funny thing is: management also benefits from progressive politics...

Sure. A job at Gosplan is a plum....

hahaha. no. What I mean is that in a capitalist economy, when people at the bottom have more cash, they can spend it on things that producers, um, produce. Also: workers who aren't at starvation level tend to work harder than those who are. Just a little tidbit from someone who has just recently escaped starvation level wages...

Andrew writes:

".....when people at the bottom have more cash, they can spend it on things that producers, um, produce."

You're right, Andrew, as far you go. Hell, Henry Ford, the bete noire of the trade unionists 75-100 years ago, understood that much-- why else did he establish the five-dollar-day in his factories back around 1914, when the conventional wisdom said he was nuts?

The problem with "progressives", Andrew, is that their grasp of economics is pretty shaky. They see people working for, say, $9 an hour at Wal-Mart, and demand that Wal-Mart pay such people more money-- after all, Wal-Mart is simply rolling in dough, and surely it can afford to pay those people $12 or $15 or $18 an hour. "It's only fair!", they whine.

Never mind that the $9 an hour might be a step up for those folks from what they got before.

Never mind that the $9 an hour is a pretty princely wage in some parts of the country.

Never mind that the $9 an hour just might be a starting wage, with a higher wage in the offing if the employee doesn't turn out to be a loser.

Never mind that the present skill-level and productivity of the employee may not justify a wage higher than $9 an hour. To pay the employee any more than that means that the employer is losing money, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of being in business in the first place. As the skills and productivity of the employee improve, he can expect his wage to increase. (See my comment above about starting wages.)

Never mind that few people stay with one employer for decades anymore. The people earning $9 an hour at Wal-Mart might, in a year or three, move on to some other job paying more money. It happens all the time, but "progressives" seem to think of people being chained to their jobs, like their fathers might have been figuratively in their decades working for Ford or Acme Widget, or even literally a la the workers in Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1926).

Andrew, if John and I have a beef with progressives (and I think we do), it's not so much that we disagree about goals. Who isn't in favor of higher wages and better working conditions? It's that we disagree about means, and much of what the progressives prescribe is boneheaded beyond belief.

Another bone of contention on my part (and John's too, I think) is the idea of "progression", that one thing should, indeed must, follow another. Progress is nice, but what happens when you finally reach the ideal state, whatever that might be? Any "progression" beyond that point is actually regression, in that it is movement away from the ideal state. But try to tell that to a progressive, Andrew. For far too many of them, the important thing is not the goal but the journey-- continued movement (and continuance of "the Movement") allows them to remain important. For them, it's all about the "benjamins", and the actual welfare of "the masses" be damned.

Every time Andrew comments, I think of one of Oscar Wilde's famous lines (from The Importance of Being Earnest): "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit -- touch it and the bloom is gone."

Hale,
How many WalMart employees do you know? I've known a few-- and none of them were making US$9/hr. Not even the ones classified as "management". The fact that you can even believe US$9 to be a starting WalMart Wage is going to get a lot of laughs among my Retail-working friends when I tell them about it...

As a point of reference: I worked at Barnes and Noble for 5 years. I started at US7, and ended at US$9.25. My raises were annual, and were the highest the company gives its regular employees short of promoting them. Barnes and Noble also has a compensation package which is the envy of other retail workers...

Simply put: WalMart workers have got on strike (or tried, anyway) so as to get all the way UP TO US$9, not to go from US$9 to twice that...

Since Walmart has come up:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=082206D

I assume most people have read this by now, but if you haven't, its a great little lesson in economics.

Oh yeah! The free market does indeed work wonders! I don’t know that I’d give WalMart the credit for Chinese poverty relief, though. Once the WTO went into effect, it was fairly inevitable that someone would tap that labor pool like a coed doing a keg stand...

Actually Andrew, the free market does work wonders. It lifts people out of poverty. The WTO can do what it will, but until an entrepreneur comes along to “tap that labor pool”, as you put it, it doesn’t get done and thus people are left in poverty.

You seem to have a disagreement with the article. Can you please state more precisely exactly what it is you disagree with?

...and here, by the way, is the full Paul Krugman editorial that is quoted in the article above.

http://www.slate.com/id/1918

It is tremendous. If any leftists have the time to explain to me why its wrong I'd love to hear.

I was not being even remotely facetious when I said that free markets can work wonders. The WTO created that market (by lifting the barriers to it), and therefore deserves the praise for lifting people out of poverty. The fact that the Chinese government hasn’t gotten too in the way of that market—while providing the basic infrastructure (roads, courts, etc) to allow it to function—also deserves some credit...

But whether it was WalMart, Target, or some other company—or a bunch of companies—was irrelevant to that market’s being tapped. It would have been _someone_, and praising WalMart for doing the obvious seems kind of silly...

What I praise is the free market system - the system that is the greatest enemy that poverty has ever known and the very one that "progressives" for some reason or another seem to fight at every turn.

And yes, I also praise men like Sam Walton, Henry Ford, Jack Welsh, JP Morgan, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. I don't give a damn about their intentions. They all got rich? Good. They deserved it. They created more jobs, more wealth, alleviated more suffering and eliminated more poverty than all the good intentions of every "progressive" that has ever lived combined.

What's your complaint against riches, or the rich? When did the conversation shift from institutions to men? And when did we stop talking about actions and start discussing motives? And: are we discussing modern progressives, who haven't held power since they came about sometime in 2002? Or the older generation of progressives back in the late 1800s, early 1900s?

"What's your complaint against riches, or the rich?"

What in the hell are you talking about?

Andrew, motives are important. It's like the old saying has it: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Or, if you like your aphorisms more recent, how about this bit from Tolkien, about how someone could "seem fair, but feel foul"?

That is, at bottom, what is wrong with progressives and progressivism, whether old or new. The ideology and its adherents are, to one degree or another, authoritarian, even totalitarian. The things they propose seem fair, but those things involve placing undue constraints on freedom of action, and so feel foul.

Classical liberalism (NOT 20th-Century Liberalism) is about striking shackles off people, not putting golden chains on them (as Teddy Kennedy would do). Yeah, freedom's an ugly, messy business, and so it seems foul. Yet it's the fairest thing going on the planet. And the Progressives can't stand it.

As for Wal-Mart, it's true that I know only one person who works (or worked?) at Wal-Mart, and I haven't seen him in 10 years or so. (He was one of my co-workers at Radio Shack in the early '90s, and left for Wal-Mart's better pay and benefits.)

The pay you get for a job depends a lot on where you live, of course. Here in suburban Baltimore, I know that jobs at local K-Marts carry wages running anywhere from $7 to $9 an hour. (I have a friend who works at K-Mart. She tried to hire me, until she found out that I was taking a warehousing job that paid a lot more.)

Having lived on such wages for some years in the middle and later '90s, I know that it isn't much fun. It helps that I'm single, but I have champagne tastes, so living on a Budweiser budget stinks.

Yet I schlubbed along, paid some dues, and my current assignment with a well-known temporary agency has me working an easy job in an air-conditioned warehouse earning $13 an hour.

I've worked for that well-known temporary agency on and off for 13 years. When I walked back through their front doors last spring after being away for two years, they said, "Thank God you're back, have we got an assignment for you!" and BAM! I'm in that air-conditioned warehouse.

If you will indulge my tendency to ramble a bit more...?

It gripes me a bit when I see younger guys (I'm talking about my fellow temps), somewhere in their 20s, bitching about how they're not making enough money. Chances are they're being paid about $9 or $10 an hour, and they complain about being underpaid when their work habits sometimes aren't the best. I want to shake them by the shirt-front sometimes, and tell them that punctuality, competence, diligence, and attitude are important things, and until they develop those things, they aren't going to get raises. "Grow up, pay some dues, and hang in there! I went from $6 an hour in 1994 to $12 an hour in 2004. Big whoop, maybe, but it's not nothing!"

Of course, I keep my mouth shut. Probably because they remind me of myself in my 20s. (rueful grin)

Now, if only I could shed my slacker ways and market myself with my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. That $30 an hour job I had doing quality control inspections on new buses for the local transit agency last year was nice. Too damn bad the contract ran out of money.... *sigh* It would be nice to get something similar, for even half that money.

That's the problem with having had a job that pays well. You get addicted to not worrying quite so much about money. It'll ruin you, I tell you!

I guess all of the foregoing is an illustration of the words attributed to Winston Churchill: "Anyone who wasn't a liberal in their 20s has no heart. Anyone who isn't a conservative by their 40s has no brain."

And I must be so old (at 44) that I'm going senile-- I ramble too much.

I want to shake them by the shirt-front sometimes, and tell them that punctuality, competence, diligence, and attitude are important things, and until they develop those things, they aren't going to get raises.

Having been on both ends of the whole hiring side of things, I can second this whole-heartedly. If you just 1) show up somewhere around starting time, 2) don't leave until somewhere around closing time, 3) do a moderate amount of work while you're there, and 4) don't act like an asshole, you'll be a valued, even revered employee most places. It really ain't that hard. I've never worked anywhere that following that prescription didn't put me in line for promotions and raises, save me from being fired, and made the work day a lot more pleasant.

John, you've been an employer in the past - does this strike you as true as well?