U.S. Government shuts down.

[Jester]

Yea, but the fact unemployment is high right now, with corporate profits at record highs is enough to disprove the notion that the owners of capital are the "job creators", yes?

I don't think we really need anything at all to disprove this. There are no "job creators". There is no "job creation" in the way that there is "car creation". Labour and capital are two inputs into a complex system of production and distribution. "Jobs" are not a product - although search costs make labour contracts sticky, since it's costly to fire someone and hire a new worker, or to quit and find a new job. But in the end, are labour markets, and they function well or badly. There is bargaining power, and it is distributed in different ways.

Even without a chart, it just doesn't make sense, because the so-called 'cult of the entrepreneur' is still nothing without labor power. Every idea, no matter how innovative it is, needs labor to make it real (much in the same way that matter must exist before consciousness can exist in material, tangible way).

Just because labour is essential, doesn't mean it should be valuable. The same necessary quality is true of water. Air. Gravity. Lots of things. The question is about marginal scarcity - what's important is how much it costs to buy the *next* unit of something. If you buy the next unit of labour for cheap, then labour returns will be low. If you can buy the next unit of capital for cheap, then capital returns will be low.

We knew this by the time after Jevons, but not by the time of Marx, though he did intuit something like this for labour markets with the reserve army of the unemployed.

This means that the easiest way to make money is artificial scarcity, also known as market power. Modern corporations have gotten very good at this, through a variety of means: branded products, political lobbying, regulatory arbitrage, and oligopoly. And labour's equivalent weapons, unions and guilds, have suffered from the changing context of globalization, where states can still pass laws to stop inter-firm competition, but are largely powerless to stop inter-labour competition across borders. And so, labour becomes cheaper, and labour share goes down.

-Jester

(Watched the video. Dr. Nicholas doesn't seem to have a message, other than "Marx was right, the rest is rubbish," with no more specifics than that. He fluffs himself up at every opportunity. He tells stories that have no content. But I don't actually know what he's saying - about Marx, about prices, about anything. He seems to think being clear about this is boring. When he finally gets to explaining anything in the last 5 minutes, he seems to have a pre-Jevons, pre-Walras concept of price based on inputs, which seems to contain no greater insight than "firms will not produce goods that cost them more to make than they get from selling them." This is economics for five-year-olds.)