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by tbrownaw 1281 days ago
"deserve" doesn't exist. What does exist is "what price makes the market clear".

Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.

3 comments

Why shouldn't we have ethical opinions about the economy?
So, things like "functioning markets are good" and "price-fixing is bad"?
Slave markets were functional. Feudalism was functional. The market for drugs and organs are functional.

Lets try tougher ones - are markets captured by cartels functional? Does OPEC inhibit free market or are they free market in action?

When tech companies create anti-poaching agreement to supress wages, is that functional?

And usury is awful.
I’d go further to ask why ethics shouldn’t play a more active and significant role in the governing of an economy?
Do you have ethical opinions for example about Newton's laws in physics? Or do you accept them for what they are?
Humans design the system in which the market operates. Obviously one cannot make an appeal to change physics.
We design car and planes just as well with physics.
This is not analogous. You likened criticizing our economy (inclusive of the state of various laws that determine how it impacts people) to criticizing physics itself (to suggest that doing so is unreasonable).

The economy is like a singular, gigantic vehicle we all occupy. It abides certain natural laws (such as human nature, and the scarcity of certain resources), but the vehicle itself is designed by some of our fellow passengers (and its design does not optimize for the things many of us feel it should).

Sure it is. You and other passengers are trying to design the vehicle by ignoring human nature, scarcity, etc. (the physics). Because you are asking yourself why does the piston deserve all the fuel and not the headlights.
And if somebody makes a shitty car that contains an extra bomb that randomly explodes and kills people we tell them that's a shitty car. We don't blame physics.
This is sarcasm I'm assuming?
I thought implying there was some sort of cosmic injustice when a software developers"deserves" more than a nurse, was some sort of sarcasm. We would never understand anything about the world if we talked like that about for example why does this rock deserves a higher potential energy than that acorn.
I'm not following you. Rocks and acorns are not outcomes of human political will, but our economy, society, and systems, among others, are. Maybe I'm missing something, I'm eager to understand your perspective further.
I hope you agree that human political will is bounded by some natural laws, the same way rocks and acorns are bound by physics. And if you want to do something useful with that political will, you better understand those laws.
I phrase things like this: the lack of real labor power through unions or ideally worker cooperatives leads to bad deals for workers. It would be in the interest of workers to build collective power and demand better compensation or start their own cooperatives to guarantee higher pay and benefits.

This has to be said because collective action necessarily requires convincing a lot of people to do it. But either way this language avoids the claim of right and wrong and simply focuses on the fact that workers today get a bad deal due to poor bargaining power.

It’s also not just about markets. The federal government places severe restrictions on what organized labor can do to advocate for itself: Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 Aka “Taft-Hartley Act” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act

People who go on about markets pretend that power dynamics and behavioural economics don't exist.
"markets" is just a word that means individuals making economic decisions for themselves
This is only true if you think "economics" and "capitalism" are the same thing.