I am all for voluntary exchanges. There are just way less of them happening because of minimum wage laws. This creates less wealth for the poor. I am 100% for everyone surviving and making lots of money.

what's better, transparently subsidizing with the government, or using government muscle to force a small segment of the population to pay for a subsidy that never gets to its intended target?

yes, he was (read a book), and yes it does. the evidence that employers are keeping the price of unskilled labor artificially low has already been shown throughout this thread with the proof that a minimum wage worker can only barely survive.

Not sure you know what a talking point is. Or maybe you just like using it to try and discredit logical arguments.

Nein! That is not the solution. Just as Karl Marx was the 19th century father of the 20th century revolt against the elitist scum C.H. Douglas shall be the 20th century father of the 21st century revolt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._H._Douglas




The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it -- Chief Sitting Bull

alright nft1o, i'm done. you don't get it, and i can't argue with you.

battle of blair mountain. private industry hires an army of mercenaries (no kidding) and enlists the help of law enforcement (and eventually the U.S. Army) to attack a large group of striking coal miners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

Just because they can't "survive" on minimum wage doesn't mean that prices are being kept artificially low. It could mean the price of living is being distorted.

Say I was making $20/hr as a single adult 15 years ago and I had 75% of my income to spend on leisure. Today I'm making $35/hr as a single adult and I have only 40% of my income to spend on leisure. Does this mean my wage is being kept artificially low? It's not keeping up with the price of living tho

Same here. It's been fun.


I saw that trainer in your avatar on the game tonight too btw. Best trainer in the NBA. I hope he gets paid enough.

I resent the quotation marks you inserted around survive...minimum wage workers absolutely cannot afford to buy health insurance (and it is obv. not provided to them by companies that pay minimum wage), so the use of the term "survival" is not hyperbole.

Under a capitalistic order you're not supposed to care about whether others have a decent wage, whether a poor kid can get a decent education or whether an old person is starving to death, whether someone can afford a hospitable bill etc. That's not your problem. You're duty is to look out for #1:

Luckily there has been enough courageous people throughout our history who refused to play their allotted role as obedient commodities in the free market order, people willing to make great personal sacrifices, even their very lives, to fight for a better life for others. We owe every freedom and right we have to THOSE people. The rich have never given us anything and they never will. You have to fight the rich and powerful to gain anything in THIS world. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it always will be as long as we live within a class system. The struggle for a decent existence continues today, a better minimum wage being only one of the many issues worth fighting for that can bring relief to large segments of the general population.

you are aware that the NBA has a "minimum wage" as well, right?

I'm on the committee of the club that runs the company.

I don't think it's theoretically possible to pay all the employees their marginal value to a business. There wouldn't be any money left for overhead. Anyway there aren't any profits.

I just don't see how someone owes me a certain wage just because I might need it.

My worth is probably something like 30/hr? Tough to say really, it's hard to estimate that sort of thing.

I've been working there 5 months. I've already got an unofficial job offer for another company here where I'll be making something like 20-30 an hour, with none of the admin stuff. So hopefully I'll be starting that in a few months.

Some of them wore government uniforms, but they were being paid by corporate interests in almost all of these cases.

If I'm not mistaken, that's because it's in their contract with the players association that they voluntarily signed.

I don't remember the government having a minimum wage contract with businesses in the US.

I would say the argument is more than specious. It's an anti-progress, power-serving, pro-status quo, pathetic and cowardly argument. It doesn't matter how much better off the poor may have it than kings had it 400 years ago. That's irrelevant. What matters is how things ought to be right now. That's the only standard that's relevant. And that's the only way progress can be made--by enough people believing things ought to be better and struggling to make it better.

And yeah, there's a lot of people who are rightfully pissed off today who want to make things better:

The owners are forced to sign the contract with the players union because of the leverage said union wields. Also, players cannot opt out of the players union, so they did not truly voluntarily sign it either.

And the U.S. government absolutely does have a minimum wage contract with businesses....it's called THE LAW.

Very well said by Chomsky. I'd just take issue with one sentence:
I think concentration of political power leads to concentration of wealth, or at least they feed off each other. The increasing control of government "regulators" (really just corporate shills) has allowed ever greater fleecing of 99.99% of the world population. It's sickening really, how we bicker about minimum wage which has almost no effect while the government and their corporate cronies steal trillions from us.

You make unions sound so negative, yet the government doesn't let anyone opt out either. At least the unions have actual contracts whereas the government doesn't have one with any of us.

So I think the thing to be taken away from this is that both unions and government are forces that use coercion (force) to get people to do what they want.

Concentration of wealth can't lead to a concentration of political power if there's no government. People don't like to acknowledge this fact. They just like to blame corporations instead.

fyp. unions and government are both extremely necessary.

also, if you really think "the government doesn't have a contract with any of us" then I am very disappointed in your political science teacher.

and concentration of wealth isn't possible if we all just refuse to let anybody "own" anything. don't make me play anarchist vs. communist with you (it's not that much fun, and I will win).

and btw, in the absence of "government", concentration of wealth is the only form of political power (or one could argue power in general) DUCY?

Ahhhh, "the right thing". In order for a "right" society to exist, there must be a totalitarian government ruling over us all. This is why appealing to subjective things like emotions and "right and wrong" will rarely result in the thing you are trying to prevent.

Right. But in one society the economy is poor as dirt and in the other it's prospering. You're also free in one of them.

Yes, I get it. Money is power. Except there wouldn't be government around to use that money on to run society like what's happening now. So money really wouldn't be power. There wouldn't be rulers.

no, in the absence of government, money would be the only form of power. and there would be rulers, as well as serfs. does feudalism ring a bell?