/liberty/ - Liberty

>>13038

>That vid

I'm an electrician who refuses to become unionized. I have fewer options for jobs because the union lies, cheats, and steals contracts from independent workers, and I supposedly make "$10 less per hour than my Unionized friends," but I don't have to pay a fucking cent in dues, and I have constant employment whereas my Union friends have to wait until the Union stops fucking them long enough to give them some scraps.

Fuck your unions.

As for the article…

>inherently relies on the exploitation and expropriation of others and the fruits of their labour.

Oh boy, here we go…

>First, that private property, in the sense I use it in, refers to private ownership (in other words, ownership concentrated in the hands of an individual, or a couple of individuals) over the means of production

Private vs. personal property, haven't even read it and I'm gonna call it, to which I'll say that the truck drivers and builders are not guaranteed a piece of your house because they built it on contract, so why the fuck should they be guaranteed a piece of your factory?

>distinction is made here between private property, which I’ve just described, and personal property

Pic related.

>Because the owner of, say, a factory, will need workers to operate that factory. And he owns a factory in the first place to make profit. That profit comes from the work those workers do, the commodities they produce; their labour is guaranteed in exchange for a wage.

Just like it's guaranteed to the builders who built the factory, unless you're about to claim that the builders also deserve a share of the profits.

>But in order to ensure he makes a profit, he necessarily must pay them a certain amount below what their labour is actually worth

>muh labor theory of value

Value is not based on labor.

Profit ensures that the factory owner has an incentive to create whatever he creates- to improve his quality of life. Vid related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgNxQ-C7ZYk

He's not expropriating anything. He planned out ahead of time that he needed to price his labor at X in order to turn a profit Y so he could live comfortably on Z. Those workers were offered a wage of X regardless of what the end value of the product would be. The only reason the "greedy evil factory owner" would need to give them a fair share is if they agreed to not accept wages until the profit was calculated. Not to mention that factory owners pours a lot more work into his business than you think. Intellectual human capital is much more valuable than an assembly line worker. It assumes profit is a scarce resource when profit is actually created through trade. I value a pizza more than my money, the pizzeria values my money more than their pizza, tada, we have both created profit for ourselves and no one was victimized because of it.

By this line of logic, the miner who mined up the ore deserves an equal share of the profits as the refinery worker as the metal worker as the electrician as the robot's creator as the coder who programmed it as the factory workers who repair/maintain it. Surely you see the flaw in this reasoning, or if you don't see this as a flaw (as I accept many don't), surely you see how this would destroy the incentives motive resulting in the miner never even having the opportunity to pull himself out of poverty via the far better job versus sustenance farming in the first place, yes? The factory owner must assume a shit ton of risks (such as never seeing his money back- and we're talking thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) in order to build the factory, pay its workers, acquire the resources, get the shelf space, market his product, etc. What incentive does he have to take that risk if he has to equally pay all of his workers who never put in any of that risk for the factory to be built in the first place? Or do you suggest that only those who built the factory/were the first workers deserve to ever have a cut of the profits? Because that's fucked up.

As for the rest of the article…

>Alienation

Boils down to "muh feels." There's other ways to make money, they aren't required to work for the factory owner. There's no reason that the miner has to have some sort of personal relationship to the product made that the salesperson does. That's the joys of Capitalism as described by I, Pencil that the blogger claims is "wrong" somehow. All these people doing different jobs because they're "greedy" and want to make "profits" are somehow coming together to create all sorts of shit without realizing it.

>Class divide

The United States (back then) made it so that class division didn't exist in comparison to other countries inb4 a lefty only quotes the didn't exist part. Factory workers and CEOs went to the same fucking movie theaters and saw the same fucking movies.

If you want to blame anyone for class division in recent years, blame government controls on the market and we'll be right there with you.

>denotes the separation of tasks in, perhaps, a factory, into increasingly specialized and singular actions

Not always singular actions (otherwise your social division of labor could not exist), and it's this codependence on each other that makes everyone's lives better. Go watch that video I linked to in my first half of this argument. It takes ten minutes to go down to a well an get water, and another hour to work for the well creator/owner to clean up the well, versus the 2 hours it would take to walk uphill to collect the water and back. Those 50 minutes you saved from division of labor allow you to specialize in your own tasks and invest your time in your own human capital. If you choose to waste it shitposting on /leftypol/ and /liberty/, that's your own business, but keep in mind if it wasn't for that Capitalistic division of labor, you'd be working 60, 80, even 100 hour work weeks to survive versus the 20-40 hours you work now for the same amount of money BECAUSE of division of labor that you claim is immoral. I claim telling people they have to work 80 hour work weeks is more immoral than having them focus on a specific task.

>but morally; and at the end of the day, I feel the human element, the moral element, is the most important.

And so do virtually all free-market advocates. That's why we're saying this is bullshit and your supposed fixes/criticisms of Capitalism, if they were solved via your suggested methods, would result in massive losses of life, liberty, and dignity among people, and wouldn't even be that likely to work given their track record.

You can be an "An"Com in a Voluntarist society. You can be a socialist in a Libertarian society if you find people willing to voluntarily come along for the ride. The reverse isn't true though- Socialists and "An"Coms refuse to allow free market idealists to perform their actions peacefully and without coercion/violence from the state. Pic really fucking related.

>>13048

>>13047

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Pic related, these people deserved what they got because they or their family members owned 5-6 acres more than was typical for a farmer at the time, or they committed the ultimate sin of renting out their land to another farmer in a mutually beneficial arrangement

Look at these class enemies, my only qualm is that our communist overlords waited for these class enemies to starve instead of giving them the swift justice warranted for their crimes of not being leftist enough.

>>13053

According to the OP's article, yes. That computer is a means of production and is exploiting the people who made the computer, faggot.

>>13076

>>13103

I wouldn't say I "refuted it," I just pointed out that the labor theory model makes a few assumptions:

1) Everyone's work is valued equally if everyone is to share in the profit.

2) If there is a way to distinguish the works of the person who built the factory from the one who works in it, then privately contracted wages do not break the labor theory and are thus not exploitation.

3) If there isn't a way to distinguish them, then it is impossible to implement the labor theory since every worker (millions) in the chain has a claim to the end product.

4) If everyone has an equal claim to the end product, then there is virtually no incentive to create a better or new product (profit motive has driven the incentive of 99% of discoveries. Those scientists might have done it "for the common good" but even they were recieving grants to do their research) because no individual will want to fund the risks involved

5) Democracy should show you the "success" of distributed costs/concentrated benefits. Those who start a business would form special cartels and refuse to hire anyone else (except maybe their kids/very close friends) since people who had no risk in its start up would benefit equally if hired down the line. Therefore the business cartel would be exploiting people more than the factory owner who hired indiscriminately.

6) Given the above, your computer is private property if you use it for business because you aren't paying the programmers or factory workers who created it.