MAKING PLANS FOR NIGEL. THE WORLD OF WORK AND LEADING YOUR CHILDREN.

At least in America, most moms and dads do disservice to their children by not explaining the reality of the world to their children by the time their children enter teenhood.

By the time their children graduate from high school, their children flounder into adulthood. Those who do so, often end up having unfulfilled, mediocre lives. It's no wonder they end up taking anti-depressants by the time they reach their 40s.

To help out a friend whose daughter has been in her final months of high school, I wrote the following in an email.

At day's end, the work world hinges here: either you work for private industry or you work for legislators of a government, directly or indirectly.

If you work for private industry you can work:

• extracting stuff (mining, logging, fishing, harvesting)
• making stuff (manufacturing, construction) 
• selling stuff (wholesale, retail) 
• transporting and storing stuff (transportation, warehousing)
• destroying and re-purposing stuff (deconstruction, waste removal, recycling)
• financing stuff (credit for all the foregoing activities)

You can work recording stuff, either for the entertainment others or for the dispersion of facts (movies, music, publishing). You can work letting people or machines talk at distances (telecom).

You can work serving others for leisure (restaurants, gambling, sports, zoos), for business (accounting, designing, engineering, computing, testing, repairing, defending legally, advising, marketing) or for personal reasons (grooming, cleaning). You can work hauling away stuff that is no longer wanted (waste control).

You can work providing credit to all who do the above (banking, securities), paying off on loss when things above get wrecked (insurance), or brokering things of construction (real estate).

If you work for government indirectly, you can serve people by indoctrinating them into prevailing beliefs paradigms (education), by babysitting them (child care, chronic disease) or by helping to heal them (acute disease).

Working for government directly, you can provide political bribes to the lazy or needy (welfare). You can do oversight of those making stuff in private industry (regulation) or their personal behavior (policing). You can collect facts for those doing private work or government work. You can kill foreigners whom your politicians don't like (military).

In general, you earn more when you are willing to put your life on the line while fewer are willing to do the same. This is so whether you face immediate dangers (e.g., high rise construction, underwater welding) or you postpone living to educate yourself in ever harder to learn things (surgery, medical arts).

On average, those who work as doctors, engineers and those who sell high-priced stuff earn the most. The best rules of thumb are these:

1. The harder it is to get a skill used in producing property (right of ownership) that others are willing to bid high to acquire in purchases and sales, the more pay you can earn.
2. The more pressing and acute something is, the greater the willingness someone has to pay to solve it or to pressure others to pay for it.

In private industry, from the 1950s and 1970s until now, technological advance has replaced dumb hands with smart machines amplifying the work of smarter men and women. Thus, all job growth has been in specialization trades or support activities for the various major divisions of industries.

If your plan is to become a CEO, you must start from day one with that goal and every act you do at work must be geared toward the politics of office life toward reaching that goal. At minimum, you must earn a bachelor's degree. It's best to do so in the fields of finance or economics.

Also, among a world of more than seven billion, few rise to the top. Dreaming of being famous, a celebrity is a waste of time, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself and all of those things that accompany everyday life for the typical person. In short, you must become a monster, a caricature of a man or woman to become a political leader, a CEO, a movie star, a pop star and so on.

Moms and dads of future teenagers should stress math, especially math for decision (odds, interest, ratios, rates of change) and measurement, English for expression (writing), visual communication (2d, 3d sketching for storyboarding), competitive athletics and musical performance.

Parents ought to lead their children in acquiring the skills and ways needed for self-expression. For self-expression is the key to good living. Those with the highest skills in self-expression end up earning more precisely because they can make property in things or experiences that others tend to bid highest to acquire.

Tattoos, fashion, idol worship of celebrities, and the work of psychologists and psychiatrists, thrive because most Americans grow up lacking skills needed for self-expression. Those with the weakest skills of self-expression live vicariously, dependent upon others to do the expressing for them.

Enjoy!

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WORK NEVER CREATES VALUE. WORK CREATES PROPERTY.

Recently, noted anti-banking blogger, Charles Hugh Smith wrote in The Changing Nature of Middle Class Work, "If we ask, what is work?, the conventional answer is tasks that somebody will pay us to do. This is true, but it doesn't address why someone is willing to pay us. The answer is to create value."

Charles Hugh Smith and all those like him perpetuate fallacy. The fallacy that work creates value is a variant of David Ricardo's labor causes value theory, which Karl Marx built upon his entire theory. 

As I show in BUT I SPENT 150 HOURS HANDCRAFTING THAT OIL ON CANVAS! OR THE LABORER'S SILLY THEORY OF VALUE, labor has nothing to do with prices. Prices get set by winning bidders. 

All prices adhere to the one and only true law of trade, the Law of Price — the winning bids of purchase and sale in the face of what is on offer sets the price. Prices get set by winning bidders who possess the means — these days legal tender cash or credit — in the face of what is on offer.

If no one bids for anything made, no matter how skillfully done, it's worthless. If bids are below cost, oh well. That is an signal that most everyone in a society of property deem the work worthless and a waste of resources. 

The entirety of trade, or commerce, or real economics ties up with two words — property and profit. Without profit from effort, anyone would lack buying power to buy anything else. Without property, no one can trade. 

Though most think of property as things possessed, property always has meant the right of ownership and never the thing owned. Only when property gets created, can trade arise between two persons. 

The name for property put to making stuff is called capital. The name for property put to purchase and sale for cash and credit is wealth. 

Work is expressed skills through time. Work becomes the wealth of the laborer when traded away in a purchase and sale. Why someone pays for work is to gain property in that work. 

Cash and credit in the form of wages becomes the wealth of the employer when traded away in a purchase and sale for wealth of the worker, which is her work.

In a purchase and sale, work is what the laborer sells and wages in the form of cash or credit is what the laborer buys. 

Until an employer gains property in the effort of an employee, which we call work, the employer cannot do anything with that work. Taking possession of something without having property in something is called theft. 

Work of a laborer is no different than computer chips made by robots in a factory. Both are components of a larger product. 

The manufacturer of smartphones with computer chips does so in quest to trade away at profit, property in smartphones for property in cash or credit.

Value does not mean usefulness. Value is a ratio. Value is the ratio of one thing for another. The ratio of exchange, that is, the rate of exchange, or said as the exchange rate, is the value. 

When one two things in a purchase and sale is cash or credit denominated in cash, value gets called by the word price. Value is the quantity of what is acquired in a purchase in sale over cash or credit denominated in cash given up in that purchase and sale.  

So, 6 oranges for $1 is the value, written as 6 oranges / $1. 6 oranges together is a trade quantity. $1 is a trade quantity. 

Stuff doesn't have value. Stuff makes value. Value is a ratio of one thing for another in actual trade. Value arises from valuation. Always, value is a ratio expressed as one thing traded for another. 

Value arises solely in the moment of trade. When one of two things in trade is cash or credit, we give the word value another name. We call it price.  

Value results from reciprocal desire to gain property from whatever causes in the minds of those involved in the trade. 

To someone, she might sell $8 and buy a hamburger and a milkshake. To someone else, he might sell $8 for a six-pack of beer.  

Even though their subjective desires differ with respect to the same sum of cash, $8, any outside observer can observe objectively value in either transaction, one burger and shake for $8 as well as one six-pack of beer for $8. 

There is no other cause for price (value) than the quest to gain control of property. No one can realize profit gains without property owing to being among a society of property. No one can derive the usefulness of goods before possessing those goods.

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HOW IS THAT HIGH-PAYING WELFARE GIG WORKING OUT FOR YOU, GOVERNMENT "WORKER"?

Government jobs pay more than private sector jobs for comparable work. It is convenient mythology owing to clever rhetoric that government work pays less than private sector work. See here, here, here and here. 

Government work is fake-work, make-work for the most part. Outside of ports, roads, bridges, border defense, contract enforcement and property assurance as to weights, measures ingredients and the like — you know, general welfare, the only kind of welfare authorized by the Constitution — government work is super high-paying welfare and nothing more.

People who work for government in any capacity other than the general welfare suffer from significant self-delusion as to their actual livelihood and worth to those in society of property.

All should be sure that private sector workers engage in work that produces property that might be wanted. That stuff is called wealth. Government work produces nothing and most often exists to inhibit the production of property and hence wealth.

Often, government work is stealth competition, paid for by taxpayers, but worked at the behest of those who engage in regulatory capture. 

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