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Just FYI: die hard conservative. Voted trump twice and will if he's the candidate again. I'm a throw liberals out the helicopter and giggle type guy deep down unfortunately. I'm flawed like that but understand my political and economic views are not the same as my faith.

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Sometimes I don't think this place is real.

Brother, I can't do the wall of text. You win. I surrender. All I will say is that your belief structure seems to stem more from Protestantism than the Apostolic Church, and both your church and mine have specifically rebutted your divorcing of labor and the individual.

Dies Irae said:

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Brother, I can't do the wall of text. You win. I surrender. All I will say is that your belief structure seems to stem more from Protestantism than the Apostolic Church, and both your church and mine have specifically rebutted your divorcing of labor and the individual.

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Lots of words were typed so maybe I missed this, but you said something about everyone has a right to a just wage, be it the burger flipper or the manager. A 45 year old burger flipper would need more than an 18 year old burger flipper. So question:

What would the Church say about a 45 year old settling for flipping burgers instead of working they're way up the chain?

The Banned said:

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Dies Irae said:

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Brother, I can't do the wall of text. You win. I surrender. All I will say is that your belief structure seems to stem more from Protestantism than the Apostolic Church, and both your church and mine have specifically rebutted your divorcing of labor and the individual.

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Lots of words were typed so maybe I missed this, but you said something about everyone has a right to a just wage, be it the burger flipper or the manager. A 45 year old burger flipper would need more than an 18 year old burger flipper. So question:

What would the Church say about a 45 year old settling for flipping burgers instead of working they're way up the chain?

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No that's not correct; the church teaches that some jobs are not meant to support an invidivual and are meant to be a level of on the job training for those fresh into the workforce. I made the distinction between "a cashier at McDonalds" earlier, and a "Manager of a McDonalds".

I don't think my understanding of economics stems from protestantism any more than my understanding of engineering does.

Zobel said:

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I don't think my understanding of economics stems from protestantism any more than my understanding of engineering does.

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Understanding economics is much different than putting it in practice. Economics is a science it isn't a philosophy, we've mistaken it as such and have pegged maximizing market efficiency as the sole guiding principle of society and collateral damage be damned.

The ancient Christian economy was centered around the church and the faith, they didn't allow money lending at interest, they formed guilds to ensure dialogue between capital and labor and keep the reciprocal obligation intact, they took holy days off from labor, and they shunned non productive income.

The enlightenment came in and voila, we have people extolling workers with families who "have never taken a day of vacation in their life" or who "never used a sick day" or "died at their desk". To any Christian this is an absolute tragedy and shows a grotesque disordering of life, but this is what you get when you distill a person's worth to that which they can produce. I understand you exercise a loophole by saying "it's their labor that we value as nothing, not them" but neither my church nor your church see it that way.

Yeah, but all that is a diatribe that has nothing to do with anything I wrote.

" you distill a person's worth to that which they can produce." thought you rejected this premise?

Zobel said:

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Yeah, but all that is a diatribe that has nothing to do with anything I wrote.

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Ok

one MEEN Ag said:

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ramblin_ag02 said:

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But, there is absolutely 'rules for ruling' within the Bible. And God expects that if Christianity spreads far and wide enough that a Christian with authority will eventually, even if for just a moment in time, be responsible for structuring their country's economy and politics. And God expects that authority to still to be handled in a Christian manner. And those expectations are what I've described earlier. And those things look A LOT like capitalistic freedoms and natural rights. It only took approx 300 years and the empire of Rome had St. Constantine, a Christian, at its helm.

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I'd say you have the cart and the horse backward. Capitalism often looks like Christianity because capitalism was often adopted and advanced by Christians. Even then we saw things like debtors prisons, company towns, and factory death traps. Market capitalism didn't solve any of those problems. It was political will driven by a sense of injustice.

So while we can speak of a labor market in abstract terms, there are limitations. People are not bushels of corn, barrels of oil, or pounds of precious metal. If the market determines that a day's wage is less than the cost of a day's necessities then bad things start to happen. If the price for food is too low, then food that doesn't get sold spoils. Metals and oil that don't get sold just sit there. If the price for labor is too low, and labor doesn't get sold, then you have hungry, angry people sitting around with no stake in their society. It doesn't take all that many of those types of people to cause huge problems. Look at coal towns one hundred years ago or Paris today. Social unrest is not pretty, and the devaluing of labor in relation to the cost of necessities is a common thread in nearly every revolution since the French one.

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If you took it one step further the cart and the horse would be properly aligned. Why are there centuries of christians who latched onto capitalism and promoted it? Because there is an ordering of finances and capital ownership in the Bible that capitalism is in tune with.

The modern form of capitalism dates back to the first stock markets in the 1600s in Amsterdam. The modern form of communism comes about in the 1800s in reaction to capitalism.

If a christian were to become ruler of a deeply subjugated country, installing property rights, enforceable contracts, freedom of movement, freedom of occupation, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, etc are all good things. If you remove those features, those are demonstrably evil things. Fallen men make fallen systems, but there is clearly one system that is better than the other here.

This is why I think its silly to say to Christianity has no economic theory. There are obvious economic theories that you can look at their ordering, compare them to what Christianity endorses or doesn't, and give a thumbs up or down. In this world, Christianity is communistic on an interpersonal level, and pro-property ownership, creation, invention, and investing on a macro level. That looks like foundational principles of capitalism to me.

In heaven, there is no democracy. There is no money. There is no scarcity nor suffering. Politicians who try to leverage christianity into onboarding communism under the guise of it being a utopia only create hell on earth.

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Yes but we have to be careful not to put capitalism on a pedestal of being a utopia that brings about Christians conversions. It promotes things that can be compatible with Christianity, and maybe more so than other economies, but its the people that are acting in a Christian way that can make capitalism beneficial, not the other way around. Especially in the western world, there is a tendency for us to believe capitalism is God's chosen method of economics. If everyone were purely selfless and Christ like, socialism would work too. But we're not, so here we are.

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People are not bushels of corn, barrels of oil, or pounds of precious metal.

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At the risk of being redundant, unless you are discussing the market price of people this isn't relevant to labor. People have the freedom to sell their labor or not. If they aren't actually free - like in the case of wage slavery through predatory company town setups - then we're not talking about capitalism any more. Capitalism and voluntary exchange go hand in hand.

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If the market determines that a day's wage is less than the cost of a day's necessities then bad things start to happen.

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This isn't a capitalism problem any more than gravity is a physics "problem". If you drop something from high enough, it will probably break when it hits the ground. That's neither bad nor good, it simply is.

Your scenario is no different. In the end, value isn't some abstract thing. If both parties in a transaction have the freedom to enter or leave that that transaction, then by definition both parties will not enter into the transaction unless they both believe they will benefit. The agreed price of the transaction sets the value. As long as there is voluntary cooperation and both parties are generally informed of relevant details, by definition this will be a mutually beneficial exchange.

When nobody is willing to enter into an exchange to employ a person at a given wage that means that the exchange would not be mutually beneficial. Even under Dies Irae's "just wage" constraints, the employer is not obligated to harm himself to employ the worker.

Another way to understand what you wrote, then, is that individuals with freedom are unwilling to enter into a transaction that does not benefit them to secure a day's necessities for a worker. Now we're in an actual dichotomy - someone has to be harmed here.

As Christians we say - we should be willing to voluntarily sacrifice to provide for the needs of others, which means it does some level of economic harm to us. Capitalism doesn't say you should or should not do that, it just correctly notes that you're shifting the harm from one party to the other. And, it correctly enables us to identify that action as charity, which also allows us to understand it correctly as virtue.

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Another way to understand what you wrote, then, is that individuals with freedom are unwilling to enter into a transaction that does not benefit them to secure a day's necessities for a worker. Now we're in an actual dichotomy - someone has to be harmed here.

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I think we're playing fast and loose with the word "harm" here. Technically, getting 19% profit instead of 21% profit and having the stock price drop from $6 to $5.90 is a harm, but it hardly compares with not being able to afford a place to live, food to eat, transportation, and clothes to wear. It's a false equivalence to equate the two.

Don't know whether this will matter, but let me phrase this another way. Our country is the richest country in the history of the world. The richest people who have ever lived mostly come from our current and recent history. Companies have never been bigger or more profitable. And yet we're having a discussion about why the market may or may not value full-time unskilled labor to the point that an individual can merely survive from the wages of it. Every other society in the before the 18th century was able to clearly notice that working people needed enough money to stay alive, and they were all much poorer than we are. It didn't always work out that way due to natural disasters and bad harvests, but every society knew that starving peasants was a very bad thing. Even poor societies full of peasants, serfs and slaves all universally agreed that working people should be paid at least the basic necessities of life. So it blows my mind when people extol our modern capitalism on one hand as the best possible system, but on the other hand think it's perfectly ok to pay someone full time wages are that below subsistence level like it's some law of nature like gravity. It's especially weird hearing it from Christians. It isn't a natural law. It's humans putting value on things, and that's always subjective. If our society and culture is undervaluing unskilled labor. That's not a problem with natural law, it's a problem with society and culture

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I think we're playing fast and loose with the word "harm" here. Technically, getting 19% profit instead of 21% profit and having the stock price drop from $6 to $5.90 is a harm, but it hardly compares with not being able to afford a place to live, food to eat, transportation, and clothes to wear. It's a false equivalence to equate the two.

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I disagree. Again, labor is just another product. A business that can't employ needed labor doesn't have its stock price go from 21% to 19%, it goes to zero. Unless they're using slave labor, every single worker there voluntarily accepted an offer, and both parties benefit from that arrangement. If the company can't find someone to work for $20, they'll go to $25 and $30 and so on until they find a seller. Or, in the extreme, until they go out of business. If a person can't find work for $45, they'll go to $40 and $20 and so on until they find a buyer.

There's no magic step between individuals and companies.

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we're having a discussion about why the market may or may not value full-time unskilled labor to the point that an individual can merely survive from the wages of it.

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Sorry, but I think this is mostly ridiculous. For one, actual grinding, can't get enough food, working literally to death to survive poverty does not exist in the US. I've been to places where it does and seen it with my own eyes. So here we're playing fast and loose with the words "survive" and "basic necessities of life".

For two, today, right now, the US is in a labor shortage. This problem is not a real one, at least not in the aggregate sense. There are some localized problems, particularly in places like NYC or San Francisco. But go just a day's drive and people are desperate for workers. Every fast food restaurant nearby me has help wanted signs. Chick Fil A pays $15 starting. We're desperate for workers at my job - we will hire you today at $20 to come be a trainee mechanic, and you'll clear $75k in the first year easily. Most people don't want to work the hours, and many others can't pass a drug test. We are squeezed all around.

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Even poor societies full of peasants, serfs and slaves all universally agreed that working people should be paid at least the basic necessities of life.

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My friend, your privilege is showing. China had a famine that killed over 30 million people in living memory. It doesn't matter what people agree to - at some point the brute facticity of reality takes over.

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If our society and culture is undervaluing unskilled labor.

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Show your work. Someone is accepting the offer, that's what defines value. Why are you upset with the person offering the wage, and not the person accepting it?

Even further, at some point there is a choice between profit and loss. Every dollar a company makes on the bottom line goes somewhere, and not a single dollar from the top line comes from nowhere. And each dollar has an opportunity and capital cost to it. If it is not profitable to employ a person in a particular job, you are asking someone along the chain to lose money. That is not a fictitious idea.

In the end, you only have two choices. People are free to enter into voluntary exchange, or you're going to have to force someone to do something they don't want to do. That is usually the reality of the objection underneath - you don't like what other people are doing. But again, unless there is coercion, your problem is with two parties, not one.

one MEEN Ag said:

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CrackerJackAg said:

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one MEEN Ag said:

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**explains how the Bible exactly shows examples of God ordered property rights and now civilization on this earth should be ordered**

**explains how humans should be giving over and above these foundational economics**

Crackerjack: ain't nothing to do with Christianity.

Alright, you do you bud. Go on back Facebook or Twitter and share your hot takes about how Christianity has nothing to say here.

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There are examples of everything in the Bible economically. You just give weight to the ones you agree with.

"All those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need" (Acts 2:44-45). A little while later, Luke stated that among the believers "not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them" (Acts 4:32). Funds collected "would be distributed to each as any had need" (Acts 4:35).

Many more examples for both systems. God wasnt promoting either.

Good and Christianity exists in all forms of economic/political situations. It has thrived under Imperialism, Kings and Democracy at times too. (Notice I didn't say communism there.) These succeed and fail based on the merit and honesty of those running the systems.

Christianity does not need Capitalism and is not the reason for its success in any way. It has helped some and has hurt some.

I'm just pointing out Christianity and Capitalism are not intertwined in anyway.

Just FYI: die hard conservative. Voted trump twice and will if he's the candidate again. I'm a throw liberals out the helicopter and giggle type guy deep down unfortunately. I'm flawed like that but understand my political and economic views are not the same as my faith.

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Right, just like discussed previously, you point to individual examples of person to person transactions. And the calling card of Christianity is giving selflessly to the point of poverty-out of love. That is what we are all called to do. Because Christianity is a bottom up change of heart religion that (like you're saying) is agnostic about the economic and political institutions either empowering or persecuting Christians and others.

But, there is absolutely 'rules for ruling' within the Bible. And God expects that if Christianity spreads far and wide enough that a Christian with authority will eventually, even if for just a moment in time, be responsible for structuring their country's economy and politics. And God expects that authority to still to be handled in a Christian manner. And those expectations are what I've described earlier. And those things look A LOT like capitalistic freedoms and natural rights. It only took approx 300 years and the empire of Rome had St. Constantine, a Christian, at its helm.

You can make the case that Christians are to be so caught up in God and serving one another that they shouldn't place any input on the political and economic systems they exist in. But that can be a false dichotomy. The British Navy wouldn't have ended slavery by sinking slave ships without Christianity highlighting man's equality. Or the suffrage movement. Or the bill of rights. Christians are called dually to make this fallen world as close to the garden of Eden as possible, and part of that includes wielding authority in way that pleases God.

If you want to think about just how far and wide the impact of Christianity has been on the world order in 2000 years, consider that at the time of Jesus, those who new about God was a sliver. The rest of the world was ruled by demons and pursuing pagan beliefs. Fast forward 2000 years and the look how far paganism has been pushed to the margins of this world. The major world beliefs are supermajority Abrahamic.

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Christianity still has nothing to do with Capitalism and visa verse. Nor does it with socialism or any other economic system.

If a Christian finds socialism super neato he can find plenty of Biblical examples. Same for the Capitalist.

I don't look for my faith in my economic opinions. It doesn't exist there even if you really think both are super awesome and compatible.

You are right that there isn't an 11th commandment to buyback stock when commodity prices are down.

You are misguided that that there isn't any macro economic or political systems that Christians should endorse and see to be implemented (or not).

Of course, Christianity has no army, no use of force, no rebellion, no subversion to bring about these types of changes.

You live in a democracy. You have a share in authority. God wants us to see to it that we use authority well.

I think you're under the misconception that I am trying to describe the US in our discussion. I honestly am not. That creeps to close too modern politics for me, and no one thinks clearly or honestly when we get too close to modern politics. I can understand that my comments about the wealth of our nation and our world might make that confusing, but I was merely trying to contrast the current world and its wealth with the world of the past. Relatively poor feudal societies understood a living wage, but wealthy capitalist countries disagree?

I'm trying to make a case for a living wage as a floor for the value of labor in a broad philosophical sense. It seems really obvious to me. If full time wages don't allow for people to have the necessities of life, then your workforce will all die and no work gets done. In a broad social sense, people won't work for wages that don't support their life, but these non-laboring people still have plenty of strength and free time. At least until they become too hungry and weak to do anything about it. But they won't just sit around and suffer. They will become a huge destabilizing force.

I'm also trying to make the point that economics is merely the reflection of human values. Beanie babies don't have inherent value. Neither does bitcoin or gold or money in general. Value is an product of social consensus. Social consensus is not a physical law. It has been different for different societies and it will be different again in the future. To some extent, social consensus can be changed. Profit, loss, and economics are all higher order phenomenon based on value. So as social consensus changes value, then profit, loss, and economics follow in the same direction.

I'm also really not sure what any of this has to do with the Chinese famine that occurred with The Great Leap Forward? I'm rabidly anti-Communist, anti-totalitarian, and anti-cult of personality. Those were the three main ingredients of that famine. Mao used communist philosophy and his totalitarian government to convert all his agricultural serfs into proletarian industrial workers at gunpoint, because Marx based socialism on industrial workers and Mao barely had any. Suddenly, almost no one was making food and everyone starved. No one wanted to tell Mao that it was a dumb idea, because they all worshipped the man and were deathly afraid of him. How does that relate to making sure that people working full time can get afford basic necessities?

The value of labor is a tricky thing in practice. Unlike a commodity or service we don't constantly renegotiate through continuous purchases. It's completely normal for a company to hire new unskilled workers at a higher wage than experienced unskilled workers, especially with our societal norm to not discuss salaries this can often go unnoticed by the employee.

Even with yearly salary adjustments employees are often unwilling to maximize their negotiations for fear of being let go or otherwise incurring negative consequences from management.

In my experience workers would have to move with much higher frequency to fully realize their market value in most industries.

Then you have to look at things if the workers can bargain collectively. Why does the value of labor change during collective negotiations? It really doesn't in one sense. But in another it very obviously does.

Moving to the owner side of these negotiations has proven to me how much stronger the owners side is. There are external pressures in both scenarios but the employees are often much more desperate and much more harshly effected by a failure to compromise than the owners.

Objectively the labor has a value between min wage and whatever constitutes 0 company profit as hard edges. But we've increased employee productivity greatly without similar increases in employee wages. Why is that? I suspect that the external pressures involved in changing employment make the market effectively less free than buying potato chips and employee wages don't mirror productivity accordingly.

I can't say what the right numbers are or the right system, our classic ideas are for owners to minimize employee cost and maximize profit. For my own company we certainly still take the largest share as owners but still pay our guys 5-15% above what market rates appear to be. I do this because it feels needlessly greedy and immoral to try and dance on the pinhead of employee satisfaction and fulfillment when I can avoid that with no threat to livelihood.

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Relatively poor feudal societies understood a living wage, but wealthy capitalist countries disagree?

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It's not a good comparison. The relationship between serf and lord is not at all equivalent to employment. Serfs did not have the freedom of movement. They also weren't allowed to change occupations, dispose of property, or in some cases even marry without approval. At the same time, this absolutely came with obligations on the feudal lord or patron's side that employers don't bear like protection and access to additional land for personal use. If

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I'm trying to make a case for a living wage as a floor for the value of labor in a broad philosophical sense.

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And my response is that this is wishful thinking. Labor is a good that is sold, just like the products of that labor. If the products of labor can't be sold at a profit, the labor to produce that product will not be bought. Or, if it is, it will be through an act of charity.

You can say, as a society we can decide that we will not pay less than some arbitrary amount for unskilled labor, but every dollar above the actual productive value of that labor is paid as charity. And, by definition, this is only made possible through coercion, e.g., force of law to prevent people from acting otherwise.

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Value is an product of social consensus.

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I think it is closer to the mark to say that value the product of individual consensus, not society. It is only concrete in each individual choice and corresponding transaction. At that point, it is immutable fact - the transaction occurred, so the item was valued. There's no concrete level above that, only various ways to aggregate, average, and pool transactions and transactional information to come up with a "market".

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How does that relate to making sure that people working full time can get afford basic necessities?

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Because sometimes there isn't enough food to go around. Sometimes there is labor that can't be made productive. Sometimes the value of certain labor or jobs goes to zero. People can sit around and agree that they should be paid more, but they can also agree they should all get unicorns or be able to fly. If you can't find a counterparty to make the deal, you're only agreeing with yourself.

And you absolutely should have the right to pay above market. You should also have the right to pay below market, if you can find someone willing to do the work.

The two keys to a mutually beneficial transaction are voluntary exchange and reasonable amount of information. You've highlighted here that employers can have an information advantage. But that isn't always one-sided and employees can leverage information as well. You mentioned employers bringing in new hires at higher pay; the counter example is an employee shopping their resume to get competitive offers. If the owner has the incentive to evaluate the price they're paying for labor, the employee also has the incentive to evaluate the price they can sell their labor for. It is difficult to me to say that one is inherently different than the other.

I agree that employees don't seem to be as aggressive in maximizing their pay as employers often are in minimizing their labor costs. However, again, without coercion and with a reasonable level of information the balance will always be struck in a way that both parties derive mutual benefit.

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But we've increased employee productivity greatly without similar increases in employee wages

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In my industry, it is because technology allows you much greater productivity without needing to reward the employee for the specialization that normally came along with that great productivity.

Take Machining for example. Machinists used to be master craftsman who had to sit and babysit a machine while it was cutting a part. CNC Machines made it to where you needed a highly paid CNC programmer to write the programs, but then you only needed an operator to run the parts. Nowadays AI can practically generate the code you need to create the part as efficiently as possible; and you've got Fanuc robotic arms loading and unloading fully automatic machines, so you don't really need anything but a few techs to make sure the robots run right.

The robots cost a lot of money up front; but you save tons of money hourly on the labor that otherwise would have been need for a fraction of the productivity. If Capital is going to put up the cash for the big tech expenses, they're going to keep all the additional profit generated by the productivity since they no longer need to give it to the employees.

But this isn't good or bad. One major thread in the story of human progress is technology being leveraged to increase the productivity of individual humans. This results in more wealth, not less. There are losers when a shift like that occurs - luddites and buggy whip manufacturers can testify. But there are winners too, like (presumably) you... or manual machinists, when there are jobs that are difficult or impossible to automate. Any manual machinist you have that you don't need because of automation and CNC tools, please send them to me as we'll hire and pay experience manual machinists as much as $40 per hour. They're rare as hen's teeth, and incredibly valuable.

Zobel said:

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But this isn't good or bad. One major thread in the story of human progress is technology being leveraged to increase the productivity of individual humans. This results in more wealth, not less. There are losers when a shift like that occurs - luddites and buggy whip manufacturers can testify. But there are winners too, like (presumably) you... or manual machinists, when there are jobs that are difficult or impossible to automate. Any manual machinist you have that you don't need because of automation and CNC tools, please send them to me as we'll hire and pay experience manual machinists as much as $40 per hour. They're rare as hen's teeth, and incredibly valuable.

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I'm not discussing it in the matter of good or bad, I'm explaining why productivity and wages have diverged since the 70's whereas before that time they were practically 1:1 elastic.

Why in the name of God are you still using manual machinists? Prototyping or one offs?

Zobel said:

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But this isn't good or bad. One major thread in the story of human progress is technology being leveraged to increase the productivity of individual humans. This results in more wealth, not less. There are losers when a shift like that occurs - luddites and buggy whip manufacturers can testify. But there are winners too, like (presumably) you... or manual machinists, when there are jobs that are difficult or impossible to automate. Any manual machinist you have that you don't need because of automation and CNC tools, please send them to me as we'll hire and pay experience manual machinists as much as $40 per hour. They're rare as hen's teeth, and incredibly valuable.

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This is a tangent, but there's an edge case competency crisis when integrating automation. There's a case study on surgeons who have used the da vinci robotic arms to help assist in surgery. And early on, the surgeons who got access to the robotic assistance were literally world class. And when the robot couldn't do things, the surgeon could step in, roll their eyes, pat themselves on the back for being God's gift to modern medicine, but ultimately go and achieve what the robot couldn't.

And now, as robots have been around longer and done more, the average surgeon who trained from the beginning with a robot never formed the absolute pinnacle skill set. And so when the robot needs the human to take over because something is too complex- the newest generation of surgeons struggle on things the previous surgeons wouldn't.

You really can't fix this because the robot takes the easy rep cycles for you and the problem is solve by just getting good unautomated years of practice in. The funny part is the da vinci company is addressing this by...introducing more hands on surgery where the robot isn't leading into their training curriculum.

Dies Irae said:

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Zobel said:

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But this isn't good or bad. One major thread in the story of human progress is technology being leveraged to increase the productivity of individual humans. This results in more wealth, not less. There are losers when a shift like that occurs - luddites and buggy whip manufacturers can testify. But there are winners too, like (presumably) you... or manual machinists, when there are jobs that are difficult or impossible to automate. Any manual machinist you have that you don't need because of automation and CNC tools, please send them to me as we'll hire and pay experience manual machinists as much as $40 per hour. They're rare as hen's teeth, and incredibly valuable.

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I'm not discussing it in the matter of good or bad, I'm explaining why productivity and wages have diverged since the 70's whereas before that time they were practically 1:1 elastic.

Why in the name of God are you still using manual machinists? Prototyping or one offs?

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Man, you've never seen a master machinist up close then. For quick turnaround stuff its incredible to be able to hand them the part, a redlined drawing, and them go to work ASAP on it.

For automation, the general workflow is feed the part file into a computer, create a G-code, virtually test the Gcode [citation needed], load the Gcode into the machine, run a test part in air, run a test part on scrap, then make a first article of inspection, review, fine tune the code, and THEN go crank out a 1000 of these in a row.

If you don't have the part files and have to work off of drawings, someones gotta manually make the Gcode. If you don't have good drawings, you're toast.

So if you do quick turnaround work a master machinist will absolutely John Henry themselves across the finish line before the robot. Now if you've got to crank out a 100 of these parts, its a lot harder to recommend forgoing the automation process.

What he said. But we repair equipment, we don't manufacture new (mostly). So everything is a one-off.

one MEEN Ag said:

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Dies Irae said:

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Zobel said:

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But this isn't good or bad. One major thread in the story of human progress is technology being leveraged to increase the productivity of individual humans. This results in more wealth, not less. There are losers when a shift like that occurs - luddites and buggy whip manufacturers can testify. But there are winners too, like (presumably) you... or manual machinists, when there are jobs that are difficult or impossible to automate. Any manual machinist you have that you don't need because of automation and CNC tools, please send them to me as we'll hire and pay experience manual machinists as much as $40 per hour. They're rare as hen's teeth, and incredibly valuable.

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I'm not discussing it in the matter of good or bad, I'm explaining why productivity and wages have diverged since the 70's whereas before that time they were practically 1:1 elastic.

Why in the name of God are you still using manual machinists? Prototyping or one offs?

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Man, you've never seen a master machinist up close then. For quick turnaround stuff its incredible to be able to hand them the part, a redlined drawing, and them go to work ASAP on it.

For automation, the general workflow is feed the part file into a computer, create a G-code, virtually test the Gcode [citation needed], load the Gcode into the machine, run a test part in air, run a test part on scrap, then make a first article of inspection, review, fine tune the code, and THEN go crank out a 1000 of these in a row.

If you don't have the part files and have to work off of drawings, someones gotta manually make the Gcode. If you don't have good drawings, you're toast.

So if you do quick turnaround work a master machinist will absolutely John Henry themselves across the finish line before the robot. Now if you've got to crank out a 100 of these parts, its a lot harder to recommend forgoing the automation process.

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All of our stuff is high production, we set the machine up and run it out for 2 weeks. I think we still have two manuals lurking somewhere but they're just for slight repair operations or one offs.

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Just a reminder, this is not the first time you've said that employers have less of an obligation to unskilled laborers than lords or slaveowners had to their serfs and slaves. Basically saying that if you want to guarantee basic necessities, then you're better off being a slave or a serf. That doesn't sound like a resounding endorsement for capitalism, especially when you're saying that capitalism generates more wealth than all these other systems. It seems like capitalism is very good at generating a lot of wealth for a very small number of people. If everyone else starves, then you shrug your shoulders and blame the market.

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If you want someone else to take care of you, it isn't that you're better off being a serf, it's that you're willing to trade your freedom for security. Freedom comes with responsibility. Likewise, when people don't have freedom, the people that are controlling them have a responsibility toward their wards. Like, for example, people who are in prison. I don't know why anyone would want to make employees wards of their employers. It seems to suggest that they are incapable of providing for themselves.

Imagine a line item bill of sale for a laborer. You agree there's a market value for a certain kind of labor, but perhaps that doesn't cover "basic necessities". Let's say it is $10/h for the one, plus an additional $5/h to gross up to cover the other. Your paycheck breaks the rates out - $10/hr for labor provided, $5/h for ... what? What are you buying there?

Your last paragraph is just the marxist lie. Capitalism generates more wealth for everyone, not a limited few. This isn't an opinion. The point is - everyone else doesn't starve. And again, none of this opines whatever on the morality of charity. I don't understand why you think that there's some evil in recognizing the difference between fair compensation and charity.

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And I'm trying to tell you there is a more important law at work than supply and demand. Supply and demand need stable markets to be effective, and stable markets need stable societies. A society where people can't support themselves with full time labor is not a stable society. A hungry group of commoners is the origin story for nearly all bandits, brigands, pirates, warlords and revolutions in history. When that happens, you don't have stable markets anymore where you can treat labor like any other commodity. There is a lower boundary to labor wages because markets are just one part of a larger society. Again, if the value of unskilled labor in the society drops below a living wage then you won't have a society for long. Eventually you'll keep going around and around with coups, civil wars, and revolutions until you finally end up in a society that provides the absolute minimum to the unskilled laborers.

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Ok? What do you propose to do about that, exactly? This isn't a capitalism problem.

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And when there is plenty to go around, but it's not going around? When labor is productive and profitable enough to provide a living wage, but automation is cheaper?

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Again, what do you propose? You ignore the bottom line - these are all free exchanges, where by definition both parties derive mutual benefit. Do you think we should force people to engage in charity? Because that's the only alternative.

I own a company in Chile and it has long been the shining star of Latin America due to its Milton Friedman inspired economy after Pinochet threw the communists out of helicopters and brought in the Chicago boys.

Chile is a great cautionary tale, because they took the survival of the fittest to the absolute extreme and had a very free market, but with gigantic income disparity. This stirred resentment in the "have nots" of society and it boiled over during Covid when bus fares were raised a pittance. They started rioting and burning Catholic Churches and destroying businesses all over the country and it ended with the Right leaning government being thrown out, and a Marxist Indio neck beard 35 year old being elected president.

one MEEN Ag said:

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You are right that there isn't an 11th commandment to buyback stock when commodity prices are down.

You are misguided that that there isn't any macro economic or political systems that Christians should endorse and see to be implemented (or not).

Of course, Christianity has no army, no use of force, no rebellion, no subversion to bring about these types of changes.

You live in a democracy. You have a share in authority. God wants us to see to it that we use authority well.

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You perceive capitalism and democracy to be part of the Christian faith. I disagree with that assertion just as I would that any other political system (outside monarchy potentially) or economic system is part of Christianity.

Not much else to talk about. No point in a nuh huh, uh huh, nu huh argument.

My family is from Chile, and lived through Allende and Pinochet. Suffice to say it isn't quite as simple as you're making it out to be. Chile began sliding back toward the Latin American mean almost from the moment Pinochet left office.

Zobel said:

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My family is from Chile, and lived through Allende and Pinochet. Suffice to say it isn't quite as simple as you're making it out to be. Chile began sliding back toward the Latin American mean almost from the moment Pinochet left office.

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Yes my friend, I almost assuredly glossed over a few things in my two paragraph post covering 30 years of Chilean history

I guess what I'm saying is it seems weird to point to the capitalist reforms under Pinochet as a cause for income inequality and social unrest in Chile, when every other Latin American country has income inequality and social unrest in addition to lower standards of living and more poverty…and that those same reforms pulled the country out of completed abject poverty.

I see this desire to have a kind of enlightened centrism like, oh excess of capitalism is bad because excess of statism is bad, then point to problems in ostensibly capitalist states as evidence. I think this approach is flawed from the start - it seems to misunderstand exactly what makes capitalism "go" and what it is.