You Are Worth More Than You Earn

"Every Canadian is worth $141,000 That is the surplus value you produce regardless of your wages and benefits."

Has this number factor in the over $500 billion national debt, growing every year, or the provincial debts, or the municipal debts that our governments have burdened upon us?

Somehow I doubt it? I do however wonder what kind of bookkeeping tells you that you have surplus, when you still have a huge debt around your neck. Do individuals say they are debt free, when they have one and two morgages on their homes, and the morgages are so high that they'll never be able to pay them off? Is it a surplus when you have a 100 bucks in your pocket after you paid your monthly bills, but still have balances owing on your credit cards?

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If I stand for my country today...will my country be here to stand for me tomorrow?

You are accounting like ENRON. It works in the short term, but not in the long run.

In the US, 20% of the people have "Zero Net Equity". Are things that much better in Canada? I doubt it.

You'd have to sell everything off (all your assets) in order pay off the debt and transform the remainder into $140,000 of hard currency. In many cases, it makes sense to stay in debt rather than sell off all your assets to pay off the debt. For example, if you bought a house and took out a loan for it. If the value of your house doubled, it may not make sense to pay off the debt by selling the house, since you'd have no where to live unless you bought another one at a much higher cost than the original, since both prices and interest have risen.

Governments should never be allowed to go into debt because the main source of securing cash is through forced taxation. No one should be forced into debt unwillingly unless you happen to agree with slavery.

Marxism won't go away, because there will always be people who are either young and foolish or old and stupid.

There is certainly a lot that is not true about Marx's ideas, but this is the case with any thinking that is 150 years old. However, there are aspects that ring true and surplus value (SV) is one of these. SV is the rough measure of how we are exploited. It should wipe away your sneer about Marxists, Mr Individualist, to note that this concept preceded Marx by about 20 years, having been used by both the Ricardian socialists of the 1820s and Proudhon in 1840. The three other comments about this posting indicate that people do not understand the concept of surplus value, seemingly confusing it with the GDP. What SV consists of is the difference between the total product of labour and its total wages. If the former was not much greater than the latter capitalism could not exist. That according to Eugene, the SV is 3-4 times the average wage should come as no surprise...

Marxism was a reaction to the absolutely abysmal labor conditions that existed in England at that time, conditions which the British author Charles Dickens addressed in several of his novels.

At that time, many employers actually made their people bring the fuel needed to heat their work areas in winter. I wonder how Individualist would feel if HIS employer made him do likewise?

Days off didn't happen. Workplace safety was laughable if it even existed at all, and children worked in pitch black coalmines for 12+ hours a day in some instances.

It's nice to see Individualist pining once more for the "good old days", where money was everything, regardless of how it was obtained or who suffered because of someone's greed.

Far as I'm concerned, he can have them.

I challenged Individualist to actually READ some of Dickens novels from that time.

Assuming of course he can "read" anything that doesn't require illustrations or crib notes.



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"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"

"The Weapon" - Rush

I challenged Individualist

should read as

I challenge Individualist

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"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"

"The Weapon" - Rush

I don't know why all of you allow yourselves to be provoked by this guy,"individualist"(sic)? He is really nothing of the sort. Neocons are a confidence game, a kind of "private" marxism. Look at the backgrounds of the major NCs and you will see marxism or more specially trotskyism at the heart of things. Wikipedia has a fairly good article on all of this. Also the term "neo-conservative" is generally not used outside of North America. In Europe the word is "neo-liberal" a more apt description I would think. Some of their favourite crooks like "Lord" Conrad Black call themselves liberals,at least outside the pages of the National Pest. "Paleoconservatism" refers to the older Republican party variety which seems a bit closer to established historical consensus. In this country older conservatives even including the "red" variety were more closely aligned with the "limited state" but certainly not the neocons. Most red tories see/saw the problems associated with the welfare state as a matter of confusing social control with social service hence their support for measures like a negative income tax. [Even Nixon ,with the support of Friedmann, supported such a program in the early seventies until this was nixed in Congress,ie. the "Aid to Dependent Families Act" was originally framed as a very modest guaranteed income. One of the opposng organizations in that situation was the major American social workers' association which feared that their jobs would be eliminated. My heart bleeds.] The neocon is more an expression of Burnham's "New Class" a characteristic it shares with certain sections of the left.

<blockquote>So where do we go to claim our bonuses?</blockquote> See Ralph. I hear he is writing cheques..........<p>---<br>RickW<br />
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"The purpose of economic competition is to eliminate competition"...." - John Kenneth Galbraith