Comment on Largest Pork Company in the US Shuts Down California Plant Due to High Costs
admin@exploding-heads.com 2 years agoI went to school with a lot of farm kids, a good portion of who wanted to escape the isolation and head to the city.
But I wonder if technology will attract these kids back as they grow older to escape the crime ridden cities and a better place to raise kids.
Technology makes it easier to stay in touch with friends, shop, educate your kids, etc.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
To me, the reality of these extremely important jobs is one of the core problems that capitalism does eventually solve, and that communism never really does.
In order to get food on your table, somebody needs to spend an awful lot of time hanging out alone in a field. There really isn't much else to do there. It isn't fun, it isn't glamorous, it's just somebody getting their hands dirty and doing the right thing and making society work.
In order for a lot of the stuff that that farmer needs to happen, you need to have a miner. Somebody needs to head into a god forsaken hole in the ground, and do incredibly dangerous things as safely as possible, and usually those minds are off in the middle of nowhere that no one actually wants to be.
For most of these things, you're also going to need to do some processing and that's going to be some very unglamorous work, probably some dirty work, probably some unpleasant work, probably some dangerous work.
So capitalism's solution to these problems of jobs that nobody wants is to pay more. Make sure that farmers are well compensated, make sure that people going into that mine are making enough money that they're going to choose to go to that stinking hole in the ground rather than sit at a desk. It absolutely means that there are people with different classes. The world needs miners and farmers. The world can mostly do without fast food chefs. The world for the most part can do without more poets. The answer for most of these is the things that are required will have the wages go up until people want to do them, and the things that are not required will go down in wages until people decide to do something less nice.
Of course, there's a few factors corrupting that process right now. We obviously have Labor movements that think that all labor is equal when it isn't, and so you have it legislated so that all work requires a certain minimum wage. We have forces trying to bring in a bunch of cheap labor to dump the market, so companies don't need to pay the appropriate wage for jobs nobody wants to do. Finally, we have the rise of megacorps that are absolutely supported by governments, and those megacorps end up distorting the market because their overwhelming resources can effectively cause regional monopolies.
Ideally, this is what happens: the kids hate living out in the country where there's nobody else, so they go off and see the world and find out what the world is like, but eventually the reality of cities filled with people who aren't doing anything in particular hits, and they realize that the situation back at home really wasn't that bad, so they come back and take on the family business. This can only happen if taking on the family business is properly compensated.
admin@exploding-heads.com 2 years ago
Well said.