Topic: Negative Externalities - page 2. (Read 12345 times)

If an employer is not in his right to sell the production of his employees for more than he pays them, then exactly what incentive does he have in such a business to begin with? If he shouldn't make a profit, then he has no reason to run that business and he shall close it, rendering all his employee's effectively jobless. Which brings the simple question: is the employer needed for the employee's job to exist? If the employee is consenting to the conditions of the employer, then the answer is yes, and the employer is rightfully entitled to his profit. If the employee doesn't consent to the conditions, then he's either jobless, which is his own prerogative, or he's forced to labor anyways, in which case he is a slave and thus isn't relevant to this argument. As such, you're point is moot my good Father.

The discussion on air and water pollution is technically a discussion on commons, which I think are wrong.

Division of labor is conspicuously absent from your list.


So, first of all, gains or loses more what?  Matter?  Energy?  Dollars?

Secondly, if you engage in trade, and you have no idea whether you are gaining or losing, how is anyone else supposed to know?


Ho-boy....

I used to work independently and work being employed.  Working independently was nice, but if that business was not going well, I got no money.  Sometimes I even lost money.  When I go to work as an employee, I never lose money, even if my company does.  Having a steady paycheck is more valuable to some people than the possibility of making more, but having the money inconsistent (and sometimes not making any).  If you have a decent amount of savings, then it might be worth it.

There are many reasons why one individual would agree to be employed by another. Risk, up front costs, reputation, etc. As always, no state necessary.

When neither side gains nor loses more than the other and they only trade what they have fairly gained.

If I make three widgets for a given amount of my labor, that amount of my labor clearly has a value of three widgets. Why would I give someone even one of those widgets to absorb risk that they can simply pass right back down to me in the form of layoffs or uncomfortable or unsafe working conditions? Even if that person built the workplace, a finite thing, he has no right to collect indefinitely on it.

I'll agree with that, for the most part.

I disagree, but I can't prevent you from consigning yourself to them.

Why don't you start another thread with a poll?

Are people just signing up for this site because they think cryptography is cool or something?

Yeah, I guess it's useless to try to form a more voluntary system that might actually fix some of those issues states have conveniently entrenched over the centuries.  Might as well keep being right twice a day.


This is nonsense.  Value is whatever someone is willing to bid for a given good or service.  Unless you're bearing all the risk and tying up your own capital, your labor is not worth the product you produce by it, and it really isn't their either, you're just bearing the other costs yourself in that scenario that the business owner would have otherwise.  Nothing has intrinsic value.  Value is the preference people show for certain goods or services.


This is an entirely ridiculous and meaningless sentence.  If you can't or don't want to support yourself in self-employment, you have to find a job.  If you don't like the job you're at, you're at no obligation to stay there.


What EULAs?  Stop making up ridiculous problems that wouldn't even happen if there was a fleet of caricature villain billionaires out there with unlimited funds and a psychopathic tendency to try to make other people's lives hard at any cost.

And these 'strongmen' are likely to be arbiters, insurance agents, and other mediators.


Stop being disingenuous.  You understand perfectly well why matter in some shapes is worth more than others, and it's because people have preferences that bear out when they have to make choices of what to do with their limited time and resources.

By any metric, governments are the largest polluters.  Yet they are universally exempt from damage claims.

No. Two things. Something only has value when another is willing to trade for it. The product's value, from the time it leaves the worker's hands until it reaches the consumer's, is one hundred percent speculative. The reason that the worker chooses to work for his employer rather than himself is that his employer absorbs any difference in the speculative value of an object with the traded value. This is in addition to all of the time the employer spent building the company before the worker came around, and the risks involved in such.

No magic involved.

Please define "fair" in this context.

No. The labor one might expend to exploit others is worthless because it produces nothing.

A state is just an entity with the power to do so. A usurer will have to become a state himself or find another one to rely on to continue his usury.

My labor is worth the product I produce by it, no more, no less. That I'd have to flee my workplace, a second home really, to find fair compensation is an injury to my humanity. As if that's not bad enough, I'd have to flee my home because there are no engineering cooperatives nearby.

Can the demand be so great that people will break their EULAs, or will they have to enter into others by buying protection from strongmen?

I never said that and I do not. I find it curious though that some atoms, after a worker uses his labor to arrange them in some fashion so as to create a product, become more valuable after the employer takes it. Must be magic.

The point is that you're worrying about a non-issue.  If people are worried about something bad happening, there will be demand for people to ensure bad thing 'x' doesn't happen.  If everyone in the world owned a private factory spewing carbon monoxide over a wide radius making most of the world uninhabitable, and it seemed like no one cared, then I'd be a little worried; but it's obviously not the case, and government has only codified that pollution is okay, as long as it's under arbitrary limit 'y,' and then made it impossible for the average person to ever recover any damages, even if an entity goes above arbitrary limit 'y.'

Even if there was a problem here, violence is not the way to solve complex, social problems.


Everything with mass is excludable.  You cannot say some atoms are special and need to be un-owned or that you have some master plan to distribute atoms fairly to people.

If your labor is worth more, go find a job somewhere else.

Only the state grants impunity.

Because labor has inherent value?

Or all trades must be equal trades?

Whomever takes the product of your labor while giving back relatively less with impunity.

And in the usury example?

Who is the polluter in this case?

In the pollution example, it is whomever pollutes, and thereby imposes harm on others, with impunity.

Who is the potentate?  Who is imposing harm on whom?  Property owners?

Indeed, that's a crappy position to be in, wherein you can only choose to shop at Wal-Mart or not shop at all. Even worse is the choice to breath or not breath.

But people often use and depend on things that other people (legally) own. Wherein everyone (legally) owns only that which they procure through their own labor, use, and occupy themselves, then I think you have something.

So, living according to an EULA of another person's creation does not count as a negative externality? Even if one can escape the terms of the EULA through death or exile, all the choices represent a potentate imposing harm on that person. As such, all forms of usury are negative externalities.