First off, people who are unemployed can't easily replace the people who work. The 35-year old high school dropout with an alcohol problem can't just jump in and share the workload of the investment banker working 80 hours per week. In the West many of the people who are unemployed are so because they lack skills demanded in the market.
Secondly, even to the extent that people do have the right skills work isn't an infinitely divisible mass. If I invest 20 hours in reading up on the election of 1976 I'll be the only one able to invest another 20 hours in writing a summary of it. I can't share that job with someone else. Nor could I easily have shared the reading. A lot of jobs in the modern economy has these properties.
Thirdly, there are many fixed costs involved in an employee, such as commuter time, having an office, etc. These costs make it inefficient to share jobs between a lot of people.
These are good points. Of course I thought about that myself. I have some ideas on it, but I can't put that in words now. Not in English, and not this morning. But you will get an answer on this part, I promise
Now, I'm not so arrogant as to think that everyone else in the world has failed at rationally organizing work whereas I alone have found the golden path to paradise. If it actually were more efficient to divide work between more people I suspect some of the many companies struggling to get ahead in the market would be doing it.
It is not that this ideas are mine (they are about 150 years old), nor did I claim to have found the golden path.
And your second sentence is just wrong: What is efficient for a company has not to be efficient for society as a whole. Producing handguns or crystal meth is an
extremely inefficient thing for society, but it is nice cash for the market player who produces it.
So, if market players don't do certain things does not mean that those things wouldn't be great from a society perspective.
This is a common mistake of market liberals / libertarians.
As regards how a market works, you seem to be mixing up different things. An agent in the market doesn't think "how much can I sell." He or she thinks "how can I best satisfy my preferences" Most people have preferences such as having a house or food and to obtain that they must have money. To have money they must work (thus, sell their labour services). Thus, they work. They don't sell as much as possible, because most people also value leisure time.
Sure. But they have to take part in the system to satisfy their preferences, and the system functions under certain rules.
For example, of course you do not work 40h a day to satisfy your preferences in a concrete sense. The value of your work is much higher than that. But you don't get all the value of your work paid, the employer keeps some of it.
This very fact makes pretty clear that capitalism is not just a simple interchange of preferences, but that other dynamics are involved.
It is true of course that the agents typically don't consider how to satisfy the needs of everyone else. They might not aim to satisfy the preferences of the bum on the street. That might be a moral failure of human beings, but it's hardly the system failing to satisfy preferences.
No! It is not a moral failure of humans, it is the system. Even if it breaks the bakers' heart every single morning to see the bum hungry on the street in front of his bakery, he can't give away his goods to him for free (he could do it once or twice, but not on a regular basis) because that would hurt his market position. And that is the cruelty of the system.
The capitalist system does not really have a goal. People have goals and these goals tend to involve satisfying their preferences by selling something in the market. If people preferred not doing that there is nothing inherent in capitalism forcing it upon them.
The goal is to produce (abstract) wealth by any means. Doesn't matter if you produce hand grenades or baby toys, porn movies or cancer pills. It has to grow.
Example: If a societies' abstract wealth does not grow anymore, it is called "crisis".
This is not a crisis in producing goods and services, like a bad harvest in earlier times. There are the same machines, the same skilled workers, the same natural ressources, the same infrastructure to produce everything people need as they were before the crisis.
It is just a crisis in making money of the goods and services produced. Sales crisis, overproduction crisis are a joke in its self, if you come to think of it.
Of course, not everyone gets everything they want. Then again, I think more people are getting what they want to a larger extent now than ever before. And in my book, that is a good thing.
Oh, no disagreement here. The capitalist society is a great improvement compared with any pre-capitalist society, as I already mentioned I think. But that does not mean that the evolution of human societies should end here.
