Smalll Businesses

You cannot come up with even one inefficiency related to a large business?Yes there are economies of scale, but not every business opportunity is large enough or slow enough to wait for a big business to ramp up. It seems to me more efficient to allow start ups to be small, and then allow some aggregation into larger business units or alternatively allow the small business to expand and take over larger share as their particular solution wins in the market place. And that sounds pretty much like what we already have.Let me also suggest that the kind of 'efficiency' you are talking about is not always a great deal for workers. Because it invariably turns out that the assumption that one person is required to produce and sell 20 units is wrong and that we can get 30 or 40 units out of that one person via automation or other scale up efficiency.

In reality, sometimes the labor can be redirected and sometimes it cannot. There is a limit to how many times we can retrain someone, and some people have already made decisions that make them difficult to retrain. We are going to have oodles of unemployed soldiers and coal miners who have seen their last days as part of the middle class. I am not the least bit interested in being part of a 'reduced' class. Are you?

What you call a rational system has the problem that it is not self regulating. In fact, employers and investors cannot reasonably be expected to participate in a system that does not increase ROI by taking at least some portion of productivity gains for themselves.Why would I as an owner/investor buy a 2,000,000 robot that will pay for itself over five years or so if I have to give away the proceeds from increased productivity now? Wouldn't I instead invest that money somewhere else?How does your system attract investment? Love for our fellow man? Government mandate? Is marc9000 right after all?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes. That is the particular idea RAZD proposed. And I simply asked the practical question of how you would get the company to act for the benefit of society. I haven't disputed here that the there is a benefit to operating as you suggest. Not if the gains are given to the employee by increasing his pay by exactly the gain in productivity. It does not seem that you want to address the question I posed to RAZD.

No I did not make such an assumption. Double productivity means making the same stuff with less effort. If you then double the salary of the employees or cut their hours by the amount of the increased productivity, you get nothing for the owner. Except that you suggested that the owners share would be zero.You are assuming that there is something unfair about the employees current salary and that the owner is running some kind of charity work program. Why should an employee get an automatic raise just because the owner figures out a way to make more money? And more to the point how do you achieve that? No they are not entitled to a portion of every increase in revenue, however generated by the company. I don't see any natural reason why they ought to be, and I don't see any incentive other than force to make the owners share that way. If the employees want to buy the widget making robot then maybe they deserve a cut.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Let's probe that statement with an example. Let's say that I am paying assembly line workers 20 dollars an hour to make widgets. One of my managers comes to me and suggests that I knock out a wall and put in a new framistat locker next to the assembly line because right now the workers are spending 30 minutes per carrying framistats from one end of the loading dock to the other of the property.According to you, if I do follow my managers advice and spend money installing the recommended storage space, I must give everybody on the assembly line a raise commensurate with the increase in productivity. That may seem intuitively obvious to you, but I don't see it. What I see is that I've removed some back breaking labor from the employees and now I can ask them to do something else in those 30 minutes.Or I can just let things be. Apparently that less than satisfactory answer is just fine.How about if I just give out raises but let people go so that my labor costs stay the same?You call your idea a "system". So how does the system work? What causes me to shell out more money? Government oversight? And how am I exploiting workers when I make their job lighter? How am I exploiting workers by using fewer of them?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Something I believe I acknowledged. I note that you did not address a single question about how your "system" might be implemented here and that I've asked you such questions several times now with the same lack of result.For the record, I am quite concerned with the income inequity in this country and with the ever increasing dumping of money into the political process that only seems to produce more inequities and less freedom. That said, I know that many of the rights I cherish are a function of our current system of government and I'm just curious about how you plan to work around the constitution.

Thanks RAZD. I think these are great suggestions. I don't think they directly answer the questions I asked Jon, which were more along the lines of what do you do with existing situations, were it is the owners money and not the employees money being invested. Only your strike answer seems to get at that. Your answers all seem to leave the Fifth Amendment and the Contract Clause intact as well.In my view, when people insist that their wages should go up in step with their productivity, then they are essentially asking to be paid on a 'piece work' basis. Are they willing to accept reduced wages when the owner steps down production because of a recession? Because that's what owners do.Finally paying workers the same wages for doing less work than than the job entailed when I hired them does not sound anything like abuse to me. I still want to someone to explain why that is abusive to them. I'm looking for an answer other than noting that the owner is making more than I am. Calling something sick is not an answer. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes I agree that it can be. But that does not mean that 'regulated' wage earning is the same unfair affront. I don't see anything insulting or indecent about receiving a fair wage for in exchange for a day's work, particularly when I've agreed on the terms before I start working.Based on the examples I posed and your reaction to them, you are more upset the fact that the business owner has made some money than with the standard of living of the workers. That seems to me to be nothing but an unwarranted jealous fit.This isn't the first discussion in which I have gotten impression that your politics are that of a jack booted thug bent on getting his way by any means. If you were in charge, I think we'd quickly find that the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss.Nobody is forcing you to work for the man, so if you find plowing your own fields more to your liking, then go out and produce five acres of corn.

Not really. You are the who expressed a longing for farm work, which I take to mean just being in business for yourself. Actually, I don't believe I've never found myself in that situation. I seem to recall some 19th century legislation that made stuff like that illegal.I don't know what your situation is. Perhaps you find yourself in bad bargains for wages. And I agree that such a thing is a problem for many people. But you objected to my examples involving something approaching a reasonable wage.

I think that's how it should be. If I could cover for someone I would do it. At least until I determined that I was being used by the same person continually.At most jobs I've been on, workers try to cover for each other as much as possible. Most of the time, I have been on flex time which means that being late is next to impossible unless you have some kind of life problem.But some people still managed to get fired for being late.

Maybe if they start their own businesses they will be successful, but who promotes people who don't give a crap about their current job to manager?

I appreciate your story, but quite obviously I am talking about people who are habitually late. In every place I've worked, (except the military), people do get a chance to work out transportation issues. And with flex time, being late generally means showing up around 10:00 and still leaving at 5:00 or earlier.Obviously being late matters more in some jobs than others. But in a professional job with clients or with meetings with the super-boss, being late often means you might just as well have kept your skinny butt at home that day. All of that stuff is beyond the ridiculous. We aren't talking about anything like discrimination here. Yes, unfortunately, discrimination against women does still go on, but I've never heard of anyone winning a suit for being asked to come to work at 9:00 when they are a natural 10:30 person. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Most people want do exactly that. I have to admit that I've worked with some fairly flexible employers, but they all want people to show up and work hard. I actually haven't witnessed a lot of people getting fired, but I never saw someone get fired when the rest of us were not expecting it. I've never wondered about that the reasons for that. I cannot remember ever seeing that type of behavior out of anyone other than entry level employees who I would not expected to be jaded.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.