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.