at least one of the companies either has to lower their price or will not be able to sell one of their products. The starving guy is now forced to either offer his labor at a lower wage or he has to offer more hours, let's say he offers more hours, just like the first one, then next month you have two guys starving and 2 products not sellable anymore. Next month 4 guys, another month later 8 guys and so on and so forth, until the system reaches the limit of its productivity, where 150 guys work twice as much, 150 guys are starving and half of all products can't be sold anymore. That's the situation we have in this world right now. At this point it doesn't matter anymore what you do, whether you decrease wages, lower prices, cut production or whatever else you do, under all circumstances 1/2 the population is starving, 1/2 of production isn't sellable and 1/2 of the money is sleeping in the bank accounts of companies and the 150 that still have a job. There are 3 possible ways out of this: 1) Let the starving people die (after which you will find yourself in a situation, where 75 more people are starving and only 75 people do all the work). 2) Tax companies and working people by 1/2 of their income and give it to the starving people for free. 3) Restrict the working hours, so companies are forced to rehire the starving ones. If I read you right, you'd prefer to let them die? I would prefer to rehire them, even though I still agree different skills and different productivity should make a difference in earnings.

Of course wages are freely negotiable under limited working hours, there's no limit to how much someone can earn. The difference is only that everyone would get paid what he is worth, rather than the most skillful one getting paid as much as the most desperate unemployed one waiting outside the door is willing to work for. Wages would become a matter of skill, productivity and qualification, but you wouldn't see graduate students working nightshift in security business or flipping burgers at McDonalds, you wouldn't see highly trained doctors taking the jobs at Walmart, only because hospitals prefer to hire less doctors and make each of them work longer hours. How to control that is another question, for self employed people it may be quite difficult if not impossible, but it doesn't have to be perfect, same as today's system survives corruption and nepotism, it would be sufficient to organize a regular working time of 10 hours a week in the same way we now organize 40 hours a week. You would only have to add a paragraph saying, you cannot have more than one job, you cannot run more than one company and you cannot run a company and be employed elsewhere at the same time. If you start your own company and you cannot manage to make it successful within the working hours you're limited to, maybe you simply aren't qualified to run a business? What's the difference between trying to replace lack of skill by more hours, as long as that just forces every other self employed one to do the same long hours? You'll be outcompeted either way, only that without limited working hours everyone works longer and a lot of people don't work at all.

Yes @Laforge, there we agree on the main point and I agree on most of the rest you wrote. Limiting the amount of work a single worker can do is the key to success. To my mind that would have to include ANY kind of work, like self employed, managers, volunteer work for free, simply everything. The point where I don't agree is, I don't think free competition can achieve that through a fair trade label or anything else not written in a law and/or not enforced. Forces of Competition will outcompete fair trade products until enough people decide they rather buy cheaper and afford more. A non mandatory fair trade label would not be honored by the general population, as you can see nowadays in fair trade coffee, where fair trade coffee remains a tiny little part of the market while most people rather spend their money for other things. The rest of what you describe is the current problem under which capitalism will ruin itself. With decreasing wages and less money going around among average people, either prices go into deflation or less products can be sold, causing companies to go bankrupt, decreased production, causing more unemployment, etc., simply a circle downwards ending in worldwide poverty for 99.99% of the population. Opening markets even further than they are will not stop this, it will speed it up. Investments such as houses, shares of stock, precious metals, etc., will increase to levels where average people can't even afford a wooden shed in the country side anymore, because anyone having achieved some wealth will try to secure it in investments not affected by currency values, but food and other all day items will become cheaper and cheaper. Take a look at Japan, where they are stuck in this problem for over 20 years now. Supply and demand are currently evening out by dropping demand due to lack of money among average people, met by closing factories and reduced supply, consequently leading to even less demand, leading to even more factories closing. Of course it won't be played out to the very end, because the point where the population revolts against this comes way earlier, but whenever it comes, capitalism will be crushed there. The only way to prevent that would not be entirely free markets, because you just can't convince the Chinese to limit their labor force. You have to protect local wealth, charge huge import duty on foreign products and make local laws limiting the working hours for everyone. Once neighboring countries see how such an environment prospers, the rest of the world will follow.