30 Dollar Minimum Wage

This is nearly 50 percent more than what you were talking about. It also says, “asian women welcome” or something like that.

I agree, a lot of ‘Modern’ terms have been inverted, perverted, and twisted around, for political purposes and also lack of education and common sense. Public ignorance and apathy, general laziness, wears away civil liberties.

Competition is a good thing, and the very force that has led to western success and surplus. You make it sound like a bad thing. Competition means higher wages for workers, when employers compete for skilled, educated, loyal, and competent workers. Competition means lower consumer costs, when companies compete to sell the same good. Capitalism is good for these reasons. Success leads to monopolization, domination of a few corporations over small businesses and smaller corporations. Average people all enjoy the benefits of this. Thus it is hypocritical for you and others to speak against it, or speak of it negatively.

In the US, taxes are between 10%-30% from state to state and including federal taxation. I’d say the average person gets 22% taxed in the US, which is very low for a developed country, and even lower for a military power house. Perhaps taxes could go up. Perhaps they should stay the same. I don’t see them going down. Therefore your point, and Gloom’s point, are both moot. “The government”, society, third-parties, already receive a large chunk of people’s income, productivity, and welfare.

And you’re right to say, they’re not asking for it. You pay, or you go to jail. That’s force. So people asking for charity on top of this, as Gloom does, is rather insulting. Don’t you have a big enough piece of the pie as is, but you want more? That’s the socialist agenda, wanting more.

I disagree entirely.

After the employer or company owner pays you for the wage you shake hands upon, the employee owes and owns nothing. The deal is done. If employees want stock or ‘ownership’ of their work after wages, then that’s up to the employer and employee to decide. Some companies do offer stock options for their employees, especially in tech related fields where engineers could potentially copyright their work. It varies from field to field. A shoemaker isn’t going to have interest in selling the individual pairs of shoes, as it would be inefficient for employees to do so. Thus it is the business owner who benefits from companies as a whole.

I disagree and it sounds to me like you don’t know rich people personally. I know a few, and upper middle class people. Most of the rich are regular people. It’s not until the top 1% that elitism really becomes apparent, and even then, some of those people actually did work for what they gained. Or took risks for it. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, did they not earn what they made?

They took risks. They reaped the reward. It’s like roulette, where socialists want a cut of the earnings of the guy who bets it all on a number. That’s unjust.

Isn’t that the point I made to Gloom, that he needs to address macro-economics and not just his own inner-city dense population?

I understand that there are levels of responsibility, that many people are born in the lowest rims of society. That’s no excuse though. That’s the way morality, accountability, and responsibility work. Kant was right. It’s universal. It doesn’t matter how rich and silver-spooned you were. It doesn’t matter if you were born a slave. If individuals don’t take responsibility for their own lives then they are going nowhere fast. This applies economically too. The first thing Moderns should learn is their value in the work-force, and the wages to compensate. If you are not being paid what you’re worth, then quit. It’s perfectly legal, and, the fruits of capitalism and western industriousness.

That’s where your wrong. Workers don’t necessarily owe anything to “democracy”. It’s only until democracy forms mob rule, and threatens the working man with jail, that ‘taxes’ are enforced by the State. Democracy is the criminal. You have things backward.

As-if it could be another way? As-if risk, competition, sacrifice is not involved to amass wealth? As-if most of the rich do not deserve the wealth they worked for?

That’s the beauty about the US, for now, still. If you work, risk, sacrifice, then you earn the wealth you make. It’s socialists like you who want to cut into that and steal.

I have no qualms against the top 1%. It’s very much to the benefit of everybody. Why do you think oil and gas is affordable? Thank the top 1%. Thank the Bush family.

Yes it is, there is already an excess of socialism in place. Socialism is responsible for the current ~$10 per hour minimum wage. That’s social enforcement and regulation of the economy by mob-rule.

No, just no, not in the US.

I’d rather them die on the street instead of my living room. I don’t think the world’s poor, poverty, discontents are my personal responsibility. I’m not a judaeo-christian, I don’t believe all the Sins of the world are mine to inherit. In fact I see that it’s immoral for people to put and push their own suffering and negative choices onto others. You ought to agree, at least, that people are poor, criminal, and foul out of wrong choices throughout life. Hobos and bums don’t magically appear on the street for nothing. They made choices to get there, bad choices, wrong choices, mostly, for those who don’t want to be there.

You are implying that people who make good choices (have an apartment, job, house, assets, wife, children, etc) owe people who make bad choices and live without.

That’s what I’m against. Bullshit. People who make good choices deserve not to have to worry about taking in the world’s poor into their living rooms as-if their welfare is owed to somebody else, on what principle?

Are you Judaeo-Christian? Are everbody else’s problems, bad choices, yours? Jesus Christ is your idol?

I have $40,000 in school debts. You want to take that on for me? Go ahead, show me your charity.

You haven’t shown that wages stagnated, because they haven’t. Minimum wage keeps going up in the US. Females and blacks make more than ever before, arguably, at the cost of white males, who have ‘stagnated’ economically.

I’m pro-privatization. Scandinavian countries are already socialist for the most part with extremely high taxes.

I’m pro-libertarian/classic liberalism, pro-individualism, pro-freedoms. Smaller or no government, defund public education, defund the police force.

However my ideals are not reality, nor would they work for everybody else. They reflect my personal opinion and values, nothing more. What’s good for one isn’t good for everybody necessarily.

Whether or not US “needs” more socialism is irrelevant to the fact that socialism has already been growing, hence the higher tax rates and repeals of previously enjoyed individual liberties. For example, consider the attacks against the Second Amendment in the US, and the state trying to impose gun laws, restrictions, and all sorts of barriers, attempting to take self-defense out of the hands of individual Americans, to replace that with “the state”. It’s the popular example. Socialism needs rebuked, not encouragement.

US is still strongly classical liberalist. The problem is new generations of entitled whiny beta chumps who want to ‘vote’ themselves more money instead of working and earning it.

The national US minimum wage is $7.25 not $10 and it hasn’t increased nationally since 2009.

Actually US citizens pay more in taxes than Scandinavians do in their respective countries. From what I read, their flat tax rate of around 60% doesn’t begin until one earns 1.5 more than the average income. Do those other countries pay all the national, state, and local taxes on top of their income taxes, such as sales tax, state tax, county tax, hotel/entertainment tax, inheritance tax, tobacco tax, alcohol tax, gasoline tax, etc, etc? No, they don’t and that makes USA taxes accumulatively higher than all other 1st world countries.

Flagrantly false.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c … _tax_rates

Wrong, either you agree with the wiki link or you provide more accurate information. Once you agree, I’ll show you exactly how much more YOU’RE WRONG. :laughing:

Important distinction here: monopolisation in a capitalist environment theoretically leads to higher prices than what they would be if competition undercut them and offered a similar enough product at a lower price, forcing a response etc. Monopolisation by the government in a non-capitalist environment doesn’t have the same effect because there isn’t incentive for any owner to push up prices for more profit (since there’s no comparable product, so you either pay more or go without entirely). In this case competition is a bad thing. No hypocrisy here - we don’t see so much benefit once competitions start to be won, once that happens the benefits we still enjoy were already established and still exist, despite starting to go bad. There is inertia because the products are already “out there” providing value after they were sold at a time when things were better.

Competition can be a good thing when the Classical Liberal theory of perfect competition is approached, but in practice companies use things like advertising to exploit consumer irrationality such that they can forge their own pseudo-monopoly from what is essentially the same product as others being seen more as a product in its own right. Economies of scale, mergers and acquisitions, the tendency in a competitive environment is highly in favour of any company that happens to get an edge - the only disadvantages are the possibility of losing track of the minutia and that since bigger sums are involved, things can go wrong in a bigger way. But good management and delegation can prevent that.

There need to be factors that keep competitions from being won. I watched an interesting video on youtube that described how these economic concepts occur in nature with application to vegetation. We really see the benefits of diversity and perfect competition in hostile and poor environments - where there are natural controls to curtail the wins of any one species over another. Once environments become rich and hospitable, winners can pull away, diversity and competition shrivel.

THIS is the reason that Capitalism is so praised - it naturally lent itself to enriching our formerly poorer and more diverse environments.
It’s also the reason why it is no longer appropriate.
We still enjoy the prosperity it brought about because it’s still present in society, but we are coming to enjoy it less and less over time.
I appreciate what it did, but it’s entirely appropriate to speak of it negatively now.

Yes, we have a public sector in western economies. You are not wrong. The point is not whether or not we have too much or too little taxation, it’s that we have measures in place to stem inequality. A society that has the most mobility and takes advantage of as much of the population as possible gives fair opportunity and doesn’t distance the top from the bottom to such a degree that there’s a complete disconnect. Competition needs to be kept in check for optimal outcome - that’s what government should be for, but at the moment it’s not.

When force still doesn’t do the job by itself, and it doesn’t because the government isn’t doing the job its supposed to do (as I just mentioned above), then yes, we still need charity - at least the rich won’t whine about charity as much, because it feels like it’s their own choice, when really they’re just doing it for their own reputation and to alleviate any guilt they may or may not feel. This is quite apparent because throwing money at something isn’t doing actually anything yourself, it’s getting other people to care so you don’t have to, and the money is going towards those running the charity as well as the actual cause - sometimes people are literally making money out of you thinking you’re putting all your money towards people who need it. Also the charities people often choose tend to be in their own interest anyway - if they really cared about the poor, they wouldn’t just donate to them, they’d fight to change the system that makes them poor even though it’s the same system that makes them rich. As if. And it’s not like they wouldn’t be able to continue to offer what they offered to make them rich if the standard deviations of income distributions were shrunk, they’re just being (understandably?) selfish.

What a ridiculous thing to say.

As if that’s not the case for capitalism many times more so.

There is a difference between communicating consent and feeling consent. You can give consent without really consenting if there is a power imbalance and/or a feeling of choice. The deal is done, but that doesn’t fully justify it, I’m sorry. If unemployment was a viable option for anyone, low skilled workers wouldn’t be forced to consent to bad deals just to get by. Funding unemployment is actually a highly valuable economic and moral device. The employed love to hate on them out of jealousy and/or high-horse virtue ethics, but they fulfill an inevitable if not a necessary role nonetheless.

Yes it is possible to get the employees in on some of the boons that the employer enjoys, and in some cases this happens and that’s great. In most case this doesn’t happen and that’s not great. Employers benefit from low skilled work just as much as they do from high skilled work (if not more because it’s cheaper due to high supply), so in the former case this just contributes to inequality even more.

I’m just going by their own words - I believe my comment about a pissing contest was in reference to a quote by Donald Trump who said it wasn’t about the money for him, it was about keeping score. You see examples of the super-rich doing this all the time, trying to outdo each other with the biggest super-yacht for example. I don’t know these people, but there’s plenty of coverage on their petty rivalries. Let them keep score, sure, just not with currency. I grew up in the upper middle class and I know very well how just as pettily competitive they are.

Bill Gates was instrumental in developing computer technology in its infancy. That’s awesome and I’m so glad for people like that and their hard work - let them be rewarded. But with incomes that are in excess of entire countries’ GDPs? No, that’s beyond ridiculous. How can one person, in themselves I mean, be more valuable than entire countries of people? The inventions he had a part in developing benefited loads of people to a huge extent, I know, but come on - on a human level this has no justification. Warren Buffet - didn’t he just make good investment decisions? I’m sure there’s an element of skill involved, but statistically someone was going to emerge lucky in that one. As if he was the only one with these skills who tried to do exactly the same thing… And as I said, funding enterprises that pay their workers less than the workers earn the company isn’t productivity - there’s no virtue to what he did. Government can fund things too, big whoop.

Very wrong.

Behaviour is entirely a result of an environment-genetic interaction. In a bad environment, no matter how good the genes, this is going to result in irresponsible behaviours. If nothing is done about this and it’s just allowed to perpetuate, there is no better excuse. It’s the responsibility of those who get on the lucky side of this crap-shoot to change these bad environments, but they don’t because of loss aversion and being too worried about themselves losing their advantage that they didn’t choose. And they are usually guilty of the same kind of common ignorance that you showed about behaviour in the above quote. The thing about free will in a deterministic universe is that you are “free” to choose, but you didn’t choose to make that choice - that choice was determined by the environment-gene interaction that occurred without your will. As if poor people are choosing to stay poor :doh:

Yes, some slaves and some downtrodden and unlucky starters manage to pull through, equally not out of any Kantian deontology or lofty privileged philosophy, but because of circumstances working in their favour despite the odds being against them - they aren’t 100%, a tiny minority will pull through.

The whole “take responsibility” thing is very popular at the moment, and it works on plenty of people which is great, but it won’t and can’t on many others - don’t assume a necessarily universality of morality when science proves otherwise.

And no, whilst quitting an exploitative role is perfectly legal, the alternatives - or at least the only ones you might know/be able to do - are often worse. So you don’t quit. Clearly, very clearly, this is the case for a great many people or otherwise we wouldn’t still see this sad situation everywhere all the time.

@Wrong

It’s not my responsibility, I didn’t inherit billions of dollars from my ancestors who exploited the environment, the economy and the vulnerable under a largely fraudulent, rigged system.

@Wrong

That’s your opinion.
Property is make believe, each individual and/or collective gets to draw the lines wherever they see fit, if they draw them at all, and then we can discuss the implications and ramifications of drawing them here and/or there.
This is how I see it: just because you pay government to protect a place for you, doesn’t make it yours, if you rarely or never physically occupy or occupied it, than it’s a kind of theft from those who’re occupying it now.

That’s not the point, the point is this is fundamentally a capitalist system, contrary to your assertion that it isn’t.

Competition is also physical.
Capitalists have incorporated corporatism in order to further monopolize the economy.
The rich have money but the poor have numbers, we’ll just have to see which class wins out in the end.
Winning isn’t absolute tho, rather battles are won/lost, class warfare never ends.
There’s no utopia, only better/worse conditions for some/many.

I never said they were your responsibility, I said they were partly the responsibility of capitalists, and I gave reasons.

I’m not a Judeo-Christian either, not only am I an atheist, but I don’t believe we’re all equally responsible for everything bad or wrong that happens to people, that was never my point.

Some poor people are more responsible for their circumstances than others.
You paint the poor with a broad brush, but perhaps I paint capitalists with a broad brush too, some capitalist are better/worse than others, but as a whole it’s a bad, or at least a now largely obsolete system.

This isn’t about charity, it’s about taking back what’s arguably ours, mainly, but also about how we and the environment could probably do more good with it than they could.

The cost of living has gone up significantly more than wages have gone up.

I’m not sure if they’re mostly socialist, I’ll have to do more research on them, from what I know all western countries are basically degrees of capitalist.

I’m either an eco-socialist or an anarchist, what I am is in my signature.

There’s no such thing as an absolute win/win, but in my opinion my ideals would make life better for many-most people living today in the west.

Not all socialists think alike.
Originally socialists were pro-direct democracy and militias, that is to say, if government should exist at all, every able bodied citizen should be a politician, legislator and enforcer, and so pro-gun. I’m pro-gun.
While I hope the state can make life better in some ways, I don’t trust it as much as you think.

The only chumps here are the ones who vote in their own servitude and slavery.

It’s not just the fittest who survive, in nature or society, it’s also the luckiest.

Bill Gates made billions of dollars…but does that mean he’s millions of times better than the average joe?
Of course not, he may be a few times smarter, harder working and so on, but not millions of times.

He just happened to make a product that was a little bit better than everyone else at the time, but if he didn’t, if lightning had’ve struck him down instead, one of his competitors would’ve been a billionaire with their slightly worse product, or someone would’ve come along in several months and built a product just as good or better than Bill Gates.
So a lot of that was just being at the right place at the right time.

If all Bill Gates money was taken from him, and he had to start all over again, would all things align perfectly in his favor as they did in the past, so he could become a billionaire again?
I think that’s about as likely as lightning striking the same place twice in a row.
So money then isn’t really a measure of greatness.

Furthermore, it was the people below and around Bill Gates too, that made it all possible, not only was he standing on the shoulders of his employees and partners but on the shoulders of all Americans, of civilization itself, but because of how patents and property is defined, Bill Gates reaped much-most of the rewards.

So while Bill Gates is a great man for having done what he did, he is not a God, he is not actually worth millions of times more than the aveage Joe, that’s just how much he has, and while he should’ve been richly rewarded for what he did, billions of dollars is absurd.

Capitalism doesn’t strictly = merit, it’s also a kind of roulette, where even halfwits could, and often do strike it rich, just for being at the right place at the right time, like a lot of reality TV stars, or cranks, quacks, infomercial guys, who manage to get lucky turning their gimmicks into gold.
So let’s not pretend capitalism is just ‘doing God’s work’, the invisible hand is not the ‘hand of God’, it’s a cainso economy, societal roulette.

It wasn’t just Bill Gates intellect or work ethic that lead to that superior product, or even his colleagues, it might’ve been the food he was eating at the time, maybe it was a little healthier or gave him the right kind of energy, unbeknownst to him, maybe his personality quirks just happened to make him the right man for the right place/time, maybe it was his wife or girlfriend cheering him on, all these variables that were largely outside his conscious control that gave him the momentum he needed to accomplish what he did.
It’s all these little things, why one man beats another one day, many of them inside the man, many of them outside.
It’s kind of mysterious how people get rich/famous, there is no exact formula, obviously genes/memes, artistry, intellect, working hard and so on are part of it, but there’s also environment. A lot of it can’t be articulated or written down in a book, so much of it is out of our control.

You’re wrong about the overall taxation rate of US versus european countries, twit.

That is no longer capitalism then, but is Corporatism. Capitalism drives prices of goods down, due to competing businesses, and drives wages up, again due to competing employers.

This is gonna be fun. Pick a European Country you claim has a higher overall taxation rate. You won’t cuz your nametag reads dishonest coward.

Bill Gates was born into money. Its easier to venture out when you know you have the safety net of your family fortune to fall back on.

It’s somewhat entertaining to see all the excuses for one’s own spiritual and moral weakness people use to blame others for their own failures, and scapegoating away personal responsibility and accountability for failing to get ahead in life. It’s obvious very uncommon and rare for somebody to begin to take account of their own life, and, you are responsible for your own wage, your job, your career, your lifestyle, and the risks you make throughout life. Instead of looking up to those who become successful, of their own accord, they are instead shamed and successes are inverted into failures. “He was born into it” “He doesn’t deserve it” “What about everybody’s lack of opportunity” “Equality” No, these are all self-serving excuses, conjured up by weak souls and individuals who are, simply put, losers in life.

Winners don’t accept failure, but will keep on trying, keep on moving forward, keep on risking, despite the losses. That’s the American way, and the premise of western capitalism, the heroes who built the country from the ground up.

Sad to see such mentality in this forum, filled up by the opposite, quitter, loser mentality.

No the losers are members of the middle and working classes who’re working harder and harder for a standard of living that’s getting lower and lower year by year, decade by decade, expecting the opposite to miraculously occur.
On the one hand, we have to make do with the system we got, but on the other, we can also opt for a better one at the voting booth and in other ways.

thejournal.ie/bill-gates-har … 8-Mar2016/

In what world does this even happen?!
In a world of money cushions, that’s where. Let us at least be more realistic and not compare apples and oranges here.
Are you really going to sit there and listen to the likes of bill gates or zuckerberg giving you, a regular Joe Schmoe, a pep talk? If I can do it you can do it too! Please!
We live in the world where proper connections matter, and where money helps money:
cnbc.com/2017/10/04/bill-ga … bucks.html

Mind sharing the other ways?

Become an activist, or a writer, try to join a union, or form one, take advantage of social services when you need to, shoplift from Walmart…
I never agreed to the rules of this game, they’re rigged in their favor.