Eturnalshift wrote:
That's just part of market capitalism... if a market/company values the labor of an individual at $X/hr (based on workmanship, demand, education, etc.), and if the consumer is willing to buy the product of that labor at a reasonable price, then that's the set price.
Capitalism is a scam because if it really worked that way the system would commit suicide.
Let's say it really worked that way, the market's valuation of labor and goods is entirely equivocal, and every worker, everywhere, regardless of race or nationality, competes on an even playing field. The cost of labor would plummet to low bid, which would be third-world peasants working for ten cents an hour.
In a modern industrial society, nominal per capita productivity is far higher than nominal per capita consumption, meaning that one worker can produce far more wealth through labor than he can consume with his wages. Because there would be no price floor for wages, and there would always be massive labor and production surpluses, the result would be massive overproduction and spiraling economic stratification, with fewer and fewer winners and more and more losers, until finally demand drops to near-zero and the system completely craps out.
This doesn't happen because of barriers in the system such as arbitrary differences in the valuation of currency, land and labor in different regions, as well as social mechanisms that ensure guaranteed markets such as nationalism and racism. Hence the American consumer props up Chinese productivity. This is also why corps rail about Social Security and other forms of welfare while quietly supporting those things: debt-fueled consumption keeps the system from imploding. If there were no wealth redistribution, or the printing of cash to hand out so people could buy things, the system would implode overnight because the capitalists would "win", purchasing power would drop to zero, and the game would end.
Black people were "fine" until the US became more of a true market economy. For the longest time, America was a traditional society, and black people didn't enter the market on the same terms as whites because employment and social roles were determined by traditional taboos and not market forces. That changed in the postwar era when we became more of a market economy, and that's when the reality of racism came into conflict with the reality of a "free" society, because blacks couldn't stick to doing black things anymore, like sharecropping and doing odd jobs, or living in mostly autarkic rural black towns, but instead were forced into mainstream society and direct competition with whites.
It holds true in other societies too. Look at so many other societies with unpopular ethnic minorities that are "fine", occupying traditionally defined roles in society, until modernization brings them in conflict with the dominant group because barriers and distances vanish and minority and majority suddenly have to compete on the same terms. Sikhs. Kurds. Uighurs. Armenians. Cossacks. Irish. In every case being an oppressed minority wasn't a catalyst for unrest and violence until freedom forced them into conflict.
I'm not saying I'm against ethnic/economic freedom. I'm just saying that the transition between the traditional world and a viable modern world is very difficult and requires a lot of social re-engineering. And in this real world, the vestiges traditional society is still what defines the market, such as it is, because if it were any other way, the result would be revolution.
