I will start out by saying that I think this depends on your definition of "skilled". College degrees don't necessarily imply any *useful* skills. Unfortunately we have been sold this idea that a college education is worthwhile regardless of the cost and regardless of what you actually learned. We are now just starting to realize that this is really not the case.

So let me ask you this. Let's say you're a perfectly competent person in India trying to get an H1B job in the USA. You are willing to work for 2/3of whatever the "normal" salary for that job is, because it's still higher than what you would get in India. What is the rationale for hiring the American worker over you who can do the job for less money?

I am not talking about from a capitalist perspective. I am talking about from a human perspective. For the price of giving 2 American workers jobs, you can give 3 Indian workers jobs and have 50% more productivity. What good is served by denying these jobs to the most competitive applicants?

Maybe it's hard to imagine yourself as an Indian. Lets look at pilots. People love flying and because of that we have a lot of people who are pilots. We have more pilots than jobs for them. There are a few experienced pilots who score really good jobs at big airlines making good salaraies. All the other pilots are stuck earning $20K/year at regional airlines, sharing apartments with 9 other pilots. In this example the highly paid pilots have more experience. Lets say they didn't. Let's say all pilots had the exact same skills. What should we do? Should we just keep paying a few pilots $200K per year and let the rest live in poverty?

If there is a high supply and relatively low demand for pilots, the market solution is to pay pilots less. Is it fair? I don't know that there exists a universally "fair" solution to this problem. It's not fair that some pilots can't do what they love and make a decent living. It's not fair to tax payers if we subsidize pilots with tax money, to artificially keep them living comfortably (and incentivize even more people to become pilots).

Maybe the market solution is not fair. I am arguing that no solution is fair, but at least the market solution will incentivize people to make the right decisions in the future. Maybe if pilots make less money then less people will decide to become a pilot and instead learn some skill that's high in demand.

Maybe I'm not responding to the part of your post you would have liked, but you basically wrote a short story, and I don't really know where to start.

Just because something is clear to *you*, doesn't make it reality. As I have stated before, I think your reading comprehensions skills and your ability to read subtext are lacking.

Unemployment doesn't indicate a lopsided labor market. It indicates a recession. Furthermore, in a truly lopsided labor market (in favor of employers), everyone would be employed but at low wages, maximizing profits for employers.

Obviously

The fact that we had an economic collapse in 2008 does not indicate a lop sided labor market. It indicates a recession. Lots of employers have failed businesses because of the financial collapse. They couldn't pay their workers salaries and had to shut their doors, and are now counted among the unemployed. A recession is bad for everyone, not just employees.

The idea of "not enough work for everyone" is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. It means that we have enough wealth that not everyone is required to work full time in order to provide for everyone. If people are starving, then is work that still needs to be done. Maybe in the worst case scenario, that work is subsistence agriculture or scavenging to keep from starving. The goal is to have an efficient economy that generates the most wealth for the least effort.

If you start your own company, you "create" jobs for people. Or to look at it another way, you are offering to buy someone's labor. You are also taking on the risk that you can turn that person's labor into profit and removing risk (i.e. granting stability) to your employee.

Furthermore the naive application of Kant's test fails trivially, because it is not god for everyone to be employers (with no employees) nor for everyone to be employees (with no employer), for the same reason that groups with 100% leaders or 100% followers don't work well.

Clearly there is an optimal balance between employers and employees. When there is an imbalance, the natural mechanism to fix this is to incentivize people to switch. When labor is cheap, there is an incentive to become an employer. When labor is expensive, there is an incentive to sell your company (and the associated risk) and become an employee.

Or we can use "modern" financial devices and everyone can be both employers and employees, by being employees but owning stock in their own company or in other companies.

You clearly have no idea what my positions are. You need to learn reading comprehension and how to make proper logical inferences from what you have read.

This indicates to me that you are not only an ideologue, but one who is not willing to read any ideas that don't sync with your own within one sentence. If anything is dangerous people who are willfully ignorant.

Had you actually read my complete post, you wouldn't need to ask this question.

Had you actually understood what I wrote, you wouldn't be asking this question.

No not everyone wants to or should become an employer. Luckily you have the option of just buying stocks in companies and you can become part owner.employer without actually having to know how to do those things. The only thing you need to do is research.

Not that research is easy. I fail to do adequate research all the time. I sign things without reading them. I pick mutual funds in my 401K without really knowing anything about mutual funds. But I *could* do research if my life really depended on it. And it's a lot easier than running a business.

I agree in the sense that I think you should be able to earn the living according to what your skills are worth. If your skills are not worth a living wage, then it is time to get better skills. Times are changing and automation is taking over more and more unskilled jobs. Pretty soon even jobs currently outsourced to 3rd word countries will be more cheaply done by machines. There really isn't going to be much opportunity for people who don't have useful skills.

The good news is that all this automation creates more wealth in the form of better goods for cheaper prices, and we (i.e. tax payers) will be able to afford educational programs to help unskilled workers develop new skills.

And if enough people do this, it will create larger demand for and a smaller supply of workers raising their market value.

By not becoming a "scumbag", you are actually helping to perpetuate the problem.

By becoming a "scumbag" you are actually giving workers more options, making them more valuable, and a better bargaining position.

If the labor market really is so lop-sided, you could become an employer, pay higher wages than everyone else, and still make a profit (i.e. not be a scumbag), but then you couldn't hire as many people as you otherwise would have (i.e. you can help some people more or help more people less)

Whether he is going to die or not, he should still try to survive. He shouldn't stop trying under the assumption that the only thing that can save him is benevolence of extremely wealthy people.

I never said willpower trumps reality. I am saying that the reality is that it is probable that no one will save you, so you'd better try to save yourself.

What rsilvergun thinks and what is reality are not the same thing. I am not suggesting workers try to become employers in reality because I don;t think that the labor market is so lop-sided in reality. I am suggesting that *if* the labor market ever were to become like rsilvergun thinks it already is, that workers should do this.

Ah yes - the "take one sentence from someone's argument and ignore the rest" answer.

It would be easy for me to take one sentence fragment from your post, and then label it as a Stalin-style communism apology, and ridicule it as such, but this is a pretty childish debate tactic.

Furthermore I was not suggesting that workers actually become employers. I was suggesting that this is what workers should do *if* the labor market was really as lop-sided as the original poster implied (which I don't think it is).

Yeah it's actually good to save the man that is drowning. What should the man do if no one is going to save him? What if there are more drowning people than people willing to save drowning people? It doesn't matter that it's not fair that he is drowning.

It is actually not proven to be said by de Toqueville, but even if it was, what you said is an ad hominem (attacking an idea based on who proposed it). Furthermore it is not referring simply to public policy. It is much broader than that. A democracy is the pretty much the best circumstance a common man can find himself in, especially given his circumstances throughout the vast majority of human history. He doesn't even have to fight (i.e. risk his life) to achieve the change that his ancestors did. All he has to do is care enough to vote in an informed way. If he can't put forth this relatively small effort compared to the price others paid for freedom, then he doesn't deserve freedom.

Maybe this is a bit harsh, but if you are waiting for the people in positions of privilege to voluntarily give up what they have, you're going to be waiting a very long time. In reality, fairness is not free. You have to fight for it. It's not fair that you have to fight for fairness. Life is not fair.

Calling it "Workaholism" actually implies we are addicted to "wrokahol", and the notable feature about addiction is the lack of choice. Maybe some would argue that alcoholics can decide not to be addicted as hard as this may be. I would also argue that workers can decide not to accept jobs that overwork them.

Well if the job market is so terrible (for employees) and never getting better, then the obvious thing to do is to exploit that and become an employer. You can hire people for essentially nothing, and rake in huge profits for doing very little work.

I don't really see anyone blaming the workers. I do see people suggesting that workers take appropriate steps to protect their interests. Maybe workers should learn skills that indentured serfs don't have. Maybe workers should take advantage of a world with cheap unskilled labor rather than being a part of the unskilled labor force and therefore causing a higher supply to demand ratio of unskilled labor (as I implied earlier). Maybe workers should actually vote. Workers clearly have an electoral advantage. They, however, continue to vote for republicans and democrats that are selling them out to corporations (or simply don't vote at all).

Is it "blaming the workers" to point out the actions that workers could do to achieve their goals? Is it "blaming the workers" to tell them that no one is going to fight for them if they won't fight for themselves?

If you want something, you need to fight for it. No one is going to just give it to you. If you're strategy is "complaining" about it, then it had better be at a level that causes politicians to be voted out of office, because what is happening right now isn't doing anything.

"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." --possibly Alexis de Toqueville or Joseph de Maistre