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자유시장 경제는 막스가 원했던 축소된 노동 시간과 높은 소득을 성취했다.
Market Has Achieved What Marx Wanted - Less Labor
By Marian L. Tupy
Marxism was supposed to have brought about a lot of positive changes, including the creation of a classless society, where everyone lived in peace. To these ambitious goals can be added substantial reduction in the amount of labor required from the proletariat. As Rodney G. Peffer from University of San Diego put it in his 2014 book, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice, Karl “Marx believed the reduction of necessary labor time to be … an absolute necessity. He [claimed] … that real wealth is the developed productive force of all individuals. It is no longer the labor time but the disposable time that is the measure of wealth.” Little did the German economist know that free markets would achieve his objective with aplomb.
The number of hours worked per day has fluctuated throughout human history. Based on their observations of extant hunter-gatherer societies, scholars estimate that our foraging ancestors worked anywhere between 2.8 hours and 7.6 hours per day. Once they secured their food for the day, however, they stopped. The foragers’ workload was comparatively low, but so was their standard of living. Our ancestors’ wealth was limited to the weight of the possessions they could carry on their backs from one location to the next.
About 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, cultivate crops and domesticate animals. The total number of hours worked rose, because people were willing to sacrifice free time in exchange for a more stable food supply. Since artificial lighting was prohibitively expensive, daylight regulated the amount of work that could be done on any given day. In summer, most people worked between 6 and 10 hours in the fields and additional 3 hours at home. In winter, shorter days limited the total number of work hours to 8. For religious reasons, Sunday was a day off and a plethora of feasts broke the monotony of agricultural life.
Our expectations as to what constitutes a good work-life balance are obviously very different from those of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. It makes sense, therefore, to compare today’s workload to that at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In 1830, the workweek in the industrializing West averaged about 70 hours or, Sundays excluded, 11.6 hours of work per day. By 1890 that fell to 60 hours per week or 10 hours per day. Thirty years later, the workweek in advanced societies stood at 50 hours or 8.3 hours per week. Today, people in advanced societies work less than 40 hours per week. That still amounts to roughly 8 hours per day, because workers typically don’t work on Saturdays. The “weekend” was born.
The overall number of hours worked has declined in tandem with increasing prosperity. Plainly put, the richer the country, the less people work. Data for developing countries is difficult to come by, but population adjusted average number of hours worked per worker in high income countries declined from 2,123 in 1950 to 1,732 in 2017. That’s a decline of 18.4 percent. Based on the available data from advanced nations, Germans worked the fewest hours (1,347) and Singaporeans worked the most hours (2,237). With 1,763 work hours per year, the United States was squarely in the middle of the pack in 2017.
Over the same time period, average gross domestic product per person adjusted for inflation and purchasing power rose by 483 percent in Germany, 1,376 percent in Singapore and 290 percent in the United States. Overall, GDP per person in high income countries rose from $9,251 to $47,149 (in 2016 dollars) or 410 percent.
So, people earn more money in exchange for less work. But, do they enjoy more leisure time? International comparisons are difficult, but the American Time Use Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that Americans enjoyed, on average, 5.24 hours of leisure and sports per day in 2017. That was 2.5 percent more than when the survey started in 2003. Whether the United States is representative of a broader trend is unclear. Still, it is undeniable that people have more free time than they used to - at least since our nomadic days.
Marx was wrong about many things. Famously, he thought that market competition would drive down profits, thus necessitating ever greater exploitation of the workers. But, as Johan Norberg of the Cato Institute points out in his 2017 book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Marx had lived through a period of immense enrichment of the Western worker. “When Marx died in 1883,” Norberg writes, “the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born, in 1818.” Blinded by his erroneous ideas, Marx could not see what was actually happening all around him.
Marx’s disciples from Cuba and Venezuela to South Africa and Zimbabwe are committing the same mistake today. Crazed by their ideological hatred of the free market, they refuse to see that capitalism has delivered what Marx had long desired - less work and higher income. Plus ça change…
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노르웨이는 사회민주주의의 모델 국가인가?
Is Norway a Role Model for "Democratic Socialism"?
•Daniel J. Mitchell
Earlier this year, I explained why Nordic nations are not socialist. Or, to be more precise, I wrote that if they are socialist, then so is the United States.
[RELATED: Bernie Sanders Is Right: The US Is Already a "Socialist" Country by Ryan McMaken]
And my slam-dunk evidence was this chart from the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World ., which shows that there is almost no difference in overall economic liberty when comparing the United States with Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
This doesn’t mean, incidentally, that we have identical policies. I pointed out that the United States gets a better (less worse) score on fiscal policy, but also reiterated that Nordic nations are more market oriented than America when looking at other variables (especially rule of law ).
The net effect, though, is that we wind up with near-identical scores.
I’m rehashing this old data because there’s a column in The Week that celebrates Norway as an example of “democratic socialism.”
The spectacular upset victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her recent New York congressional primary election has catapulted the topic of democratic socialism to the top of America’s political discussion. …we have a country that very closely approximates the democratic socialist ideal. It’s a place that is…considerably more successful than the United States on virtually every social metric one can name. I’m talking about Norway. …Norwegian workers are heavily protected, with 70 percent of workers covered by union contracts, and over a third directly employed by the government. The Norwegian state operates a gigantic sovereign wealth fund, and its financial assets total 331 percent of its GDP… Meanwhile, its state-owned enterprises are worth 87 percent of GDP. Of all the domestic wealth in Norway, the government owns 59 percent, and fully three-quarters of the non-home wealth.
I don’t know if those specific statistics are true, but I certainly don’t disagree with the assertion that Norway has a large public sector.
But here are a couple of passages that don’t pass the laugh test.
Norway is unquestionably more socialist than Venezuela… Indeed, it is considerably more socialist than supposedly-communist China.
This is absurdly inaccurate. If there was a thermonuclear version of wrong, you would be seeing a giant mushroom cloud.
Here’s the data on overall economic freedom for Norway, Venezuela, and China. As you can see, Norway is far more market oriented.
So how does the author, Ryan Cooper, rationalize his fantastical assertion of Norwegian super-socialism?
If you read the article, he has a tortured definition of democratic socialism. One of his variables is government ownership, which normally would be a reasonable piece of data to include.
But it’s an artificial number when looking at Norway since the government controls the nation’s oil and also has a big sovereign wealth fund that was financed by oil revenue.
In other words, Norway is geographically lucky because all that oil boosts Norwegian GDP. It makes Norwegians relatively prosperous. And it definitely helps partially offset the economic damage of big government.
But it’s nonsensical to argue that oil-rich Norway somehow provides evidence for overall notion of democratic socialism. It’s sort of like looking at data for Kuwait and asserting that the best economic system is a hereditary sheikdom.
Yet he wants people to support socialism simply because of Norway, as illustrated by this final excerpt.
…when it comes to building a decent place to live, Norway is completely blowing America out of the water. So while conservatives have been pointedly ignoring the most obvious and relevant piece of evidence in their spittle-flecked tirades against socialism, Norwegians can and do point to the United States as an example of what happens when you let capitalism run wild.
But there’s one itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny problem. As you can see from the chart , Norway and the United States have almost identical levels of economic liberty.
So if America is “capitalism run wild,” then so is Norway. Or if Norway is “socialism,” then so is the United States.
The bottom line is that both the United States and Norway are admirable nations by global standards. We both rank in the top-20 percent for overall economic freedom.
But we’re not Hong Kong or Singapore , so we both obviously should do a better job of following the recipe for greater prosperity.
[Originally published at International Liberty.]
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세금을 올리려면 초과반수가 필요하도록 해야 한다.
콜로라도주의 납세자 헌장에 따르면, 세수(稅收)가 인구 플러스 인플레보다 빨리 증가해서는 안 된다고 되어 있다.
두 번째 규정은 세금 인상이 입법부의 초과반수의 동의 없이는 이루질 수 없다는 것이다.
Politicians Should Need a Supermajority to Raise Taxes
•Daniel J. Mitchell
The best budget rule in the United States is Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Known as TABOR, this provision in the state’s constitution says revenues can’t grow faster than population plus inflation. Any revenue greater than that amount must be returned to taxpayers.
Combined with the state’s requirement for a balanced budget, this means Colorado has a de facto spending cap (similar to what exists in Switzerland and Hong Kong ).
The second-best budget rule is probably a requirement that tax increases can’t be imposed without a supermajority vote by the legislature.
The underlying theory is very simple. It won’t be easy for politicians to increase the burden of government spending if they can’t also raise taxes. Particularly since states generally have some form of rule requiring a balanced budget.
Basically, a version of “Starve the Beast.”
Anyhow, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, 14 states have some type of supermajority requirements. (발췌)
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