30 Dollar Minimum Wage

Right, so an argument from pathos rather than logos. Prepare to be dismissed by those who can just as easily and authentically say they equally don’t care about your concerns - but like you said, you don’t care. Communication breakdown.
Personally though, I would prefer a solution that actually worked in reality and didn’t make everything worse, which requires reason. Jumping the gun due to an emotional response - no matter how justified - could just as easily ruin everything.

A sane definition of a good economy might be one that maximises contributions from as many people as possible, including both parents of families of any size (potentially even their kids and retirees too), in order to supply all their respective needs to an even greater extent, utilising all the types and degrees of talent available for the provision of the best possible goods and services. This individualism disintegrates the biological family entirely except by coincidence, or arguably it expands the concept of family to encompass the entire economy. Whether or not you prefer this vision is arbitrary, personally I wouldn’t prefer it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily insane.

And as long as we can keep on top of it and continue to innovate our way around such problems, our species will persist. The vast majority of species that have ever existed are already extinct, and newer ones are being discovered all the time. Natural selection is topping up everything we’re losing.

And the other side of the same coin is that immigration allows access to new perspectives and non-local talent that can be combined with local talent in order to achieve better results than we could from the utilisation of just local talent.
And of course, the lower the wages, the more employees can be hired and/or the products or services can be sold cheaper. Thus you don’t need as large a wage in order to afford the same stuff you always bought before.
Honestly, I think the immigration argument is rubbish.

You’d be surprised what you can take as an employee: if you’ve ever been one of the remaining employees after punishing numbers of redundancies are imposed on the workforce of the company you still work for - as I have - you might assume it’s all over and your new challenges insurmountable - as I did - yet somehow find yourself still above water. This is especially so if you’re desperate to keep your job as some source of guaranteed income as opposed to risking an unknown period of none.

This is what I am in favour of: a living wage for all those not in work so they aren’t forced to accept a low wage out of fear of being given even less in benefits or nothing at all to live on. The problem is how to fund this as, for one, it’s probably far more expensive than you might guess, and if too many opt for it instead of working, there are less opportunities to tax everyone to fund it and the provision of currently expected levels of goods and services may decline with less people employed to offer them. This would require even higher welfare to afford what you were previously used to, which may now have inflated in price as well as what you’re used to is now more rare with less competition, and with demand for it much higher - the resulting spiral here ought to be clear to see.

However, tax always happens at the point that money changes hands, and the money is still in the economy so the taxation could surely just be restructured to extract the same levels of government income. As to what this money corresponds to in real wealth terms, it’s debatable that productivity would actually decrease if people had a viable option not to work. Apparently experiments with universal basic income have worked out pretty well - I think if anything, the types of things offered in the market might change, but the basics and the amount of business would be sustained.

Unfortunately you might have a great deal of home owners and landlords not wanting their property to drop in value to much less than they paid to buy it. They’ve already contributed to the problem by resisting further housing being built near theirs as it might reduce the value of their property if it’s unsightly as low cost housing is usually seen to be. And without the incentive that your property will increase in value, less houses will be privately built anyway. Those who fund the building of a house will have to offer builders much less or it will have cost them much more to fund the building of the house than to sell it, making it even less appealing to get into construction leaving fewer people to actually do the building. Also, the fact that most people can’t afford to own a property and are forced to rent gives them much more freedom to move house - it’s a lot easier.
But honestly I do despise the disproportionately high cost of living, it’s not like renting arrangements or other alternatives couldn’t be made if houses were cheaper to buy like they used to be not even that long ago. Socially funded housing is fine by me, but again, there is the problem of increasing tax revenues to afford it.

That’s what government is supposed to be for, in theory. If those in charge become too oppressive and conditions imposed by them too harsh, those near the top are supposed to overthrow and replace them - this is what happens to smaller extents in socially developed species naturally, and historically it has happened plenty of times with humans to much larger extents. The problem is that things have to get much much worse than they currently are to motivate such a revolution. If people aren’t literally starving they tend not to be motivated to such extremes that they will resort to drastic action. Our government is meant to represent our collective wishes and provide a greater power over our capitalist masters as a mechanism to overthrow them to the kinds of scales we see today. But in practice, they are paid for by the masters so…

Decentralised then. Granted that there is nothing free about any system in a deterministic universe where everything is determined to do what it does by prior things since long before you even existed. Further, everything you do effects everyone else at least minimally and indirectly. And even a weaker definition of freedom has a dual nature: one man’s freedom in a finite space is another man’s restriction as you say. The super rich even intentionally buy several houses in an area just to live in the most secluded one for more privacy. They’re free to do that, but nobody else is free to live in or even enter the grounds of these unused houses.

Absolutely disagree. We need to be creative to get around this seemingly naturally emerging inequality that is just going to grow until only one person has all the wealth. I agree that the environment is an issue, but its destruction is only really a natural consequence of free “decentralised” markets. The problem is that the ideology, based around self-interest, has enough people competing on equal enough grounds so as to mutually keep everyone else in check. But with growing inequality, this Classical Liberal ideal just gets further and further out of wack and the environment and the poor pay for it.

Every child man and woman should have bread to eat
we should have cafeterias where you can get a daily meal with an iris scan.
Problem solved.

I mean people can be homeless, but not starving. A lot of great people were homeless at one point.

Money is really a luxury.

But you’ll see people will try to sell their daily bread for a snippet of fake gold so they can die holding it close.

“Fake Wage”

@Silhouette

It’s not that I don’t care at all, or I wouldn’t’ve been busy trying to rebut peoples arguments against mine here, or propose counter, countermeasures for dealing with how capitalists and the economy might react to significant socialist reforms, it’s that in all likelihood, nothing anyone is going to say to me is going to change my mind about needing a major minimum wage increase, or some combination of substantial socialist reforms or an anarchist revolt.

No a sane definition is one that, minimizes, contributions from as many people as possible.
Humanities biggest problem is humanism, that it overvalues its own industry and innovation.
Productivity is not a good, or if it is, you can have too much of a good thing.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for annihilation.

And I find the notion we’re going to someday colonize, farm and mine other planets for their resources anytime soon, if ever, profoundly absurd.
It would cost quadrillions of dollars, preposterously more money than we have to attempt such a feat, and it’d be just that, an attempt, we have no idea if such things are even possible.
I mean sure, that’s what they said about landing on the moon, that it was impossible, but supposedly we did (I’m not sure that we did, but I’ll leave that for another thread).
But it was also said God himself couldn’t sink the titanic.

On top of that resources like oil, gas, uranium and so on are getting harder and harder to come by.
There’s talk about massive soil erosion and water shortages on the horizon.
We don’t even have the resources or tech to even attempt such a thing, and we need to power down our economy and reverse population growth immediately.

We’ve already made such a mess of our own planet: thousands of species extinct, and thousands more to come, our own species, life as we know it on the verge of annihilation, climate change, world war 3 over the now dwindling resources, and on and on.
No combination of more efficient or greener techs is going to permit us to continue to grow forever.

Not only do we face collective destruction, thanks to modern science, social engineering and tech, but I’m not sure we’re any happier or healthier as individuals as well.
We’re certainly not any, freer, modernity is a double edged sword.

I’m pro economic sustainability…scratch that, I’m pro economic stagnation, if not outright recession.
We need to learn much more about how to live in harmony with the world and ourselves before we even dream about spreading our civilization to other worlds.
As it stands, our civilization is cancerous.

Humanity should by and large only produce what it needs to survive, and not a whole lot else.
There’s far too many toys, too much crap, junk and waste, and too many people.

Of course humanity probably won’t heed the warnings some sensible economists, scientists, thinkers and writers are making, we’re going to continue on this path of self-destruction until it’s too late.
The bulk of us are just goin to have to learn these lessons the hard way, if we’re around to learn them, that is.

Study history, civilizations, like individuals and species, come and go, many of them because of things like climate change, or political, economic and ecological overexpansion.
What makes you so certain ours is on solid footing?
To me it looks more like quicksand.
Modernity has only been around for a couple of centuries, a tiny blip in human history, itself likely a tiny blip in the history of the world.

Arguably only A few civilizations have been around for millennia, remained roughly intact, but incrementally declined until they were shadows of their former selves, and only few of them were able to re-ascend, like China.
Even if we are fundamentally progressing as a species, civs often take a few steps back after taking several steps forward anyway and we’re long overdo.

Innovation comes and goes, I think we’re less innovative now than we were in the early 20th to mid 20th century, I mean other than the internet and phones, little else has had a revolutionary impact on our day to day lives.
Perhaps most or all of the low hanging fruit sort of speak have been plucked at least for now, and it’ll be centuries or millennia before we’re able to get seriously innovative again.

The first civilizations on record Egypt and Sumer were very innovative, they gave us the wheel, courthouses, metallurgy and professional armies, so many firsts within just several centuries.
Ironically the Giza Pyramids were far more impressive than the pyramids that came afterwards, but then it took civilization perhaps till now before it saw as many or more firsts as it did then.

In summary innovation and progress aren’t givens, far from it, we’re taking it all for granted.

I find that abhorrent, putting kids and retirees to work, like they’re just machines, their lives only valued for their utility.

It’s modern scientific and tech innovation that generated the problems in the first place.
Human extinction wasn’t a serious possibility in the pre or early industrial era, now it is.
Perhaps the solution is to slow science and tech innovation down to a crawl, so potential threats can be ascertained beforehand, rather than afterward, if not stop innovation altogether.
Test major innovations on smaller scales over longer periods of time, before we even consider implementing them ubiquitously.

And the flipside of this is that some immigrants and their way of life may not be compatible with western civilization.
It was German immigrants who brought the Roman Empire down.
Of course by then their civilization was weakened, but so has ours arguably.
I want to protect our environment, the last thing I want is for Canada to have millions of more mouths to feed.

No products won’t be sold cheaper, that’s why prices almost always incline while wages almost always stagnate.
Instead capitalists will use the increase in profits they make to buy lots of shit and have fun with it at our expense, or invest it in more needless productivity for its own sake, and they will almost exclusively benefit monetarily and materially from it, or no one really benefits either way more of our precious resources are squandered.

Maybe we should scrap min wage altogether, and put the poor to work 12-16 hours a day like they do in China, making more gadgets, gizmos and toys for the rich, maybe that further increase in economic growth and environmental decay will somehow innovate us into saving the environment, kind of like borrowing yourself out of debt.

Universal welfare?
I think many-most people are too selfish, and would abuse the system you propose.
I mean for someone who criticized me earlier for proposing a big min wage increase and supposedly not being prepared for counterarguments, what you propose here seems much less feasible.
And if a lot of people abuse and take advantage of it, inflation will soar and skyrocket.

I think everyone that can work should, there needs to be some challenge and growth in life, and some shouldn’t work hard to feed others who refuse to feed themselves, it’s just that challenge should be proportionate to resources available, rather than this artificial scarcity we have now thanks to capitalism.
While increasing min wage and the amount welfare pays, if anything I’d put more checks and balances in place, to make sure only people who genuinely need it are receiving it.

Whatever has to be done, if government has to take over a large portion of the food and hosing industries to ensure people have inexpensive food to eat, so be it.
It can be done, and already has been done in Canada to an extent.
It may just be better to do this, than increase minimum wage, or it may be better to do both in conjunction.
Government will just have to print money or tax the rich, and when this causes inflation, so be it, really all that matters is essentials like food, housing and healthcare are inexpensive.
Or government can fund these industries with the revenue it makes from selling these inexpensive goods.
It may not make a lot, but once these industries are taken over, the value of a dollar will dramatically change.

Unfortunately working people don’t have much of a spine anymore, if they ever did, the establishment has them completely bamboozled.
Indeed sometimes conditions have to get really bad, before they get good.
There are genuine socialist parties in Canada, the US and the UK, but conveniently for the cryptocrats no one gives them the time of day.

I’m not sure the universe is entirely deterministic, but that’s neither here nor there.
That’s a metaphysical question, we’re talking about sociology, politics and economics here, the meaning of the word free radically changes depending on the context you’re using it in.
Your needs and desires may be completely determined by genes, social conditioning, the environment, but some systems have fewer sociopolitical and economic restrictions on your needs and desires than others.

Also, just because your society is decentralized, doesn’t mean it’s free, case in point: feudalism.
And also, you could conceivably have both a state, and a free market, but a different conception of property than the capitalist one, where either there are limits to how much real estate you can own/government will protect for you, but you can still do anything with your property that you wish, like pay someone 1 dollar an hour to work on it, or build unsafe housing and charge people an arm and a leg to live there.

Myself I never agreed to the rulers or rules our economy is governed by, many of us never did, and so I have very little loyalty to this system.

Right, that’s why when it comes to the economy and the environment I think there should be some basic restrictions on what people can get away with, unless we did away with the state and/or the capitalist conception of property altogether (which gives you the right to own as much stuff and land as you can pay government to protect for you) for the aforementioned alternative conception of property, than I think we could have a free market, we probably wouldn’t need much-any coercion.

And the more finite the space, the less free you are, which’s the flipside of urbanity and high population density, in many ways society was freer when it was more rural.

Capitalism isn’t based on self-interest really, at least not entirely.
It’s a certain way to do an economy, its rules and regulations permit people insane amounts of wealth, or none at all, depending on their luck, talent, tenacity, or how much corruption they can get away with.
It also tends to benefit the haves more than the have nots, hence rich get richer poor poorer.
In the beginning of capitalist economies, when the gap between rich/poor was relatively slight, and there were a lot of frontiers, low hanging fruit, there were lots of opportunities for poor people to strike it rich, or at least middle class.

But overtime, frontiers have shrunk, disparities have grown tremendously, and classes have become more deeply entrenched and virtually impossible to challenge within the limitations of the system.
For the people it hasn’t benefited much, or at all, it’s a kind of altruism on their behalf to continue supporting it.
And of course the system has become monstrously corrupt, megabanks and corporations form cartels, receive welfare/propped up by government so they can never be challenged/held accountable, tax breaks, loopholes…
It’s only a matter of time before it completely collapses, catapulting us into a new dark age, or there’s a revolution, either one.

But even if there is a revolution, of course it doesn’t mean things are going to get any better, for example a military dictator may rise to power in the USA or Europe to seemingly challenge the establishment, he may promise the poor some relief, and he and his immediate successors may deliver on some of those promises, for a while, but in exchange for most of the democracy and freedom they have left.
Eventually he/his successors will form an absolute dictatorship, and then people will be totally enslaved.

I think it’s a combination of capitalism, science and tech that’s allowed us to threaten the environment as much as we have.
Capitalism without modern science, without the technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th century: planes, trains and automobiles, electricity, the green revolution and so on, certainly wouldn’t’ve given us climate change or anywhere near as much overpopulation, pollution, deforestation and so forth as we have now.
It’s not just capitalism that’s the problem, it’s technology itself, especially when it’s in the wrong hands. If you have a ‘communist’ dictatorship that only cares about furthering its own power in the short term, then it may start nuclear war, or a series of events leading to nuclear war, expand itself both politically, and/or economically, with no regard for who or what gets in its way.

You’re a naive socialist.

First of all, it’s against personal “Freedoms” to force people to work against their will. Perhaps you are pro-slavery then too???

Secondly, people who don’t work, don’t deserve income. Money doesn’t appear from nowhere. If you are want to give-outs to lazy people then are you doing so in your personal life? Do you give $100 to every homeless person you see? Nope, you don’t, because you probably don’t have a job, and are probably living under your parent’s roof, or somebody else is footing your bills.

Prove me wrong. I dare you.

@Wrong

By forcing people to work, I just meant not giving people money who clearly just don’t want to work, I thought we’d at least be in agreement on that.
If they want to beg, fine, if they want to steal, I could care less, I don’t respect this economy enough to care if people steal from corporations.

People who can’t work deserve income, people who won’t work don’t deserve income.
But everyone who can’t work or works deserves a livable, decent income, we don’t have that now, for reasons I’ve already covered extensively.

Neither do houses and boats, nature has to be cut down to supply them, that’s why our economies need to shrink, that’s why we need to begin greening and localizing, rather than globalizing.

That’s not what I said, how much of what I said did you read, 5%?

I occasionally give a few dollars to the homeless, even tho I’m poor myself.

I’m a janitor and I pay my own bills.

This is what you said, “everyone who can work should work

So you’re contradicting yourself already.

Do you want to take back “everyone who can’t work, should have a livable income” too?

Wrong, quadriplegics cannot work and there are many on that sort of list who should be given a livable income.

Were you referring to slavery again Wrong? Did I jump the gun?

Uh…there’s a difference between: you should, and: you must, or else!

Like you should buckle up before driving, or you should bundle up before going outside in negative 30 degree weather, doesn’t mean I’m going to beat you over the head if you don’t.

I, shouldn’t, have to explain this stuff to you, you, should, know this stuff already, but that doesn’t mean I think you ough to be thrown into a reeducation camp.

Yea I think Wrong’s the only one advocating slavery here.
He thinks socialism, in all cases, is totally evil, like that children, the disabled and seniors living in poverty should have to work 12-16 hours a day for whatever capitalists will pay them: 10 cents an hour, 20 cents, a bowl of rice a day, like they did in the 19th century before socialist reforms, that’s his idea of freedom and prosperity, exploiting the vulnerable.

:laughing:

Laugh it up, I’m not the child saying “everyone should” do this or that like an imbecile.

A lot of people who don’t work, or can’t work, don’t necessarily deserve handouts either.

So far the OP has made no convincing arguments and demonstrates very little to no understanding about basic economics. I hope the OP is under 18 years old, because it would be an embarrassment if you were older.

I don’t give a shit what you do, was just using those examples to demonstrate your incompetence with grammar, and I’ve already demonstrated I know a hell of a lot more about economics than you.

I’m 33 years old, I’m ‘lazy’, and I don’t like to work much.

So fucking what?

My grammar is masterful as is my knowledge of economics.

If you had half a clue then you would know that Wage is a deal and relationship between Employer and Employee. Your regulations, your “everybody should” nonsense, represents government and 3rd party intervention. So in other words, you want to intervene between the employer and employee to dictate what you subjectively deem as ‘fair’. But you don’t explain why or how, really. Your second premise is that “everybody deserves” (livable wages). What is livable, is subjective. One person can live on beans and little to no heat in winter. Other people cannot live on that. Some people live on yachts. There is no such thing as “livable wages”. A 250lb person eats more food than 150 or 100lb people. Is it a matter of “deserving” more food? The second premise itself is flawed. You mentioned that “everybody” should work. Some people don’t want to work. Some people work hard and get nothing. Some people work nothing and get a lot. All this is not a matter of justice, ultimately, but matters of nuance and discretion. Some people are fine with working at McDonalds. Others hate it. Some people will fight for a high paying job. Others will not.

You mention none of this, which to me, and others here, immediately indicate that you have not thought about this topic very deeply, but instead very shallow.

The first main problem of your proposals, and there are countless, is why is it “fair” for a third-party (you) to stick his nose into other people’s business and dealings? If one person wants to pay another person $5 per hour, then what business is it of yours to dictate whether that wage should be higher or lower, as-if you had the first clue as to the value of the work, or the relationship between two people.

Should a father working his son, to mow the yard, receive $30 per hour, because you say so, because “everybody deserves”? Or that Walmart should be forced to increase to $30 minimum wage, although the end result won’t be what you predict anyway.

Until you present a case, your proposals amount to nothing more than a deluded sense of “what’s fair”. And it won’t convince anybody. People in the real-world, adults, employers, employees, know the value of their work intimately. If a job is not worth $15 an hour, if it’s not worth $50 an hour, then don’t do it. It’s that simple.

Welfare is about 600 in Canada, disability isn’t much more, it’s probably about the same or worse in the states relative to the value of their dollar.
600 dollars isn’t enough to afford an apartment, let alone pay for food, clothing, transportation…
That’s why many people on welfare and disability end up on the streets, squatting, in shelters, ‘couch surfing’, living in/out of their vehicles, several people crammed into one tiny apartment, barely eating, eating crap, begging, stealing, and then many people wonder why they can’t get their shit together?
It’s because they themselves have never been in that situation before…but it could happen to you, if a series of unfortunate events were to befall you, accident, divorce, lay off, sickness, unless you’re very rich, it could happen to you.
600 dollars is 7200 dollars a year, that’s about 3 times below the poverty line.

As for why I think wages should be much higher than they are, it’s because the economy has grown a lot in the last half a century, so has the cost of living, while wages have relatively stagnated.
Again, that’s why the average man and woman both have to work full time to support themselves and their children now, they didn’t have to do that several decades ago.
There may be several reasons why this so, but one of, if not, the, reason is: capitalists have an unfair advantage over workers (your average worker needs to get a job many, many times more than big wants to give him a job), and if left unchecked, this advantage tends to grow, because big business tends to incrementally consolidate more and more of the economy, even without corruption, but inevitably it leads to corruption, accelerating the growth.

Everyone ought to know the ‘middle class’ has been shrinking for decades, and in all likelihood will continue, until we’re back where we were in the 19th century, where conditions weren’t much better than that of slaves, because the social services haven’t been keeping up with the gains capitalist have made and the losses workers have made that tend to multiply over time.
Mothers and/or fathers should be able to take care of their kids I think, don’t you?
They shouldn’t be forced to have daycare or nannies, grandparents or older siblings look after them, or leave them on their own.

If unchecked capitalism ultimately leads to some combination of death, slavery and the destruction of the environment, why not?
Why shouldn’t workers do away with the or their notion of property altogether, or keep it, but institute occasional reforms to correct enormous disparities, what have they got to lose?
If economic growth is destroying the environment and not only not benefitting, but detrimenting the vast majority of people, in a democracy, what are we losing by taking some of the money back through the exercise of our democratic powers?
Absolutely nothing!

I don’t think we should have economic growth at all, because the environment needs to be protected for ourselves and future generations…because climate change, because mass deforestation, pollution and so on, rather I think we should concentrate on putting the resources we already have to better use, but if it does grow, people should grow along with it.

I mean according to you, if someone takes a job that pays a penny an hour, that’s how much the job is worth.
No need for a minimum wage at all.
Desperate people will take any ol’ job for anything, they will produce thousands of dollars of product for pennies, while the capitalists make thousands of times more than them in opulence just for cracking the whip or doing nothing, because somehow, through a lot of luck, talent and/or tenacity, they managed to inherit, or build the family fortune, which included a factory, a factory the workers may have produced enough product to purchase thousands of times over.
And many, most or all of these workers might not make enough to lift themselves out of these conditions for generations, if ever, because all the factories in their region are paying around the same, as little as humanly possible to subsist on, and very few workers rise in rank and even managers aren’t paid that much more, I think anyone can see how absurd this definition of value is.

No public officials have defined what our needs are, it’s called the poverty line, our needs are on it or above, and we as a democracy can also discuss what our needs are, and come to some reasonable, objective, or at least intersubjective approximation/notion of what our needs as human beings are.
You make it sound like even attempting to do such would be akin to voodoo or black magick.
Of course peoples needs vary somewhat, yes a midget might be able to live on 100 dollars of food a day, but the average person can’t, and that’s what we need to be considering most of all, average people.

You can survive in a hole in the wall on gruel for years or even decades, many prisoners in the 19th century had to endure such conditions, but your life expectancy is going to be more than halved, it’s going to physically and psychologically disable you to the point where if you could function in a society before, you probably won’t be able to now, not to mention you’re going to be in a ton of pain and suffering, so let’s not pretend that just because you’re alive, your needs are being met.
Conditions have to be better than that, but of course you don’t have to live in a palace either.
There’s a happy middle between these two extremes and we can discuss what that middle is, I think it’s having enough money to afford a roof over your head, a one bedroom apartment if you’re single, eat some combination of fresh, whole foods and, whatever you want to call it, industrial foods, take the bus around the city, the poor have to be able to get around, or else how would they find jobs or buy groceries and so on, it’s not rocket science, people should have enough to live comfortably or half comfortably, so they don’t have to struggle everyday.

I may be somewhat of a radical for proposing some of the things I am, but you’re also a radical, more radical than me, you’re a capitalist extremist, you want to take us back to the 19th century when there was no social safety net, when many people had to work 12-16 hours a day to ‘live’, if you want to call that living, we both know it’s a kind of half death.
If I was as radical of a leftist as you’re a capitalist, I’d be saying, we should have absolute equality, each man must live in the exact same house, eat the exact same food, wear the exact same clothes, drive the exact same car, and anyone who even dreams of having a little more should be executed!
Contrary to what you think most people would sooner agree with me than with you, not that I base my opinion on what other people think alone, just saying (I mostly base it on what I find to be reasonable after considering the data).

I didn’t agree to these rules and regs, to your definition of property or value, its rules of acquisition, themselves very subjective.
There’s many ways to do property and an economy.
There’s many ways it has been done in the history of man.
Some people have no sense of property at all, or an egoistic or fluid sense of property, and have argued we could have something like a society without property, see Max Stirner.

Or property could be defined more based on, continual, frequent or intermittent, physical use or occupancy, which would set arguably natural limits to how much stuff you can own, see Benjamin Tucker.
Or on ‘mutualism’, see Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
Or that it should be based on need, which’d also set limits.
Or that it should be based on democracy…or equality, or ‘equity’, a kind of merit independent of the capitalist definition/notion of merit.

Some people think intellectual property or usury is illegitimate.
Some people think that you should be able to sell yourself into slavery, or that if you can’t pay your debts, you should be sold into slavery, or that if you’re captured in war, you’re a slave, and on and on.
Some people think that the state should be dismantled, that any taxation at all is a kind of theft or extortion, and on the other hand, some people think everything should belong to the dictator.

Where do you draw the line?
Myself I believe property is basically subjective.
But we can still discuss the implications and consequences of drawing the line here or there, and come to some sort of fuzzy, popular consensus or hard, legal consensus for solving disputes.

Disability in the USA, for adults, starts between $600-$700 if you had low earnings for the years up to applying. As far as I know, there is no general welfare benefits otherwise. Individual states have food stamps ($100-$250 mo.) that homeless/disabled can acquire if they can come up with a mailing address and for 6 months only the homeless can receive around a $250-$275 stipend for living expenses, but as you know that doesn’t allow for any decent standard of living.

My concerns lie with the vanishing middle class and working poor. Sadly, those who do not feel the brunt of the changing economic situation, refuse to seriously consider the future implications, the directions that their own lives are heading albeit slowly but surely. What do you call that morose kind of despondence? That painful, to me, shortsightedness?

What’s the economic climate in Canada? How much of the population lives as the working poor or worse? In 2015, 14.3% of the USA lived in poverty, but that number seems low. I’d bet that it’s more like 35%, but announcing that to the world would shine a negative light on the US’s economic status.

Here, there are two poverty lines built into the tax codes which I do not understand ($22,000/$10,000+/-), Alaska places the official status at $15,060 for an individual. Since the number fluctuates by state, it’s a mess to sort out. I believe that $22,000 tax code used to be $25,000 which is an interesting drop that shows economic decline rather than growth.

Whose business is it to attempt to influence decisions that involve anyone other than your self?
Is it always best if people make only their own decisions?
Do only people directly involved in a decision have the best perspective on it?

Anti-Socialists love that argument: “who are you to intervene?!” as though it were a simple question with a simple answer #-o Who are the current decision makers to intervene? You might as well ask “who are you to question intervention?”

You need an absolute morality to answer any of these questions with certainty, and good luck grounding anything absolute without falling foul to the problem of what grounds the grounds.

As such, there are no more grounds to reprimand someone for proposing an intervention than there are to back up a lack of intervention. It’s not an argument.

Again, what morality determines who “deserves” anything? At the moment there’s just disagreement on what’s important.

@Wendy

1 in 7 (or 4.9 million) people in Canada live in poverty.
Between 1980 and 2005, the average earnings among the least wealthy Canadians fell by 20%.
Over the past 25 years, Canada’s population has increased by 30% and yet annual national investment in housing has decreased by 46%.
21% of single mothers in Canada raise their children while living in poverty

http://www.cwp-csp.ca/poverty/just-the-facts/

When you have hundreds of billionaires, 1% of people living in poverty is too much.
There shouldn’t be anyone living in poverty, unless they refuse to work.
And the consequences of that will just have to be managed, just as the consequences for the disability/welfare we have now are managed.

Take a look at this:

Average Cost Of New Home -

1960 $12,700
2013 $289,500

So homes were 23 times higher in 2013 than in 1960

Average Wages -

1960 $5,315
2012 $44,321

Where as wages were 8 times higher in 2013 than in 1960.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/70yearsofpricechange.html

This is one example of how we’re all getting poorer, except the top tiers.

Wages versus Housings costs were 3 times better in 1960 than in 2013.

Again this is just your opinion and subjective perspective. $600 goes a long way in the rural areas of US, rent as low as $200 per month. Some people could live very well on $600 a month. So what you’re indicating here is that your subjective lifestyle is more expensive than $600. That doesn’t mean it should be a standard for everybody.

I’m pro individual-responsibility. If people can’t get their lives together then that’s their fault. Your “uplifting” them is neither asked for, wanted, or noble. When you use them as pawns to your political games then it’s ignoble, disgraceful. You can’t merely pretend to “want to help” others. You have to actually do it or you receive no credence from these socialist views you espouse.

If you are against women working then you should become anti-feminist and preach traditional gender values, conservative values. Much of the reason things have become so bad, in your own words, is because of the ‘feminist’, socialist, and other liberal-leftist movements. If conservative values remained then women would be able to stay at home, and men would receive 2x the pay they currently get. This would cause economic downturn, but there is your real “socialist versus capitalist” argument.

Why aren’t you a conservative, if you want men to work and women to stay home, mother, and raise children?

Economic growth occurs because people want to work, to afford a living. People have a demand for revenue, paychecks, $30 per hour wages. All of this drives the economy. Employers are the Supply. Employers supply jobs, to which menial labor works. You cannot stop the economy without causing more poverty, starvation, ruin.

Correct.

It’s none of your business, or anybody’s, to interfere with business dealings. However today there is excessive regulation, government intervention, and socialism (as you espouse). You don’t realize that you and your kind have already won, and, caused damage to society. You are acting as the government representative, to force employers to pay certain wages.

Isn’t your position most unjust and unfair?

This is fallacious rationale.

If workers were paid pennies then they would not afford a room to rent. If they had no room to rent then they wouldn’t work at the job long. So it’s in the employer’s interest to pay wages such that workers can continue to work. And they have paid such wages. And they will continue to do so. Smarter workers are ones who are willing to quit, and join a competitor’s factory or business, for higher wages. Employers must compete against each other to attract and retain the best workers. Otherwise a company will have low paid, unskilled, and unreliable workers. They will pay for this cost. So it’s not worth it.

I just think you don’t really care about common people and you’re advocating more for yourself and/or the community directly around you. Around the states and world, people do live on little or nothing, and many are complacent or fine with it. There is no need for “a better world” scenario where “everybody is happy” as-if happiness revolves around money, when it doesn’t.

The bottom-line is that you are pro-third-party intervention, pro-government, pro-socialist. You are against business dealings between two people. If it’s unfair, paying pennies, or whatever, then it’s still none of your business. Rather you presume that intervention is automatically good or righteous, that it “should” be. Furthermore your claims about minimum wage do not presume the conclusions that you claim, that “people would be happier”, “society would be better”, or economic feasibility. In fact you mentioned that you want to see the economy plummet. So that is also presumed within your intentions for a $30 minimum wage.

Not only is it unrealistic but your idealism is flawed as well. It won’t necessarily “help” anybody but yourself. And once inflation would kick in, and it would, then it wouldn’t necessarily help poor or middle class people either. All it would do is create economic stagnancy and class immobility. People would not be able to move from poor to middle class, or middle class to rich. The US is based on high class mobility. A poor person can become rich, and rich can become poor. However your socialistic mentality has taken power and even this is barely true today.

Socialism needs repealed, not advanced.