Inflation and Labor Shortage

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Democracy at Work

Politics, News, Government

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a REPEAT episode. In this week's show, Prof Wolff talks about the social effects of inflation and the lack of accountability on the part of employers. Capitalist employers set prices with the only motive of maximizing. Employees, the vast majority, must live with inflation but are excluded from decisions setting prices. Employers scream labor shortage to get the government to force workers back to work at low wages. Employers recover from economic crashes but undercut workers efforts to do the same. How capitalism works.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic
0:16.1	dimensions of our lives, jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host,
0:24.2	Richard Wolfe. This time of year, the July 4th holiday is on people's mind. And I wanted to
0:32.1	start with that because it allows us an insight into economic problems we're facing now.
0:40.2	Independence back in the end of the 18th century was on Americans' minds.
0:45.2	They were angry, frankly, about the reality of being governed by George the third King of England.
0:55.3	They didn't like, and they were very clear about this, that he, the king, had all kinds of
1:01.6	power and authority over them, and they had none over him.
1:06.4	In other words, they were angry that the king could do all kinds of things that were good for
1:12.5	the king, or maybe good for British Empire interests, but were not particularly good for the
1:19.9	colonists here in what came to be known as the United States.
1:24.9	It got so difficult, it got so tense, that the Americans, so called, decided
1:31.8	to revolt, to break away in a violent revolution against the established authority of King George
1:41.6	III. And as you all know, we celebrate the War of Independence that made the United States free.
1:50.2	And notice, we did not establish another king to replace George the third, having become independent of him.
1:59.6	No, we did something very different.
2:01.6	No king.
2:02.6	We didn't want that anymore.
2:04.6	We didn't want anyone in political authority to have power over the rest of us without some reverse power to kind of make it more,
2:16.6	dare I say, democratic.
2:20.8	Well, why am I talking about this?
2:23.1	Because in our economic system, we have situations quite like what we didn't tolerate
	...

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