Thursday, March 3, 2011

One Quibble with Marxists

Earlier this week, an unnamed professor was espousing the various benefits of communism, and was citing the labor theory of value. For those of you that don't know much about this, it is the idea that a product is worth the labor hours that went into it, so, if something was produced by 40 hours of labor, by ten laborers at ten dollars an hour, the product would theoretically be worth 4,000 dollars as a baseline, with prices adjusted afterwards for supply and demand, as well as rarity of materials involved. The Marxist's problem with this is that the Bossman will end up making far more money than the basic laborers, and therefore we should all erupt in revolt or something. The problem with the rational person is that the Bossman is usually supplying capital to purchase tools/land/develop the means of production, may or may not be the guy who started the whole operation, and is generally in charge of structuring the company. In Marx's theory, Bossman should only be paid as much as one of the workers, despite all his previous contributions, organizational or financial. One cannot just take ten guys out into the desert to start making something without providing finances for tools, or finances for land. More importantly, ten random jackasses getting thrown together for some sort of a common goal doesn't generally work out that well. For example, if I were to get ten friends together and we were to do something like choose a place to eat, the entire group would call into complete and utter pandemonium, we'd all starve, and by the time we got to our eating establishment of choice someone would inevitably not have enough money on them to get food, never mind figuring out what to actually order. If that one Bossman guy were to come along and organize the ten of us, we'd save some significant amount of time, and it would be a much more efficient operation, the people who didn't have money would just get left behind, and by the time we got there, we'd be totally clusterfuck free. Despite this being an asinine example, the organizational flaws of getting ten jackasses in one group demonstrate the key problem with the labor theory of value, kinda show that the capitalist coming along and getting everyone together under one company with some semblance of a plan saves significant amounts of time. It is because of this that he is contributing more to the company than each individual worker, and is thusly paid more, despite all the Marxist's/Angsty teenagers with Che Guevara tshirts' claims. Here is a picture of a cat unicorn fucking a dolphin.

2 comments:

  1. I was reading your article, got half-way through, saw the Unicorn and then got distracted.

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