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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (323918)	1/31/2007 1:24:57 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574239

But what you are choosing to ignore is that the change hurts everyone but the well off who were involved either as investors or upper mgmt. I'm "ignoring" that because it isn't true. They aren't firing workers in order to produce less and make less income. Their firing workers because with the economies of scale in the combined company some of the workers aren't needed anymore. Continuing to produce the same amount or more with less workers is called greater productivity. Greater productivity is what enables per capita growth (well you could also reduce unemployment, but its already low, or you could have people work more hours, but I don't think people want to give up holidays or have longer work weeks). If you have X employees producing Y goods, and you change to X-500 employees producing Y goods. Then Y goods still get produced. Eventually the 500 employees mostly are employed again, and they produce Z goods or services. Z is a positive number. Y+Z is more than Y. Z represents new wealth for the economy. I understand you apparently care more about redistributing wealth then creating it, but you have to create it before you redistribute it. Yes, in the short term people lose their jobs. Yes that typically is not very enjoyable, and can even be a very painful experience. But try to eliminate the pain involved in increasing efficiency and you just wind up eliminating most economic growth, making almost everyone worse off. --- This is hardly something new. New techniques, new technologies, buyouts and economies of scale... All these things often result in less workers being needed. Usually some people lose their jobs. Often the direct benefit doesn't go to the workers at least not in the short run. But in the long run everyone benefits. Should we have "saved" the jobs of everyone replaced by automated machines? Should we have "saved" the jobs of the employees of buggy whip manufacturers? Should we have outlawed the importation of televisions so that Americans can have jobs making the TVs? Should we hire elevator operators across the country, and eliminate MS Office and competing programs so that there will be more jobs for secretaries/admin. assistants? Of course not. Doing any of things would be harmful acts not helpful acts, despite the fact that on the surface they would seem to create or preserve jobs. Creative destruction does indeed cause destruction that can be painful, but it creates far more than it destroys. Anticipating a possible response - Yes a buyout/merger might not actually increase efficacy. In some cases it may even reduce efficiency. If so its a bad business decision, and investors in the acquiring company will likely suffer. But you provide no evidence or argument that efficiency will suffer from this merger. And if it is a bad business decision it should be criticized on that level. Bad business decisions can hurt people but that doesn't make them some sort of fundamental injustice.