Morning all;

• The Howard voters were told to go away sly, so if no-one reply's to this site, don’t be surprised.
• A lot of sly-belly aching goes on with the posts to this thread, but very little information other than statements from the left.

Corporations, like any person or business’s, only respond to demand from the general population. No demand, no business will consume energy or materials to produce!
• If you want high returns on your super, that involves high profits.
• If you want higher wages for higher wealth consumption, that involves business controlling their cost’s. This means 2nd rate environmental management.
• Mankind, that’s you and me, cause trees to be chopped down to grow food and fibre, most of which is discarded before it’s used in the western world. (Read an article that 40% of food taken home from a super market in Australia was never eaten, and with the over weight problem, some more should never have been bought. The food was produced to satisfy demand from “you and me”
• Most of the trees chopped down in west Australia are for new freeways and oversized housing.
• People in Australia are huge consumers of energy, that’s the cause of global warming. After all energy costs in Australia are in line with regulated wages growth, mean that we have not go the message that energy is bad to consume, and it’s non-renewable and on the decline.
• Why not argue for a decline in the consumption of energy as well as other non-essential demand. Planting tress means that productive agriculture land is taken out of production. This puts more pressure on the remaining productive land.

Quote:
What type of laborer is more essential to the well being of our society, garbage collectors or advertising executives? The hospital cleaner or the accountant? The school teacher or the star football player? The aged care nurse or the CEO? The volunteer fire fighter or the lawyer who won’t give you his expertise for less than $300/hr? Have you ever thought about the fact that intellectual “labour” can only done when basic material needs are met? Who meets those basic needs, and are they any less valuable and essential to the functioning of society than the “entrepreneurs”. Why should “intellectual” or “organizational” laborers be better off materially than other types of laborers, when those others are the ones that enable them to do their intellectual labour?

• .well I would rather a well paid food producing land manager than any of the above. All the above I can do, or don’t need, (like the football star, if I don’t go and finically support his income, he will not exist).

Business manages their affairs to maximize their profit.
Union are doing similar, managing other people affairs to maximize their profits.

So what’s the real difference?
One working within the supply/demand situation, subject to the laws of the land.
The other is blackmailing people to hand over wealth that the market would not have to do if it had not been interfered with.

A real reason why “Howard voters” are not posting here, would be that they are to busy working on keeping many people that are posting here in a very high paid job, creating wealth for this country.
How many of you are self employed, and employ other people?
Even more importantly, how many are self emplyed in the export sector?

My thoughts for the day.

tao: I don't know what (if any) society's endpoint will be. Hopefully, I'd say simply capitalism. Strictly, there's no free market because there's state intervention.

However, we can still see how narrow your definition of capitalism is. Capitalism is billions of interactions, some related to others, some not, not some over-arching system. You seem to insist on defining capitalism as one person (or corporation) exploiting another. However, capitalism is also as simple as one person mowing another's lawn for a haircut. To answer a later question, the profit doesn't have to be monetary.

If capitalism turns out to be immoral then it's because particular interactions are immoral, not because interactions are, by their very nature, immoral. This is why your views will never be accepted: your notion of exploitation is, like original sin, anti-human.

I would explain the straightforward "voluntary transaction", but I suspect you'd find a sinister ulterior motive by one or more of the parties involved.

As to your question of what type of labourer is more essential to the well being of society, I think it's a bogus question. These things are decided by individuals or groups of individuals to have different weights at different times. What's incredibly important to me right now might not be to someone else, and vice versa. To try to ascribe greater importance to the material is to ignore the fact that whether we like it or not, people are often willing to go without what you might consider basic in order for the more sublime (eg. music and art, their team winning a grand final, etc.). This is precisely why your simplistic, one size fits all, anti-individualistic dogma had to be thrust upon the people of eastern and central Europe and held there forcibly, yet was so gleefully abandoned once given the chance.

I'm not going to argue that all entrepreneurship has good outcomes because people don't always do good things. However, without the profit motive, perhaps most people wouldn't create or be productive, and most people are involved in capitalist transactions with either neutral or benign intentions.

Tao you have my sympathy, I lived the childlike dream you are liveing quite some time ago.
Once more I am one of 16 hungrey kids of a low paid railway worker, who has worked with his hands from sub teenage years, and you insult me with union oficials are not workers?
My members trust me, no better praise can come to a true unionist/worker.
Your socialist dream ignores the simple truth workers on incomes half and less the national average have in many cases NEVER voted other than conservative!
Thanks for your anti Labor jibs!for such as you drive more away from the only party that can ever help workers the ALP.
Reality is bury your head if you wish, but socialism is dead.
20 years from now we will if we look back see a stronger maybe smaller union movement, and as a result of a long term Labor goverment a better life for lower paid Australians.
But much rough ground and hard times lies between that time and now.
No insult intended but your views unrealistic as they are only contibute to problems of the true poor.
Have you eaten spuds and pumkin for tea and the skins for breakfast? do you know hunger? I do.

Actually Shorbe, mowing a lawn for a haircut is called “barter” and they can be privately “traded” in any economic system. You can’t save up a haircut or a lawn-mow. Capital is stored labour in the form of money. You accuse me of having a narrow definition of capitalism yet you try to reduce it down to a friendly little chat over the back fence to obscure the argument.

I agree with you that capitalism is an ad hoc “system” for want of a better word but the overall effect (simplistically due to word limitations) is this: A small minority of people own the vast majority of the productive land, the tools or means by which human beings produce what they need to sustain themselves, and previously stored labour (capital). They use the state apparatus (politicians (both sides), police, legal system, military, bureaucracy, media, unions), which you so detest, to keep it by force and obfuscation. The rest (the majority) are forced to sell their labour (physical or intellectual), or face starvation. The two groups are called “classes”. So the majority have to expend their labour to produce goods (including food) for the lowest price, which are then sold back to them for the highest price, and the minority pockets the difference. The minority also fight among themselves for resources and markets which is the cause of war – and use the majority as cannon fodder.

You introduced your belief in the inequality different types of labour as a premise to your argument, yet consider my refutation of that premise a bogus question.

Just exactly which individuals decide that hospital cleaning has less “weight” than “intellectual labour” and therefore deserves less remuneration? I doubt it’s the cleaners – mmmm – maybe it’s the “intellectual labourers” (the minority) who have so much time to come up with such convoluted explanations and euphemisms because they don’t have to clean the toilet. I suppose you think tomorrow the cleaners and the “intellectual labourers” are going to “decide” that the intellectual labourers can work for a cleaner’s wage and vice versa. Voluntarily! Ha!

tbc

Tao, A week or so ago i sad is that you Barnaby and said go away.

I am sorry, I wrote the wrong name that message is for my mate

Dunart Joyce. Go back and read Dunarts post, He jumped into this
forum like a smart-arse and that message is now for Dunart.
Dunart thinks he is a entrepreneur but he's not because he dosn't
have the ethics and compassion needed. I am totally for unions
they are needed for balance in society whether you belong to them or
not. However i am very much entrepreneurial with the ethics dunart
will/may never have. Tao, be cool. That is what we are meant to
be discussing here which is directly connected to work choices
and its effects on society. The work choices bill was rushed and so
badly written it will be a legal nightmare for all. No other
western country has such anti-union legislation, and for good reason.

Have a Good day.