http://www.gladerebooted.org/viewtopic.php?p=156974#p156974
This response negated any need for my to respond to your longer post. If the Law of Supply and Demand is valid, then nothing I posted was either out of place or unintelligible.
That said, you and Taskiss have yet to defend your positive assertion that jobs will improve our economic situation. Surely, since my position is "idiotic" and "out of touch", the two of you should have no problem finding a litany of links to disagree with me ...
And, yet, neither of you ever offered a single citation or even explanation for your position.
Why is it I'm supposed to accept your (mostly Taskiss there) "refutation" (which is a bare assertion) when you two have demanded over and over I "prove" a negative? And, when I actually even bother to entertain your irrational request, you ignore what's posted because of whatever impetus you have?
Sure, you asked a bunch of questions; I read your post and determined that asking a "yes or no" question of my own would solve the problem in the most expeditious manner: either you agree with the Law of Supply and Demand or you don't. If you do, then "jobs" won't help ... if you don't, then "jobs" might help ...
But, you know, I've provided a sourced explanation for my position and only received a bunch of ... bullshit containing no citations and a whole lot of appeal to tradition and popularity. What incentive do I have for continuing the debate, when you throw out such lovely false dilemmas like this last one?
But, all of that said, since you really don't get it and neither does Taskiss ...
And because Hopwin actually asked nicely ...
It's pretty much all about
money. Money ... money ... money ...
Money and the
velocity thereof.
Government policy concerns itself, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, pretty much only with the rate at which
currency changes. You'll note, I used "currency" there, not "money", because our government and talking heads have a very deluded and inaccurate understanding of "money" ... as does the vast majority of the population. In fact, Americans and pretty much everyone else who has lived their entire life under a fiat currency conflate the two terms; but, "money" and "currency" are not synonymous.
So, what constitutes "money" in the United States? Well, to answer that, we need to know what a
commodity is and is not ...
Hint, at least as far as macroeconomic policy and government action is concerned, the following definition is no longer valid:
Wikipedia wrote:
A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.[1] A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats it as equivalent or nearly so no matter who produces it.
Rather, because as Frederic Jameson has said, "We're all Marxists now;" the actual definition of
commodity is something like this:
Wikipedia wrote:
In classical political economy and especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is any good or service produced by human labour and offered as a product for general sale on the market. Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g. human labor-power, works of art and natural resources, even although they may not be produced specifically for the market, or be non-reproducible goods.
Marx's analysis of the commodity (in German: Kaufware, i.e. merchandise, ware for sale) is intended to help solve the problem of what establishes the economic value of goods, using the labor theory of value.
Of course, there's a whole lot of conflation between the two in the media and government and in political speech; but, unless someone specifically mentions pork bellies or cotton futures, they're using the Marxist definition.
Money and commodities are very much involved with each other; and, in the United States, that fungible, ever present, and value regulating commodity happens to be ...
Human Labor.
2010 Census Data will likely show median incoming dropping from 2000, but even so the median household income in the United States is right around $50,000 a year (
$50,233 in 2006). So, we can divide $50,233/2080 to find the median value of a dollar in a standard work year ($0.40 / minute). This means a dollar is functionally worth 2.5 minutes if human labor if we use the median household income. But, that's probably a bad idea, because Bill Gates "made" about $1,000,000,000 (1 billion dollars) last year (or enough to bring 20,000 people with 0 income to the median line). And, obviously, because we're in the business of trading in human labor, a five-dollar bill has significantly less real value to Bill Gates than it does the panhandler on the corner of 5th and Park. (That's $134 or so a second by the by for Gates).
Now, were our money not labor and our currency a marker for some other commodity, something that isn't quite so disparate as human labor, we'd see a lot more stability in prices and inflation; we'd also see more stability in wages and earning, instead of a continual decline over the last 50 years.
In any case, we're trading in human labor; we valuate things in time units of labor; we back our currency in time units of labor ...
But our government and our economic policy really don't care about that; they simply don't. In fact, the value of a five-dollar bill or a thousand-dollar bill is essentially the same: worthless. U.S. monetary supply is ... (and consequently policy) is stupid ... it is stupid in epic ways ...
Money SupplyIf you click that link, you'll see part of the conflation between money and currency. The Money Supply is the total number of physical currency in circulation plus ... well, plus mostly credit.
Here's where things become problematic for "creating" jobs ...
1. The Federal Reserve has been engaging in "quantitative easing."
...
More later when I have a chance ...
I think I get it.
In essence, every extra dollar the Fed prints (because the Gov't or private sector spent it) devalues every other dollar out there (inflation). However, since wages have not increased at the same pace as inflation labor has been devalued (setting aside WHY wages haven't kept pace, too much labor or too much demand for dollars).
However, productivity has risen as has the scope of goods and services available which needs to be reflected some how.
Pegging wages to inflation would not solve this problem as it would instead create hyper-inflation correct?
The flip-side of this problem is that if you capped the money-supply by pegging it to a hard commodity like gold then you have deflation correct?
You also couldn't solve the problem with price-setting as the goods and services prices would not reflect the true market value of them?
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