Friday, August 5, 2022

Glenn Loury gets read the riot act by Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Bill. Yes, Wolff responded very well to Loury's two-part question. Workers do indeed bring their own investments to the operation. The "property rights" blindness to this fact (and the reliance of "private" enterprise for so much government support) has damaged this country. And both parties are complicit.--Frank

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    1. Good to hear from you, Frank. I'm sure you remember, as I do, when the United Steel Workers went on strike and shut things down for, what? over a 100 days? I also remember hearing Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "Sixteen Tons." I grew up in steel and coal country (Johnstown, PA) and so did you, no? Scranton was anthracite country. And the name Lackawanna resonates in Jersey City, where I lived for 15 years.

      My father was trained as a chemical engineer and spent most of his life working for Bethlehem Mines, working with and designing coal-cleaning plants. His job required him to take regular visits into the mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. While he didn't labor in them like the miners did, he understood their working environment. He believed that, if you were going to have responsibility for mining operations, you had to have had experience actually working in the mines. Those workers were investing their lives down in the mines. Steel mills were dangerous places as well.

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