Wealth Distribution in the USA

Who creates 'the wealth' when a factory worker in Vietnam turns a few dollars of material into a pair of Adidas that sell for 150 dollars? Apparently not the factory worker who gets 60 dollars a month for doing so. Apparently only the company who manufactures the demand for sneakers is creating any wealth.

That's a cop out answer. The factory worker is given his pay which is a small fraction of the value he adds to the materials he starts with. Surely the value he adds is more than 2-3 dollars per day.Your refusal to acknowledge an inequity in even the most gross circumstances is pretty telling.

Because even the 2-3 dollar rate is abusive and inhumane? Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Is slavery the only kind of abusive treatment you can imagine? People who take $2 a day to live on have few options, and being willing to pay such a person $2.50 a day doesn't make you some kind of philanthropist. It makes you yet another exploiter.To answer your question about value, there are many ways to evaluate the value added by an employee, but one thing we do know is that the value added by manufacturing an item is always greater than the mere wages the laborer doing the making is paid. Were it not, nobody would be asking the laborer to do the work. Yet we have posters here who would claim that the laborer does not create any wealth because he has been paid some trifling percentage of the value he has created.In fact, the value created by the labor of making a pair of shoes from a few dollars worth of materials pays almost every one else involved in the entire process. Most of the other people in the chain are extracting from the value added by the laborer.

Percy, all you are doing in your arguments here is rejecting labor theories of value in favor of pure capitalist systems of valuing labor. Why is your theory of value more accurate?

That's true. The market determines that the value of a pair of sneakers is maybe a couple hundred dollars. The value of the raw materials only a few dollars. It is certainly the case that the assembler's wage is determined by the local market for his labor.But the laborer's wage is a poor proxy for the value the laborer has added to the materials.

Are you suggesting that a diamond cutter does not add value that exceeds his wages?What I am suggesting here is the idea that only capitalists create wealth and that no laborer does is complete crap.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Of course they are not equal. Capitalism would not work if that were so. I think that valuation is demonstrably wrong. A worker who only adds value equal to his wages will soon be out of a job because nothing he does would add to the bottom line. I am puzzled by your repetition of this assessment of value in the same post in which you acknowledge that a diamond cutter adds value in excess of his wages. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No, they are not different. A laborer's contribution to the company is his value to the company. Which makes the calculation difficult at least in the case of the night watchman. But it is not all that difficult to figure out the value added or subtracted by having onsite mechanics and repair people.

It seems to be a little bit more than that at least to you. Otherwise, you would have dropped the issue when I made clear that by value I mean 'value to the company'. Apparently even that phraseology does not sit well with you.As Dr. Adequate has pointed out, the employee's wages are his wages. The employees value is something else. The fact that the value is, in some cases, difficult to calculate does not mean that the valuation does not work. As you're example points out, often we can make a calculation. At a minimum we can estimate the impact of the downtime avoided by having onsite repair people. We can make those estimates both for preventative maintence and repairs performed by onsite people. In addition we can compare the difference in costs between having repairs done by wage earners rather than contractors.

Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I've already said that such a system would not work.

The reason businesses cannot do this is because their prices should already be set as high as the market will allow. Raising prices when overhead increases should result in fewer sales.

Who said, or suggested that getting the fact that an employee adds more to the bottom line means that the employee is being exploited? I don't believe this to be anyone's argument. It certainly is not mine, and Dr. Adequate explicitly denies that it is his.I'm trying to imagine how a business could even operate successfully without the employees in toto creating value in excess of their salaries. Isn't creating value what employees are supposed to do.

It is an argument that $2 a day is inappropriate, yes. But it is not an argument that the laborer should be paid and that no one else should make any money. The laborer will always be paid some fraction of the value he creates. I'd argue that some people manage a ratio greater than 1. It falsifies a view that nobody holds. In my view getting paid $2 a day is so grossly unfair that it need not be explained by the value of what he makes. The worker is paid as he is because his access to the global labor demand i almost non-existent.I'll be explicit about my position. Coyote has expressed the view that redistribution of wealth is unfair to those who create wealth. In my view that is a completely bogus view of the way wealth is actually created. That bogus view is a supported by the bogus accounting that you are promoting in which we pretend not to be able to notice that employees as a group are creating wealth and value in excess of their salaries.Yes, the calculation of value is difficult to make for some individual employees. Even for the diamond cutter we can ask whether he is solely responsible for the extra value generated by his work. After all the cut stones must be set and sold. (Yet somehow you accept that we can calculate the value added by the diamond cutter and reject the idea that we can calculate the value added by a single worker making pairs of sneakers.)But the main idea is that saying that the individual calculation is too difficult for people not in production, so we'll just call the net gain (value-wages) zero is a lie of the highest order. As you have agreed, the workforce, as a whole, does create value. And that value does not come from summing a bunch of zeroes. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

There is no chance of my ever agreeing with you on this point. Occupying an adult exclusively and paying him or her wage that barely supports him returning to work the next day is an evil to be avoided. I don't accept the excuse that it's what everyone else is doing. I accept that you feel differently.And apparently being caught doing that is something sneaker companies hate. Your argument does not resolve anything.It is the profits, if any, and not the revenue or the value added that belongs to the shareholders. Expenses must be paid before the shareholders get to divvy up the profits, and the salaries include materials, taxes, and salaries. Employees and management, and the executives are all paid out of the revenue stream and all get theirs before the shareholders do.