My reply was to the overall back-and-forth between both of you. Krugminator is presenting capitalists as some kind of hyper-competent supermen who could, McGuyver-style, assemble entire cars single-handedly if called upon to do so. What nonsense. It's not only false in the specific historical cases he mentions, but even if it had been true, it would still be irrelevant. Technical competency in actual production of goods or services is not what makes entrepreneurship valuable; it has little if anything to do with entrepreneurship. People who think this way don't understand the difference between managing and owning a business. The manager knows how to run the business; the owner knows how much revenue the business generates and how much it is worth on the market relative to other, similar (or different) businesses. Sometimes, one person performs both roles. But they really are separate concerns.
That said, the idea that workers "do the real work" and owners are some kind of useless, entitled, bolt-on appendages is also incorrect. Yes, the shoemaker is the one with the skills in making the shoe. But a shoe-making company that mass-produces shoes is not a shoemaker, it's a mass-production shoe-making company. It may employ shoe-makers. They may even be part of the "secret sauce" that gives the company value. But the company itself is like a machine made out of people -- it is the buying, making, repairing, scrapping, etc. of those machines-made-of-people that is what large-scale entrepreneurship is really all about. Too many artisans get this mixed up, because they look at the secret-sauce in a company and they recognize the skill and talent of the core artisans in the company. "It's the coffee roasters who are the heart of Starbucks, the management chain is just fluff." Well, the roasters are the heart of it, but the management chain isn't just fluff, you simply could not have a human operation at that scale without all the accoutrements of such operations (management, payroll, fleet, facilities, etc.)
Artisans really are very skilled at what they do, some of them have world-unique talents that no one else can exactly replicate and, in certain industries, they can be worth millions of dollars a year... Hollywood actors or well-known pop musicians are very visible examples of such artisans. But, at the end of the day, they can only work about 2,000 hours a year or so, no more than anybody else. So it's not until you "scale up" an operation that it goes from being worth maybe a few dozen million dollars a year, into hundreds of millions or billions. That 10,000x scale differential between the most valuable sole-proprietor concern in existence and the revenues of the largest corporations... is capitalism. So, you need both.
It is this very tendency of artisans to despise the "untalented corporate zombies" which is what the Marxists have targeted in order to form the core of the revolutionary proletariat. You need artisans, but you also need the boring check-box bean-counters. You don't get modern production (both in terms of scale of automation and precision/replication) without both. That's why the Marxists have targeted this, because it is the "weak joint" of the modern system of production.
Thanks but I'll pass...And who or what vested the power in you to pronounce us man and wife? You kiss the bride; I'm not going to.![]()
Site Information
About Us
- RonPaulForums.com is an independent grassroots outfit not officially connected to Ron Paul but dedicated to his mission. For more information see our Mission Statement.
Connect With Us