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0 pointsMichaelZuo2y ago0 comments

The quote doesn’t make sense, labor is pretty much a commodity for the vast vast majority of people. Almost by definition.

I would say at most 1 out of 50 are genuinely really unique in some way, and that’s being generous, the rest of the population are just regular average Joes or not too far off.

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Animats2y ago

So much labor history has been forgotten. Here's the founding document of the International Labor Organization.[1] This was, when it was founded, on a par with the World Trade Organization. The ILO position, mainstream at the time, was that wages are an output, not an input. The purpose of economic activity is to maximize worker wages. Not return on capital.

That few people today even know this was once mainstream is the result of a very effective lobbying campaign started in the early 1970s. Milton Friedman provided the theory, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce providing the money. There was a master plan for this, the Lewis Powell Memorandum.[2] This is where the organized conservative movement came from, from think tanks to talk shows.

[1] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:62:0::NO:62:P62_...

[2] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

MichaelZuoOP2y ago

I know the history, it still doesn’t make sense.

e.g. Wages can be both inputs and outputs. Because there’s no ultimate judge deciding how these things should be considered.

Millions of writers can write billions of words about it one way or the other, but at the end of the day they don’t count for anything, when compared to 8 billion lives worth of daily decisions.

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