On Tuesday, September 17, 2019, 04:43:11 PM PDT, Razer <[email protected]>
wrote:
On September 16, 2019 9:48:23 PM PDT, grarpamp <[email protected]> wrote:
>>https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=taxation+is+theft
>>
>>https://mises.org/books-library
>Taking most of the surplus value created by my labor is theft fuck you very
>much.
"Surplus value" is a phony, fictitious concept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value that originated in the
mid-1800's, when it was individual physical labor which "made" most products.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, when products began to be made mostly, and
eventually almost completely, by machines (and later, even robots). These
days, products are manufactured virtually entirely by machine, and that
includes automatically packing them into sales packaging.
"Surplus value" is best seen as phony when you consider one extreme limit, you
can imagine when a caretaker comes in to the factory in the morning, turns on
the lights, and the machines make the products. That factory makes a 'profit',
of course, the difference in the sales price of the product, and the parts and
electricity used to put them together. "Workers" want to think they they
'created' the products that the machines and robots actually created. They
want what they call "profit", which is actually mostly the responsibility of
hundreds of machines.
In reality, the cost of those products generally includes raw materials
(including pre-assembled parts), and the machines which build the product.
(Machines which must be purchased from other companies.) The actual value
added by the fewer remaining workers is becoming tiny. AS IT SHOULD! It is
this gradual change in reduction in individual, physical effort which gradually
makes products cost much less, as a proportion of typical people's incomes.
If you doubt this, would you rather have been "poor" in 1960, or "poor" in
2019? Today, "poor" means you can't afford a new 60-inch-plus TV every couple
of years. Somebody I know just bought a 50-inch RCA TV for $230, from Walmart.
In case you think the idea of a near-worker-less factory is fiction, one was
actually built in Hillsboro Oregon in about 1986, to make printers. Sure,
there were some workers: They opened boxes of piece-parts and poured them into
bins that the robots could reach. And the human workers physically boxed the
printers, presumably because that was a job that could not yet have been
automated. I believe that factory still exists, it makes ink cartridges now.
(Unless this is another such Epson factory.)
https://apm.activecommunities.com/hillsborooregonparks/Activity_Search/epson-printers-manugacturing-in-oregon-since-1986/3349
Put simply, workers want to believe that they are entitled to a percentage,
hopefully constant, of what they calculate as being the "profit" on building
products. That might have seemed true in 1850, but the idea must have been
dying by 1950, and we should hope that by 2019 it is thoroughly dead. We
should all be thankful that we don't live the way people lived in 1950, and
certainly not in 1850.
Jim Bell
