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Happy Labor Theory of Value Day
Y’all know how much I dislike commies. Labor Day, in particular, is one of my biggest pet peeves. It’s literally my least favorite holiday, right up there with Presidents’ Day.
By contrast, I’m a huge supporter of Thanksgiving. We should spend our days of rest being thankful for what we’ve achieved and not feeling entitled to something we didn’t earn. That’s the essence of Labor Day, a day designed to reinforce the cultural divide between the entrepreneur and the people he employs.
Labor Day is rooted in Karl Marx’s misbegotten Labor Theory of Value, which holds that Labor is the most important part of the production cycle and therefore should get the lion’s share of the profit from sales.
Of course this idea is nonsense because it deprecates the imagination and risk-taking of the entrepreneur to zero while elevating the laborer’s contribution far above its contribution. At its heart is an unquenchable envy of those who don’t dream, organize and risk anything, to expropriate the rewards of those who do.
It’s nothing more than that. Those that feel exploited ultimately have to look at the person in the mirror and decide to stop being a victim and change their state of being.
That said, these ideas flourish in an environment where the money is corrupt, ensuring that the entrepreneurs are offered the choice to become rent-seekers and steal unearned wealth from those that toil for them.
The problem today is that we have allowed both the rent-seekers and their proletariat water-carriers to join forces to squeeze out the middle class. The fundamental problem of today’s leftists is that they cannot see this basic fact; that they have helped create the very economic divide they rail against by treating the local shop owner they work for who can barely make payroll every two weeks with the CEO of Raytheon.
Things have gotten so bad on the wealth inequality meter that we’re finally beginning to see proles understand that the bourgeoisie as victims as well. This is why you’re seeing lip service given to bromides like buying local, farm-to-table, and fair-trade among the Millennials.
The problem with all of that is that, like it or not, Amazon’s economies of scale, for example, can bring you fair-trade coffee from plantation owners in Colombia cheaper than your local supermarket can.
Starbucks will happily sell you that latte made with almond milk to stick it to the ‘dairy mafia’ or whatever PETA’s talking point is du jour. But they will conveniently ignore that those almonds likely came from expropriating water from the Colorado River to feed farms in California, at century-old rental fees.
So, fair trade for whom?
None of this virtue signaling helps workers. None of this empowers small businesses. It’s just more colonial wealth extraction abroad and ruinous generational wealth destroying taxation at home.
It’s all just feeding the same system because the underlying cause of the wealth transfer, ever-debased money, is never addressed.
The Bitcoin Maxis are just Millennial Gold Bugs with better manscaping.
But, again, I’m encouraged that we’re beginning to get through the haze and see things more clearly than ever in human history the mechanisms by which tyrants manipulate the lower economic strata into perpetual war over an economic pie they purposefully shrunk and took for themselves.
I don’t even blame Marx for seeing things the way he did. In the time period of his analysis, backed by British aristocratic globalists according to Richard Poe, the switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy was so swift that the surplus of labor was shocking and the transition heart-breaking.
But, remember, as well, that it would have been far worse had there also not been the international gold standard at the same time. The late 18th through early 20th century was a period of immense wealth generation for the lower and middle classes.
Wealth, particularly in the US, was compounding at a rate the oligarchs of old couldn’t set up toll booths fast enough to extract and slow back down to just above subsistence.
You could almost smell the real source of the envy during this period as gold democratized wealth in a way that had to gall the ‘kings of old.’
These “inevitable” clashes between labor and management that resulted in the Sherman Anti-Trust and Wagner Acts here in the US were premised on the Labor Theory of Value and unprovable economic theories of natural monopolies. The irony is that the only one that actually exists is government itself. And they have led to ‘labor’ becoming just another off-balance sheet line item for the military-industrial-banking complex.
The truth is that technology is always pushing labor’s skills down the depreciation curve, just like everything else. It doesn’t mean we have to be inhumane about this, but the law should be neutral and allow things to work themselves out, because people eventually will respond to proper incentives.
I have more than 20 years of experience in analytic techniques obviated by literally one invention… the ICP-MS atomic emission spectrometer.
And I knew it almost immediately. Once the prices on ICP-MS’s dropped to within the grasp of the mid-tier regional labs, atomic absorption guys like me (not that I couldn’t run an ICP or ICP-MS) would no longer be in demand. Why?
First it did with one instrument what a lab used to need half a dozen pieces of equipment to do. And it would do it better, faster and more accurately with better limits of detection for nearly every metal in the nastiest solutions.
But the most important reason was that you could train a smart high school graduate to operate the thing and the degree-holding QC officer could just validate the data run. No need for a guy like me who could do it all unless I wanted to be the QC officer.
It’s why I moved away from home in 2005 and went to work at a startup where all of my skills came to bear, while being applied to something I knew nothing about — electrochemistry and metallurgy. I was adding to my skillset and, I thought, staving off the end of my career as a chemist.
I also hoped that startup would pay bigger dividends but ultimately, it didn’t and I found myself at a crossroads which led me to where I am today. Had I not gone through the complete reframing of my place in the world – I’m only a victim of my previous choices – I would have never survived that period or be the man I am today, capable of doing the things I currently do.
I could have sank into envy and self-destruction. And that, sadly, is where a lot of people are today. It’s dressed up in a lot of cheap rhetoric, some of which is fair, but most of it isn’t.
I keep coming back to the Millennials’ need for authenticity as one of the driver’s of much of today’s politics and economic decisions. Slowly, as the oldest ones approach middle age, they are seeing the game for what it is and are getting really angry.
That’s good, because many of them are angry at the right people. While they would never willingly associate themselves with “the right” when you present them with key insights into why they are feeling what they are feeling, it moves them away from the Marx and towards the Mises.
Neither one is a savior here. As people , we’re clearly not built to overcome the trauma of living in this fallen world and the emotional abuse that it inflicted on all of us. We’re the children of the bottom of the cycle.
But, it is during these climaxes in history that great changes in perspective occur. That’s what’s happening here. People only make real substantive change when the crisis is in front of them, not over the horizon.
So, we’ll have to suffer through this period and watch as many of us go through the agonizing process of the Kubler-Ross model of grief, while embracing bad ideas at times along the way.
The current political landscape is a mess and as we “celebrate” labor’s contributions to the world, on the eve of the Presidential primary season, note how there is a concentration of major unions all on strike or threatening to, mostly against the wishes of best interests of their membership.
- UPS narrowly avoided a Teamster’s led strike in July
The Screen Actors Guild is on strike because they know deep fakes and AI are about to replace actors. - The Writer’s Guild is on strike because the suits have been over-paying actors for generations.
- The UAW is fearing the job loss from EVs that is coming thanks to “Biden” and Davos mandating an end to individual travel.
- Now, railroad workers in the northeast are threatening to strike over wages while state budgets are collapsing.
The rhetoric coming out of SAG, the Writers’ and the UAW is simple political insanity. These are attacks by organized labor on behalf of Davos to further weaken industries that are already in serious trouble thanks to the return of risk premia to the capital markets.
The auto industry can’t afford one-tenth of what UAW boss Shawn Fain is putting on the table:
“We have a lot of options that we’re looking at but extensions on the contract is not one of them,” Fain continued.
He said, “We’ve been clear” to Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis about “what our priorities are,” such as a 46% wage increase, reinstating traditional pensions, and trimming the workweek down from 40 to 32 hours.
These are demands which cannot even be considered a ridiculous opening offer. They are far more a political gambit designed to blackmail both auto workers and producers into making a deal which will destroy both of them.
This is an industry that will never recover the sales losses from COVID, nor will it make the switch to EVs that no one really wants to drive. And yet, CAFE regulations from the “Biden” administration pretty much phase out ICEs (and complexity) in car manufacturing in the US in the next ten years.
UAW workers can have all of those things the Fain demands, but then he will control a UAW with 10% of its membership.
And guess what? In the minds of those who still believe in Marx, it will be management’s fault. Because in a Labor Theory of Value world only labor matters.
Management is the enemy because all profit is exploitation. It’s a distraction to shift the blame onto big corporations rather than the government that was in bed with those same corporations the entire time.
Look, management doesn’t hate labor, they hate paying more for it than the value that labor produces.
If you don’t believe me why are all the cool cars still produced outside the US market? The small pickups, the free-breathing diesels, etc. It’s because of CAFE and the immense regulatory burden placed on the entire auto industry here in the US.
So, there will be plenty of complicated internal combustion engines produced by these same companies making auto workers wealthy all over the BRICS+ space in the coming years. Meanwhile, they are using the Labor Theory of Value to tell US auto workers they are worth $50+/hour plus benefits to monitor robots doing the jobs they used to do.
These “labor negotiations” are just another attack vector by rapacious corporatists. And it will be insanity like this that will eventually break their stranglehold on the labor narrative. No one cares that the actors are on strike, or the writers.
The UAW has shaken down the “Big 3” so many times that most cars are produced in Right-to-Work states anyway. And guess what? Those places are all thriving, so much so, that CNBC released their list of the 10 worst states to live in the US.
If this isn’t just another pathetic attempt at gatekeeping and desperation to keep the ‘good people’ from leaving the shitholes of the Northeast and West Coast I don’t know anything about anything anymore.
In short, because people respond to incentives and because they have a memory of a better life they will not leave behind stories of the ‘bad old days’ of capitalism, even the tarnished and bastardized version we still practice for the next generations.
No, the anger and frustration embodied by what I recently called “The Oliver Anthony Gap” will end this nonsense sooner than we think.
This is just part of the cycle of history folks. And like good little Marxists they want you to believe that that cycle is horizontal, that things really don’t get better, just a different kind of worse.
But the reality is that the cycle of human liberty is upwardly sloping.
Marx has been in ascendance for over 150 years. Interest rates are at historic lows. The idea that we can retrograde society and humanity to go forward is a lie, a lie that enriches them and maintains their power, while convincing us we don’t have any.
But the truth is the Rent-Seekers have no more wealth to extract from the world. It’s all Death Star or bust for them now. They will double down on saving the world from capitalism because that’s all they have and to do that they have to elevate everything we do to an ‘extinction-level event.’
But, we all know that’s a manufactured and a product of our own self-loathing, downstream of their abuse. Once you break that cycle, the only path is being #ungovernable.
So, no Truce with the Davos Furies folks. Give no ground on COVID masks, health passports, Climate Change or ESG. It’s all just Labor Theory of Value nonsense to separate you from your reason and ultimately your wealth.
This is what really fuels all of my rants. It was this insight connecting money, time and wealth extraction that set me on this path. That’s what I celebrate on Labor Day, the opportunity to work at my highest capacity for those who value it.
Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.
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Author: Dan Egan Title: The Devil's Element Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Date: Copyright 2023 by Dan Egan page(s): 6-10 |
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Today's encore selection -- from Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever. The legendary and almost mythical Johnny Appleseed (whose real name was John Chapman and who lived from 1774 to 1845) helped usher in a hard-drinking era in American history: "One of the most smoothed-over stories in American history has to be that of the itinerant, animal loving, humbly dressed John Chapman, who planted frontier nurseries that grew into apple orchards in Pennsylvania and up and down the Ohio Valley. Chapman came to be universally loved and known as Johnny Appleseed. Although children's books and Disney drawings often feature Chapman literally sowing apples out of a hand-sewn burlap bag, he was far more organized than that -- luckily for his crops and for his very happy customers. "An American Saint Francis of Assisi (according to one story he put out a cooking fire rather than hurt some mosquitoes) crossed with Paul Bunyan and Henry David Thoreau, he strode into the national consciousness as smoothly as apple cider. There he stayed, enshrined in our most sentimental frontier myths, the subject of dozens of sanctified children's books and depictions, like The Legend of Johnny Appleseed, the 1948 film from Walt Disney Studios that tells the story of a skunk-loving apple farmer led west by an angel who sings an apple song. ...
"Chapman, born in 1774 in Massachusetts, was ... a devout student of the popular teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose many American followers embraced a secular humanist creed. He had a system for growing apple trees. He would find seeds from the leavings of cider mills and plant them to become nurseries for orchards. He seemed to have an instinct about where people would want to settle -- on riverbanks, at the confluence of the primitive roads beginning to be built -- and it was in those places that he planted. By the time a community had grown up, Chapman had apple trees to sell. Then he would leave the plantings in the care of local farmers and return every two years to oversee the crop. "In general, seeds like those that Johnny Appleseed carried did not grow edible apples. Most edible apples are grown from grafts in which pieces of trees that bear a certain kind of apple are grafted onto other trees to create the best eating apples. Apples grown from seeds are usually small and sour. They are called spitters for obvious reasons. They are 'sour enough,' Henry David Thoreau wrote, 'to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream.' But apples grown from seeds are very good for one thing -- making hard cider. Furthermore, apple cider was almost the only way the settlers could experience sweetness. Sugar was rare. Honey was hard to get. "Johnny Appleseed was not carrying the possibility of eating apples; his mission was something quite different and more mature than Disney's 1948 movie version. Far from being the American Saint Francis, John Chapman turned out to be the American Dionysus. No wonder everyone was glad to see him coming down the western roads! 'The reason people ... wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio,' [Michael] Pollan writes [in The Botany of Desire]. 'Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.' "Until Prohibition, most apples were used to make cider, which was always fermented to create a healthy drink with a healthy punch -- about 10 percent alcohol. By freezing cider and siphoning off the alcoholic content, which did not freeze, farmers made the more powerful applejack -- often as high as 66 proof. 'It takes a leap of the historical imagination to appreciate just how much the apple meant to people living two hundred years ago,' Pollan writes. 'By comparison, the apple in our eye is a fairly inconsequential thing -- a popular fruit (second only to the banana) but nothing we can't imagine living without. It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of sweetness, however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman's time, the desire it helped gratify.' "Digging further into his research, Pollan became even more convinced that, although Chapman did not frolic in the orchards with naked maidens, he was very much like the mythical Greco-Roman God of drunkenness, Dionysus. By teaching man how to ferment grapes, Dionysius had given men the gift of wine. American grapes were too sour to be fermented successfully, so the grape was replaced with the apple. In his book The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer writes that Dionysus was also the patron of cultivated trees and the discoverer of the apple. Although, as Pollan points out, Chapman's sexual experimentation was limited to trees in orchards, in many other ways he came to represent the twining together of man and the natural world symbolized by the earlier god. 'As I delved deeper into the myth of Dionysus, I realized there was much more to his story, and the strangely changeable god who began to come into focus bore a remarkable resemblance to John Chapman. Or at least to 'Johnny Appleseed,' who, I became convinced, is Dionysus's American son.' The success of Johnny Appleseed was just one of many factors contributing to drinking in nineteenth-century America. As Chapman was floating down the Ohio River carrying his seedlings in a hollowed-out log, or headed farther west for Indiana, the United States had reached a crisis in the amount of drinking that was done on a routine and daily basis by almost everyone."
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For decades liberals have beat into the heads of white Americans that they are racists responsible for enslaving blacks. The insistence on white racism was music to the ears of black activists. Here is racial provocateur Al Sharpton 21 years ago:
“The first thing we need to do is acknowledge that you robbed me. Let’s start there with reparations. . . . America must admit its sins in Africa and its sins against people of African descent.”
This lie has become institutionalized in the media, black racial preferences, and in university black studies departments and their graduates. Enough white Americans have been indoctrinated that the public has accepted black racial privileges in university admissions, employment, and promotion for more than a half century.
Americans have been falsely blamed, and no historian, no scholar, no investigative reporter stood up to correct the blatant misrepresentation of history.
For many years I have reported that the slave trade was an African institution. The black kingdom of Dahomey was the slaver state. The Dutch, Portuguese, British, and French ship captains were the transporters of blacks enslaved by other blacks to the new world. Apparently, Brazil was a larger market for enslaved blacks than England’s North American colonies.
Dahomey was a highly organized almost absolute monarchy as efficiently organized as the United States today, and perhaps more so, but with far more unity and social cohesion than exists in the United States. Dahomey had powerful enemies over whom Dahomey eventually prevailed due to its success in slave wars. The slaves provided trade goods for European firearms that Dahomey used to build its armies, including a regiment of Amazons, who proved themselves an effective fighting force.
Survival required that Dahomey was organized for war to expand its boundaries and to take captives from opposing forces as slaves, who were used to work the royal plantations that supplied food for the army and to trade to Europeans for weapons. In effect, it was the soldiers of Dahomey’s army who were the slavers. Every soldier to whom gunpowder was issued was required to bring to the king the head of an enemy or at least one prisoner as a slave. Many of the enslaved blacks brought to the New World were black warriors captured as prisoners of war, and some were royal personages.
During the years that US universities were destroyed by foolish liberals permitting the inauguration of “women’s studies” and “black studies,” propaganda operations in which lies were propagated to ruin relations between men and women and between blacks and whites, I reported that the actual history of the slave trade was once well known and could be found, among other sources, in Karl Polanyi’s book, Dahomey and the Slave Trade. I regarded the fact that accounts of slavery blaming Americans and the US Constitution could flourish–as for example, the New York Times false “1619 Project”–to be evidence that education had disintegrated into rank anti-white propaganda. If black studies was really interested in scholarly undertaking, why was Karl Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade kept out of print and unavailable?
The answer was obvious. Frauds have a narrative, and they are opposed to all facts.
Recently, a reader brought to my attention that a new edition of Karl Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade had appeared, published as Monograph 42 by the American Ethnological Society. I don’t know what this society is, and I haven’t investigated it, but praise to the society for bringing back a definitive study of the slave trade. Little doubt that the classic will be dismissed by black studies departments as “white supremacy.”
Actually, Polanyi’s book is not a study of the slave trade. It is a study of Dahomey, in Polanyi’s view an “archaic economy.” Karl Polanyi was the leftwing, socialist, perhaps moderate communist brother of my Oxford University professor, Michael Polanyi, a distinguished physical chemist who later became a groundbreaking philosopher of science and knowledge. Karl’s major work is The Great Transformation. Once I was familiar with his work, and once I wrote a scholarly article about it, but the journal referees relied on his followers, and my criticisms or interpretations did not meet with their approval. It was long ago, and I don’t remember about it. Perhaps one day I will find a draft in a file.
The point is that Karl Polanyi was not an admirer of a market economy. It was important to him that there were other ways of organizing economic activity. It seemed important to him that whatever they were, government was involved. In Dahomey the King was certainly involved. Indeed, the primary source of revenue, the capture of slaves in slave wars, made the economy a government operation. Thus, Polanyi’s interest is not directly in the slave trade, but as slave wars were a primary activity in Dahomey, Polanyi cannot write about Dahomey and ignore the slave trade.
To be clear, Polanyi’s interest is not to make a case against Dahomey for originating the trans-Atlantic slave trade that “black studies” departments blame on white Americans. He is studying what he calls an archaic economy as an illustration of social organization that is not free market.
I don’t blame Dahomey either. I am interested in facts, not blame. Dahomey dominated the slave trade for 250 years, and Dahomey’s existence depended on it. Dahomey was not forced by white Europeans to provide them with slaves. Europeans were not allowed beyond the port and were no match for Dahomey’s army until the beginning of the 20th century, 50 years or more after the British Navy had stopped Dahomey’s revenues from the slave trade.
Today Dahomey is known as Benin. On the beach at Ouidah there is a monument, The Gate of No Return. The monument symbolizes the passage of the captives of Dahomey’s slave wars into slavery. What I want to know is how can such a public monument remain unnoticed by black studies departments that pretend to be educational?
Looking for the 2022 reprint of Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade, I found a second book, also 2022, with the same title. Curious, I ordered it. The author is Vivian Chibuife, a black female African historian who self-publishes.
Chibuife’s book was provoked by the 2022 movie, The Woman King, that portrays Dahomey’s Amazons as liberals opposed to slavery. Although Chibuife appreciates the movie’s emphasis on the achievements and abilities of black women, she takes exception to the falsification of history.
Chibuife gets in a few sentences blaming whites for their participation in the slave trade as customers, but she is too honest to produce a false account. In some ways she is more straightforward than Karl Polanyi. Her account of Dahomey and its rise is straightforward and parallels Polanyi’s. But she rejects all nonsense about where the slaves came from or that anyone wanted to stop the slave trade before the white British did with warships blocking the port.
Here are brief passages from her text:
“As a result of its harsh military actions and its limitless need for slaves, the kingdom of Dahomey had only hostile ties with its neighbors.”
“Dahomey began actively participating in the Atlantic slave trade in 1727 [prior to that accumulating a slave work force for itself] when it overthrew the coastal Kingdom of Hueda and seized control of the port city of Ouidah. Between 1659 and 1863, approximately a million enslaved Africans were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas, according to historians.”
One of the uses of slaves captured by Dahomey was their execution in human sacrifice to the king’s ancestors. This was a great waste of money and a cruel use of lives, and the barbaric practice helped the French to eventually undermine Dahomey as “barbaric.” The kingdom succumbed to the French in the middle 1890s as the 20th century approached.
In closing I will again make the point I have often made that in a diverse, multicultural society composed of many ethnicities it is socially and politically disastrous to teach one race to hate another. But that is what the United States does. Blacks are taught to hate whites, and whites are taught that they are guilty. Such a society simply cannot survive, and the non-survival of the United States appears to be the main goal of American universities, Democrat party, and presstitute media. We are undergoing the intentional destruction of a once free and successful society.
As far as I can tell, there is no one to stop it.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.