In a recent message I described a thought experiment in which someone is stranded on the deserted island, where resources are abundant, but their ability to make productive use of those resources is very limited. What happens in this situation when a new scissors wash ashore? With two people who work together, things can improve. They can specialize and start with a distribution of labor, and collect more resources together than one of them could be done alone. This would also be true if a third Castaway Wal and a fourth, and so on were to wash.
There is another point that can help clarify this kind of thought. When we present this scenario, we only think of what the Castaways would improve ‘ standard of living. With more people who work together, their standard of living can increase. They can collect more food, build better hiding places and store more supplies. In this scenario no “wages” are considered. We do not think about how many sea shells they can collect to act together as a primitive form of currency. The only way their standard of living can increase is if they can increase the amount of goods and services that they can produce. As long as more people who work with an increasingly extensive division of labor can produce more than before, their standard of living will continue to rise.
This fundamental idea is not changed to a modern economy with currency and wages. For people who are concerned about the American employee and want to ensure that the wages of the American employee continue to rise, there is no way to make that happen Unless productivity also increases. Without an increase in the amount of goods and services that are available to Americans, wages cannot rise in real sense, just like the standard of living of our Castaways cannot rise unless they can use their resources more productively.
I have previously written about Harold Daggett, the head of the A -Vakbond that is known as the International Long -Shoremen’s Association. Daggett recently achieved many newspaper heads with its simultaneous demands for massive wage increases for trade union staff, along with insisting that American docks do not implement modern automation – and his threats to close the docks and paralyzing the American economy if he does not get the way.
As John Stossel recently has notedof all ports of the world, no American port is in the top 50. This is because American ports, commissioned by the trade unions, have refused to improve the type of productivity and efficiency that automation improves that other countries use – on the added costs Making it considerably more dangerous from port work that it must be, so that employees are unnecessarily killed and reduced at work.
Daggett and the ILA, together with so many other trade union leaders and organizations, demand that their employees get higher wages and at the same time prevent the kind of progress from increasing the productivity of employees. So if the port employees get a wage increase without increasing the productivity of what they do (and in fact keep productivity artificially low), their wage increase can only happen by making other Americans worse off. It is a naked and open question to enrich yourself at the expense of someone’s fellow citizens.
And this is the kind of behavior that we would expect to see from people whose mentality is built on a zero interface thinking. Just as this thinking can make you believe that an increase in the number of employees is damaging existing employees, because more work must mean cheaper work if you believe the profit of a person must Be the loss of someone other than Naturally You will not hesitate to demand that others are even worse for your situation to improve. Because, in thought, that is all that someone can ever do, in a zero sum world. Economy teaches us that we have opportunities to work together and finish each other better. Protectionist populism teaches people that if they ever want to get up, they have to step into the neck of their neighbors to do it.
Perhaps we should update Thomas Carlyle (generally misunderstood) that economy is a “gloomy science” and apply that name to the Zer0 sum thinking of populists and protectionists. But again, it might be too generous for such a way of thinking to call it a ‘science’, gloomy or otherwise.