https://twitter.com/ProjectLiberal/status/1729138596592935207
the video is basically describing supply chains and how complex it is. see: commodity fetishism labor makes everything. markets are not necessary.
Supply chains so complex! Capitalism is truly amazing! Socialism has no supply chains!
When my parents grew up in the USSR they had to make their own pencils from the random piles of lead in the snow on the way to school.
seriously, pick your watch or your glasses or something at least
Milton Fraudman
I was first exposed to the pencil thing, then I heard Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism and realized how much of economics is just blow-hards.
Adam Smith already wrote about the division of labour in the production of iron pins, it’s retreading the same ground but going “isn’t it great that we’re outsourcing to so many different places that it makes it harder to organize labour”
The pencil thing is retreading something from hundreds of years earlier and ignoring critique since then.
It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they’ve never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.
by aimixin
Dude’s never heard of a process engineer and I’m supposed to believe he understands how the whole economy works?
'‘Many people make the pencil’
Yeah some dude from Trier made that same argument in some book written in the 19th
Actually some dude in England before that made the same argument
Oh, you don’t know how to make a pencil? Skill issue.
Also, after the US completely destroyed Democratic Korea’s entire industrial base, the first factory that reopened in the whole country made - you guessed it - pencils.
I have something to admit. Before I had any idea who Friedman was I was already somewhat read on socialist stuff. So when I saw the pencil video I thought he was a Marxist professor doing a vulgar explanation of labor division.
theres a reason economics is called the “dismal science”
Markets are a transitional mechanism for marrying wholesale raw material production with industrial manufacturers. But once those relationships are formed, the industries integrate vertically and the market becomes vestigial.
Labor makes things possible, sure. But logistics as a rarefied branch of labor is both vital to an efficient supply chain and heavily influential over the flow of revenue within and between firms. The whole idea of the “middle man” as a parasite stems from the leverage afforded to extract rents in between extractive labor, industrial labor, and retail labor.
What’s curious is that this middle-man position isn’t even strictly capitalism. It can be (via the ownership of transportation capital), but it can always be entirely divorced from the ownership of the machines and real estate involved in production, by way of financing or licensing or administering traffic. The real sleight of hand that markets perform is to transform the concepts of corruption and price gouging, by way of legally or physical monopolizing certain trade routes and cash flows, into economic growth and (exchange) value accumulation.
This can still exist in a socialist economy. It is just categorized as economic loss rather than economic gain.
labor makes everything
No lol
