In the comments section on Good/Bad Liberals, commenter Jonathan brought up a point which I characterized as ‘dumb leftism’, but something I do want to go into a bit more, because I think it helps define the faultline between the Left and Right pretty neatly.
Basically it comes down to this. Adam Smith and Marx both talk about the hypothetical ‘pin factory’, in which workers make pins. Hypothesize for a minute a pin entrepreneur, who invests a machine – or a process – whereby the productivity of the five workers goes from 100 pins/hour to 200 pins/hour.
Who gets the additional 100 pins?
In college, I asked a doctrinaire Marxist economics professor (a fairly notable writer in the area…)exactly this question. His reply?
“Well, imagine that I’m a really good machine thief, and I can steal the machine that the factory uses to make 200 pins/hour, and reduce the productivity to 100 pins/hour. What portion of those 100 pins do I get to keep?”
I still remember my initial response: “You’re kidding, right?”
He wasn’t.
I believed then, and believe now, that it’s actually a somewhat complicated question…but that there’s no question that there’s no comparison between a pin machine inventor and a pin machine thief.
Ideally, the machine thief “keeps” only the portion of taxes the business owner and employees pay to keep him in prison.
Why is the question complicated? Assuming that the workers do not have to work harder, I see no reason why the enterpreneur can’t keep the extra 100 pins. A good entrepreneur will do profit-sharing down the line anyway, and it is better for the workers if the entrepreneur can keep a competitive advantage than for the business to shut down and the workers to lose their jobs because of a) a competitive disadvantage b) premature profit sharing and not having enough money to invest when necessary.
Entrepreneurs have, other than paying a decent living salary and providing a stable and safe working environment, no responsibility to have their workers profit from their investments unless it substantially changes the workers’ jobs, in which case it is up to the workers to either renegotiate their salaries or to find another place of employment.
Found a semi-related joke this morning.
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From:
http://www.lonestarcoffeebar.com
The Ant & The Grasshopper
American-style:
CLASSIC VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!
UPDATED VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing “We Shall Overcome”. Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.
Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his “fair share.” Finally, the EEOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act,” retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Vote Republican.
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