Zonie63
Posts: 2826
Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
A person's choices can impact the value of their labor. I can relate this to the NFL in a way. Terrell Owens was a phenomenal athlete with some amazing receiver skills. The value of his on-field input could have improved any team. Few teams were willing to even attempt to sign him, in part because of his salary requirements. Another part of teams' unwillingness to sign him was his lockerroom antics and that he was considered a "lockerroom cancer." He was not good for team chemistry, which could outweigh his on-field inputs.
The choices an individual makes can, and do, make a difference within a company, outside of the skills brought in. And, if a person chooses to not develop any skills, that person won't qualify for jobs that require skills. How is it not a person's fault if he/she chooses to not gain the skills necessary for a particular level of work desired?
In the example you’re citing here, the employee in question did have the skills (no matter if he was born with the skills or acquired them during his youth). If his salary requirements were too high, then the business has to make a decision as to whether the skills offered are really worth it (which is part of what we’re talking about here). As far as intangibles such as being a “locker room cancer,” that seems more of an arbitrary opinion and a value judgment than anything that can be objectively proven about the individual’s actual skills.
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I was attempting to differentiate between people who choose to be on welfare rather than work, and those who don't have any choice but to be on welfare (that is, they are incapable of working). Taking care of those who can't take care of themselves is, in a sense, a legislating of morality.
It’s also a way of maintaining political stability, which should be the more important consideration.
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I'd be more supportive of charity doing that job, but I'm not willing to just pull the rug out from under them, allowing them to "fall through the cracks" until charity increases to the point where it is sufficient. I'd much rather see government give charitable donation incentives to increase charity and then reducing government welfare programs.
Thing is, government social programs and welfare are not necessarily the products of a bunch of sappy bleeding hearts. That’s where a lot of conservatives seem to misdirect a lot of their criticism of these programs, presenting a false choice between government welfare versus private charity to help those who can’t take care of themselves.
This also has to be viewed in the context of our discussion about “true costs” and the value of one’s labor to an employer. Strictly speaking, from a business point of view, it really shouldn’t matter why or how an individual has the skills he has (or doesn’t have). If a business decides that a fry cook should earn X amount of money, then what other business concerns do they have? By the same token, a person who is incapable of working at all would have zero value to the business (or any other business for that matter).
But in America (as in most other industrialized countries), we don’t just pull the rug out from under people (not like we used to anyway). We don’t always think in terms of dollars and cents and how much value an individual has in society. I just think there’s something incongruous about being warm and fuzzy about those deemed “unable to take care of themselves” while being cold and harsh towards those who might not be quite so helpless but still have trouble getting by.
If we’re going to look solely at the needs of a business and how much they value the labor of their employees, then that’s one thing. As cold-blooded as it might seem, the idea that “it’s not personal, but strictly business” at least has a certain reliable consistency about it. If that’s the argument being made here and the position being taken regarding skills, costs, and the value they might have to a business or its clientele, then I could accept that as valid from a purely pragmatic business point of view.
But in the real world, it doesn’t work quite the same way as they imagine it does in the economics classrooms which are cocooned deep inside academia.
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
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ORIGINAL: Zonie63
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
Coming down on the health care industry would almost necessitate coming down on every other sector of industry, wouldn't it? You have to apply laws fairly.
Absolutely.
That's a chilling comment, IMO.
I was just agreeing with the view that laws should be applied fairly.
As for it being “chilling,” I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that. What seems far more chilling to me is when we put ourselves and future generations at the mercy of big banking and other globalized interests which are accountable to no one and are far more insulated from the will of the people than the Administrative State could ever be.
We might also disagree on what “coming down” on an industry would actually entail, although again, I would put that also on them, for creating the conditions leading to a situation where it might be necessary to come down on them. In politics, everything is negotiable, but if industry is unwilling to negotiate in good faith and the government comes down on them, then they bring it on themselves. All of these rules and regulations and government agencies deemed part of the “Administrative State” invariably came about due to some sort of problem likely caused from a private sector industry that was behaving irresponsibly. No doubt there was some sort of visible problem or social ill which was widely known before it even came to the government’s table and long before a decision was made to “come down” on anyone, whether it was the cotton industry, the meat-packing industry, the cattle industry, the mining industry, the railroad industry, the textiles industry – or any number of other industries which have acted irresponsibly with human lives and have been on the business end of Big Bad Gov coming down on them.
We were talking about accepting responsibility earlier on, and this, in my view, is about the various industries and other powerful groups in this country accepting responsibility. At the very least, if the idea of regulation and price controls is really so chilling, we should at least look at the conditions which necessitated regulation and coming down on the private sector in the past.
I really have no love of government, but when we’re talking about business, we’re not talking about a bunch of choir boys. I view businesspeople just as I view politicians and lawyers. Some are good, some are honest and ethical – but many are not. We all have to take our chances, and let the buyer beware. But sometimes, rules, regulations, and a bit of policing are necessary to maintain order and stability in society.
But it’s the bad apples who make it necessary. Let’s not forget that.
Even our Constitution and system of Checks and Balances established by our Founding Fathers were deemed necessary because of their shared historical experience. If every monarch throughout history had been fair, just, benevolent, and compassionate, then none of that would have been necessary.
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Government is a lumbering beast. I can't even imagine how long it would take for providers to prove their cases. The damage that can be done in the meantime could be very bad.
The damage is going on anyway, no matter if the government acts quickly, slowly, or not at all.
There have been occasions where the government has shown that it can act rather quickly when it wants to. Where it moves slow is when someone wants to move slow, such as making it difficult to amend the Constitution (to prevent any hasty or precipitous actions we might later regret).
I suppose government could be a bit more proactive if it wanted to. That may be part of the problem, since you’ve got a do-nothing Congress which leaves it to the bureaucrats to run things, yet they still fuck it up and then it’s up to the judicial branch to clean up all the shit they cause. As a result, the court systems across the country are clogged up, as if the judicial branch exists as the government’s sewage system.
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It certainly does depend on the job you're hiring for. No question about that at all.
Why are HR Dept's and previous employers more concerned about lawsuits?
It’s just a fact of life in this litigious society in which we live, but even that’s the result of the bad apples who end up stinking the whole barrel.
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So, it's only business that causes the reduction of length of employment?
No, not only business.
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I completely agree that a reliable, loyal, and long-time employee is better for a business. There is no guarantee that a long-term employee is reliable or loyal.
Well, there are no guarantees with anything, although some intangibles like loyalty, reliability may not show up in an accountant’s ledger, so they might conclude that the long-term employee (who would likely be receiving a higher wage) as more of a financial drain on a company. There might be pressure to replace the long-term employee with a newer employee who would start out at a lower salary.
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In jobs that have a large learning curve from one business to another, it behooves business to reduce turnover as much as possible; keeps training costs down, and maintains production levels. It would also, IMO, be better for business to promote employees rather than hire external candidates, as long as business can get qualified candidates from within.
This all makes sense to me, although not every business seems to operate according to these principles.
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Do other countries have more stable government regulation environments? If they do, then it's easier to look further than one or two years down the road. The regulatory environment in the US changes so much from year to year, it's difficult to do that.
That’s because the politics changes all the time in the U.S. However, it’s not all that unstable that we can’t think a bit further ahead.
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Because central planning has been shown to not work very well.
It does have its problems, although those are problems inherent in any large nation. Some things that we’re faced with today are the consequence of things that weren’t planned very well yesterday. We already have a centralized system anyway, whether we want it or not. That was the choice we made, and it would be exceedingly difficult to go back on that choice now.
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RE: Budget Battles and the Growth of the Administrative... - 
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