When I was a kid, everybody assumed that high wages were "good for the economy." Now, everybody who is anybody assumes that low wages are "good for the economy." If the natives of a country (or even the previous immigrants), are enjoying relatively high wages, whether in computer programming or stoop labor, then the borders must be opened and wages hammered down for "the good of the economy."
One reason everybody has signed on to this new low wages uber alles ideology is that the people telling you this, whether plutocrats or well-paid television presenters, are much better looking on average than the losers making the low wages.
The difference wasn't always this stark. In the old days of J.P. Morgan and friends, the Fat Cats literally were fat. Then, for much of the middle of the 20th Century, the affluent and the wage-earners were similar in weight. Now, rich people are much more slender than the non-rich.
Now, though, a fat rich lady, Gina Rinehart, Australian mining heiress and the richest woman in the world at the moment (and mother of four), has enunciated the globalist conventional wisdom. But, looking as she does more like a coalminer's mother than like a mineowner, she's getting all sorts of pushback, such as suggestions that she looks like Jaaba the Hutt. From Reuters:
"The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business," Rinehart told the Sydney Mining Club in a rare public appearance. A video of her address was posted on the club's website.
"Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day," she said in the video. "Such statistics make me worry for this country's future.
"We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment."
Rinehart, whom Forbes estimated to be worth $18 billion in February, opposes a recently introduced mining tax as well as taxes on carbon emissions, which has created tensions with Gillard's government.
Rinehart has also called for miners to be allowed to bring in foreign workers, and her company Hancock Prospecting was granted government approval in May to hire just over 1,700 foreign construction workers for her Roy Hill project in Western Australia.
Gillard criticised Rinehart's remarks, saying the resources sector was doing well and had an investment pipeline of $500 billion, of which nearly half was at an advanced stage.
"It's not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a gold coin, and then ask them to work for a day," Gillard told reporters. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions."
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118 comments:
To all the Who-Whomers among us:
She's a WASP, German-American husband.
When I was a kid in the 1960's, I remember that "a rising standard of living" was something that America took great pride in and was considered one of the key elements of the American Dream.
This meme goes back at least to the 1930's.
But it died out a long time ago. Latter 70's or early 80's at the latest is my guess.
Now it is considered a gross moral wrong to pay anyone a cent more than the utter minimum that they will accept under the conditions of harshest duress.
What has the U.S. become? I haven't changed.
One reason everybody has signed on to this new low wages uber alles ideology is that the people telling you this, whether plutocrats or television presenters, are much better looking on average than the people making the low wages.
Bonk. The reason "everybody" has signed on to this new low wages uber alles ideology is that the people telling you this either directly stand to benefit from cheap labor or are professional shills and spokesmouths for those who do.
Completely off topic:
Steve, are you planning to write a review of P.T. Anderson's "The Master" once it comes out?
Both sides get it wrong.
What really matters is wages relative to productivity.
To all the Who-Whomers among us:
The "Who-Whomers" don't deny that there are always indigenous elements willing to pursue personal wealth and gain at others' expense. They believe these vulnerabilities exist everywhere and in every time and can be aggravated and exploited by interested parties.
Gee, why didn't we think of this sooner? Find fat, ugly people on the other side and give them wads of money to start foundations and buy media exposure!
Seriously, why does she look like that? And I am not talking about her weight alone. She presents an image of someone unhealthy and unkempt. Working class women of a certain age tend to look like this from a lifetime of being overworked, sleep deprived and having to spend all their resources on maintaining a dignified lifestyle for their family, which they usually manage only by a hair.
A big woman, no way around the fact ;)
But Bill Gates isn't exactly good-looking. Neither is George Soros.
I think she really got in trouble by saying that workers are lazy and should work harder. If she had only called for more foreign workers and open borders, she would have been lauded by the media.
"To all the Who-Whomers among us."
We are all who-whomers in terms of whom we care about. Sailer, for example, doesn't give a damn about Palestinians no matter what Zionists do to them. They just don't fall into his Sympathy Sphere. Ironically, though Jews hate him and have done far more harm to his kind than Palestinians ever have or will, Sailer prefers Jews over Palestinians.
It's the insane Nice Waspy who-whomery that makes no sense. You'd think that given what Jews have done to white Americans, Sailer would sympathize and identify with Palestinians, but his version of who-whom demands that he side with Jews against Palestinians who've done absolutely no harm to his people.
Many of our people don't age well. Even if they inherit a billion plus dollars.
Make no mistake. You look at her as a fattie, but she looks at you and your family as food. You exist ONLY to enrich her and others like her. And if you object, you are a "communist."
At least Marie Antoinette said "Let THEM eat cake."
Note to the non-Australians: "gold coins" in the Australian dialect means $1 or $2 in Australian currency, produced in a gold colored alloy that do not contain any actual gold at all.
Gillard is making a joke here, typically charity events ask for a "gold coin donation", meaning $1 or $2, or thereabouts.
I WAS BORN A RICH MINER'S DAUGHTER.
Gina Reinhardt is rather Orwellian in her porcinery.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
> Make no mistake. You look at her as a fattie, but she looks at you and your family as food.
> At least Marie Antoinette said "Let THEM eat cake."
lol!
White Australia was such good policy.
"What has the U.S. become? I haven't changed."
What happened was massive legal and illegal immigration - that's what changed. And *this* because of two things (1) an increasing number of catholic voters who have always supported immigration or were apathetic on the subject and (2) the liberalization of the Whites in general on matters of race, ethnicity, etc. Once you accept that we're 'all equal' and a black/jewish/other race/ is just as good American as a WASP who came over on the Mayflower, then attacking immigration becomes only a matter of class and money.
She looks like every awful manager I ever had in Tennessee before I retired.
She worked very hard inheriting that billion plus, I'm sure.
I never understood the "low wages are good for the economy" argument, since it represents a reversal of priorities. You want a healthy economy so you can have a wealthy citizenry. If your people are making good money you'd rather have that continue even if it means the aggregate growth of the economy is lower.
Even the people arguing for tax cuts on the high end were arguing from the position that everyone would benefit, not just the people paying less in taxes.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'd rather have an "uncompetitive" economy with full employment and high wages than a "competitive" economy full of desperate immigrants pushing down wages on the low end.
As people are notoriously bad conceptualizing large numbers, I'm always trying to think of new ways to explain them. My latest for dealing with billionaires is to mention that for every billion some business "titan" has made for themselves, there are 1,000 employees that are NOT millionaires.
Think about that. For example, for all the hero-worship Steve Jobs received, he could have had another 10,000 millionaires at his company and not moved his personal needle one iota.
It's making me quite sympathetic to the idea that high marginal income taxes made it easier for company management to share the proceeds with their employees. At 50-70% marginal tax rates, they might as well share it with the employees since otherwise the govt was going to take most of it. Not that I expect our current crop of Republicans to be able to wrap their mind around such a concept, but maybe the gen X & Y-ers, that is if there's any left in 10 yrs.
I thought Ma Joad was a socialist. Looks like she's been eating more than she's picking.
What's wrong with a high-wage economy supported by strong tariffs and restricted immigration, especially from third-world hell-holes? I mean, how many iPhones does one person need?
It's not the Australian way to toss people $2.....and then ask them to work for a day," Gillard told reporters. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions."
What is he, a commie pinko labor union activist or what? An Australian version of a Democrat?
The first Person of Walmart billionheiress.
Looks like she's been partaking of some 'macronutrient supplementation'; you missed the tie-in there Mr Sailer.
I think she would be well served by investing some of her wealth in the hiring of a spokesperson.
Doesn't "low wage" just mean an amount of money that doesn't buy a lot of stuff?
So if you have low wages, who buys all the stuff? Won't people buy less stuff if they have low wages? If nobody buys stuff, won't people make less stuff?
Actually he is a she. And yes she is pretty pink for Australia.
How much would she have to pay to get her salad tossed?
At 50-70% marginal tax rates, they might as well share it with the employees since otherwise the govt was going to take most of it.
In theory, maybe. In reality it just ends up being recognized in other countries with lower tax rates.
I would note that low wages in the private sector are good, but high wages in the government sector are also good. When has the New York Times ever bitched about high pay for lard-assed bureaucrats in Washington? I do it all the time.
Why are high wages in the private sector bad and high wages in government jobs good?
My theory is that it has to do with the needs of money printers. A currency debasing regime is always worried that its debased currency will lose its value. To prevent that, they suppress prices and wages in a variety of ways. Diocletian and Nixon did it by decree. The current American regime does it more subtly.
High wages in the private sector can lead to a "wage-price spiral" which would destroy the value of the inherently worthless paper money.
But high pay for government employees and high taxes have the effect of throttling business activity, leading to higher unemployment and lower private sector wages. The lower the wages, the more the fiat currency keeps its value. I think it's especially important for currency debasers to suppress wages when food and fuel prices are going up. If wages, food prices and fuel prices all start going up rapidly at the same time, then you are not far from hyperinflation, the currency debaser's worst nightmare.
So Steve should also consider the question of why high government wages are not a problem.
For context, it's worth noting the labor situation in Australia. Thanks to a relatively small population, a surfeit of natural resources, and demand for them from China, skilled laborers in Western Australia's mining country are averaging over six figures per year. Most of us would think that's a good thing, but Rinehart owns a bunch of sites that aren't being mined yet, and she'd prefer to pay people less to mine them. She doesn't have much sympathy for slackers on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.
Incidentally, I own a few shares of an Aussie company that makes a specialized kind of mining equipment. The company's based in Western Australia, but is trying to build a factory in Indonesia to do some finishing work that it's getting priced out of due to local labor costs. The company has had some trouble raising financing though, probably due to some corporate governance issues and arrangements that don't look great (e.g., the company sponsors a 13 year old go cart racer in the US, to the tune of $100k per year. That go cart racer is the CEO's grandson).
Good on Oz for having its rich and poor look so alike.
"Anonymous said...
Note to the non-Australians: "gold coins" in the Australian dialect means $1 or $2 in Australian currency, produced in a gold colored alloy that do not contain any actual gold at all.
Gillard is making a joke here, typically charity events ask for a "gold coin donation", meaning $1 or $2, or thereabouts."
Thanks for the explanation. I was going to say - I'd work in a mine for a gold coin a day.
"She worked very hard inheriting that billion plus, I'm sure."
As a matter of fact, she did. Her court battles with her father's widow, erstwhile Filipino maid, Rose Hancock, were the talk of Perth in the early Nineties.
In theory, maybe. In reality it just ends up being recognized in other countries with lower tax rates.
That's another big effing lie we've been fed. Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al off-shoring their IP to shell companies in tax havens has no economic purpose and is an obvious end-run around paying taxes. The IRS is clear that anything with no economic purpose, except to shelter income from taxes, is illegal. If a little guy did what these companies do they'd be sent to jail.
"Rinehart, whom Forbes estimated to be worth $18 billion in February... her company... to hire just over 1,700 foreign construction workers..."
For example, a mere 10% of her wealth, which let's face it is far more than a person could ever actually spend could pay 1,700 construction workers $1 million dollars: 1,700,000,000.
What millionaire miner is a job Australians won't do? Yes, I'm slightly confusing stock and flow, but still... I'm not saying they should be paid $1M/yr, but $1M over 10, she could afford it.
$2/day types are filling the US. (But in a compromise they will get $1000/day in government benefits.)
Diversity spreads to all corners of the U.S.
http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/57648510?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p
Oddly amusing is Detroit Free Press using Vallejo CA, perhaps Americas most dysfunctional city, as an case study. I say perhaps because the most dysfunctional city might still be Detroit.
No one cares about Palestinians because they are like most Muslim peoples, a failure at everything. If you don't like Israelis because they are rude (and are indeed known for this) they gave us a lot of medical devices and computer hardware. No one loves the Swiss either but their watches, guns, and chocolate are superb.
The laugh is that South Africa has "cheap labor" that is melting down. The ANC is in turmoil over ever-increasing wild-cat strikes, the police firing on and killing striking miners who were in turn fired up by Witchdoctors and Julius Malema of "kill the Boer" fame.
South Africa's mining sector is in full meltdown, predictably, as the cheap labor is no longer willing to live in deplorable conditions and the ANC falls apart over failing to deliver a decent standard of living to its people (predictably -- a people believing in witchdoctors won't be very skilled or valuable as workers).
Aussie is getting hit by the Chinese slowdown in turn hitting imports of Iron Ore, coking coal, steam/power coal, bauxite, and the other minerals that Aussie, and Brazil and South Africa export. BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Xstrata, Vale, all are pulling back billions of development because China is slowing down. All the import of cheap Indonesian workers in the world won't fix the mining sector ... globally. In Brazil and SA as much as in Aussie.
At least skilled workers can be more productive marginally with better capital investment. And a sane regulatory framework. No in in their right mind invested a penny in South Africa as everyone knows nationalization will happen sooner rather than later. Vale is suspicious of the Brazilian leftists for the same reason. Gilliard might impose a tax, but she won't seize the mines as in South Africa, Brazil, most of the rest of South America, and Indonesia.
Existing mines with better earth movers, better refining processes, etc. can eke out efficiency gains with guys who can read, write, and operate complex machinery. Which is more than the South African labor force working for pennies a day can do.
I've never understood precisely why resource extraction people are honored for great wealth.
Kind of like finding oil under your north forty.
Were you smart or something?
Our right of capture laws (though I think that mostly applies to water) are really screwy.
But this woman...
If I were supreme overlord, what is she exactly if I pointed my finger at her and said "You no longer own any property or a company."
What would she be then? Could I randomly pick a name out of the phone book and expect they would do as well if they listened to the right experts?
She basically is in the business of selling rocks to people. People are willing to pay a lot of money for what she has to sell, but it seems to me she is the beneficiary of the luck of the draw, not talent.
" No one loves the Swiss either "
Whiskey, how dare you insult Steve Sailer so in his own blog's comments section?
"When I was a kid in the 1960's, I remember that "a rising standard of living" was something that America took great pride in and was considered one of the key elements of the American Dream."
This meme goes back at least to the 1930's.
Even further. I am pretty sure that Jack London seemed to express pride in the higher standard of living of ordinary Americans in his book about the East End of London: The People of the Abyss.
Also, didn't Benjamin Franklin express similar pride in a letter explaining the thriving economy of the American colonies?
I was also a kid in the 60s (and 70s) and I picked up on it from watching American TV.
"For context, it's worth noting the labor situation in Australia. Thanks to a relatively small population, a surfeit of natural resources, and demand for them from China, skilled laborers in Western Australia's mining country are averaging over six figures per year."
Then mine what it's economically viable to mine. Save the rest for later, when it may actually be far more valuable.
I can actually agree somewhat with Rinehart about minimum wages, government waste, and excessive regulation. Reform all that with one caveat: no foreign workers at your mines, no guestworker programs anywhere, and far less immigration. That would be the free market at work. Let Australian citizens keep their inheritance (the value of living in Australia) and Rinehart can keep hers.
Rinehart and others like her want to keep their inheritances, but want to dispossess Western workers of theirs. Fuck 'em.
At the same time they're screwing us over on immigration, those of us in the Republican Party are actively supporting a platform favoring elimination of the estate tax. If Mitt Romney gets elected president, the first thing he'll do is cut taxes for rich people and businesses,a nd try to eliminate the estate tax. He won't do squat to reduce immigration. He won't do squat to secure the border.
"Africans want to work".
I snorted the fizzy water outta my nose.
"Africans want to work".
I snorted the fizzy water outta my nose.
To all the Who-Whomers among us: She's a WASP, German-American husband.
Phew, close call that one.
When I was a kid, everybody assumed that high wages were "good for the economy."
Going back many decades now, that used to be one of the standard ways of arguing that American capitalism was superior to communism.
The capitalists of that era were correct, but you know, you've really got to give credit to the commie revolutionaries in those days for their willingness to threaten death to lying scum like this Rinehart. I guess that's just one more of those things you "can't talk about that" these days.
Black South African platinum miners are definitely NOT willing to work for one dollar a day.
In fact they are striking for pay of $200 per week. In South African terms, this is an enormous wage for a non professional position.
- And consider that well over 50% of able bodied black South Africans are out of work - and never ever likely to work, the 'natural' wage of black South African labor should be damn near zero (according to the vulture economists who define the debate).
In fact black South African miners are so keen on big wages they are willing to charge police with machetes for it, and sustain dozens of comrades killed - I doubt white Aussies would ever go that far to win a pay claim.
For those HBDers out there, you might be very interested in the thoughts of Gina's old man Lang Hancock, who was unafraid to express some pretty abrupt ideas about how to improve Australia, particularly as regards Aborigines.
Other interesting facts: Lang ended up marrying his Filipino maid, who became the pin-up girl for gold diggers after carrying on the way only a Filipino ex-maid turned millionaire can; and Gina is trying to buy out the failing Fairfax media group, which currently produces Australia's bien pensant leftist broadsheets, and is meeting plenty of resistance.
It is worth putting this in context. We are talking about a place (Western Australia) where there is a chronic labour shortage (because people unsurprisingly do not want to live there). A place where truck drivers can get >$100,000 pa. See salaries here http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/mining-oil-gas/-/wa They need skilled labourers not cheap unskilled labourers. The foriegners are most likely skilled New Zealanders or Irish workers who can get paid double what they would at home.
OTOH the gradations of the glassy-eyed cable TV metrosexual look are subtle enough that it can work against you, since people who look like on-air talent aren't considered plausible as hardened chieftains protecting the root interests of their backers/posterity. It was amusing to see the rah-rah autoworker speech in Charlotte last night delivered by someone apparently from Ann Arbor's ballet company. Vladimir Putin has never tried to emulate the mannerisms of John Edwards or Julian Castro
To the wannabe Wobblie above who inquired about Gillard, that's in fact a woman and, by Australian standards, a relatively feminine one
"Then mine what it's economically viable to mine. Save the rest for later, when it may actually be far more valuable."
Exactly, across the ditch New Zealand hires third worlders to catch its deep sea fish resources because the locals are supposed to be too lazy too catch them. But so what, catch them later, these untapped fish stocks aren't just going to disappear into the ether if they aren't caught immediately.
A global free market in labour is incompatible with the existence of any kind of nation state. What you'll get instead are zones of economic activity occupied by whatever races are currently willing to work for the lowest wages. Any successful nation state is a cartel of sorts.
"Any successful nation state is a cartel of sorts."
Indeed.
But which convention -- Democrat or Republican -- would boo you offstage more vociferously if you said that?
Maybe about 5% of the Democrats -- beefy old union guys in windbreakers -- would clap. Would any Republicans applaud? Or has the whole point of having a country become in the bipartisan imagination letting immigrants in?
Yes but the reason anyone believes them is because they're better lokking
I dunno - I bet that about 30 years ago, she was a pretty hot number.
And even today, I'll bet that beeyotch would fornicate your testes right off.
She's just got that "you're gonna shut the heck up and enjoy it, little boy" look to her.
Wanna tell you a story, 'bout a woman I know...
High wages are RACIST!!(xenophobic too!!)
WAIT!!! How do I become an Alstralyan minah...I´ll work for peanuts to live in a country like that
WAIT!!! How do I become an Alstralyan minah...I´ll work for peanuts to live in a country like that
She's obviously fond of Africans. I say deport her to Africa.
Labor should always be as expensive as possible, as that means that only the companies that use the latest and most efficient technology survives in the short run.
The logic even translates to the long run, as it is the companies that are the best at using the latest technology, that survives the competition here as well.
My beef is with illegals not they take some much white jobs, they actually take more jobs from kids-fast food, blacks and other Hispanics already here is that they usually have kids and are still working at McDonalds around 30 or so, so we have to pay free and reduce lunch programs for them. Its the welfare cost usually for because they are in low wage jobs as adults more and have kids.
Any successful nation state is a cartel of sorts.
No idea what this faux sophisticated shit means. Seriously - can you take me through it ? And by the way don't give me the current USA as an example of a 'successful nation state'.
"Now it is considered a gross moral wrong to pay anyone a cent more than the utter minimum that they will accept under the conditions of harshest duress."
Well, this is pretty much how Karl Marx said it would be...we had fair warning.
"Any successful nation state is a cartel of sorts."
Confused silence would be the predominant reaction on both sides; the more historically aware might ask "Uh, like OPEC?" No one knows what "cartel" means, and people are out of the habit of thinking so precisely that the phrase "of sorts" is a useful qualification.
Cennbeorc
Eric: I never understood the "low wages are good for the economy" argument, since it represents a reversal of priorities. You want a healthy economy so you can have a wealthy citizenry.
There are two classes of people for whom this makes sense:
1. The sane, viz., the rationally greedy: "...and by THE economy, I mean MY economy".
2. The insane, that is, the crazed mystics who serve not An Economy (that abstraction that stands for the various processes which provide for human material needs) but The Economy, a sacralized reification that is an end in itself, and to which humans and their needs and wants - even their strictly material needs and wants - are relevant only to the extent that they serve The Economy.
Type Twos are often very useful for the purposes of Type Ones.
Matthew: yes, exactly
There are two intellectually coherent positions: pro-inheritance and anti.
Note to the non-Australians: "gold coins" in the Australian dialect means $1 or $2 in Australian currency, produced in a gold colored alloy that do not contain any actual gold at all.
Gillard is making a joke here, typically charity events ask for a "gold coin donation", meaning $1 or $2, or thereabouts.
I was wondering about that. Aren't actual gold coins worth about $1,000 now? I'd definitely work for one of the real kind a day.
A fat whore,
who sinks her maw,
into the jaundiced jaw
of the black and white thinking
elite
wh0 make her munt scratch claw.
Hating grog, and cigarattes,
like her Filipino madam mother,
waking her to take water out to the men,
and tide them over in their grog fog haze,
she learned to hate the booze, and its ways.
Taken to Hungry Jacks, she was
The Burger King,
Not cool enough to be an Ozzified american Prom Queen.
So, she sat, on her bloated fat,
waiting for Macarthy only to do her bolt on Bolt.
Neocon, Yanks, lower wages, lower standards, prostitute your children, whore them out, feed your mouth, wipe your drool.
This is the lesson. This is Oztralia.
Well, people like Joel Konkin that even lives in Orange County are in a fantasy land, he still laments that the Republican party doesn't go for illegal immirgants as much as he does. Most of the right wing Tea Party folk in the OC are upper middle whites with small businesses and the social conservative among them are middle aged whites that come from Mission Viejo hardly anyone comes from Santa Ana. Moral of story Republicans can only get old upper middle class whites in small businessess or who are self-employed and live in traditional conservative suburbs like Mission Viejo which is becming more empty nesters since US census shows Mission Viejo at 14 percent and the US average is 12 percent.
"So if you have low wages, who buys all the stuff? Won't people buy less stuff if they have low wages?"
This works in the other direction too. If you pay high wages you have to charge your customers more. So everyone gets great paychecks but has to pay through the nose for basic necessities. In the end you get...New York City.
"White Australia was such good policy."
White Australia was a good policy. It prevented the country from being swamped by cheap non-white labor and allowed Australian society to develop free of the intractable racial problems experienced in the Unites States and elsewhere.
As the late Australian politician Jack Lang wrote in his memoirs:
"White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave. There would have been no need for the Japanese to invade this country. We would have been swallowed up by the rolling advance of a horde of colored people, anxious to escape the privations of their own countries and prepared to impose their own standards on this country."
This woman has a half-sister who is half aborigine. Before marrying his filipina maid her father had an affair with his aborigine cook.
That's diversity Australian style.
Sailer, for example, doesn't give a damn about Palestinians no matter what Zionists do to them. They just don't fall into his Sympathy Sphere.
The more interesting fact is that Palestinians don't fall into the Sympathy Sphere of Saudis, either. With all of their wealth and resources, they have done next to nothing to aid dispossessed Palestinians. I was in Kuwait for a few months after the Iraq invasion, and was surprised at the Kuwaiti (and Egyptian, and Saudi) take on Palestinians. They are considered untrustworthy, and are definitely the bottom of the barrel in the Arab world.
"So if you have low wages, who buys all the stuff? Won't people buy less stuff if they have low wages? If nobody buys stuff, won't people make less stuff?" - Shhh.
"Most of us would think that's a good thing, but Rinehart owns a bunch of sites that aren't being mined yet, and she'd prefer to pay people less to mine them. She doesn't have much sympathy for slackers on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale." - Hopefully Australia won't let her stripmine out their natural resources for someone elses benefit at extremely low pay. Once extracted those deposits won't magic themselves back, so they'd better get a return on investment beyond a permenant underclass that hates them.
We are talking about a place (Western Australia) where there is a chronic labour shortage
This sort of talk really grates on my nerves. There is no such thing as a "labor shortage".
Libertarians can understand this perfectly well in the context of things other than labor. The current high price for gasoline is not indicative of a "chronic shortage of oil", it's just the market sending a signal about the correct worth of a particular resource. But where labor is concerned they turn into Marxists.
"Rob said...
A global free market in labour is incompatible with the existence of any kind of nation state."
More to the point would have been to say that "a free market is incompatible with any kind of nation."
Nations, societies, cultures are humanistic creations. They are the instruments by which we experience life. Because they are not dedicated to the maximisation of profit they are inherently and necessarily anti-capitalist and capitalism is inherently and necessarily anti-national, anti-social anti-human.
Capitalism will use them if it is in the interest of capitalism but will have no hesitation in discarding them. Let me give you an example. The capitalist class in the U.S. used the culture of white supremacy to bolster the case for black slavery. A century and a half later the capitalist class in the U.S. uses the culture of cultural Marxism to globalise the labour market. Capitalism can do this because capitalism has no morality beyond the maximisation of profit. That capitalism used white supremacy and uses cultural Marxism says nothing about the morality or veracity of whose ideologies, only their utility. There is no grand conspiracy of capitalists hiding behind the curtains, it's just the logic of the system.
Therefore anyone who believes in any kind of humanistic ideology whether that be nationalism, christian morality or postmodern liberalism must first and foremost be anti-capitalist.
What implications does this have in the real world? Well here's one; for all his faults, the amnesty, his contempt for whites and so on... it clearly is in the best interest for anyone from camille paglia to your average stormfront reader to vote for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. The stronger capitalism is the more futile of hopeless everything else becomes.
skilled laborers in Western Australia's mining country are averaging over six figures per year. Most of us would think that's a good thing, but Rinehart owns a bunch of sites that aren't being mined yet, and she'd prefer to pay people less to mine them.
What you're saying is, Rinehart thinks she knows what the "correct" cost of a resource ought to be, and she wants the Australian government to help her get it at that cost.
Isn't Rhinehart really pointing out her problem with the labour unions?
Australia has had a strong labour movement and even a Labour Party. One would expect a lot of unproductive labor policies to drive up her costs.
Maybe this is her way of putting pressure on the government to throttle back on union power.
I was in Kuwait for a few months after the Iraq invasion, and was surprised at the Kuwaiti (and Egyptian, and Saudi) take on Palestinians. They are considered untrustworthy, and are definitely the bottom of the barrel in the Arab world.
I don't see how that could surprise anyone. In Jordan they tried to overthrow the government, and in Kuwait they welcomed Iraqi invaders with open arms. You'd have to be irrational to trust them.
I met a woman who looked exactly like this a few years ago at a Lab Corp. of America facility in Berkeley. She was the only employee there, performing both admin./patient intake and the blood-drawing. She was extremely competent. I paid up front in full by credit card, then received a bill from the company. Not her fault - that's how Lab Corp. does business. Then they ignored my letters and sent it to collection.
Say what you want about Australia, its income is more equitably distributed than the old US of A. The CIA has their Gini coefficient at 30 while the USA is 45.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html
I heard their minimum wage was 15 dollars and the average wage was in the 90s. We in the US have been fooled by Reaganomics which was OK for the first five years but after that it has been a disaster for the middle class which keeps getting told they don't have the balls to make it in cowboy capitalist entrepreneur land. All the while the cowboy capitalists import low wage coolies to undercut the middle class. Remember the law of supply and demand was repealed by the USCongress when it comes to labor. What have we had?.... two immigration Reform Acts which tacitly repeal the law of supply and demand, at least when it comes to employment and labor..
That's the meaning of surplus value...whatever the owner can extract from the worker's labor while providing enough for the worker to subsist.
Marx made all of this totally clear like 150 years ago. Forget about reading him as a framework for change: just look at it as a description of reality.
This lady made money the old-fashioned way: by inheritance and by being cheap.
So cheap, she can´t afford to have a proper haircut. Or give her workers a raise.
An Australian fund manager writes of a visit to New York:
http://brontecapital.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/lessons-in-my-laundry-part-1.html
I also did my laundry. Much to my surprise my hosts did not have an ironing board.
I told my wife by phone - and she thought they must be absurdly wealthy - but then even the wealthy in Australia have an ironing board. Sure they were a highly motivated and extremely hard working professional couple and ironing was hardly a priority - but it was still strange.
And then in Brooklyn - a week later - I worked it out. I dropped my laundry off at a Chinese Laundromat and got back a few pressed shirts, my jeans, socks etcetera and paid $11.75. I figure the same basket would cost me $28 in Australia. Why would you bother to wash and iron if you were prosperous and laundry was that cheap... moreover there was at least two laundries between my home and the subway. I did not need to go out of my way.
This was all because of something I knew on paper - but the price of washing made it personal. Australia does not have large numbers of very low wage employees and - even in the days machines - laundry is a labor intensive and non-traded commodity. Laundry is expensive in Australia because the person doing it expects to make $15 plus per hour. Sure minimum wages are a little lower than that - but most lowly skilled workers are paid more than the minimum. The laundries I pass in Brooklyn take the clothes to a large warehouse-type room filled with Chinese women who speak little English and who almost certainly work for less than minimum wages. And a upper middle-class New Yorker either never sees them and can ignore them. A large low-wage group make the (very rich) lifestyles of the American elite possible. They make it possible to never do your washing, eat in up-market restaurants, have nannies look after your children and have a material standard of living that even very rich Australians might envy.
Mrs Rinehart isn't rich enough for her liking. Australian workers need bu be more like NY workers for her to achieve this.
How much would she have to pay to get her salad tossed?
There are a lot of folks who would do it on spec.
No one cares about Palestinians because they are like most Muslim peoples, a failure at everything. If you don't like Israelis because they are rude (and are indeed known for this) they gave us a lot of medical devices and computer hardware. No one loves the Swiss either but their watches, guns, and chocolate are superb.
They're pretty good at being the squeaky wheel, like most west Asians. I guess if they could run and dance, they'd be all over Israeli TV?
South Africa's mining sector is in full meltdown, predictably, as the cheap labor is no longer willing to live in deplorable conditions and the ANC falls apart over failing to deliver a decent standard of living to its people (predictably -- a people believing in witchdoctors won't be very skilled or valuable as workers).
Now you're contradicting yourself. No one cares about Pals, sure, but Swipples and "Scots-Irish" care very much about blacks. They can run and dance and wear lab coats.
No one speaks up about anyone Israel steps on because the Israel lobby will step on them if they do.
"Because they are not dedicated to the maximisation of profit they are inherently and necessarily anti-capitalist"
Logic is not your strong suit.
Well, people like Joel Konkin that even lives in Orange County are in a fantasy land, he still laments that the Republican party doesn't go for illegal immirgants as much as he does.
Joel Kotkin, I think you meant. What a piece of work he is. Leave it up to people like that to do your heavy thinking for you and you'll soon find yourself with a Statue of Diversity with an inscription that cuts to the chase: "Welcome, useless immigrants. Tell your friends about our country!"
Here's a diversity-boosting piece from him at Reason Magazine from 1989 that could have been written yesterday, a real classic of the genre. It begins: "The past year America has become a nation obsessed with forebodings of decline. A perceptible gloom grips the nation’s political, corporate, and media elites." Read on you'll find that everything's a gonna be A-OK. Nothing really every changes with these people.
This works in the other direction too. If you pay high wages you have to charge your customers more. So everyone gets great paychecks but has to pay through the nose for basic necessities. In the end you get...New York City.
No, what you're describing is a situation with low wages.
"High wages" just means an amount of money that buys lots of stuff. They're not "high wages" if they don't let you buy lots of stuff and barely cover basic necessities.
She looks like she's had one too many chili dogs and soggy biscuits.
Isn't Rhinehart really pointing out her problem with the labour unions?
Australia has had a strong labour movement and even a Labour Party. One would expect a lot of unproductive labor policies to drive up her costs.
The percentage of unionized workers in Australia is in the low 20s. The Australian Labor Party is as committed to immigration as any other mainstream party in the west.
How bad are unions for The Econonmy? Detractors should be forced to provide some hard evidence. Growth throughout the postwar period was tremendous despite unionization rate two and three times as high as today.
The Dude who Knows Real Chicks out in MeatSpace said...
"I dunno - I bet that about 30 years ago, she was a pretty hot number.
And even today, I'll bet that beeyotch would fornicate your testes right off.
She's just got that "you're gonna shut the heck up and enjoy it, little boy" look to her."
What the f*** are you talking about?
"No, what you're describing is a situation with low wages."
Well, yeah. This is what you get if you raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity. A runaway inflation, and that's under a good scenario. Of course, if you point this out the socialists and the paleos (is there a difference?) will accuse you of shilling for the "low wage lobby".
The laundries I pass in Brooklyn take the clothes to a large warehouse-type room filled with Chinese women who speak little English and who almost certainly work for less than minimum wages. And a upper middle-class New Yorker either never sees them and can ignore them.
Ah, that's the way things should be in the libertarian paradise! Very Important People can have their needs taken care of on the cheap by Morlocks living deep underground. Of course VIP"s should never have to encounter or even see those disgusting sub-human creatures.
As Shakespeare should have put it, "First, we hang all the libertarians."
http://brontecapital.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/lessons-in-my-laundry-part-1.html
It's amusing that people who work in the ludicrously over-compensated "financial sector" - the last real bastion of socialism in the West - are so convinced that the people who work in laundromats and pick fruit are just too damn over-paid!
"whether plutocrats or well-paid television presenters, are much better looking on average than the losers making the low wages."
I dunno. I think most of the plutocrats look just as unpleasant as you'd expect however i wouldn't be surprised if the airbrushed TV autocue-readers have that effect - especially the actor-politicians.
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"good for the economy" means good for an overclass with a dozen passports and zero loyalty to the people who rely on the economy being talked about.
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"But it died out a long time ago. Latter 70's or early 80's at the latest is my guess."
1965 immigration act plus ten years for the effect to start kicking in.
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"It is worth putting this in context. We are talking about a place (Western Australia) where there is a chronic labour shortage"
Good. That'll be nice for the people living there then at least for a bit until the technological innovation that will always follow that kind of situation evens it out - as opposed to the cheap labor solution which destroys innovation and thereby gradually causes the economy to stagnate.
(So it's not even like the overclass are acting in their own long-term best interests. They are operating solely on the basis of what gets them the most money TODAY.)
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"OTOH the gradations of the glassy-eyed cable TV metrosexual look are subtle enough that it can work against you"
I think that is just starting to happen as there are now so few suitable looking white males who are still part of the anti-white coalition on TV who aren't obviously homosexual.
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"But so what, catch them later, these untapped fish stocks aren't just going to disappear into the ether if they aren't caught immediately."
Exactly. The only way they'll disappear for good is if they're over-fished.
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"Labor should always be as expensive as possible, as that means that only the companies that use the latest and most efficient technology survives in the short run."
Quite.
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"Well, this is pretty much how Karl Marx said it would be...we had fair warning."
Except he was completely wrong and it turned out completely different from his predictions when the bulk of the capitalists were from the same ethnic group as the workers.
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""Any successful nation state is a cartel of sorts." - No idea what this faux sophisticated shit means."
It means protectionist - but in a good way.
This is what you get if you raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity.
What America has been doing for the last forty years has been increasing productivity without increasing wages. I'm sure you have some half-assed explanation for why that's a really good policy.
"The more interesting fact is that Palestinians don't fall into the Sympathy Sphere of Saudis, either. With all of their wealth and resources, they have done next to nothing to aid dispossessed Palestinians. I was in Kuwait for a few months after the Iraq invasion, and was surprised at the Kuwaiti (and Egyptian, and Saudi) take on Palestinians. They are considered untrustworthy, and are definitely the bottom of the barrel in the Arab world."
The Gulf Arabs hate the Palestinians because the Palestinians (and the Lebanese) actually do all of the skilled professional work in those countries that keep them running while the Saudis & Kuwaitis collect their checks. Saudi Arabia was built mostly by Palestinian engineers (Yasser Arafat's construction firm built the highway from Basra to Kuwait City, for example.)
What the f*** are you talking about?
The chick who is now fat & [relatively] ugly & a billionairesse.
Even at her [now advanced] age, I guaran-dadgum-tee you that she'd ride the pole from midnight to dawn [if only you could rise to the occasion].
PS: And, to continue a point from a previous thread, so too would Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
it clearly is in the best interest for anyone from camille paglia to your average stormfront reader to vote for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney
I tend to think so too, but for other reasons that you mention. For some reason, having a mulatto president seems to be leading to a racial awakening for a lot of white people. Obama helps people wake up and smell the coffee.
Is "at whim" code for while drunk because that might explain this message board.
"White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this."
How did the White Australia policy die? My understanding is it died the same way White America died: first they let in other whites (Southern & Eastern Europeans) which fractured white cohesion...
Funny how it always seems to begin like that...
"Except he was completely wrong and it turned out completely different from his predictions when the bulk of the capitalists were from the same ethnic group as the workers."
I read about a Wall St exec who said that Marx's description of Capitalism was correct, but his prescription about what to do about was wrong. I can't remember who it was though.
Well, yeah. This is what you get if you raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity. A runaway inflation, and that's under a good scenario. Of course, if you point this out the socialists and the paleos (is there a difference?) will accuse you of shilling for the "low wage lobby".
Well, you're still not talking about a situation with high wages. If you raise wages, but the resulting wages don't buy lots of stuff, then you don't actually have high wages. "High wages" means an amount of money that buys lots of stuff.
Billion dollar cottage cheese.
no miss piggy jokes yet?
http://ukcommentators.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/he-said-it-not-me.html
Eamonn Butler's Adam Smith Primer tells us :
"The workers’ best friends, Smith surmises, are rising national income and capital growth, because they bid up wages. A landlord with surplus revenue will hire more servants. A weaver or a shoemaker with surplus capital will hire assistants. In other words, the demand for labour rises when – and only when – national wealth rises. The 'liberal reward of labour' depends entirely on economic growth."
That scenario supposes a fixed (in the short term, anyway) supply of labour. What if our landlord, weaver or shoemaker could import an almost unlimited number of low-paid servants and assistants ? What if, on top of that, their low pay was topped up by government through a tax credit system - a system originally designed to take low-paid Britons out of poverty ?
If the wages are low enough there's no reason why even in a system of economic stasis or recession our landlord shouldn't hire more servants. There's also nothing to stop him sacking the servants he has and replacing them more cheaply from the almost unlimited pool of new labour.
What was stopping it in Adam Smith's day was the cost of transport, the absence of a government pledged to abolish child poverty (aka "subsidise an employers low wages from tax receipts") and the fact that the locals just wouldn't wear it. A load of foreigners coming in and taking our jobs ? No way !
Now transport's cheap, there's that lovely subsidy, and above all the moral and political objections to undercutting "our own people" (a phrase which immediately brands the utterer with the indelible scar of racism) have been totally marginalised and discredited. The trades unions, which instinctively understood the objections to cheap 'scab' (non-unionised) labour, now welcome the undercutting of an entire working class.
"How did the White Australia policy die? My understanding is it died the same way White America died: first they let in other whites (Southern & Eastern Europeans) which fractured white cohesion..."
Essentially, yes.
Large-scale non-British European immigration from the end of WWII onwards weakened Australia's identity as a British nation, and gradually led to the doors being opened to immigrants from an ever-wider range of countries. The so-called "White Australia" policy started to be quietly dismantled in the late 1960s. However, non-European immigration into Australia only really began in the mid to late 1970s when state-sanctioned multiculturalism was imposed on an unsuspecting Australian population.
Like in Canada, multiculturalism was ostensibly introduced in Australia to benefit those non-British European ethnic minority groups - "white ethnics" - already in the country. However, it soon became a vast social engineering experiment aimed at radically transforming Australian society. Rather than being merely a policy of accommodating our existing diversity, multiculturalism became a tool for increasing diversity far beyond anything Australia had ever experienced.
Needless to say, Australians never had the chance to vote on multiculturalism. We never had the chance to vote on non-European immigration. These were policies foisted upon us from above.
"How did the White Australia policy die? My understanding is it died the same way White America died: first they let in other whites (Southern & Eastern Europeans) which fractured white cohesion..."
Classic multiculturalist strategy: divide and conquer.
@Podsnap
By successful nation state I mean one that's racially homogeneous, or near it.
Such a state is an organism that's not subject to free-market principles and can only survive by protectionist policies, at least where the importation of cheap labour is concerned. It might make perfect sense from a purely capitalist point of view to replace the population with low-wage immigrants, and the object of good government is to prevent that.
How did the White Australia policy die? My understanding is it died the same way White America died: first they let in other whites (Southern & Eastern Europeans) which fractured white cohesion..
Then your understanding of American history is erroneous. "White America" has died in my own lifetime, and it has not been "Southern & Eastern Europeans" who killed it. It's been "old stock" Americans like the Bush family.
"I read about a Wall St exec who said that Marx's description of Capitalism was correct"
It is logically correct in the same way the idea of rational economic actors is logically correct i.e. it is logically correct if you exclude biology aka human nature.
"I read about a Wall St exec who said that Marx's description of Capitalism was correct, but his prescription about what to do about was wrong. I can't remember who it was though."
Do you remember if the Wall St. exec offered an alternative prescription?
"We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions."
Who knew nazism was so entrenched in Australia?
Severn - Great comments - you should have your own blog man!
Piling on the hatefest, she's already a meme:
http://www.quickmeme.com/Spiteful-Billionaire/?upcoming
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