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By “Mark Andrew Dwyer”
January 28, 2007
[An article written for Canada Free Press][1]
Are illegal
Mexican "migrants" just willing to work and contribute to the
economy, or are they stealing the American dream? And if the latter is true then
what exactly and how much of it are they stealing? It turns out that a
clear-cut answer to these questions may be found in quite unexpected place:
Marx's economic theory of surplus value.
I claim that the “migrants”
pre-empt, or steal, if you will, a share of the surplus value that they are not entitled to, in the amount of
roughly 25,000
dollars per "migrant" worker a year on the average.
Imagine that
you leave in a sparsely populated country some 150 years ago or so, and you just
invented how to turn the energy carried by the nearby river into electricity.
So you design and build your little hydroelectric power plant, a laborious task
that took you some four years or 10,000 hours of hard work, and now you have a
utility that with no work or cost, except for a little maintenance, is
generating free electric energy that is worth, say, one dollar per hour, or at
least, that much you collect from the neighbors who use your electricity.
When you sit
back at the end of the day, you try to figure out if your work, money, and
initiative that you put in your little enterprise were worth the trouble. Let's
see. If you paid yourself the prevailing wage of one dollar a day while
building your power plant, you would have to spend 1,500 dollars for labor. The
materials that you had to purchase were, say 500 dollars. That adds to 2,000
dollars for the construction of your power plant.
If you run
your plant 20 hours a day, leaving four hours a day for routine maintenance, in
just 100 days the charges that you collect for the electricity it supplies will
pay for your cost of construction, and from this point on, you will be making a
net profit 19 dollars a day (20 dollars you collect from the neighbors while
paying yourself the prevailing wage of one dollar a day for maintenance), or
some 7,000 dollars a year, quite a handsome income at that time. And your
neighbors will enjoy cheap and plentiful electricity that would make their work
lighter and lives more enjoyable.
Where did
these seven grand come from? According to Marx, it's the surplus value, which he defined as the difference between the sales
price of the product (in this case, electricity per hour) and the cost of its
production (in this case, the cost of material, capital, if any, and labor, the
latter determined as the cost of recreation, that is, food, drink, clothing,
shelter, entertainment, child rearing, etc., that the workers must pay for in
order to be able to work and procreate). In our case, the seven grand a year,
after the initial 100 days of operation, was the surplus value that your enterprise was generating. And since Marx
claimed that the surplus value
belongs to the workers1,
you as the only worker are justly entitled to it. As a result, you are making
now 20 dollars a day (the cost of your labor plus the surplus value, we assume here for simplicity that your plant never
needs any additional investment or spare parts), twenty times more than
everyone else in the neighborhood. Whoa!
Now, suppose
that a "migrant" comes along and offers you his work as a maintenance
guy in your power plant so that you can go fishing, instead. But when you
propose him the wage that is prevailing where he came from, one dollar a day,
that is, he demands that you pay him 20 dollars, and a college professor,
quoting Marx and his theory of economy, supports his demand, arguing that your
"migrant" laborer is entitled to one dollar a day wage plus the surplus value of 19 dollars a day, which
adds, indeed to 20 dollars a day. Your "migrant" may be even willing
to negotiate with you and take a "loss" of 15 dollars a day and work
for you for "substandard" pay of just five bucks a day. Does he have
any moral or factual base to expect you to pay him that much?
Obviously, he does
not. He was not the one who made the invention, without which his work would be
worth just a dollar a day, never mind any up front investment of capital and
labor, so there is no good reason, except, perhaps, for your altruism and
generosity, to pay him more than that. The situation would have been quite
different if, say, your former teacher who taught you physics and engineering
in your school years applied for a job at your power plant. Then it might be
just right to split with him the surplus
value that your plant produces and pay him, say eight dollars a day. You
might do the same for your poor neighbor who used to watch after your property
when you were away, but why should you give something for nothing to a stranger
who had no part or role in your entrepreneurial success? Although you certainly
can, you don’t have to and most likely, you will not. And if the
“migrant” doesn’t like it, he is free to go back to where he
came from.
In American 12
trillion economy that generates humongous surplus
value (in the range of trillions dollars a year), that surplus value is
split, albeit on non-equal parts, between the investors, the entrepreneurs, the
inventors, and the workers, for an average of about 25,000 dollars a year (a
rough estimate obtained from dividing the total annual surplus value by the
estimated number of full time equivalent persons that are eligible for their
share in that value). One may consider that amount a benefit of membership in
the American society, or a dividend of ingenuity and work of past generations
of Americans that built this country, its infrastructure, and its economy, and
contributed to progress in science and technology without which practically
none of today’s economic miracles would have been possible.
And that
25,000 dollars per worker surplus value
is exactly what is at stake when a Mexican "migrant" illegally jumps
the American border in order to "do the job that Americans are unwilling
to" (or he says so). Should this "migrant" stay and work in
If this is not
stealing then nothing is.
Here is more
bad news. A big share of this stolen amount is used to influence what the
American economy is delivering to its customers and the American government is
doing for its people. Have you had any problems with buying American (non-super
spicy, that is) food in a convenience store or a fast food restaurant, or
finding American (as opposed to Mexican) music on the radio? Are you irritated
by having to read bi-lingual (English and Spanish) instructions how to cook
your pizza (probably, already spicy as hell) or install a landscaping light? Is
your nearby Ross or Marshall’s full of flashy, colorful merchandise that
pleases tastes of Mexicans but not yours? Do noisy street merchants that sell
smelly food and products of dubious quality and value bother you? Are you
concerned with ethno-centric “Latino” organizations and politicians
that vigorously push for changes that you disapprove? Well, this is how the
above mentioned 25,000 dollars per laborer work, remaking
_________________________________
Notes
.
1Not that I agree with
Marx that all the surplus value
belongs to the workers, although one may argue that in the U.S. some part of it
belongs to those workers that are part of the American society (“national
community” or “the people” as the Supreme Court once phrased
it) and deserve to participate in American dream. Here, I let Marx get away
with his obviously invalid claim in order to not give leftist ideologues that
consider any deviation from Marx’s teaching a heresy an easy excuse to
dismiss my simple hydroelectric power plant example. In any case, if the
American employers are sharing the surplus
value with their workers, as they usually do, then they owe that share to
the American workers, but not to
Mexican migrants.
2The
cost of “free” social benefits, like free health care in emergency rooms,
subsidized housing, practically free education, etc., with little or no income
taxes paid, should be subtracted from the cost of
recreation and added to the actual amount of the surplus value stolen by the “migrants” from the
American society. Oddly enough, many opponents of mass “migration”
perceive this former amount as the only one that the “migrants”
actually steal from the Americans, neglecting the latter (the share in the surplus value, that is) which is a raw
of magnitude higher than the former. As a result, even the most vocal critics
of mass Mexican “migration” into America seem to underestimate its
actual cost by a factor of ten (rough estimate).
3But
he does claim as if the “migrants” had launched a successful Bolshevik-style
revolution in the
Readers’ comments: None at this time. [top]
REFERENCES
[1] Stealing the
American Dream
By Mark Andrew
Dwyer
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/dwyer013007.htm
Past commentary (January 2, 2006): THE
CUCKOO CHICKS
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