Reply #4: Here's the issue as a I see it: it's about competition. [View All]

[AP]

Everyone talks about competition between corporations and about how that's important to the economy. You want to have competitiveness so that companies are driven to make better, cheaper products, and provide better services. It keeps American moving forward in terms of innovation. Competition is good. Corporations, once they get large, no longer want competition. Republicans generally protect them from competion. We all know this.

However, there's another competition. There's competition in the labor market. One form is obvious: between employees for a job. You go to school, you work hard, you build up expericence, and you try to do that better than other potential employees so that you get hired first.

There's also competion between and employer and and employee. After getting all that education and experience, you put a price on it and try to sell it to an employer. Now, in much the same way that Republicans have destroyed the need for companies to compete with each other (and have legislated profits for companies, whether by going to war for them, or taking away their tax burdens, etc.) they have also legislated away the need to compete in the labor market. They have tipped the field to advantage capital over labor every way they can think of.

During the Clinton years, there was a little competition for labor that drove up its value, but a lot of that was driven by another problem: delivering wealth to people through capital gains which ultimately benefitted the super-wealthy investor class way more than the class of people who have little capital and nothing more to sell than their labor.

In any event, labor has been utterly devalued in the last 30 years because it's something EVERYONE can do, and much of economic history of the last 30 years has revolved around the theme that we're not delivering wealth to everyone. We're delivering wealth to people who already have a great deal of money -- ie, to capital and not to labor.

Incidentally, the notion that legitimizes holding wealth back from labor in America is a fear of inflation. Economists believe that if you give too much money to people, it will drive up prices and drive down profits. Economists thought there was a magic unemployment number below which inflation would happen. Clinton went below that number by about 20% and there wasn't any inflation. But that was because there was no real increase in wages for most Americans and because people spent more money on more things, and because there was a lot of room for increased production without comodities becoming scarce because we were coming of the Bush I recession during which that capacity had been built up.