Can a trade-off between business & the consumer be made on wages & prices?

[Skidmore]

This comes from reading the thread on labor shortage and orange trees and something I didn't particularly articulate well there. First of all, these "free markets" are not free now, but manipulated and the labor market is being equally manipulated--both for the purposes of maximizing profits for business. Now the American worker has been royally screwed in this climate. I don't believe that there are not workers to do the jobs out there. I do believe that businesses do not want to pay wages that people can afford to live on. To get lower prices, consumers are forced to tolerate these manipulations. Personally, I think that there are a lot of businesses that shouldn't be operating if they need to engage in such activities to stay in business. I believe that massive labor and business practice reforms need to occur together. That if businesses want to pay workers less here, they need to shift product prices down correspondingly to reflect that decrease so that workers can afford to live within the means they are given. I'm not an economist, but I do understand that the consumer and the producer are being held to different scales that only sometimes overlap.

[bemildred]

1. Markets are never "free". That is bullshit for the rubes.

Any good capitalist will bend his efforts relentlessly to gain control and influence in the government and the markets he/she operates in. This is as plain as the nose on your face, but we are not supposed to talk about it in public because that makes control of the government and markets more difficult.