I guarantee this person says "basic economics" at least 5 times a day :ancap-good:
truly shocked that someone whose avatar is a snake with a pinochet hat would have an incoherent understanding of marxian economics
do mud pies next
The post is cringe obviously but I’m even more appalled by the brain dead 300+ People who liked it.
A serious response - the worker says it’ll take them an hour to make the chair which they value at $20. So you pay that. They require wood, which the logger says will take them an hour which they value at $20. You say it’ll take you an hour to get the materials to and fro and make the sale - which you value at $20. So you sell the chair for $60 dollars and pay the two workers their share.
Why not sell the chair for $70 and keep the extra $10? Because you valued your work as being $20 as did the other two workers. Which means the true cost is $60. You can charge even $100 if you want, but if the true cost is $60, then there will be other sellers selling it for that price, thereby driving you out of business.
Unless you have a monopoly on the wood and you pay $20 to a cop to protect the woods and only allow your logger to cut the trees. In that case the true cost is $80 and by charging $100 you get to keep $40.
But why stop there? If only you have the tree supply then your logger and chair-maker can only be employed by you and no one else. You can just pay them $10 each, enough to buy food and water and nothing else, this decreasing the true cost to $60 and pocket $60.
Maybe the other people you’ve driven out of business don’t like your monopoly and try to revolt. You have two options. Pay the cop $40 instead of $20 to prevent your competitors from bribing him. They, of course, don’t have that much cash so they can’t outpay him. Now your true cost for the chair rises to $80 and you keep only $40. That’s not good enough.
But, also, the other sellers join together to overthrow your cop and take over your monopoly. So you have to buy some of them out. You pay some of them $20, which is what they were making before, to fight the others. True cost of the chair rises to $100 and you still only sell at $100 so you now only get $20. Not good enough. You make no extra profit. This is what you would’ve originally gotten if you’d just been honest. But now you only get this while doing much more work, suppressing your workers, reducing the number of chairs, and making everyone miserable. Good job.
The post is cringe obviously but I’m even more appalled by the brain dead 300+ People who liked it.
I figure at least some of those are bots. There is a lot of money put into right-wing astroturfing.
Occam's razor. They're probably just drones going along liking everything that appeals to them at the moment.
Come on, admit it, we've all done this. Don't kid yourself. They save their bots for the 100k+ posts.
This is what you would’ve originally gotten if you’d just been honest. But now you only get this while doing much more work, suppressing your workers, reducing the number of chairs, and making everyone miserable. Good job.
Far easier to just employ cops directly and demand a fee for doing business in your territory. Then your costs drop substantially and all you really care about is the chair-making people generating enough surplus to pad your wallet. Spend a bit more and you can send your cops abroad, to seize lumber and extort labor from neighboring states. Install the existing chair makers as overseers who administer the bureaucratic chair-making state, pitting one against the other for the privilege of rank within the chair-o-cracy.
Yes, things do seem a bit less efficient than if you'd played fairly. But now you're making $20/chair warehouse, and you're rapidly expanding the number of warehouses in your domain. Your objective is no longer to make chairs at the lowest per-unit price, but to increase the rate at which chairs are produced and sold relative to the economy as a whole.
no mention of materials, furnishings, tools, etc.
all $20 to buying their labor power
this is so stupid
I dunno man, seems like a problem you could solve by not stealing the value generated by your worker when you clearly didn't even do anything to MAKE THE FUCKING CHAIR IN THE FIRST PLACE
I have fun with these people by framing "basic economics" as meaning "the owner of capital takes surplus value from the worker, and extracts profit without labor"
You'll probably get "the employer takes all the risk", as if the business going under isn't going to effect every employee and many others in the community.
stop exploiting labor? do you know of a better way to turn a profit by owning capital? marx btfo
Same energy as saying that worker Co-ops "don't work" because you can't make as much money off of them.
How do I expand my facilities without cheap investment capital if I'm not posting an increasing rate of profit? How do I attract cash-heavy VCs and maximize the volume of sales per quarter? How do I continuously and indefinitely grow the economy on a global scale?
Bet you stupid Marxists didn't think of that, didya?
Even after all this, the opening line: "You employ someone to make chairs"
Why? Why don't you make your own damned chairs? What are you adding to the process of chair creation and distribution? This question goes entirely unanswered. Nobody explains where the lumber for the chairs comes from or who works the cash register to clear the sale or what you do with excess chair inventory. It's just... "How do I get to make money every time you make a chair? I guess someone else will have to pay more than $20. Otherwise nothing works."
Things other than the workers labor that went into making the chair
Like wat
Wood (don't ask how it was chopped, transported, or processed)
Nails (don't ask how they were created or where the raw material came from)
Transport (dont ask who's transporting them, or how the trucks got built)
Etc. Etc.
Raw materials, fractional products, means of production, and logistics/transportation.
All of those add up into what's called "static" value. Or value that they directly impart on a commodity in accordance with their market/exchange value. The reason it's static is because the surplus value/labor value of the product has already been extracted by another capitalist.
So a chair uses $15 worth of wood, nails, glue, and machine life (power, maintenance, etc). This means that the chair now has exactly $15 worth of value, but no use value so also no real exchange value yet. When a carpenter leverages their labor against those means of production with static value, they generate "variable" value or "labor value".
Example: $15 worth of parts, $15/hr wage for the carpenter, 3 chairs per hour. Each chair sells for $20. In this situation, the value of the commodity is true. It's equal to the labor imparted by the carpenter plus the static values associated with costs of production.
Now the capitalist who owns the chair factory isn't happy with this. So they try to reduce material costs. They buy wood that's a bit cheaper and get the material cost down to $13, but when they go to sell the chairs they find that the chair is now only worth $18 so they still get no profit.
Going back to the factory, the capitalist decides that he's going to work his carpenters harder. Now they have to make 4 chairs per hour instead of 3 and lo and behold when he goes to sell the chairs the next day, each of his workers is now making him $5/hr worth of profit!
With this knowledge, he realizes that he can make an extra $20/day off his 4 workers by extending their shift from 8 hours to 9. He also realizes that hiring more workers means he can generate even more profit per day (as each man hour worked makes profit).
He hires 6 more workers and is now bringing in $50/hr for himself.
From this relationship, all of capitalism springs. All it's issues are centered around contradictions that arise from this simple example.
Marxism is very bad, see, imagine you own the means of production
Best response. Marxism is not "both sides", Marxism is on the right side of history.
