Allin wrote in ope-l 3559
"So let's forget about this silly topic (v=0)."
I for one am not talking about v = 0. I'm talking about why capitalists
introduce labor-saving technical changes. I'm saying that capitalists always
have an incentive, irrespective of the wage rate, to substitute machines for
workers, because the additional machine costs per unit of output can be less
than the repression costs saved per unit of output. My critics are the ones
who keep trying to make v = 0 the issue, when it simply isn't. The issue is
this:
Do capitalists always have an incentive, irrespective of the wage rate, to
substitute machines for workers, because the additional machine costs per unit
of output can be less than the repression costs saved per unit of output?
The issue, I repeat, is:
Do capitalists always have an incentive, irrespective of the wage rate, to
substitute machines for workers, because the additional machine costs per unit
of output can be less than the repression costs saved per unit of output?
Once one understands why the answer to the above is yes, all the
distributionist and market-oriented discussion of choice of technique falls to
the ground.
I don't happen to think the class struggle at the point of production is a
silly topic.
Andrew Kliman