On Nov 17, 2013, at 4:47 PM, Eugene Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Pen-l, on environmental blogs, in pundit pronouncements, carbon pricing
> and massive technological investments dominate the discussion.
>
> Even if any and/or all of that would work to prevent runaway global warming
> (and it won't) we'd have, most likely, business as usual with clean energy.
>
> Why the single perspective on technology? Even carbon pricing depends for
> results on a technology change.
>
> Why do we need more energy? Why do we need as much as the world now uses?
>
> Pen'L's own Sandwichman has been on this flaneur thing big time.
>
> Green House Gas (GHG) emissions won't be curbed, let alone reduced, until
> consumption is reduced. Which is to say, income is reduced.
>
> Which, if addressed through aggressive reductions in working hours in the
> North, can be accomplished without hardship and with economic justice. There
> will be no environmental justice without economic justice and no stopping
> global warming without both.
>
> Gene
>
=============
A few non-sentimental points from a dolt hunkered down in the so-called
‘smartest city in the US’:
The street corners within the city and the neighboring ones, replete with ADA
compliant sidewalks, are saturated with Sandwichpersons selling everything from
mattresses and medical marijuana to tax advice.
One of the biggest corporations in the state, if not on the planet, just sold
$95 billion worth of atmosphere wounding commodities while demanding that the
workers who build the planes take, over the next several years, a major hit to
compensation and the citizens of the state effectively subsidize the ‘wage’
differential between those working in plants located along the I-5 corridor and
those working in a ‘right-to-work-for-less’ state.
The last time the unnamed state, run by those ever so brilliant Democrats, paid
the extortionists, I [and several others] sent all the subsidies data off to
those wonderful technocrats at the WTO and a food fight ensued over the beauty
of international law and the future of an empire. Alas, I have no desire to
take a vacation to set off another round of said aesthetics conversations and
all I can wonder about in what little spare time I have is where the biggest
forest fires on the planet will happen in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2016, 2018……….
The capitalists and their corporate managers clearly have every intention of
reducing everyone’s income but their own; after all everyone who is lucky
enough to have a job is overpaid and underworked. The gods of productivity must
be appeased:
Clearly, with different and distinct classes that perform different roles in
the production
activity, the competitive market-price mechanism would not be an
appropriate institutional mechanism for guiding the economic system
towards the realization of the natural wage.
In such a situation, the market-price mechanism would simply bring
about competition among workers, and would in fact lead to another effect.
Among the classical economists, it is Marx who most clearly perceived this
other effect of the competitive market-price mechanism, as applied to
labour. He gave the clearest picture of what may be considered as the other
extreme (with respect to the one depicted above, when referring to a
uniformly spread entrepreneurship in a pure labour economy) of the
application of the market-price mechanism to the determination of the
actual wage rate. As is well known, Marx (1867) thought that, in a society in
which entrepreneurs form a quite distinct class (in his analysis, because they
own the means of production), entrepreneurs and workers cannot mix; they
are not interchangeable. If then labour is thrown on a market and is traded
as any other commodity, then we can only expect the competitive
market-price mechanism to perform its job with labour precisely in the
same way as it does with any commodity: namely to drive the price of
labour toward its cost of production. In the case of labour, the cost of
production is the subsistence wage rate; this is what the competitive
market-price mechanism would achieve. Therefore the entrepreneurs
would reap whatever is above subsistence ('exploitation'). We should note
the perfectly logical consistency of Marx's arguments.
[Luigi Pasinetti, “Structural Economic Dynamics” p. 144]
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