Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?Follow

It's pretty easy to make a point when you define the thing you're speaking about in a way designed to support it. Just saying. Chomsky's pretty good at this, but that doesn't make him right. So now "capitalism" is to blame for not sufficiently dealing with global warming? Who does he think he's kidding? The only thing capitalism does well in this context is accurately measure the cost versus gain and reject those that wont work. The fact to bring out of this is that the proposals for dealing with global warming will cost a ton of money and wont actually have any effect on the end result. But what Chomsky isn't going to tell you is that wasteful spending is the means to an end he wants. Global warming is just the latest scary thing that the socialists use to convince people to let them spend that money.



That's an interesting way of putting it. "Has become unpopular"? Doesn't that suggest that we always used to tax people's wealth upon their death and only now people are opposing it? It's been pretty unpopular since it was first enacted, and has been called a "death tax" for at least 60 years. The only goalposts that are moving are the imaginary ones in liberals minds.




Again, an odd way of looking at things, given that the rise of the "ultra rich" class has coincided with vast improvements in quality of life for the working class. Saying that the rich squeeze their wealth from the working class is a grossly inaccurate depiction of what's really going on. But socialism requires that people adopt a zero sum viewpoint of economics in order to be adopted, so that's the lie that has to be repeated, no matter how obvious it should be that it's false.

Baiting Smash (and to a lesser degree Almalique and catwho) is really the only reason I post in these silly politics threads.

If the employer could double his profits by paying his employees double their pay, he'd do it in a heart beat

The market's view of Costco speaks volumes about the so-called Wal-Martization of the U.S. economy. True, the Bentonville (Ark.) retailer has taken a public-relations pounding recently for paying poverty-level wages and shouldering health insurance for fewer than half of its 1.2 million U.S. workers. Still, it remains the darling of the Street, which, like Wal-Mart and many other companies, believes that shareholders are best served if employers do all they can to hold down costs, including the cost of labor.

Surprisingly, however, Costco's high-wage approach actually beats Wal-Mart at its own game on many measures. BusinessWeek ran through the numbers from each company to compare Costco and Sam's Club, the Wal-Mart warehouse unit that competes directly with Costco. We found that by compensating employees generously to motivate and retain good workers, one-fifth of whom are unionized, Costco gets lower turnover and higher productivity. Combined with a smart business strategy that sells a mix of higher-margin products to more affluent customers, Costco actually keeps its labor costs lower than Wal-Mart's as a percentage of sales, and its 68,000 hourly workers in the U.S. sell more per square foot. Put another way, the 102,000 Sam's employees in the U.S. generated some $35 billion in sales last year, while Costco did $34 billion with one-third fewer employees.

Bottom line: Costco pulled in $13,647 in U.S. operating profit per hourly employee last year, vs. $11,039 at Sam's. Over the past five years, Costco's operating income grew at an average of 10.1% annually, slightly besting Sam's 9.8%. Most of Wall Street doesn't see the broader picture, though, and only focuses on the up-front savings Costco would gain if it paid workers less. But a few analysts concede that Costco suffers from the Street's bias toward the low-wage model.

Source (a bit old, but proof that lower wages aren't necessarily a better business practice): http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-04-11/commentary-the-costco-way

Costco generated $21,805 in U.S. operating profit per hourly employee, compared with $11,615 at Sam’s Club. Costco’s stable, productive workforce more than offsets its higher costs.

Source: http://hbr.org/2006/12/the-high-cost-of-low-wages/ar/1

You honestly don't see why measuring profit per employee is the wrong way to look at this?

Again though, it's not done "so your husband's boss can get a bonus". The company doesn't think "we really want to hand this guy a bonus, so let's come up with some way to reduce costs so we can do that". They think: We need to reduce costs. Perhaps if we give management an incentive to reduce overtime in their departments, the cost of that incentive will be outweighed by the savings in labor costs within the department.