Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you’re still wrong. Let me explain:
The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.
Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there’s a higher supply, prices go down; while if there’s higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.
Now, companies don’t have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it’s done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.
The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won’t have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that’s what we’re already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.
I don’t think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That’s why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.