Union emasculaton a good thing?

Originally posted by normbenign
Of course direct trade of resources is extremely inefficient and wasteful. Money lubricates and accelerates. Also money enumerates, and makes measurements possible, enabling accounting and measurement of success or failure.

A unit of value cannot be counted among the things of value any more than one can claim an hour is the essence of time.

Originally posted by moon1969
I like your thoughts of worker owned businesses. However, until a proliferation of worker owned businesses comes to fruition, as you desire, and which will likely not happen in our lifetime, unions are better than no unions for working people, that's for sure. Imasculating unions and ridding America of unions accelerates the push and trend to plutocracy in America.

I sometimes wonder if what unions really accomplished was to merely make a horrible system seem palatable for 80 some years. By making that system seem marginally functional for so long, the unions may have diverted us from making the substantive, systemic changes that were really needed. Perhaps it would be better to just let the Republicans run rampant for a while so everyone could clearly see just how morally bankrupt they really are. Then once their propaganda had been thoroughly discredited in the sight of everyone capable of seeing, we could set about clearing away their wreckage and rebuilding things the way they should have been all along.

Originally posted by rwingett
I sometimes wonder if what unions really accomplished was to merely make a horrible system seem palatable for 80 some years. By making that system seem marginally functional for so long, the unions may have diverted us from making the substantive, systemic changes that were really needed. Perhaps it would be better to just let the Republicans run rampant fo ...[text shortened]... bout clearing away their wreckage and rebuilding things the way they should have been all along.

I get what you are saying, and have seen similar themes in your comments in other issues. And I lean more toward you than the other way with the intransient inequities or problems of the status quo. That fundamental or systematic change is the only real solution with given issues, and that tweaks or minor improvements are really only smoke and mirrors, and actually provide cover to maintain the bleak status quo. I have some friends who are convinced that things must get much worse before they get better, or that we must tear down and destroy entire systems and paradigms. Also, I remember studying about Legal Critical Studies of 70s-80s in law school, for example. However, I am not completely there yet, and as of now resigned to pushing for improvements, no matter how meager, in existing systems.

Originally posted by rwingett
One of the big attractions of cooperative industries is that they're rooted within the community they operate within. They don't ship themselves overseas because labor is not seen as an externality to be minimized at all costs. Thus they are very stable enterprises as seen by the example of the Mondragon cooperatives. Your ossified ideology simply does not apply.

Well, I think what I said is neither ideological nor ossified. But I can see the appeal of what you propose. It has a certain limited utility. Why don't you organize one and keep us updated?

Originally posted by rwingett
I sometimes wonder if what unions really accomplished was to merely make a horrible system seem palatable for 80 some years. By making that system seem marginally functional for so long, the unions may have diverted us from making the substantive, systemic changes that were really needed. Perhaps it would be better to just let the Republicans run rampant fo ...[text shortened]... bout clearing away their wreckage and rebuilding things the way they should have been all along.

Jesus. Just when you get me thinking that you're walking through a coherent argument, you start foaming at the mouth. Wipe your chin.

Originally posted by rwingett
Perhaps it would be better to just let the Republicans run rampant for a while so everyone could clearly see just how morally bankrupt they really are. Then once their propaganda had been thoroughly discredited in the sight of everyone capable of seeing, we could set about clearing away their wreckage and rebuilding things the way they should have been all along.

Republicans, assisted by Dixiecrats who were really Republicans by another name, did run rampant in the 1980s.

By and large, the country liked that it saw to the extent that the Democratic party had to morph into a lite version of the Republican party on economic policy just to be competitive. It remains such to this day, though the "great recession" being blamed on Republicans by a majority of the people may allow the Dems to move a little leftward now.

Originally posted by moon1969
I get what you are saying, and have seen similar themes in your comments in other issues. And I lean more toward you than the other way with the intransient inequities or problems of the status quo. That fundamental or systematic change is the only real solution with given issues, and that tweaks or minor improvements are really only smoke and mirrors, an ...[text shortened]... , and as of now resigned to pushing for improvements, no matter how meager, in existing systems.

The "status quo" has burgeoned the greatest period of technological advance in the history of mankind. I wouldn't be so quick to throw under the bus a system that gave people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg the financial incentive to build what they built.

Originally posted by sasquatch672
Jesus. Just when you get me thinking that you're walking through a coherent argument, you start foaming at the mouth. Wipe your chin.

That's what you get when you wander into my thread. Beware!

Originally posted by sh76
The "status quo" has burgeoned the greatest period of technological advance in the history of mankind. I wouldn't be so quick to throw under the bus a system that gave people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg the financial incentive to build what they built.

The greatest number of technological advances is certainly not on the top of my list for most socially just nations. In fact, such a quality could just as easily be at home with most despotic nations. After all, the Nazis certainly came up with a laundry list of technological innovations of their own.

Originally posted by rwingett
The greatest number of technological advances is certainly not on the top of my list for most socially just nations. In fact, such a quality could just as easily be at home with most despotic nations. After all, the Nazis certainly came up with a laundry list of technological innovations of their own.

You're mixing economic and social issues. The Nazis were bad not because of their economic policies but because of their authoritarian social, racially discriminatory and aggressive military policies. In fact, on a purely economic scale, the Nazis' policies would probably be considered left of (or at best equivalent to) the Democratic party's.

Whether the government is despotic is mostly irrespective of its policies on the economic axis that ranges from communist on one end to neoliberal lassies faire capitalism on the other.

Originally posted by sh76
You're mixing economic and social issues. The Nazis were bad not because of their economic policies but because of their authoritarian social, racially discriminatory and aggressive military policies. In fact, on a purely economic scale, the Nazis' policies would probably be considered left of (or at best equivalent to) the Democratic party's.

Whether the go ...[text shortened]... is that ranges from communist on one end to neoliberal lassies faire capitalism on the other.

My point is that social justice is preferable to technological profligacy when it comes to building an award winning society.

Originally posted by rwingett
My point is that social justice is preferable to technological profligacy when it comes to building an award winning society.

social justice is for losers

Originally posted by Soothfast
A unit of value cannot be counted among the things of value any more than one can claim an hour is the essence of time.

I don't see how this modifies what you responded to. Trade happens with money that would be unlikely without it. A farmer sells his wheat to a mill, how does that happen without money? The mill sells flour to a great many bakers, and the bakers sell bread to consumers. Those trades are very clumsy, and may not happen at all in a barter economy.

Of course money has only the value the traders assign to it. The hour is rather rigid, hardly comparable to money which can be very flexible.

Originally posted by rwingett
My point is that social justice is preferable to technological profligacy when it comes to building an award winning society.

Social justice is always appealed to when someone wants to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Originally posted by sasquatch672
Well, I think what I said is neither ideological nor ossified. But I can see the appeal of what you propose. It has a certain limited utility. Why don't you organize one and keep us updated?

Don't you see that if he successfully organized such a venture, he would be his own enemy? He knows that this involves real work, and deserves real reward. Doing it all for nothing of for love of neighbor is just asinine.

And the notion of assembling a large group to do it, well the larger the group, the smaller the chances of anything getting done, and of that anything being successful.