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In other words, let rich and powerful people exploit those less fortunate as much as they can get away with, forestalling any new limitations on such abuse and relaxing the existing limitations on such abuse, without regard to any sense of basic human decency.
I have to wonder, given how much success right-wingers have had over the last generation with their efforts to double economic injustice, and assuming the right-wingers get their way on this matter in this generation and double economic injustice for a second time in as many generations, whether they'll be working to re-institute slavery a generation from now.
In other words, let rich and powerful people exploit those less fortunate as much as they can get away with, forestalling any new limitations on such abuse and relaxing the existing limitations on such abuse, without regard to any sense of basic human decency.
I have to wonder, given how much success right-wingers have had over the last generation with their efforts to double economic injustice, and assuming the right-wingers get their way on this matter in this generation and double economic injustice for a second time in as many generations, whether they'll be working to re-institute slavery a generation from now.
No.....let the great workers get paid a fair wage without the poor workers running to the labor board.
All of my little jobs I would have been paid more.
In other words, let rich and powerful people exploit those less fortunate as much as they can get away with, forestalling any new limitations on such abuse and relaxing the existing limitations on such abuse, without regard to any sense of basic human decency.
I have to wonder, given how much success right-wingers have had over the last generation with their efforts to double economic injustice, and assuming the right-wingers get their way on this matter in this generation and double economic injustice for a second time in as many generations, whether they'll be working to re-institute slavery a generation from now.
1) You edited my comments to remove context in order to build your little straw man, which is indicated by "in other words" so you argue against your construct, not mine.
2) In voluntary employment, neither employee nor employer is in the deal against their will. I make a substantial multiple of the minimum wage for what I do. My employer has a lot of wiggle room between my compensation and the federal wage floor...yet continues paying me what I feel like is a pretty darn good overall wage. Why would this rich and powerful entity do such a crazy thing, when their natural inclination is to exploit and harm me with "slave wages" (one of our lexicon's funnier oxymorons btw), given that according to your model, I have no choice but to work for anything they choose to pay me, even if it is $0.05 per month?
3) How obtuse must a person be to equate the libertarian principle of voluntary association & mutually agreeable, voluntary trade with oppression/slavery? No worker should work for a wage they find disagreeable, nor should an employer pay wages they find disagreeable. Since employment in this country is 100% voluntary, neither must. A wage floor enforced by law is closer to oppression/slavery than anything I am suggesting, because it forces the employer, in some cases, to pay a wage they find disagreeable and/or unprofitable. The intern is a good example, as is cheapo labor like holding the placard on the street corner, a job that does not require a ton of skill or training. These are jobs that are properly in the $0-5 per hour range. The intern gains resume bullets and knowledge, the placard holder gets a little extra scratch for doing what they'd be doing at home for free...sitting/standing around doing nothing. Nothing unfair, oppressive or enslaving about any of that.
If you find holding a placard on a street corner detestable at $5 an hour...THEN DON'T DO THAT FREAKING JOB!! If you find working for free as an intern detestable...THEN DON'T DO THAT FREAKING JOB!!
What world do you live where the individual does not have the choice in the "take the job or not" equation? Did you go on a job interview once and have the prospective employer demand, at gunpoint, that you take the job at the wage they demanded? Is slavery legal where you live? If so, you should probably notify someone in the federal government, because slavery is 'sposed to be bad juju.
But who are you to tell an employer what the minimum is for any job they need done? I would pay someone $5 per week to clean my cats' litter boxes. Given the amount of time it takes me, that would work out to be less than minimum wage. Since I am not allowed to pay anyone less than minimum wage, nobody gets that $5 and I clean the kitty sand myself. I would pay $5 to have my driveway shoveled. On a bad snow day, it would take an hour. Oops, guess nobody gets my $5 and I go get exercise. Etc etc. You can go ahead and decide that cleaning cat boxes and shoveling driveways should pay $10.10 per hour, and all that means is I will do that stuff myself. So potential paying work just got eliminated because you decided for me how much I must pay for stuff I want done.
All minimum wage laws do is take a certain number of jobs at the un/low skilled margins and eliminate them because they cease to be profitable over not doing them or doing them yourself. This hurts those with no/few skills the most, since those are the jobs that launch them into the larger market of skills. In the cases where the employer adjusts prices to retain the same number of jobs, the consumer of their product gets the hit in higher prices. Since that hit is typically lower as it is spread out among many consumers, this is seen as a utilitarian net positive. It's illusory though, because it uses "dollars per person" welfare state thinking instead of "number of people harmed vs number of people helped" liberty/natural rights thinking.
4) You like to straw man the stuff I type because you like yelling at libertarians. I get it. But know this...you are the resident king of fallacy, and you rarely make a logically sound point. You did not logically address my point, you went for an appeal to sympathy/ridicule based on a straw man. Your most probable response now will be to paint me as uncaring ogre and enslaver of the masses, but anyone other than you reading our exchange will know who is on the side of logic and who is on the side or childish emotional nonsense.
1) You edited my comments to remove context in order to build your little straw man, which is indicated by "in other words" so you argue against your construct, not mine.
2) In voluntary employment, neither employee nor employer is in the deal against their will. I make a substantial multiple of the minimum wage for what I do. My employer has a lot of wiggle room between my compensation and the federal wage floor...yet continues paying me what I feel like is a pretty darn good overall wage. Why would this rich and powerful entity do such a crazy thing, when their natural inclination is to exploit and harm me with "slave wages" (one of our lexicon's funnier oxymorons btw), given that according to your model, I have no choice but to work for anything they choose to pay me, even if it is $0.05 per month?
3) How obtuse must a person be to equate the libertarian principle of voluntary association & mutually agreeable, voluntary trade with oppression/slavery? No worker should work for a wage they find disagreeable, nor should an employer pay wages they find disagreeable. Since employment in this country is 100% voluntary, neither must. A wage floor enforced by law is closer to oppression/slavery than anything I am suggesting, because it forces the employer, in some cases, to pay a wage they find disagreeable and/or unprofitable. The intern is a good example, as is cheapo labor like holding the placard on the street corner, a job that does not require a ton of skill or training. These are jobs that are properly in the $0-5 per hour range. The intern gains resume bullets and knowledge, the placard holder gets a little extra scratch for doing what they'd be doing at home for free...sitting/standing around doing nothing. Nothing unfair, oppressive or enslaving about any of that.
If you find holding a placard on a street corner detestable at $5 an hour...THEN DON'T DO THAT FREAKING JOB!! If you find working for free as an intern detestable...THEN DON'T DO THAT FREAKING JOB!!
What world do you live where the individual does not have the choice in the "take the job or not" equation? Did you go on a job interview once and have the prospective employer demand, at gunpoint, that you take the job at the wage they demanded? Is slavery legal where you live? If so, you should probably notify someone in the federal government, because slavery is 'sposed to be bad juju.
But who are you to tell an employer what the minimum is for any job they need done? I would pay someone $5 per week to clean my cats' litter boxes. Given the amount of time it takes me, that would work out to be less than minimum wage. Since I am not allowed to pay anyone less than minimum wage, nobody gets that $5 and I clean the kitty sand myself. I would pay $5 to have my driveway shoveled. On a bad snow day, it would take an hour. Oops, guess nobody gets my $5 and I go get exercise. Etc etc. You can go ahead and decide that cleaning cat boxes and shoveling driveways should pay $10.10 per hour, and all that means is I will do that stuff myself. So potential paying work just got eliminated because you decided for me how much I must pay for stuff I want done.
All minimum wage laws do is take a certain number of jobs at the un/low skilled margins and eliminate them because they cease to be profitable over not doing them or doing them yourself. This hurts those with no/few skills the most, since those are the jobs that launch them into the larger market of skills. In the cases where the employer adjusts prices to retain the same number of jobs, the consumer of their product gets the hit in higher prices. Since that hit is typically lower as it is spread out among many consumers, this is seen as a utilitarian net positive. It's illusory though, because it uses "dollars per person" welfare state thinking instead of "number of people harmed vs number of people helped" liberty/natural rights thinking.
4) You like to straw man the stuff I type because you like yelling at libertarians. I get it. But know this...you are the resident king of fallacy, and you rarely make a logically sound point. You did not logically address my point, you went for an appeal to sympathy/ridicule based on a straw man. Your most probable response now will be to paint me as uncaring ogre and enslaver of the masses, but anyone other you reading our exchange will know who is on the side of logic and who is on the side or childish emotional nonsense.
Doesn't the government at least partly control housing just by having national parks. How many places can the homeless not stay due to government regulation?
If 5% of the military budget went to build housing what would that do to housing costs? If rents went down 30% what effect would that have on the need for minimum wage? The curious thing about the United States is that with such a low population density why is housing costs so high. Sometimes I wonder how the housing market is manipulated.
No.....let the great workers get paid a fair wage without the poor workers running to the labor board.
No one has a problem with great workers getting paid a fair wage. The issue is the doubling of economic injustice in a generation, and how that has resulted in more and more of the most vulnerable people in our society being unable to pay their own way. You want people to pay their own way right? Yet you vacuously prattle on against jobs paying enough so that people can pay their own way, hiding your offensive claptrap behind inane insinuations that people you don't care about obviously are all idiots and deserve to be abused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Driller1
All of my little jobs I would have been paid more.
The self-ratifying self-deception has no end, apparently.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
1) You edited my comments to remove context in order to build your little straw man, which is indicated by "in other words" so you argue against your construct, not mine.
Yet it still accurately describes the effect of what you support.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
2) In voluntary employment, neither employee nor employer is in the deal against their will.
You're deliberately blinding yourself to the societal impact of an imbalance between the demand for work and the demand for labor. How the heck do you expect to be able to post a valid perspective while committing such self-deception? If you were honest with yourself, you'd admit that you're not even talking about the right context. But I don't expect you to admit that your reasoning is flawed in that way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
3) How obtuse must a person be to equate the libertarian principle of voluntary association & mutually agreeable, voluntary trade with oppression/slavery?
How obtuse must a person be to blind themselves to the injustice of today's labor marketplace?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
4) You like to straw man the stuff I type because you like yelling at libertarians. I get it. But know this...you are the resident king of fallacy, and you rarely make a logically sound point.
Coming from you, that means nothing. What could be more nonsensical than a libertarian whining about a principled person like myself calling out libertarianism for its offensively self-centered nature.
Minimum wage should be such that a person working full-time, 2,080 hours per year, is 10% above the poverty line. I'm an engineer so I will call that the factor of safety. It should be based on a two-person household and rounded to the nearest $0.25 / hour.
Minimum wage should also be indexed to inflation, with an automatic biannual COL adjustment. This should not be a political discussion every few years, nor should people deal with constant reduction in buying power.
Currently, using my formula, the minimum wage will be $8.25 / hour in 2014, with a future projected increase to $8.50 / hour in 2016, and $9.00 / hour in 2018.
For far too many of our people so long as most of the minimum wage workers are young, black or Mexican women an inadequate minimum wage and nonexistent benefits are perfectly acceptable. These people should be punished for not being born white, middle or upper class males.
The minimum wage debate is social not economic. Keeping it low is designed to perpetuate our permanent underclass.
For far too many of our people so long as most of the minimum wage workers are young, black or Mexican women an inadequate minimum wage and nonexistent benefits are perfectly acceptable. These people should be punished for not being born white, middle or upper class males.
The minimum wage debate is social not economic. Keeping it low is designed to perpetuate our permanent underclass.
And if they are great workers they should be stifled???
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