When you say "rent-seeking" as a concept is fundamentally bad, however you personally mean it, you're playing into the extremely common narrative in American politics that low prices for you the customer are a social good and high prices a sign of corruption and waste
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ladyattis
A framing that has both been very successful and done incalculable damage to the US working class
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ladyattis
I agree that the lower-prices-at-all-costs is a bad principle to go off of, but I'm not sure that rent-seeking is typically the issue, is it?
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There are fairly few places where individual workers have the opportunity to seek rents; plausibly something like occupational licensing, maybe.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @ladyattis
Ricardo did draw a distinction between deliberate rent seeking and wages being propped up at an inflated level by the "customs and habits" of a given country Like the reason English workers didn't live in mud huts and eat only gruel is England generally thinks that's improper
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To the extent that's true, globalization is a direct attack on it - our "customs and habits" (and the minimum wage laws passed to reflect them) get our jobs shipped overseas to a sweatshop in Bangladesh The labor movement is about recognizing "customs and habits" are fought for
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Anyway this is why I don't feel like trying to argue that if it's justified it's not really rent seeking because rent seeking is bad You should be letting go of the idea of an "efficient market price" in the first place, it's a dangerous fiction
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
I don’t see it as such. He hasn’t demonstrated labor recovering the full value of its labor is the same as rent seeking.
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Replying to @ladyattis @mssilverstein
Whether or not the objective value of a good or service exists, it cannot be detected empirically by some kind of scientific Marxist value-o-meter The job of a union isn't to try to get paid the "correct" wage, it's to get paid as much as they can
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It is NOT the union's job to say "Nope, we're getting paid too much money now, this is more than our labor is objectively worth, time to give some back to the customer because now they're the ones getting screwed" It's not their fucking problem
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Good unions try to make sure their demands won’t put their employers out of business. It’s counterproductive for everyone if that happens. So strategically, it IS in the interests of a union to set the terms of employment at a level where customers will buy & employers survive.
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Sure, but that's a different calculation, a pragmatic one not a moral one
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