Human Action: dagarna 19, 20

Två kapitel till har lästs i Human Action.

Det första, Work and Wages, behandlar arbetsmarknaden. Några citat värda att begrundas:

It has been asserted that a job-seeker must sell his labor at any price, however low, as he depends exclusively on his capacity to work and has no other source of income. He cannot wait and is forced to content himself with any reward the employers are kind enough to offer him. This inherent weakness makes it easy for the concerted action of the masters to lower wage rates. They can, if need be, wait longer, as their demand for labor is not so urgent as the worker’s demand for subsistence. The argument is defective. It takes it for granted that the employers pocket the difference between the marginal-productivity wage rate and the lower monopoly rate as an extra monopoly gain and do not pass it on to the consumers in the form of a reduction in prices. For if they were to reduce prices according to the drop in costs of production, they, in their capacity as entrepreneurs and sellers of the products, would derive no advantage from cutting wages. The whole gain would go to the consumers and thereby also to the wage-earners in their capacity as buyers; the entrepreneurs themselves would be benefitted only as consumers. To retain the extra profit resulting from the ”exploitation” of the workers’ alleged poor bargaining power would require concerted action on the part of employers in their capacity as sellers of the products. It would require a universal monopoly of all kinds of production activities which can be created only by an institutional restriction of access to entrepreneurship.

The essential point of the matter is that the alleged monopolistic combination of the employers about which Adam Smith and a great part of public opinion speak would be a monopoly of demand. But we have already seen that such alleged monopolies of demand are in fact monopolies of supply of a particular character. The employers would be in a position enabling them to lower wage rates by concerted action only if they were to monopolize a factor indispensable for every kind of production and to restrict the employment of this factor in a monopolistic way. As there is no single material factor indispensable for every kind of production, they would have to monopolize all material factors of production. This condition would be present only in a socialist community, in which there is neither a market nor prices and wage rates.

Principen om metodologisk individualism (principen att det är fel att tala om allt guld eller allt järn i världen när man behandlar guld eller järn i ekonomisk mening, eftersom vi aldrig måste välja mellan allt guld och allt järn) implicerar att det inte går att permanent sänka löner. Varje entreprenör som anställer någon tar därmed bort arbete från andra produktionskedjor, och för att göra det måste han övertyga den som säljer arbete — arbetaren — att det är bättre att sälja till honom än till någon annan.

Work and Wages är ett av de kapitel där det framgår tydligast att alla tjänar på en fri ekonomi.  Det är här det klassiska citatet finns:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

Om man läser Human Action, eller något annat inom österrikisk ekonomi, och integrerar det man läsermed grunderna, som Mises lägger fram i de första delarna av boken, slås man av hur allting sitter ihop, om man bara tänker till. Det är inte så att man lägger en fin och logisk grund, tar ett språng från den och börjar argumentera för kapitalism, utan man utgår verkligen från grunden i sina argument och återkommer till den.

Nästa kapitel The Nonhuman Original Factors of Production är kort och innehåller inte så mycket intressant material.

Bara två kapitel kvar om kapitalismen alltså…