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Let's talk about the minimum wage Let's talk about the minimum wage

06-04-2012 , 02:44 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
a few ITT mad at the poor for wanting to survive
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.
06-04-2012 , 02:45 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
businesses (and workers) would then be being subsidized by the Gov't, which is socialism (obviously not to be tolerated in America, at least if you believe everything you hear on Fox News).
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?
06-04-2012 , 02:47 AM
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Originally Posted by willie24
right. it would hurt the people who have artificially high wages right now, while helping those who are artificially unemployed. win-win imo.

your carnegie example is not helpful. i don't dispute that artificially keeping the worker down has EVER happened. further, i don't care what the purchasing power of your exploited workers from 1880 may have been. it's not relevant. if they were exploited, which i'm sure they were, it was through some sort of collusion against them, monopoly etc. it wasn't just that he didn't pay them enough because he was an ******* or something, and it doesn't follow that current (non-collusive) companies who pay a low wage are exploiting anybody.

that's what i asked you for. you said that current US employers, in general, are keeping the price of unskilled labor artificially low. give me some evidence.
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.
06-04-2012 , 02:48 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by dessin d'enfant
Lol...it's almost like we should be incredibly skeptical of a person who puts a very narrow range on the worth of their labor to their employer!!!!

(If you actually read and try to understand what people say instead of responding with talking points you might realize that nothing they are saying even contradicts the shallow talking points!)
Not sure you know what a talking point is. Or maybe you just like using it to try and discredit logical arguments.
06-04-2012 , 02:49 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
Lots of people in this thread mad at the poor for voluntarily working for less than said people think they deserve. Solution: Make businesses pay them more!


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
06-04-2012 , 02:49 AM
alright nft1o, i'm done. you don't get it, and i can't argue with you.
06-04-2012 , 02:52 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the doing of government? Did the private sector commit these things?
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
06-04-2012 , 02:54 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
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.
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
06-04-2012 , 02:57 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by willie24
alright nft1o, i'm done. you don't get it, and i can't argue with you.
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:01 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:02 AM
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Originally Posted by A_C_Slater
This forum is full of 1% elitist scumbags and their house negro sycophants. There is actualy a slave in this thread that is grateful for his $2 hour. And this tzwien Ubermensch has probably never worked for less than $20 an hour in his life. And empathy be damned, he just knows $3.50/hour is good enough for the sub-humans. Mark my words, the last revolution will begin before the end of the decade! The 20th century Marxist revolution will seem like a movement of timid moderates compared to the awesome vengeance that the 21st century version shall deliver.
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:

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There's an ideology that takes a lot of effort to implant: it's so inhuman that it's hard to get into people's heads, the ideology to just take care of yourself and forget about anyone else. An extreme version is the Ayn Rand version. Actually, there's been an effort for 150 years, literally, to try to impose that way of thinking on people.

During the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Eastern Massachusetts, mid-nineteenth century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn't want. One of their main complaints was what they called "the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self." For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose "the new spirit of the age" on people. But it's so inhuman that there's a lot of resistance, and it continues.


One of the real achievements of the Occupy movement, I think, has been to develop a real manifestation of rejection of this in a very striking way. The people involved are not in it for themselves. They're in it for one another, for the broader society and for future generations. The bonds and associations being formed, if they can persist and if they can be brought into the wider community, would be the real defense against the inevitable repression with its sometimes violent manifestations."

"Occupy" by Noam Chomsky, pg. 73-4
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:03 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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.
you are aware that the NBA has a "minimum wage" as well, right?
06-04-2012 , 03:07 AM
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Originally Posted by dessin d'enfant
Why do you have access to their financial records if you are a menial $2/hr worker?
I'm on the committee of the club that runs the company.

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Originally Posted by einbert
Since you're paying overhead for the business out of your paycheck, you're receiving an ownership claim for eventual profits generated in return, right? You realize they're making you their partner on costs, but not profits, right?
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.

Quote:
Originally Posted by A_C_Slater
This forum is full of 1% elitist scumbags and their house negro sycophants. There is actualy a slave in this thread that is grateful for his $2 hour. And this tzwien Ubermensch has probably never worked for less than $20 an hour in his life. And empathy be damned, he just knows $3.50/hour is good enough for the sub-humans. Mark my words, the last revolution will begin before the end of the decade! The 20th century Marxist revolution will seem like a movement of timid moderates compared to the awesome vengeance that the 21st century version shall deliver.
I just don't see how someone owes me a certain wage just because I might need it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dessin d'enfant
Lol...it's almost like we should be incredibly skeptical of a person who puts a very narrow range on the worth of their labor to their employer!!!!

(If you actually read and try to understand what people say instead of responding with talking points you might realize that nothing they are saying even contradicts the shallow talking points!)
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:10 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the doing of government? Did the private sector commit these things?
Some of them wore government uniforms, but they were being paid by corporate interests in almost all of these cases.
06-04-2012 , 03:13 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
you are aware that the NBA has a "minimum wage" as well, right?
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:14 AM
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Originally Posted by Ray Horton
U don't get it.

The libertarian argument is that the poor shouldn't complain, because they have access to amazing technology,like the internet (which, as we know, had nothing to do with government research), cell phones, and ZOMG FLUSH TOILETS unavailable to (even rich) people in past generations. The argument is specious, because wealth is-- in some respects-- obviously relative.
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.

Quote:
"If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."

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

Quote:
"The population is angry, frustrated, bitter--and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have lead to an extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by, literally, the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they're not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. This is mostly from the financial sector--hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on.

At the same time, for the majority of the population, incomes have pretty much stagnated. Real wages have also stagnated, sometimes declined. The benefits system that was very strong has been weakened.

People have been getting by in the United States by much higher workloads, by debt which sooner or later becomes unsustainable, and by the illusions created by bubbles--most recently, the housing bubble which collapsed, like bubbles do, leaving about $8 trillion in paper wealth disappearing for some sectors of the population. So, by now, U.S. workers put in far more hours than their counterparts in other industrial countries, and for African Americans almost all wealth has disappeared.
It has been a pretty harsh and bitter period--not by the standards of developing nations, but this is a rich society and people judge their situation and their prospects by what ought to be the case.

At the same time,, concentration of wealth leads almost reflexively to concentration of political power, which in turn translates into legislation, naturally in the interests of those implementing it; and that accelerates what has been a vicious cycle leading to, as I said, bitterness, anger, frustration and a very atomized society."

"Occupy" by Noam Chomsky, pg. 54-55
06-04-2012 , 03:20 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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.
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:23 AM
Very well said by Chomsky. I'd just take issue with one sentence:
Quote:
At the same time,, concentration of wealth leads almost reflexively to concentration of political power, which in turn translates into legislation, naturally in the interests of those implementing it; and that accelerates what has been a vicious cycle leading to, as I said, bitterness, anger, frustration and a very atomized society."
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:30 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
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.
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:33 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero Protagonist
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.
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:36 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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 the right thing.
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:40 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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.
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?
06-04-2012 , 03:41 AM
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:50 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by neverfoldthe1outer
and concentration of wealth isn't possible if we all just refuse to let anybody "own" anything.
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.

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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?
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.
06-04-2012 , 03:53 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by tzwien
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?

      
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