Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

[PsychoSerenity]

You folks should read the "Cult of the Boss" in the November Playboy. Just sayin'.

Might have to get a copy of that ..

Edit ... actually not sure I can here ... Can you paraphrase what it's about, please, zilla.

Look for "PB 2011-11" in NSFW. It's the last two images in the OP.

Interesting opinion piece. I don't know why people keep looking at me with doubt in their eyes when I tell them that Playboy articles interest me more than the airbrushed pics.

THE CULT OF THE BOSS
WHAT IS THERE TO ADMIRE ABOUT BUSINESSMEN?
BY JOHN SUMMERS

Conservatives invoke Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek in their defense of the free market. Liberals invoke John Maynard Keynes for his defense of government intervention. Only in Thorstein Veblen, however, may a sane person hope to understand the carnival of mendacity that has sent America spiralling into the abyss.

Veblen, nearly forgotten today, grew up in a gilded cage disfigured, like our own, by robber barons, predatory monopolies, financial panics, lockouts, strikes and mass unemployment. Then, as now, a priestly class of economists rationalized such phenomena while the people, overwhelmed by a swell of ignorance and greed, emulated the pecuniary values of business. A long agricultural crisis devastated the country. Politicians intoned assurances that these were temporary abnormalities in a Sound System, just as our own Depression is cast as a trial of faith, a crisis of confidence.

Veblen smashed this big lie by attacking the superstition of “natural law.” Classical economists, thus indebted, had portrayed capitalism as a reflection of timeless truths and eternal laws. Veblen treated economics as Darwinian cultural science. He found conflict, force and fraud persisting in a society supposedly harmonized by contracts, laws and peaceful rules of rational exchange. His economics tried to explain why capitalism did not fall apart from sheer sleaziness. “The great American game, they say, is poker,” he wrote in 1923’s Absentee Ownership, his book that most illuminates our own era. “Just why real estate should not come in for honorable mention in that way is not to be explained offhand.”

Although Veblen armed his contemporaries with irreversible insights into the monstrous nature of consumer capitalism, life among the late-Victorian class condemned him to the immiseration that is often the fate of original minds in America.

He was born on the Wisconsin frontier in 1857 to Norwegian immigrants and reared on a farm in Minnesota. At Carleton College he married Ellen Rolfe, a niece of the schools president. He embarked on graduate study at Johns Hopkins and the Yale, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1884. But as he disbelieved in supernaturalism, he disqualified himself from teaching philosophy in any God-fearing college or university. The next seven years he passed reading, unneeded and unemployed on farms owned by his father and father-in-law. Eventually he found work teaching economics as a low-level instructor at the University if Chicago, where in 1899, he wrote his first and most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Nobody has attacked the strategic imperative of consumer capitalism – confusing personal worth with the accumulation and display of commodities – with a more vicious erudition than Veblen in this great book. Most of its admirers, however, misunderstood his intentions. His students complained of his mumbling through interminable lectures and refusing to give examinations. He gazes silently out of the window while his students waited for him to speak. Even this indiscretion Veblen’s colleagues might have forgiven had he not also seduced their wives. Irregular relations with Laura Trigg, the wife of a colleague, got him fired from Chicago when Ellen supplied school officials with a dossier of hi infidelities. He moved to Stanford, where he was fired again, also for reasons of moral unfitness. Dismissed or refused at Cornell, Harvard and the University of Missouri, he took revenge by writing The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. (1918). The subtitle he preferred was “A Study in Total Depravity.”

Veblen wrote prodigiously after leaving Missouri and won a share of notoriety and influence as an editor in New York. But the Roaring Twenties left him a defeated man. During his last years he lived alone, unemployed and impoverished, in a small cabin in the hills surrounding Palo Alto, California. He survived on the strength of donations from admirers. “After all,” said President Calvin Coolidge, “the chief business of the American people is business.” And the people had joined the businessmen in an extravagancy of frenzied greed, the end of which Veblen knew was coming. He died on August 5, 1929, less than three months before the Great Crash. Shortly after, he resurfaced as a prophet without honor, a “masterless man” who suffered from “woman trouble,” as John Dos Passos wrote.

The conspicuous inattention given today to Veblen’s criticism of business can’t conceal his broad relevance. The corporation, he said, burst into the 19th century as nothing more creative than a collective credit transaction; it was an institution mobilized by the business class for the purpose of seizing control of the industrial process from the workers, farmers and engineers.

Business enterprise was “a competitive endeavor to realize the largest net gain in terms of price.” The point was to manipulate markets, to maximize profits, using chicanery and prevarication against consumers. “Its end and aim is not productive work,” he wrote, “but profitable business; and its corporate activities are not in the nature of workmanship but of salesmanship.” Joseph Schumpeter famously said business entrepreneurs practiced “creative destruction.” Veblen said they were just destructive.

Even Karl Marx, who marvelled at the productive capacities of modern capitalism, turned businessmen into heroes. Veblen called them saboteurs in pursuit of “the right to get something for nothing.” Their network of credits, liabilities, collateral and other make-believe schemes of capitalization operated on the medieval principle of force and fraud.

Business-as-usual extracted a continuing surcharge on the underlying population’s “instinct of workmanship.” Industry made useful things for human needs. Business made money.

Veblen’s distinction between industry and business reads like an advanced memorandum on the follies of “growth” as the tonic for our malaise. Against the barrage of pecuniary language directed our way by consultants, management theorists, self-help gurus, venture capitalists, financial journalists and other vested interests, he said America’s enormous productive capacity suffered from a corporate form designed to make money, whatever the cost, while denying workers a chance at meaningful participation. Business’s destruction of farming, handcrafts and small-scale production, combined with its plunder of natural resources, has left us – just as Veblen warned – with ancestral memories of craftsmanship, and a food fetish. The best we can hope for, while our politicians wrangle over the businessman’s debt and securities, is to return to the same stupefying jobs we once held and to pay for the privilege of turning ourselves into brands. Liberals, meanwhile, make new idols of rapacious businessmen such as Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, and evangelical Christians make common cause with their natural enemies – libertarians – in the Tea Party. America, left and right, remains in thrall to what Veblen called the “business metaphysic.” The market is not an impersonal, fallible mechanism for distributing resources. It’s a source of spiritual values, and it’s never wrong. The invisible hand distributes virtue and honor along with wealth. God wants you to be rich. But rich or poor, you have what you deserve. Such is their message in this time of despair. Which proves that orthodoxy in the service of business, and business armed with religious purpose, cannot be killed by ideas alone.

John Summers is editor of The Baffler

From Playboy, November 2011, pp 131-132, American edition

I do prefer Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, though.

interesting!

Now listening to The Theory of the Leisure Class audio-book.

[Seth]

...and for every available job in the US there are 4.7 unemployed. It's fine and dandy to say you need to apply for jobs, but if all available jobs were filled, you'd still have 11 million people out of work.

So? A five percent unemployment rate is desirable for an economy because it keeps the competition in the labor market robust and encourages workers to strive to keep their jobs. When employment nears 100 percent, workers tend to slack off and service suffers, to the detriment of the employer's ability to sell products and make a profit.

So for the economy to work, a significant percentage of the population MUST be stamped down to the bottom of the pile. What a wonderfully fair system.

Who said life is fair?

Obviously life naturally often isn't fair. But the whole point of living in a society and having politics is to try and create a system that reduces the unfairness rather than one that exacerbates it. America was founded on such idealistic concepts as "all men are created equal".

Indeed. The key word being "created." Notice that the idea does not say "are entitled to be equal." It says "created" equal. What happens after that is, according to our ideal, largely up to the individual to determine, since liberty is our most important societal ideal. The problem with liberty is that it includes the liberty to fail. There's a reason for that: failure encourages people to better themselves, which is the only true path to prosperity.

Anyway, it's not a matter of "stamping" anyone down, people gravitate to the unemployment line naturally, all on their own. But their ability to find a job depends on the state of the economy, and the more vibrant the economy, the more people who can find jobs, as I pointed out earlier. There is no direct control of the economy by the government to keep a certain percentage of people unemployed, I merely point out that the economy functions most efficiently when there is about 5 percent unemployment. This provides a large enough pool of unemployed workers seeking jobs to keep wages (and therefore the prices of goods) from skyrocketing due to labor scarcity, but not so large that it's a drag on the economy to keep them from starving via government benefits.

More unemployment becomes a drag on the government, which raises taxes to pay unemployment and other welfare benefits, which causes a contraction in the economy due to higher production costs. Less unemployment drives consumer prices higher and cools the economy because scarce labor resources can command a higher price.

It's all about balance.

You're right, it's a system that tends towards that specific balance. It's a small enough percentage of people that they can be ignored or even blamed, but they won't be able to cause much trouble. Yet it's a big enough percentage to create that competition in the labour force that you consider to be desirable.

Indeed.

And you are correct that the economy, with the system as it is, will function most efficiently with that competition. - Because it gives employers a powerful bargaining position and allows them to keep the expense of wages below the true value that the employees add to the business, thus generating profit for the business by exploiting employees' desperation.

Wrong. You're spouting Marxist propaganda here. The "true value" of the laborer's work is what he agrees to accept for doing the work. Any individual employee only contributes a very small part of the "value" of the product he produces, and so he is only entitled to a small percentage of the compensation received when the product is sold. The worker is not "exploited" in the least because he agrees to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed wage, which he gets paid whether or not the product he contributes to is ever sold. The owner takes the risk that the product will not be sold, and is the one who risked the capital to create the product and facilities where the product is produced. The worker gets a wage every week, no matter what. He accepts the safety of a regular wage, which does not include the potential for sharing of profits in place of the risk of investing his time and labor as the owner does, with the possibility of getting nothing at all if the product fails to sell.

There is no exploitation going on at all because the argument you make that the employee is being cheated out of the value of his labor is false. The falsity of the Marxist argument is that capital risk is in fact a valid form of labor that morally justifies a greater reward than the safety of a regular wage. If the laborer is willing to NOT take a regular, fixed wage, but rather is willing to invest his labor, rather than his capital, in the business and place compensation for his labor at risk as the capital investor does, then, and only then is he justified in expecting a share of the profits...if there are any.

So long as he opts for the security of a weekly paycheck, which gets paid regardless of profits, he is being fully compensated for his labor.

As you say, when the state of the economy improves more people can find jobs - which means businesses can't keep the wages low, they get less or no profit and the economy slows. When it's bad, people are desperate for jobs, and the businesses can make more profit out of them - and it all comes to a rough equilibrium with about 5% of the population suffering and desperate for work.

Yup. And it's those people, the ones who truly CANNOT find work (as opposed to those who WILL NOT find work) who need our support.

It's one of the fundamental flaws of capitalism. It's not a fair system.

There is no "fair" system. It's a utopian delusion to think there is. There are only better and worse systems, and capitalism is the best system we've discovered so far.

And it means it's absurd to say that the the unemployed are responsible for being in that situation, because, at a time when you can't have unrestricted growth i.e. expansion onto a new continent, and you can't simply deplete earth's resources for profit, some people necessarily have to be unemployed for the system to function. - And that's before getting on to the fact that all this system does is lead to more wealth being accumulated by those who are already wealthy, and that wealth becoming more and more disconnected from anything that actually benefits society.

Sorry, but there's plenty of jobs out there, they just aren't the sort of jobs that people who are getting welfare or unemployment checks are willing to do, as proven by the fact that we have 12 million illegal aliens who have come here to take those jobs.

As for the canard that you can't have "unrestricted growth," nobody's claiming you can, but we can, and must, deplete the earth's resources for profit because that's how humanity advances and will eventually leave the planet and go on to exploit the resources of the rest of the universe. Devolving into Luddite primitivism simply ensures the eventual extinction of humanity.

[amok]

What strikes me in the "life isn't fair" roundabout, is that it's used by both sides.

A lot of people seem to imply that it's the sole domain of the poor, but almost every time I've heard it used by the rich - wah, wah, wah, it's not fair that the losers want me to pay more taxes, wah, wah, wah - the VERY SAME person uses the "life isn't fair" catch phrase to counter arguments that the system should at least try to achieve fairness.

I say suck it up, buttercup. If the poor take take you down (not that I think it's going to happen), well, life isn't fair, is it?

[Seth]

What strikes me in the "life isn't fair" roundabout, is that it's used by both sides.

A lot of people seem to imply that it's the sole domain of the poor, but almost every time I've heard it used by the rich - wah, wah, wah, it's not fair that the losers want me to pay more taxes, wah, wah, wah - the VERY SAME person uses the "life isn't fair" catch phrase to counter arguments that the system should at least try to achieve fairness.

I say suck it up, buttercup. If the poor take take you down (not that I think it's going to happen), well, life isn't fair, is it?

The problem is not that life is not fair, nor that government is involved in the fairness of society, it's all in HOW the government tries to go about creating or ensuring fairness.

Libertarian government goes about protecting fairness by providing protective mechanism by which individuals may enforce the contracts they have freely made and by providing resources to protect against force and fraud, the theory being that human beings generally act with rational self-interest in their dealings with others and that fairness is best served by government limiting itself to it's proper police-power role of ensuring liberty and freedom of contact. Libertarian government does not attempt to impose "fairness" by taking from one group or person and giving it to another, it allows each person and group to seek and find their own economic success and happiness through liberty.

Socialism attempts to "level the playing field" by first falsely presuming that one persons wealth is "excessive" and another's is "deficient" and it tries to rectify this purported "unfairness" by seizing the wealth of one and redistributing it to another. This, of course, is only seen as "fair" by the recipients of the stolen wealth, not by those who owned the wealth and earned it by being members of the productive class, only to have it stolen by the government to mollify the greed and avarice of the dependent class.

Of the two, only the former truly provides "fairness" because under Libertarianism, each person is solely responsible for his or her own wealth and success and may not blame others for their own inadequacies and failings. This is entirely fair, even though it is not necessarily equal.

But then again, "fairness" and "equality of outcome" are two entirely different things.

[amok]

What strikes me in the "life isn't fair" roundabout, is that it's used by both sides.

A lot of people seem to imply that it's the sole domain of the poor, but almost every time I've heard it used by the rich - wah, wah, wah, it's not fair that the losers want me to pay more taxes, wah, wah, wah - the VERY SAME person uses the "life isn't fair" catch phrase to counter arguments that the system should at least try to achieve fairness.

I say suck it up, buttercup. If the poor take take you down (not that I think it's going to happen), well, life isn't fair, is it?

The problem is not that life is not fair, nor that government is involved in the fairness of society, it's all in HOW the government tries to go about creating or ensuring fairness.

Libertarian government goes about protecting fairness by providing protective mechanism by which individuals may enforce the contracts they have freely made and by providing resources to protect against force and fraud, the theory being that human beings generally act with rational self-interest in their dealings with others and that fairness is best served by government limiting itself to it's proper police-power role of ensuring liberty and freedom of contact. Libertarian government does not attempt to impose "fairness" by taking from one group or person and giving it to another, it allows each person and group to seek and find their own economic success and happiness through liberty.

Socialism attempts to "level the playing field" by first falsely presuming that one persons wealth is "excessive" and another's is "deficient" and it tries to rectify this purported "unfairness" by seizing the wealth of one and redistributing it to another. This, of course, is only seen as "fair" by the recipients of the stolen wealth, not by those who owned the wealth and earned it by being members of the productive class, only to have it stolen by the government to mollify the greed and avarice of the dependent class.

Of the two, only the former truly provides "fairness" because under Libertarianism, each person is solely responsible for his or her own wealth and success and may not blame others for their own inadequacies and failings. This is entirely fair, even though it is not necessarily equal.

But then again, "fairness" and "equality of outcome" are two entirely different things.

I actually don't disagree with some of your points.

I was only talking about the people I've heard (or read) who use the "life is unfair" phrase in one context and don't quite get that it also applies when it might work against them. I think they're jerks.

[MrJonno]

Libertarians allow people with more money to have more control over their society.
Democracies give everyone one vote whether you are a factory owner with a 1000 employees or one of those employees which is why they hate it.

As their are a lot more poorer people than richer people guess which one leads to a better society for most people

[Seth]

Libertarians allow people with more money to have more control over their society.

Mendacious and ignorant nonsense. Libertarians are not about "control" over society, they are about freedom. Those with no wealth are just as free as those with great wealth to do as they please so long as they do not initiate force or fraud.

Democracies give everyone one vote whether you are a factory owner with a 1000 employees or one of those employees which is why they hate it.

"Democracy" is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Why should 1000 employees have a vote over what a factory owner does with HIS factory? It's not their fucking factory. If they want a vote, they can put together their own capital and build their own factory under any socialist rules they like, for all the good it'll do them. Your version of "democracy" is exactly why our Founders didn't institute a democracy, they created a Constitutional Republic that uses some very limited democratic processes.

Democracy is on the long list of Very Bad Things. No democracy has lasted long beyond the time that the dependent class gains the majority and learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury, as Alexander Tytler predicted two hundred years ago.

As their are a lot more poorer people than richer people guess which one leads to a better society for most people

Capitalism, of course. Certainly NOT democracy, ever.

[MrJonno]

"Democracy" is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Better than one big wolf doing the deciding for everyone.

If a 1000 people work in a factory which they consider dangerous they can either use negotiate with the owner to try and improve things who may or may not be interested of their can elect a government that will who certainly will listen as they outnumber the owner 1000 to 1.

I do my investing via the ballot box

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"Democracy" is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

You say "wolves" like it was a bad thing. They're working for their dinner, not asking for entitlements, and they have better manners than you.

[Coito ergo sum]

Libertarians allow people with more money to have more control over their society.
Democracies give everyone one vote whether you are a factory owner with a 1000 employees or one of those employees which is why they hate it.

As their are a lot more poorer people than richer people guess which one leads to a better society for most people

Democracies give everyone a vote on things subject to being voted on. A majority of the residents in my town can't vote, for example, to have a slumber party at my house at which I will supply snacks and beverages. My vote trumps them all, in that context.

Democracy is great, when coupled with limited government and separation of powers. Democracy is not employed, for example, in the judiciary, which decides certain disputes, but doesn't have a say in other things. A judge or panel of judges makes a ruling, majority of the population be damned. The President or Prime Minister doesn't have to hold a referendum on every executive decision. The executive officers have certain powers, and they can act within those powers, majority be damned. Certain areas of life - like the voicing of political opinions, and what gods we do or don't worship - are not up for majority vote either.

Democracy is a good thing, but not everywhere and in all places. I would never want my right to be an atheist subject to the vote of 1,000 or 100,000,000 other citizens. Would you?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The only real difference in all these political systems is what they're called.

[Coito ergo sum]

The vast majority of non-citizen, and non-legal resident aliens working in the farm industry are, in fact, legal. Only a small percentage of farmworkers are illegal. So, in no sense of the word can it be said that "illegal aliens" do work Americans "won't" do.

A quick web surf suggests that about 25% of all farm workers are here illegally:

Nearly a quarter of all farm workers are here illegally, and according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 17 percent of those cleaning the nations' offices and 12 percent preparing food in the country don't have legal work papers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5250150

Granted NPR is not the most reliable source, but given their liberal leanings, those numbers are probably lower than the reality rather than higher. If your numbers for citizen and legal resident farm workers are correct - and I have no reason to believe otherwise - then the arithmetic says that there are more foreign farm workers here illegally than on legal H2A visas.

If we take that number, 25%, as the true number, it still means that it is flat out wrong that "illegals are doing jobs that Americans WON'T do." The remaining 75% of folks doing those jobs are either American citizens or legal aliens. Americans WILL do those jobs. I know that for a fact because Americans do, in fact, do those jobs.

[Cunt]

The worker is not "exploited" in the least because he agrees to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed wage, which he gets paid whether or not the product he contributes to is ever sold.

Just a thought here, Seth, but every time I have worked for a wage - EVERY time - the bosses have added work to the job without increasing pay.

What the worker is supposed to do is a fixed amount of work for a fixed wage, I agree, but what actually happens is quite different.

Bosses take advantage, and even the best of them don't like to see their employees 'sitting around', even after they have finished what they contracted to do.

Because of this, I have come to realize that 'work ethic' phrase which is tossed around is really a 'slave ethic'. No business would or could agree to do work for money if the work could include 'other duties as deemed necessary by the boss' while not including more money.

I have started applying a 'business ethic' to my work. Since then, most wage-paying employers won't agree to anything. They simply MUST have something in their contract which allows them to ask for more without paying for it.

It isn't anywhere near fair, and a perfect example is that when hiring someone to clean a place of business on a wage, most business owners would add more duties whenever the janitorial staff was 'sitting around' (finished their duties). When contracting a cleaning company, more duties almost universally means business owners being charged more.

[MrJonno]

Democracies give everyone a vote on things subject to being voted on. A majority of the residents in my town can't vote, for example, to have a slumber party at my house at which I will supply snacks and beverages. My vote trumps them all, in that context.

They should be able to (and in fact can) but if society is that screwed up to choose that then the problem isnt democracy its the people and area you live in.

If 51% of population want to make it legal to shoot the other 49% then there is zero point in having any higher laws preventing them as your country is finished anyway.

[Coito ergo sum]

The worker is not "exploited" in the least because he agrees to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed wage, which he gets paid whether or not the product he contributes to is ever sold.

Just a thought here, Seth, but every time I have worked for a wage - EVERY time - the bosses have added work to the job without increasing pay.

That's why you need to get things in writing. If it's not in writing, the boss and you can always change the terms. The boss can add work to the job by saying "I need you to do this." You can say,"sorry boss, no my yob, mang." In which case he can say either, "o.k., fine," or "well, I don't need you anymore." Similarly, you can say after working there for 3 months, "boss, this is unreasonable work you have me doing, and I need to only do 80% of it..." and the boss can either say "o.k." or "no, keep doing all the work." You can then say "I quit."

What the worker is supposed to do is a fixed amount of work for a fixed wage, I agree, but what actually happens is quite different.

What the worker is supposed to do is what the worker and the employer agree upon. That could be "sit there and look pretty" or "work your ass off."

Bosses take advantage, and even the best of them don't like to see their employees 'sitting around', even after they have finished what they contracted to do.

It's not an inherent concept in working at a job that if you are given a task and finish it in 6 hours that you ought to sit around and relax the remaining 2. If you're paid by the hour, the boss can give you work to do, and when you finish, he can give you more work to do. Or, he can stop you half way through and put you on another project. You'd be free to refuse, of course, or quit.

Because of this, I have come to realize that 'work ethic' phrase which is tossed around is really a 'slave ethic'. No business would or could agree to do work for money if the work could include 'other duties as deemed necessary by the boss' while not including more money.

That depends on whether the work is paid on a project basis, or a time basis.

I have started applying a 'business ethic' to my work. Since then, most wage-paying employers won't agree to anything. They simply MUST have something in their contract which allows them to ask for more without paying for it.

It isn't anywhere near fair, and a perfect example is that when hiring someone to clean a place of business on a wage, most business owners would add more duties whenever the janitorial staff was 'sitting around' (finished their duties). When contracting a cleaning company, more duties almost universally means business owners being charged more.

That's because with respect to the employed by the hour janitor, the janitor is hired to work for a set number hours at a set wage per hour, regardless of what he is or isn't doing. The employer need not anticipate how long the job will take, and then let the employee finish early and sit around.

With respect to a contracted cleaning company, the business owner doesn't control the hours or pay by the hour - he pays by the job. When the job is done in one hour or three hour, then the payment is the same.