Virtual ghost
Complex paradigm
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2008
- Messages
- 22,108
It's a philosophical bias as well. I think they can benefit their members in the short term but they do things like:
1. hurt consumers who are charged more for products
2. make companies less competitive by artificially increasing wages above market demands and negatively impact their ability to be agile to changing market conditions
3. make it very difficult to fire people who underperform and make companies more risk averse in hiring as a result
4. retard economic growth by making companies less competitive and reducing the number of jobs in an economy
5. drive artificial behavior such the early retirement of teachers and unchecked pension liability debts in states and local municipalities, thereby hurting all of the taxpayers in a given state
This would nicely stand in the case we are in the mid 20th century. However with globalization in the mix this logic quickly starts to fall apart. In other words if you place emphasis on the level that money gets to decide the odds are that no one in US will have a job because everything got outsourced. What is basically what we are watching in practice. The thing is that dictatorships can easily outperform democracies in costs due to obvious reasons, while modern transport can quickly close the distances. Therefore everything you wrote here defines a democracy: more expensive product, less competitive, likely to underperform etc. However does that mean that we should get rid of democracy ? Sometimes more costly solution is simply better solution on the long run. Personally I find it absurd that America that constantly brags about it's checks and balances in government constantly runs away from the same thing in the economy. Because unions are fundamentally checks and balances, they aren't 100% ideal but they provide at least some general social stability. Especially now when you can outsource just about everything into Asia for extra profit. Maybe there the product will be produced for less but the consumer base that used to buy it probably wouldn't buy it, since they no longer have stable job/income (if they have it at all). Who took out almost all industry out of USA ? Private interests and the market. Therefore blind prizing of those in a shortsighted in my book. Which is why they shouldn't be left without any checks and balances. This is where you should insert the saying about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The whole current situation as well as the whole MAGA thing are fundamentally nothing more than consequences of lack of checks and balances in the economy, which doesn't work for most at this point. Plus on all that you have to rise taxes because you need to rise military budget in order to compensate for the rise of dictatorships that your free market is feeding. What is the trend that is unsustainable. Also to be fully open marketization of everything is producing open nostalgia for the Communist era in my part of the world and the numbers are often so bad that this nostalgia isn't completely unfounded. Since our manufacturing is generally a shadow of what it was a while back. Also a few years ago when Russian state took over the private business empire that is the spine of out economy it took it due to bad management and market. However there were no protest or fears for democracy over this, which is because people were hoping to get some change of the system. The fact that publicly among people there were crickets in the air over this says many things. What can be further proven with the fact that our openly pro business parties tend to get about 2% of the vote.
However this trend exists even in bigger picture. I mean the whole Europe is getting filled with Nazis, Communists and other radicals, especially since those ideologies originally came out of workers frustrations with elites. These issues are exactly why European welfare state was invented, so that these great evils never happen again. However since CEOs today think they can do anything in the modern world we are coming back to where we were. While the odds are that US as a country will go with "Trump vs. Bernie" in 2020, what is basically proving that you are on the same exact path to what happened in Europe once and now it could happen again. I mean in my part of the world we have a history of killing business owners and if something isn't done the history will probably repeat itself. Just yesterday the ultra nationalist fascist leaning party was founded in my country and it claims that their goal is to bulldoze mainstream politics, which has leaning towards US and market economy. However if current order in Europe falls it is questionable if US in current shape can face China and all of this allies and pawns.
Therefore think this through, this is much more complex problem than "workforce productivity". Globally democracy is in deep crisis over this.