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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (15722)	4/21/2017 9:46:17 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 365074

>> Else he wouldn't have badgered so many wealthy company owners to raise the pay of their employees as a way of warding off the Great Depression. Now, that's a different thing. I believe if you will check the conversation, you'll find your argument was that Ford believed [literally] that he could make money by selling cars to his employees. Specifically. I told you at the time it was ridiculous, and that the statement was clearly a marketing statement, not any real suggestion that raising pay enabling his employees to buy more cars would make Ford more profitable. But it is history. The reality is that Ford's actions were SHEERLY free market in nature: He needed to keep the assembly line moving, and he knew paying more would do that. That is a businessman making a decision in his own self interest, and that is why markets work. Anything that interferes with markets (government, unions) imperils the employee's interests. That's my only point with that discussion between you and me.

To: combjelly who wrote (15722)	4/21/2017 9:49:37 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 365074

By the way, I just heard Mark Cuban on TV talking about the subject of automation & jobs, and he appears to have gotten on the bandwagon. Which I'm glad to see some people with big mouths now doing. One of his comments is that Fortune 100 companies all have great awareness of this topic now and know something has to be done. This is going to be interesting to watch the awakening, and pools of wealth scrambling to get their shares by "helping" solve the problem.

To: combjelly who wrote (15722)	4/27/2017 9:17:07 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 365074

If he believed it then he was a fool on that point (which isn't saying he was a fool generally). Particularly if he believed it would work with just his company (that his company would do better by paying workers more, specifically because the workers could then buy more) which is the way its usually presented. Most of those extra wages wouldn't go in to buying new Fords. Also even if every single worker spent 100% of the extra wages on Ford cars, there are other costs for each new Ford besides labor, the extra revenue would only cover the extra labor cost. Total purchase amounts increasing could provide some economy of scale, but not much, the extra purchases would be only a small fraction of total production, even if wages increased by a large amount. As for raising wages in general, at a time of collapsing demand and revenue like the great depression, that just contributes to more unemployment. One of the main reasons you can get severe recessions or depressions in the first place is that wages (also debt) won't seamlessly adjust downward in a deflationary situation. Wages just being "sticky" causes problems in such a situation. Increasing them only increases the problem. One of Hoover's interventions that helped the Great Depression become so "great", was the pressure on employers to raise wages. (Very unlikely to be as big of factor as higher taxes and tarifs, because employers could often ignore the pressure, but its a much less known negative intervention by Hoover, and is also more relevant to this discussion.)