Suppose you own a company, call it company A. You have a job opening for a cook and it is a minimum wage job. The first guy is a white guy out of high school seems real eager to work, the second guy is a black guy who was fired from his last job after 3 weeks, and the third guy seems al-right but has tattoo and seems a little shady. Since they demand the same wage the minimum wage, the white guy is going to get the job.

Now consider the same scenario if there was no minimum wage. With no minimum wage, in addition to the 3 candidates, you might get more candidates consider the 4th an white non-violent ex-con but served in Iraq.

In this latter scenario with no minimum wage, the job goes to the candidate that wants it the most. He will underbid the others to offset his flaws. Suppose considering his prejudices and wage he decides to hire the black kid at $5.00 per hour with the promise to give a raise later.

Now the employer can afford to presently pay $15 per hour for the job. So the new hire goes well he turns out to be a real good employee and gets better as time goes on. However, he is looking to make more money. So he looks at other jobs and gets accepted as a another cook in for $12 per hour. Now suppose his current boss counter the offer and offers him $15 per hour.

Suppose Company A has a 50% profit and suppose company B has 25% profit but uses the rest for employees wages. As time goes on the best employees will move to company B since the wages are higher. The division of labor and the invisible hand of business with set the wages and fire the worst workers, allow the best companies to grow, and force the worst companies into bankruptcy. If wages are cut and prices drop it only gives the dollar more value. The dollar rising in value due to dropping prices is a wage increase. Thus low wages and low prices with low profits actually may be the best raise for poor people in America. Thank god for McDonalds and Walmart.

So suppose you have a mine and a bunch of union workers and they go on strike. Not considering the higher prices for the commodity consider the other people that want to get a job at the mine. Suppose the mine workers are getting paid $50 per hour. However, you have an unlimited list that would work for $15 per hour. Why to the typical liberals consider the union miners at $50 per hour good for workers? They gain at the expense of someone else.

You can follow the same logic with international trade such as U.S. steel, but in the end you will always find in every case that restricting what businesses do will always result in hurting the workers the most. As more restrictions are placed on businesses it will restrict the creation of competitors and the creation of new industries, this ultimately creates a smaller job market and lower wages. More businesses equals higher wages less profit and lower prices. Unions have value for health and safety standards and rehiring fired workers, but those ultimately help business too. What is good for business (or GM) is good for America.

After listening to Obama's speech tonight everything is wrong with it. It is not as Schumer says it is because the republicans are on the take. It is because all government involvement will damage wages and prices more than government involvement is suppose to help. This is because government is not subject to but disrupts the invisible hand and the division of labor which ultimately results in people being less free and wealthy.

Now consider his free college ideas. Now it is possible to provide free college to everyone, just tack on 5% when they graduate to their taxes and send it into a endowment fund to give to new college entrants to go to school. Thus there is no debt to be repaid and the vouchers goes to the student first. Thus the schools must compete for the vouchers. But all this could be and would be done privately without government involvement.

Obamas idea will only result in colleges charging more per student behind the scenes. Most colleges already charge the taxpayer $20,000 per year. Yes, it might be wise to allow students to enter college with no money but they should work for it in wages after they graduate. To work for it by completing it and with good grades, is no different than saying you are working by running on a treadmill. In the end the workers that don't go to school ultimately pay for someone else's vacation. And this government run vacation is not even that good.

Only 3 sentences in so far, but, I need to know the race of the 3rd guy with the tattoo in order to make proper decisions going forward.

Just trying to show the high teenage black unemployment rate is caused by the minimum wage laws. According to BLS the black youth unemployment rate is presently 24.8% and labor participation rate is 50%. Furthermore, people are put in jobs and careers they have no interest in.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm

I was watching a show on RT, and they mentioned the reason why you have such high unemployment in Italy is that after 2 years it is nearly impossible to fire anyone. Every goal and law meant to help someone, sick days, gender pay, minimum wage ultimately hurt the ones they want to help the most.

Of all the bills the republicans want to write the top priority is forcing the requirement for Obamacare penalities from 30 hours to 40 hours for employers. This actually helps employees as it gives the employee the chance to hold 2 30-hour jobs and test them out and trade the bad job for the good job. So of all the bills that could help the employees (ending minimum wage and public sector unions) the politicians pick one that may actually help us.

Then you got this republican response, 80% of the farms in Iowa are owned outright, most Iowans with farms are multimillionaires and collect $100,000s in subsidies over their lifetimes. They could lease their farm out for higher than the median wage. Then this lady spends 5 minutes trying to convince people how poor she is.

sorry for the rant.

I too think that minimum wage laws are silly. I'm a big believer in markets which is why I want the government to employ a lot more people.

Don't get the oxymoron. The government could hire a lot of people at $1 or $2 per hour, building roads, if they are willing to work for it.

Government jobs make the people poorer. Some jobs like librarians and pbs could and should be eliminated asap. By their very nature all government jobs will pay more than their private sector equivalent. Government execs will never be able to hire and fire as well as in the private sector, thus overpaying for labor. Government execs will never be able to build infrastructure as well as in the private sector, thus overpaying for materials. Government will never be able to spend money as well as in the private sector, overpaying on boondoggle projects in which no one is held accountable. The private sector thrives on the competent driving out the incompetent. Thus if you end PBS and shows like NOVA, their equivalent like Universe and How the Universe Works will be made more cost effective and more educational. In the meantime turning PBS into a revenue machine for the government.

Now you may say look at what government has done for the solar industry. My response is they hurt it badly. Evergreen a good company was forced into bankruptcy since they had to pay the minimum wage jobs. Tariffs are place on Chinese companies resulting in higher costs. Tax credits and rebates only slow installations that can do without them and are already cheap enough. Government red tape often adds $3 per watt to installations and months and sometimes years delay.

The government is responsible for police, jails, and defense they can't be cut, but they can be aided wherever possible. Road work can be contracted out.

That's the point steelhouse. When the government employs people to the point where unemployment is low, the private sector is driven by market forces to pay higher wages.

The trade off 50 years ago was the private sector paid more but the public sector offered better job security. Separating workers; from those who weren't ambitious but generally wanted a stable job from with those who were, and happy to gamble.

When you remove the government from the equation, the employers have an inbuilt advantage because even though the worker and the capitalist need each other, one need is more immediate than the other. The worker has to work soon to survive and the capitalist can choose to live off his capital in the meantime.

The effect of this it that there are the "haves" and "have nots". There is little social mobility under this regime as the haves will use their market position (quite rightly) to maximise profit at the expense of the have nots.

Capitalism isn't a zero-sum game per se. It's just that in the short run economic gains can only be balanced with economic losses. If your company fares better, than at least one of your competitors fares worse. A competitor for these purposes can be defined as your customers or other suppliers.

In the long run, capitalism can be made to work (for 99% of the population). It just requires a dominating company or a number of large companies to be run not for profit. In the real world that is unlikely to happen so the best solution is for the taxpayers to band together and form their own company, the government.

No offense this is all wrong.

1. When the government employs people to the point where unemployment is low, the private sector is driven by market forces to pay higher wages.

Higher wages does not make anyone better off. All it does is increase the prices. The net sum game of the government trying to lower unemployment by employing people is reduced wealth, wages and freedom for society.

2. The trade off 50 years ago was the private sector paid more but the public sector offered better job security. Separating workers; from those who weren't ambitious but generally wanted a stable job from with those who were, and happy to gamble.

This is also a fallacy. The U.S. post office worker makes more than UPS and FED Ex workers. The public school teacher makes more than private school teachers.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...achers/280829/

3. When you remove the government from the equation, the employers have an inbuilt advantage because even though the worker and the capitalist need each other, one need is more immediate than the other. The worker has to work soon to survive and the capitalist can choose to live off his capital in the meantime.

This is another fallacy. The worker can buy stock if he or she wants. The worker can save his income use it later. The reason why people don't save there are a lot of benefits of not owning money you can't be sued, you can bypass insurance, you can get food stamps, welfare, medicaid, lower tax breaks, and lower phone and utility costs. You can probably save $10-$20K a year not owning assets in America.

Most inexperienced people lose money investing in capital, most people I know will not come near the stock market due to all the money they have lost. Just look at all the people that lost on gold, dot-bomb, and oil in recent years. A home is not an investment, it is only an investment because the mortgage rates are so low that the government is using peoples bank accounts to subsidize housing.

Workers are capitalists just as much as the owners. It is the workers that are paid first. Only after the workers are paid, the interest is paid, the taxes are paid, repairs and maintenance, do the owners of the business get paid.

4. The effect of this it that there are the "haves" and "have nots". There is little social mobility under this regime as the haves will use their market position (quite rightly) to maximise profit at the expense of the have nots.

This is all wrong. The workers have the choice where they want to work. They can walk out the door any time. They can save and invest or start a business with what they have gained. They can go to school and become a dentist for $160,000 a year. A business owner would need a a business worth $3,000,000 to make that much. There is also a general trend when profits are high wages are high.

Look at all the businesses where profits are high and you will see that wages are also high.

5. In the long run, capitalism can be made to work (for 99% of the population). It just requires a dominating company or a number of large companies to be run not for profit.

Generally it is true non-profits pay better than profits. No money goes to government or shareholders. But consider if all businesses were non-profit. Suppose you have a ****ty job in the post room. There is no hope for you can't save and invest and all the would be profits go to the top.

6. In the real world that is unlikely to happen so the best solution is for the taxpayers to band together and form their own company, the government.

This is basically the communist manifesto. Because the government is usually just a bunch of morons known is the United States as liberals and USSR the proletariat. This class is just a bunch of hamsters on the wheel. They may spend the money on PBS or whatever they think they want to they work at home and take long vacations. Obama is a member of this class his brother and Uncles are not. If Obama did not work for government he would be like his uncles, just a bum living on the street. Bums living on the street working hard to support the government employee lifestyle they pay for.

Yes if you work in government you can get the best health care and go to gyms, drive around and hang out with celebrities, fly around and hire the best speech writers to tell the people what a bunch of bums they are. However they must convince you the business owner is the enemy, not the government employee you feed and work so hard to line the pockets of.

The best solution for the taxpayers is to stop the government as Thomas Jefferson warned. Stop the government so they can be rich instead of the government employees with their money.

The only difference is the non-government poor in the Soviet Union starved to death. Here they are guaranteed food to get some votes to keep them in power.

I was with you until this ^...To think the reasons people don't save is that not saving is a superior economic strategy is pretty lol. (perhaps the upper end of the slave class) The obvious real reason is that their wages barely cover their cost of living.

This is more the cause with the effect worsening with time. Employees are employees because they already don't have.

Those who have land are self sustainable, those who don't aren't and therefore need jobs. Employees will always be in a horrible negotiating position and represent a lower class.

Solution - A host nation should divide their land into lots with it being inherited by their sons. All others wishing to live in said nation, would obviously have to become an employee or marry in, as they wouldn't be able to own land, since it's already spoken for.

Numbers 33:54 And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.

That being said, I think you (Steelehouse) made some good points as to why governmental crap like min. wage is horrid.

Deut 4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yyv1xYDWAxk

According to law of rent, when land is plentiful as in region 1, Henry George showed that is when chattel slavery pops up. New settlers will just take up new land rather than pay any rent. Thus they must have slavery in order to get people to work for them. However, as the place fills up slavery is replaced with land ownership as well as capital ownership disguised as land ownership. The reason rents are far easier to collect than having to deal with housing and feeding slaves. George also showed as land fills up, all the profits and wages end up going to rent. What Henry George did not see is that government property, sales, income and other taxes are another form of rent. Thus rents are divided between the land owners and the government.

Whet I propose is limiting the amount land you can own so you never leave the 1st 2 regions. That way the rents are always small. In case of farmland, the government could impose a property tax maybe $150 a acre to allow larger optimal size farms and make sure the land is used for farming.

For cities that may require limiting free land ownership to 1000 square feet. Thus, there may be a mandate that all construction in certain regions might be 40 stories high. Then next to least apartments, the land might go directly to wilderness, free wilderness as it will not be economical to build a building even if the land was free. Thus you could live anywhere in the United States on free land with no taxes or permits.

I could not find a interpretation of Numbers 33:54 "And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit."

But, I interpret it as everyone gets equal lands. If a women gets married she loses her inheritance but becomes the family of her husband.

People will buy what they can they use debt say to buy a car or a house. Debt becomes usuable money which is often easier to obtain and safer than saving. You can always walk away from your debts.

Minimum wage in San Francisco will rise to $15.00/hr by 2018. Now we'll see if small businesses can survive.

Fwiw, a woman ONLY gets an inheritance in the case where she has no brothers.

Numbers 27:6And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 7The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them. 8And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. 9And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his brethren. 10And if he have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his father's brethren. 11And if his father have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his kinsman that is next to him of his family, and he shall possess it: and it shall be unto the children of Israel a statute of judgment, as the LORD commanded Moses.

And in such a case, she has to marry someone from her own tribe, in order that her inheritance isn't transferred outside of said tribe. (e.g. Joseph to Judah)

Numbers33:5 And Moses commanded the children of Israel according to the word of the LORD, saying, The tribe of the sons of Joseph hath said well. 6This is the thing which the LORD doth command concerning the daughters of Zelophehad, saying, Let them marry to whom they think best; only to the family of the tribe of their father shall they marry. 7So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe: for every one of the children of Israel shall keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers. 8And every daughter, that possesseth an inheritance in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe of her father, that the children of Israel may enjoy every man the inheritance of his fathers. 9Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEvB_ZIWtAg
San Francisco Market Street 1906, no state income, no federal income, no sales, no capital gains, no dividend taxes, no poker taxes. No minimum wage.

San Francisco may survive, as much of the rent will be going to pay the minimum wage. also, it will be a good place for illegals to move in to work under the table. Throwing more out on the street to those that play by the rules and can't afford to pay the rent.

“Lots of Bums and Homeless”
3 of 5 starsReviewed March 28, 2012
Ride the antique street cars. They go in a loop and are worth the $2 fare. Too many bums and homeless to walk around on Market St.

Visited March 2012

I say California, Oregon, New Mexico, Iowa, Nebraska, should be income tax, minimum wage, and union free zones to help the poor become rich.

San Francisco will thrive regardless. But small businesses will have problems.

The lower middle class can't afford to live in San Francisco. Very expensive for K-12 teachers and lower level healthcare workers.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancis...nt?oid=2919165

The black population has dropped to 6.3% of the city. Over half the County Jail's population is black. Very few blacks in the jury pool. 25% of blacks are convicted felons. Not unusual for a black defendant to have a jury of 12 non-blacks.

I think the solution is on a 12 non-black jury allow one black jurer(13th member) from the country jail's black population. He will be a non voting member. Now the non-black jury can hear a black's point-of-view.

Minimum wage laws and the sentiment in support of such laws rely on some very basic economic misconceptions:

1) That free exchange (in this case labor for wage) can be exploitative, which taken to it's logical endpoint implies that free trade is a zero sum game where wealth isn't created, only passed around and eventually funneled to rich people. We can see how ridiculous this argument is by the fact that even the very poor of the world are living FAR better than they used to live, and better all the time.

2) That there is somehow an infinite amount of resources in the world, "enough" for everyone if only the capitalists weren't so niggardly with what they pay their employees. But we see that the cost of creating everything we use is directly tied to the cost of resource extraction, and that new things are not created where there isn't an incentive for them to be created. That incentive comes from the profit-and-loss system, which minimum wage laws attempt to subvert at every turn.

3) Pro minimum wage people are incapable of comprehending opportunity costs, and unseen outcomes. They only see that when there's a high minimum wage, the lowest-paid employees make what they call a "living wage," and chalk that up as improvement. They don't see the unseen, that less will be employed in sum total, that fewer businesses will emerge to begin with because their projections must be altered to account for the post-minimum wage reality, that employed people build experience and human capital while the unemployed do not, which might enable them to succeed in the job market one day.

Cue the people who inevitably will say "but in this case and that case, a rise in the minimum wage didn't increase unemployment!" Of course, they ignore the potentiality that MORE jobs would have been created in the absence of the law, that a simple lack of decrease doesn't prove anything one way or the other.

The simple fact is that in the absence of a welfare state and minimum wage laws, the unemployment percentage would be very nearly 0%. The value of the lowest jobs would be lower of course, but people would willingly work those jobs. And where someone willingly participates in commerce, he is subjectively better off.

1. Minimum wage workers are exploited even though they are living better. Suppose you are a minimum wage worker in your 30s at McDonalds. What chance do you have to start your own burger shop in the town which you work? This number is close to 0% where I live. note: I have a solution to turn this number to 100%.

2. One of the fundamental laws of capitalism is you pay the employees as little as possible. The employers are not trying to be mean. Wages are set by the invisible hand. Some companies like In-n-Out burger or Costco pay more for a better quality longer lasting employee. Compared to the McDonalds live and die young which pay low and have high turnover strategy. It is their strategy to choose. For many firms in the SP500 that is over 100K a year.

In many ways hard slavery still exists in the United States today. Enforced by the private property and tax laws of the State.

Why is it necessary for everyone at McDonald's to be on the fast track to entrepreneurship? Being an entrepreneur is an extremely difficult, stressful, and risky endeavor. The huge majority of people aren't interested in being one and its easy to see why. It's pretty hard to get stress-induced ulcers when you're getting a steady salary and have a set clock-in and clock-out schedule. I know workers understand this, because in the absence of minimum wage laws, assuming McDonald's was offering a competitive salary with other no-skill-no-experience positions in the market, potential hires would be lined up around the block for the opportunity to work there. And yet somehow commerce between willing participants is deemed to be exploitative by you and others.

Buyers attempt to get the lowest price for the resources and products they bid for, and sellers attempt to get the highest price. As it should be. The problem with a pessimistic view of this is that it disregards the fact that labor is a scarce resource like everything else, and the value of even the lowest quality labor constantly rises in capitalist systems. There is simply more things to do than there are people to do those things, and wages reflect that. This is why baristas at Starbucks make more in big cities in the U.S. than in small cities, and why all baristas in American Starbucks locations make vastly more than in Starbucks locations in third world countries.


It could be that companies like In-n-Out and Costco have a more enlightened view of how business ought to be practiced and are playing the long game more effectively than their high turnover competitors. If this is the case, I'm sure they will grow their businesses geometrically and their practices will start to become imitated and eventually mainstream. And if it is not the case, maybe they will collapse into a heap of nothing. I see no need for governments to intervene in this process, just let the market decide.

You'll get no argument from me that the state does many things which pervert capitalism, but there is nothing even remotely slave like in America today. It's an insult to slaves (past and present) to suggest that someone being paid an agreed upon wage to do agreed upon work is tantamount to slavery.

Private property is probably the most important right that people have. It is pretty much the basic building block of all human prosperity and happiness that has been achieved over the last 300 years. You're going to need to qualify a statement that suggests otherwise. Or if you like, I will go into greater depth why this is the case.

1. Why should owning a business be considered harder compared to working. Many of the McDonalds owners are so stressed, they own 2-3-4-5 stores (why would they do that to themselves). You may be on salary but you have to deal with the public and your wages are low. People on the restaurant floor are the ones interacting with public and preparing the food. The business owner main job is to order supplies. This can even be automated.

The problem is the government is already intervening. If there were no land laws on the books, the workers would just start their own restaurant. The average McDonalds grosses $6500 per day. Assuming a 50% margin and about $3000 profit per day. If there were no taxes and no wasteful management, the employees could be making 2-5X their current wage or more.

2. Should not labor be more scarce in a rural area. The rents are lower in a rural area, thus the costs or production are lower and they can pay less despite the longer transportation costs. The baristas could then move to the city to make more money. The rent is generally considered the amount for owning the land and the city/county/federal taxes.

3. The slave owner was responsible to house and feed the slaves. Furthermore, the slaves got the praise and dignity they they did all the work. Today, many of the workers live in slums, without healthcare (pre Obamacare), and must pay for their own food. The business owner has a lot less responsibilities. As written above the business owner gets the praise running an extremely difficult, stressful, and risky endeavor. An owner of a 1000 acre farm today only has to cash the $20,000 a month rent checks.

4. Private property is probably responsible for every major war over the last 1000 years. Many of the so called religious wars, like the 30 years war, were actually wars to control the land. Otherwise why do at times do the Catholics and protestants fight together. Private property does not even involve the best use of the land. I would even call WWII a land war look up Japanese land reform and Hitler was bitter for being forced to live on the streets and halfway houses.

The corporation is responsible for most of the wealth of the last 300 years. Who builds the cars, the corporations. Who builds the airplanes like Boeing, the corporations. 1/2 of Palm Springs and much of London is built on leased land. All land in the United States can be considered leased since you pay property tax on it. When China switched from government to the corporation, only then did it become the worlds largest economy. Federal reserve policy will not help the economy, the economy improves when the restrictions to corporations are lowered.

I resist talking about McDonalds franchise owners because I don't believe they are entrepreneurs in any sense. More like investors and managers, both of whom often have great value in a capitalistic system. We can talk about how McDonald's works in greater depth if you like, but I'd like to get more into the argument of why entrepreneurs choose to be entrepreneurs instead of choosing to work for someone else.

It is not that owning a business should be harder. It usually is, that's just the way it goes, but there is stress beyond the manual labor of it. Having a business is always risky. If I had to state the most crucial difference between an employer and an employee, it would be that the employer has to deal with this great risk while the employee experiences very little risk at all.

So when we discuss what appropriate payout should be to a business owner, it must always account for that risk. When you set mine pocket deuces in a NLHE cash game, you're doing so with full expectation that you will lose your initial investment 88% of the time, and may even lose your entire stack some of the rest of the time, so you do not even play the hand unless the payout for when you flop a set and it holds up will be worth the risk.

It is very difficult to have an omniscient view of all of the unseen risks a business owner needs to be compensated for, and I think leftists conveniently seem to forgot all of the businesses which go bankrupt constantly.

Could you explain how if there were "no land laws," all burger flippers would have their own restaurant? Also, there's almost no way an average profit margin for McDonald's is 50%. Loads of McDonald's locations are losing money, and I'd guess that 10-15% profit margin is what they shoot for in a successful restaurant.

Labor is always more scarce in urban areas because urban areas are making more efficient use of labor resources. They have to do more with less, and wages increase to make up for this. Baristas in rural areas have a tough judgement call to make because often they would not make more in a major city if you account for higher costs of living.

Sorry, you aren't convincing me of anything with this. I will say that farms today are not even remotely capitalistic. Almost everywhere in the world, they are propped up by tax-payer funded subsidies, and there's nothing free market about that at all.

Say public property and you might get agreement from me. First of all private property hasn't even really existed in a widespread fashion in the major countries of the world for more than 300 years. Prior to that it was mostly owned by anointed nobility, kings, or emperors.

It's just such a perversion of the meaning of private property to ascribe it to the land owned by the great powers who participated in WWI and WWII. If human beings weren't a public good, those wars probably wouldn't have been able to happen on such a scale, and certainly wouldn't have lasted as long as they did. If you want to toss the slavery term around, the conscription that was necessary to provide the human resources for those wars was definitely like slavery, not to mention the shooting of deserters.

[ I think we probably kind of agree on this point. I'm afraid you fall into the classic trap of blaming capitalism, private property, the division of labor, etc, for problems that should unequivocally be blamed on the state. The market as it currently exists is not capitalism, it is merely capitalistic a little. I find it interesting how critical you are of taxation, yet you seem to want the state to regulate our wages. Could you go into your reasoning for that?

1. why entrepreneurs choose to be entrepreneurs instead of choosing to work for someone else.

Many times the employee has no choice, they have no money to buy a business, can't afford the rent, and can't afford the red tape.

2. It is not that owning a business should be harder. It usually is, that's just the way it goes, but there is stress beyond the manual labor of it. Having a business is always risky. If I had to state the most crucial difference between an employer and an employee, it would be that the employer has to deal with this great risk while the employee experiences very little risk at all.

If you are diversified there is no real risk or stress. To me dealing with guests is the stressful part. Warren Buffett almost seems happy after a correction of 30%.

3. It is very difficult to have an omniscient view of all of the unseen risks a business owner needs to be compensated for, and I think leftists conveniently seem to forgot all of the businesses which go bankrupt constantly.

No real disagreement, but most of those risks involve paying taxes, minimum wage, red tape, and the rent.

4. Could you explain how if there were "no land laws," all burger flippers would have their own restaurant? Also, there's almost no way an average profit margin for McDonald's is 50%. Loads of McDonald's locations are losing money, and I'd guess that 10-15% profit margin is what they shoot for in a successful restaurant.

Technically Steve Jobs, Hewlitt and Packard, and Michael Dell probably broke the law working out of their garages and dorm rooms. If there were no permits, property taxes, and no rents, the barrier to entry would be lower and there would be less wage gaps. Division of labor also occurs within businesses.

5. Labor is always more scarce in urban areas because urban areas are making more efficient use of labor resources. They have to do more with less, and wages increase to make up for this. Baristas in rural areas have a tough judgement call to make because often they would not make more in a major city if you account for higher costs of living.

You rarely see the poverty in rural areas like you do in cities. The more money you make in a city is often a wash. It is part of the invisible hand too. However, most cities have a geographic advantage. New York was not built 20 miles inland for a reason. The land builds the city.

6. Sorry, you aren't convincing me of anything with this. I will say that farms today are not even remotely capitalistic. Almost everywhere in the world, they are propped up by tax-payer funded subsidies, and there's nothing free market about that at all.

They are pretty capitalistic. But, they still suffer from the private ownership of land as in farms can get as large as they want. Look up land reforms in post war Japan.

http://www.crosscurrents.hawaii.edu/...&unit=JWORK098

7. Say public property and you might get agreement from me. First of all private property hasn't even really existed in a widespread fashion in the major countries of the world for more than 300 years. Prior to that it was mostly owned by anointed nobility, kings, or emperors.

Private property is pretty much a universal trait of mammals. Even when and Indian tribe fought another tribe it was usually because of land. Even the Roman empire was based on private property. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium

8. It's just such a perversion of the meaning of private property to ascribe it to the land owned by the great powers who participated in WWI and WWII. If human beings weren't a public good, those wars probably wouldn't have been able to happen on such a scale, and certainly wouldn't have lasted as long as they did. If you want to toss the slavery term around, the conscription that was necessary to provide the human resources for those wars was definitely like slavery, not to mention the shooting of deserters.

If there is a war, I think you should be obligated to fight in it. Otherwise you should lose rights to your property since that is what the war is for. Otherwise why should you ever sign up for war, when you can let some other sucker take the risks.

9. I think we probably kind of agree on this point. I'm afraid you fall into the classic trap of blaming capitalism, private property, the division of labor, etc, for problems that should unequivocally be blamed on the state. The market as it currently exists is not capitalism, it is merely capitalistic a little. I find it interesting how critical you are of taxation, yet you seem to want the state to regulate our wages. Could you go into your reasoning for that?

I started the thread about ending minimum wage. The problem is not minimum wage, it is private ownership of land where people in a geographic area take more than their equal share of land. The government should not tax people, they should be forced to work a certain amount of time for the city, if they choose to live in the city.

$

mmmmmm...ok

Ah... Thank god it feels like spring somewhere! It may be snowy as **** outside, but steelhouse is beginning the cycle of trollage anew. This time it looks like posters he's caught are distinctly of the 'low wattage' variety... So this might be a long and entertaining show.

mmm wates ???

>> ".. tax-payer funded subsidies..."

" the state to regulate our wages.
.. "

mr.s socal:: u wantes ??