I forgot to address one Budge comment in the post below:
You say that wealth is created from labor. I disagree. I say that wealth is created by the combination of capital, labor and entrepreneurship and are co-dependent. What the engineer designs is of no use unless adequate capital is put at risk to achieve scale economies. And specialized labor must be paid an adequate salary to create production. But labor alone cannot create wealth. It has to have inputs to turn to products that can be made economically efficiently.
Labor precedes capital. There is no capital without labor.
Resources without labor just sit there.
Therefore, labor is the source of all wealth.
Academic.
Piece of Mindful 
So I guess resources aren’t capital?
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Imagine a place with resources and no labor or capital, like say, Antarctica.
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Why don’t you read the question again.
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Typical Budgism – “When I use a word,it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Resources are not capital until converted to such by labor.
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So the ownership of land isn’t capital? How about mineral rights? When the cave man made his spear from a branch and a rock did the inputs become capital when he took them or only after he made the spear?
This is a legitimate question.
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The “ownership of land” is not a “resource”, which refers to things in place and unharvested or mined. Resources become capital when labor is applied to them.
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Well the dictionary says this:
4. the wealth, whether in money or property, owned or employed in business by an individual, firm, corporation, etc.
5. an accumulated stock of such wealth.
6. any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.
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So, is labor always capital …only when labor is property? Is taxation the same as partial ownership, i.e. semi-public property? Foolish perhaps to think in terms of bright lines separating textbook categories.
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WTF?
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OK, consider one hair split down the middle. You’re just fookin’ awesome.
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Listen, this is about defining the words used in a debate. There’s no hair splitting here. I’m saying that resources are capital by my definition. You’re saying they’re not. The resolution of terms in the debate dictate the outcome.
You do this all of time. You use your own definitions of words then declare yourself the winner of the argument. I don’t mean to go all Socratic here but if you are, in fact, even partially conceding than how do you defend your argument?
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Now THAT’S funny. Dave, dude, you went to a dictionary to define a word for debate? That’s avoidance. There can be no debate, as you rightly point out, if there can be no agreement on terms. So what did you do? You went to a source that lends no authority but rather clarifies words given common or colloquial meaning. I’m serious; it’s hard to type through the laughter. You might as well have written: ‘Chu keep using dat word. I donna think it means whatchu think it means.’ And this right Mark accurately accused you of devotion to specious authority.
Oh shit Dave. Thank you. That’s the best laugh I’ve had in quite a while. My sides are hurting and I’m not kidding.
Oh crap, I’m still laughing.
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I do not see any difference in the outcome of the debate if there is overlap between resources and capital. You’re splitting a hair by saying that not ALL capital is from labor, as natural resources in the ground were not put there by labor. You then went to great lengths to prove that resources are capital.
So I narrow my point – that computer you tap away on, the software you use, the plants and factories and burger joints are the product of labor. The money they produce that wealth accumulators hoard or reinvest is the product of labor. That part of capital you say is natural resources does not move without labor.
You do this all of time. You avoid the essence of an argument and go off on a tangent, and harp away on it. If I got the last part right now, you’re saying that if I concede that natural resources that are owned may indeed be considered capital, then I’ve lost the whole argument.
How does one come about ownership of natural resources? Gift or inheritance? Someone had to lay claim – most sit in the commons. But if someone purchases the right to develop minerals, they have merely converted one kind of capital to another. Apply a little labor, and you have value added.
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Oh god. The mirth is winding down, so upon rereading there should have been an “after” in that previous comment.
Dave, as Mark has stipulated, a “resource” implies an object, the thing, and a subject, the user. Simply put, the term has no relevance without the user. By tying wealth to possession of the “resource”, one does in fact bind that wealth to the possession of the subject user. That would be labor, in case you missed that part.
Coal, oil, wheat or gold, none have any value (the essence of wealth) if none desire their use. The subject is the user and must use for wealth to have relevance. For something to be “used” labor must be applied. Mark is right about the primacy of labor. If you wish to argue with him in Socratic fashion, that’s a loser of a tactic because separating resource from use and then from wealth is logically invalid. One can trade commodities, but that’s just betting isn’t it? The wealth is instilled by the value of the use of commodities, not their mere existence.
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Wulfgar, I know you laugh at fart jokes too.
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That is logically false. Labor may or may not have “possession” of the wealth. As a matter of fact, I would say that Mark thinks that labor deserves that ownership, or more of it anyhow, but is denied.
You guys aren’t addressing my point at all. I said that wealth is created by the combination of capital, labor and entrepreneurship and are co-dependent variables. None are independent of the other. Mark makes this a chicken and egg question where the reality is that in economics relationships are both codependent and covariable. In other words, labor is not higher on the pecking order of wealth creation but is but one variable in a three term equation. Wealth cannot be created without all three terms.
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And Mark, the ownership of the wealth is not relevant to the discussion per se. Wealth could be either individual or collective and the same codependencies would apply.
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No, the wealth is instilled by the perceived value or their use either now or in the future. By your logic gold coins would have no value.
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Tsk tsk, Dave. That isn’t what I wrote, now is it? What I wrote, quite logically, is that wealth is possession of the resource only if one has possession of the user, labor. Labor has primacy in the chain of wealth. I did not nor would insinuate that labor requires possession of resource for wealth, only that wealth requires the possession of labor to gain value from resource.
Bull and Shit. Labor and “entrepreneurship”, as nebulous a term as ever there was, are required for wealth. But capital? No. Sports heroes. That’s not labor and capital. That’s labor and talent. Software designers. Labor and desire (talent). I could carry this out to the extreme, but it’s rather pointless. Because it still doesn’t deal with Mark’s accurate assessment of resource, which I noticed you avoid completely in favor of the term “entrepreneurship”. What is clear is that capital remains nebulous and thus unnecessary.
True, somebody somewhere had to invest for others to achieve wealth. In most cases, they created a resource. But the fact remains that labor brings that resource to wealth, and owning the labor is the driving cause. As Mark has argued and you refuse to countenance, it is labor that carries resource to wealth.
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Hunter-gatherers – resource equals wild pigs and hickory nuts. They are nothing unless harvested. They exist, but are of no use without labor.
Capital equals baskets and spears. They don’t exist without labor.
These are codependent as you say, but labor is superior to all, and precedes capital.
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Wulfgar, in economics lingo the word “entrepreneur” is often interchangeable with either “management” or “talent.”
Secondly, maybe you should write a bit clearer. You think that some of use fuck with you. The fact is that your writing is usually unclear. Read the first paragraph again and look for your structure. Who the fuck is the user? Did you mean owner?
Last, if you think there’s no capital involved in the development and sale of a sports hero?
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Interesting a side – back during one of the football strikes, the players decided to form their own teams and play anyway, thinking the fans woudl come to see them becuase they were the product.
The fans did not come. It seems that the franchises are a large part of the value of a football team.
Anyway, I don’t think we can go further. You ade your point about codependent variables, but I maintain that they are not all equal.
And the practical question is, does labor get paid what it ought to?
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Mark, hunter gathers die without those types of “resources” to feed them. Chicken meet egg.
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The question of labor being paid adequately is an entirely different issue.
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Sorry if I was writing above your head, Dave. I’ll try to be clearer in the future.
User means exactly what it means. Resource is used … by a user, the subject of use. That does not imply ownership except to the dim. I’m sorry, was that above you? The purpose of the use (for generating wealth, for consumption, for pay in compensation for extraction) is incidental. Labor is required to achieve any of those goals. Are you keeping up with me here?
You claimed that resource has value, “percieved value” in itself. That is just crap. It ignores the user, the subject of the value. The only value offered is through the primacy of labor. The labor to extract, that labor to exploit or the labor to consume. That is what we call “economy”, and guess what, chuckles, it all comes back to labor, just as Mark said it did.
It doesn’t surprise me that you would think such simple truths to be unclear. You deal in a paper economy; value afforded through promise of riches (wealth). More paper, more promises, more ‘wealth’. But the only promises worth a hill of beans, are those backed by labor, by the effort of extraction, the exploitation of extraction, and the compensation for the effort of extraction. Anything else is a bubble, and it will burst. I wonder if we’ve seen such things before …
There, was that too complex for you? Am I being unclear? Or are you just going to fall back on the same old tired trope that ‘Wulfgar just doesn’t make sense … wahhh. I sure wish he’d be more clear for us dimwits’.
Hmm, a word that has many meanings, one might say “nebulous”, exactly like I said it did. Or was that part “unclear” as well?
Now that? That was fucking unclear, hypocrite.
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Hey Wulfgar, Fuck you. You’re both an asshole and a moron.
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Oh, and you’re a shitty writer. I mean that.
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They die without implements, they die if they do not hunt and gather. But I think you want to minimize the labor factor and maximize the capital factor without admitting that capital would not exist without labor. That’s why you jumped off this tangent about resources being capital without admitting that they are worth nothing until people use them by applying labor. Antarctica is, after all, loaded with resources, but whose capital is it?
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I’m not trying to minimize or maximize anything. The input variables for the production of one good over another vary significantly. Making flower arrangements is highly labor intensive. Making steel is highly capital intensive. I have no cause to minimize labor – we can’t exist without it. But labor needs capital as much as capital needs labor. Now, this isn’t a right/left discussion. Marx said the same thing I’m saying but he said that labor should own the capital collectively. This isn’t about ownership, however, it’s about how economies work.
Marx put labor above capital because it’s human and humans are more valuable than non-human resources but he agreed with Smith on labor’s codependency with capital (hence the title of his masterwork.) The egalitarian argument is fine – although I doubt that egalitarianism serves the greater good – a different discussion. But to say that labor has a primacy as an input good in the economic cycle is nonsense.
A case can be made that capital is over-compensated vis a vis labor in the modern era. I’ll debate that. But the reason that the capital resources of Antarctica haven’t been employed is because the cost of labor and external capital to use them is too high to make them economical – not that the capital resources don’t have value. They just have lower value relative to other capital resources. And as soon as its relative value increases then the fight for ownership will ensue.
If the argument is about distributive justice (read Rawls) than it’s a fair argument. But you cannot separate labor from capital in the modern era. Without capital mankind would starve.
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My instinct is to go to bat for labor. End of story. Name of post: Rock, paper, scissors.
But labor precedes capital, capital is stored labor. After all of this, I don’t know that it means as much as I thought it did.
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OK, I’ll lead the horse to water. If you won’t read Rawls why don’t you read about him here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice
and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls
The primary reason for you to spend the 10 minutes is that I think he’s wrong on so many levels. But he is the guy who, more than any single American philosopher I think, gave the moral argument for progressivism.
I found him fascinating in his original thought and it’s contrast to (dare I say it?) Locke. Rawls died in 2002. (and if you would ever actually read him you’d be a hellava lot more fun to debate.)
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I’ll take your critique under advisement, Dave, as long as you take this sincere criticism from me:
As Mark has pointed out in both this post and the previous one, you’re really shitty at argument and debate.
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“A moral argument for progressivism” …
I don’t hold you in the high contempt that Wulfgar does, and I value your arguments, and you are very good at argument and debate, but you do, as I have said earlier, have a blind spot as big as Alaska. I go back and forth on it – it is human depravity, and while it is often exhibited in outlying psychopathic individuals, it is more often seen in group settings, especially authoritarian ones – military, corporate, mafia-like structures. (My Unitarian brothers cannot decide on a hymn to sing.) In the group setting, depravity shines brightly. And the group setting is almost always a right wing structure, those willing to submit to the authorities and carry out orders almost always right wingers.
So I don’t give much credence to your point made so subtly here that the progressive movement lacks for morality. Your attitudes are based on the premise that property rights are central to human rights and your blind spot is this: Property accumulation is at the center of the depravity of the right wing. Without that urge to accumulate, all the other passions subside – we no longer want to subdue one another, killing and torturing resisters seems a bit extreme.
So don’t talk to me about the morality of the progressive movement. We’re at the heart of it, and we are not the ones killing and torturing – our crime is that we are trying to minimize the accumulation of vast pockets of wealth. That’s rather minor.
Anyway, libertarians are odd ducks – I notice this about you and Natelson – you have anti-grouping tendencies, and I like that about you. You don’t submit to authority easily. That’s why you’re a tiny minority. But you act as a stabilizing element for the far right in that you provide them their moral and intellectual foundation as they go about their ugly business.
But I’ll do more than take a look at Rawls – I’ll read him in depth, but in my own time. Right now my mind is centrally occupied by Baucus and the economic justification for buying a Kindle.
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Mark, I’ve never said that. I’ve said something to the effect that progressive can’t make the moral argument because most of them don’t know it. But the argument exists whether I buy it or not. At the same time most conservatives can’t make the moral argument for conservatism either. I point them to Russel Kirk who, by the way, referred to libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and believed that Buckley’s push for fusionism was wrong headed. Kirk introduced us to the notion of collective societal moral memory and framed it with the term “standing on the shoulders of giants.” I disagree with a much of what he said but, just as I do with Rawls, there are things with which I agree.
Rawls’ book, The Law of Peoples, is probably where you and I find a good amount of common ground. It’s his essay on foreign policy and I found it largely correct. But when you get to it I’d start with The Theory of Justice.
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See, Mark, this is one place where you’re wrong. You can’t be good at argument and debate if you have a blind spot as big as Alaska. Especially in Dave’s case, where his blind spot about his blind spot is also as big as Alaska. And that’s where I come in.
I don’t hold Dave in contempt. I simply enjoy him thinking so, because it helps to defeat his expectations. Dave doesn’t function very well if he can’t hold his expectations over others. That’s why he does such silly things as use a dictionary to define words for a debate, or change word usage to favor whatever point he thinks he’s making. That’s precisely why he relies on the authority of others to establish his own. He has expressed here that he would have more fun debating you if only you would follow his expectations, read his tomes of the canon of Budge, and accept his interpretations of such before engagement. Where I have more fun is poking that bloated veneer of ego with a stick.
I also place a high value on what Budge writes. He’s actually a thinker, like you (and I don’t care if either of you admit it, like myself as well.) That’s why we value argument in the first place. But arguing with his demands became tiresome to me. I have more fun defeating his expectations and poking him with a stick. He’s welcome to profess loudly the depth of disappointment I force upon his troubled brow. Ha. That just adds to my amusement. You would be well not to mistake that for contempt.
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Wulfgar, I just think you’re a dick.
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And that matters?
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I was expecting a “thank you” since it appears you’ve been working at it for most of life.
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Gentlemen, gentlemen … what we have here is failure to … actually, we have different personality types. The habits of each of us drive each other nuts. Budge is analytical, I’m empathetic, and Wulfy, I see more of Budge in you than anything resembling me. Both of you are hard-nosed about practical outcomes, while I am concerned that people are happy and well. My empathetic appraoch to problems doesn’t sit well with the hard-nosed analyst. Budge is driven to distraction because I don’t go read his philosophers, but I have told him the truth – those things do not resonate with me. So we get testy with one another.
My other habit that doesn’t sit well with either of you is that I do not accept things at face value – I’m always looking for the real meaning of things, the real motives of people. Now that gets me off. I love solving puzzles.
Anyway, from my point of view, you two are more than a little alike, although Wulfy, you do tend to show up at the dance with brass knuckles in your back pocket. C’est la vie
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Rebel without a pause?
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is usually, if your pace is actually a long time, you will exclusively allow it to become difficult
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I dont disagree with this blog..
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Hey This isnt to bad, i am browing your site now and wanted to say Thanks for taking your time to create this
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