On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:17 PM, David Shemano <[email protected]>wrote:

> Jim Devine writes:
>  "To my mind, capitalists are always interested in justifications for
> maintaining high unemployment, since it disciplines labor (keeping wages
> low and labor-effort high, promoting profits) and protects the purchasing
> power of their paper assets.
>
> Total fantasy.  The notion that there are capitalists interested in
> maintaining high employment is ludicrous. It is the progressive left that
> supports policies that increase labor costs and encourage unemployment,
> whether it is minimum wage, unionization, mandatory health care benefits,
> unemployment benefits,


Capitalists are interested in keeping labor costs low. What is so ludicrous
about the idea that capitalists like to keep a "reserve army" of desperate
people around as a way of keeping costs down?




> useless college education that produce individuals that are unemployable.


So college education is "useless", unless it provides job training that
benefits employers?




> Each of these policies is designed to discourage the employment of human
> beings and substitute machinery, and they do what they are supposed to do.
>

This is nonsense. Minimum wage and safety net policies were implemented
with the stated goal of providing aid to low-income people.

These policies may, as an inevitable side-effect discourage the employment
of human beings, but to suggest that this is the intended purpose of
progressive public policies is ridiculous.

-raghu.
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