Soulflytribe wrote:Because we shouldn't foster social inequality among the working class, so they all should receive more or less the same wage in spite of how much they produce.
He who wishes equality without tyranny wants what never was, and never will be. Enabling your anti-justice, anti-liberty parasitism will simply lead directly to the Soviet system: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."
I don't know why a comrade would want to destroy the brotherhood and friendship among workers by stimulating greediness and jealousy.
Well,
comrade, some of us understand that greed and jealousy are part of the human condition, and rewarding people commensurately with their contributions does not stimulate them. Greed is excessive desire for more than one needs or deserves (NOT a desire to deserve more than one has), and rewards commensurate with productive contribution simply secure workers' just deserts. Jealousy comes from a perception of injustice, and evident justice offers no occasion for it.
Sorry, but you can't reduce greed and jealousy by Procrustean egalitarianism; you can only divert them into even more destructive channels. Competition to be more productive than one's brother worker is a positive-sum game that enriches society. It is diverting the competitive urge into
other forms of competition -- for status, for privilege, for political power, for undeserved wealth -- in negative-sum games that destroys the brotherhood and friendship among workers.
Drlee wrote:The real answer lies in individual situations.
No, the real answer lies in understanding land.
The employer must pay a landowner for access to the publicly created economic advantages that make it possible for the worker to be so much more productive. While this excess seems to be his product, it is actually produced by the services and infrastructure government provides, the opportunities and amenities the community provides, and the physical qualities nature provides. The landowner takes it, but the worker hasn't earned it any more than the landowner. The problem is that the worker is taxed to pay for the government services and infrastructure that his employer then has to pay the landowner for. The productive sector of the economy must pay for government TWICE so that landowners can pocket one of the payments in return for nothing.
Moreover, the worker must pay a landowner for a place to live that enables access to the employment opportunity that allows him to make enough money to pay the taxes that are then given to the landowner, too. So the employer has to pay the worker enough to enable him to support both the government and the landowner, as well as himself. Drlee has at least a superficial understanding of this:
Sometimes wages are driven by local economies. I know one person who was transferred from San Francisco to Arizona and allowed to keep her San Francisco wages. She earns about four times what the Arizona hires earn. For now anyway.
The short answer is that most wages are driven by job description and prevailing wages rather than productivity.
No, they are driven by landowner privilege and the taxes that support it. Market wages are equal to the productivity of labor ON MARGINAL LAND, as all the rest of the worker's production is taken by landowners in rent. Once you understand landowner privilege, everything else falls into place.