My State's Schools Are Shutting Down

[lester1/2jr]

EX: in the short run --10 minuets of your labor is worth $2.00 and you used to be able to buy an Asylum Film DVD with it, but now the DVD costs $2.03. In the long run you are paid $2.03 for 10 minuets of your labor, and now you can buy that DVD)

right. thats not what adjusted for inflation means in the example on wikipedia and it's also wrong. adjusted for inflation means they have taken what your paycheck bought in 1930 and compared it with what it buys today and shown wether it buys more or less. your actual check isn't "adjusted for inflation" the STATS are.

Suppose we didn't have inflation (i = P) for five years, what would happen to nominal wages (W), would they increase, or decrease?

ostensibly they would stay the same but they would probably increase because going that long with no inflation woudl be a sign of a healthy economy. for most of our countrys history we had virtually no inflation. an ounce of gold was 20 dollars in like 1790 and still 20 dollars in 1920.

there's been policy mandates that have weakened the scope and bargaining power of unions

I think thats putting the cart before the horse. If times were good companies generally would have a hard time attracting quality workerers with low salaries.

IN the end I think our divergent views of what happened it Detroit are the key. You feel it was the unions losing power and outsourcing coming into play. I feel it was the unions driving manufacturing out of the the city and we are lucky China and other countries are willing to make us cheap stuff or we would really be up a creek.


at any rate, wether you feel the chicken came before the egg or vice versa, all of this is fueled by our governments propensity for spending and inflating, which takes money and economic oppurtunites out of the economy and transfers them into wasteful stuff they control. without our massive warfare state conversations like this would be  nitpicking in an amazing and robust economy.

[ulthar]

This caught my eye:

But I honestly believe we live in a class society, and those at the top have more in the way of power than the lower classes, I think we should have a balance of power, that's what democracy is all about, but what's profitable for those at the top isn't always good for everybody else.

Okay, you said you are done, but this statement made me think of something that seems to be often overlooked.

So far as the representative part of our democratic republic is intact, the upper class does not necessarily have more power because of smaller numbers.  If the rich held ALL the power even now, I think we'd be seeing a far different social, political and legal landscape.

One of the most interesting "theories" in this that I have seen came from a novel about the Vietnam War.  One of the characters was a history buff and had developed the "dot in a sphere" model.  His idea was that instead of a single line of left-right or rich-poor (or any other 2 dimensional false dichotomy), a better model is a sphere.

The surface of the sphere represents the positions of interest of just about any position or ideology.  The dot in the middle is the "state" of the society or at least its level of peace.  If one side gets to pull too hard on the dot, it moves away from the center and society is disrupted....in the form of revolt or war.

A few wealthy folks with a lot "financial power" can be balanced by a LOT of much poorer people with "voting numbers power."  Thus the dot can remain somewhat in the middle (orthogonal pulls are not being considered here, only the specific dichotomy of rich/poor...but in this model, every possible diameter of the sphere is such a dichotomy).

I think this is sort of what you were saying in the quoted paragraph...that a balance is required.  I just rankle a bit at the oft bandied notion (not by you Nukie, just in general) that the rich have prima facie more power just because of their money.  In the absence of the 15th and 19th Amendments and other suffrage principles, that might be true, but Bill Gates' vote for President counts the same as a destitute homeless registered voter (in principle).

By the way, if anyone knows if this sphere-dot theory really exists (outside the fictional novel in which I read it), I'd love to see some sources; I've always thought it an intriguing idea.