Of course there are a lot of unemployed people out there. What people don't like to acknowledge is that, for the most part, they are entirely fungible positions that have been removed. They're positions that those employers can do without (if they hadn't gone out of business entirely--at which point it becomes prudent to ask, "couldn't you see the tea leaves?"). The people who remain employed during a recession are people who have worked to become irreplaceable (or just aren't replaceable enough at the moment to make the loss of productivity and efficacy worth firing them).
I don't know where they're publicly available (resources through my school), but go break down unemployment by level of education. College grads are at something well below half the overall level of unemployment. (I wish I could get granularity on how many of them are, say, English majors, but I don't think that information's available out there.)
As for the garbagemen--sure, they do a hard job. And there's a thousand people lined up behind them to take the job if they don't want it. The difficulty of the job is not what determines the paycheck, otherwise a garbageman will be pulling down a hundred and twenty kay. The rarity of somebody who can actually do the job matters. There are lots of potential garbagemen--thus, garbagemen aren't worth much. Nobody is entitled to a "living wage," they're entitled to a fair market wage. The two do not necessarily coincide.
Once you turn 18, it is no one's responsibility but your own to make yourself worth it to other people to get paid the way you think you deserve.
All due respect, I'm not sure if you're trying to flame (as per your first post) or not, but you might be missing things here with a simplistic economic approach. Econ is one of my degrees too....
There have been several market failures lately.
Where to begin? Banks and bankers have responsibilities to others in a larger ethical and legal sense. They have fiduciary duties to their stock holders to act in the best interest of the corporation and ethical duties to the rest of us to not be massive cheats/twits. Highly paid twits in the banking industry ignored what was right in front of them: you can't make subprime loans to people who can't pay them back for short term gain. Further, the bank's CPA (Certifiied PUBLIC Accountants) had ethical duties to report on the risk; they didn't. So the banks all acted stupidly and there was no alternative (as presupposed in a market theory) to put your money in. There was a massive systematic risk of the entire US banking industry collapsing, and thus we bailed them out. The only problem is that the same twits are still running things in banking.
Same thing in insurance. Credit Default Swaps pay you in the event a bond issuer (borrower) defaults on the bond. It's bond insurance, but Lobbyists inserted one line into a house bill saying they were not. This means that they are not regulated as insurance and you don't need an "insurable interest," which means you can insure your own risks but not other people's risks. This is because you would then be benefiting off their failure and have an incentive to make them fail. Enter Mortgage backed securities.... A little company called AIG sold sometimes 12 insurance policies on the same bond to guarantee payment, because the US housing market would never crash and hey, let's collect all those premiums.... That means AIG had to pay 12 people the entire amount of a bond (easily $1 million in grouped bonds) for each bond grouping of mortgages that weren't paid. Hence, why AIG needed bailed out....
Finally, traditional Investment Bankers were partnerships and not corporations for reasons that would take an entire class to get into. Partnerships have unlimited personal risk to the partners, but lower taxes than corporations and are very selective about their owners/members. The idea used to be that only professionals would be in this type of partnership, to ensure that the profit motive would be tempered by respect for ethical considerations imposed on a profession (like in law firms). Now corporate investors simply want more money and could care less about professional ethics in Investment Banking Firms. Finally, with the new introduction of corporate limited liability, the "who cares if it fails" attitude took hold, because after all, the former partners--now shareholders--aren't responsible
Everyone else seems to be....
Combine lax/stupid banking across the whole industry, insane insurance practices, and no liability for traditionally risky businesses and you get one hell of a storm. This has taken down businesses that were otherwise perfectly stable. Many failed simply because of the recession brought about by these three primary factors. We do bankruptcies and have been surprised to learn that longstanding businesses--that weathered previous recessions-- are falling because of this.
As for the workers, I agree generally with investing in human capital to make yourself better. However in this case, the cause of the unemployment seems to lie in places other than human capital. It is because of an insane capital market, that labor is now suffering. Regulation concerning disclosure akin to the 1933-34 securities act is required to rectify this, because if these bankers, insurers, and investors were lawyers, they would be sued for malpractice. Currently there is no such legal theory to sue on.
This horrid economy was caused by stupid banks. We are all paying for it.
We are not banks, thus we are paying for things we are not personally responsible for. All the while, the banks who caused this crap, will never pay for it, because if they did, it would take the rest of us down with them even moreso.
Given the above, can you not at least see that the currently unemployed population is not at fault? It's a causation issue. Capitalism requires that the people in charge of major institutions act rationally. Even Ayn Rand said that. What happens when they don't?
As for my argumentation style, I'll have to agree to disagree with you.
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Topic: Why do people argue and fight instead of calmly debate? (Read 7570 times)