In early September, I wrote about how capital and labor are both necessary to create prosperity.
Economists sometimes explain this with lots of jargon, referring to capital and labor as “factors of production” and pointing out how they are “complementary.”
In ordinary English, this simply means that workers earn more income when they are equipped with better machinery, equipment, and technology. Similarly, investors can only generate earnings if they have people to utilize capital.
This doesn’t mean that there’s a happy relationship between labor and capital. Indeed, there’s a constant tug or war over who gets what slice of the economic pie.
That being said, the relationship tends to be reasonably cordial so long as the pie is growing.
According to some folks on the left, though, that’s not the case. From their perspective, workers get screwed and capitalists grab ever-larger slices. Consider, for example, this tweet from @existentialcoms.
This tweet made a big splash, with nearly 30,000 likes and more than 12,500 re-tweets.
But there was a slight problem. Actually, a big problem.
There was a counter-tweet from @ne0liberal featuring three graphs that demolish the core premise of the tweet from @existentialcoms.
Here are the three graphs that @ne0liberal shared.
The first one confirms that workers enjoy far more leisure time than in the past.
The second one uses current data to show that more productive workers have much more leisure time.
And the third one reveals that worker compensation has increased significantly.
The unambiguous conclusion is that capitalism produces very good outcomes for workers. If @existentialcoms and @ne0liberal were in a boxing match, this would be a first-round knockout.
My modest contribution to this discussion is to point out that there are no real-world examples of good results produced by socialism. Or Marxism. Or fascism. Or by any form of statism.
Yes, there are some rich nations with big welfare states, but they only imposed those policies after they became rich.
Which is why I’m still waiting for any of my friends on the left to successfully respond to this challenge.
P.S. Since I’ve decided that @ne0liberal produced the counter-tweet of the year, I may as well also call attention to the best-ever tweet about capitalism and socialism, the world’s most-depressing tweet, and Trump’s worst-ever tweet.
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Image credit: LaurMG | CC BY-SA 3.0.
