30 Dollar Minimum Wage

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.

When you live in a world where people turn to socialism, taxing, third-party interventions, all wanting to take cuts and pieces from the individuals (capitalists) who are successful then you know you’ve lost, and you’re on the wrong side of history. It’s easy to steal from others, by advocating for taxes and increasing taxes. It’s much more difficult to actually make money, profit, work hard, and owning up to failures, mistakes, losses. The capitalists are still the heroes of today. They’re not yet defeated, but hope does look dim, after reading this thread and the socialist advocates.

How many people are advocating for personal responsibility? Just me?? That’s it.

If a worker is not getting his/her wage, then don’t whine and bitch about it, demand a raise, or quit. The onus is upon you, not the employer. Or better yet, start your own business, see how well you do there. But these are words falling upon deaf ears. Nobody wants to do the ‘right’ thing. Everybody still wants to steal bites and crumbs of the pie. I understand that, because it’s addictive. In the US socialists already voted themselves about 22% of the pie, and want more.

I’m the anti-popular position here. If it were up to me, I would get rid of the government almost entirely, or entirely, reduce taxes down to 0-5%, and it only goes to military spending. No public education. No public roads. Private roads, tollbooths, privatize everything. More capitalism, more competition, not less. Strike out the minimum wage and child labor laws completey. If a 14 year old teenage boy wants to work then let him. That’s real education, not socialist liberal-left propaganda of the public education system, teaching kids to steal steal steal more of the pie.

You are all being a bit disingenuous and pedantic towards urwrong. The issue is not an exact dollar figure of $200, the fact is that accommodations can be had for cheaper than what most of you are assuming livable is, asian girl or not. What is livable anyways? Roof over your head and food in your mouth? What kind of roof? Or does it include transportation, entertainment, comfort, indulgence? A whole apartment for a person? Why is a room unreasonable? Do you mean the same “livable” benchmark as a minimum wage worker? Which is starting to get back to the original topic of this thread of raising minimum wage to $30 an hour. If $30 an hour is livable is this also what welfare and disability should pay out to? How would this not result in the halting of the industriousness of a nation? I am not saying that we shouldn’t review what level of “livable” we intend to provide, but a $30/hr equivalent is ridicule worthy.

Sorry, but anyone who has actually had to work hard, struggle, sacrifice for and to keep their place in the world understands this stuff intuitively. In fact, socialists’ lack of understanding of how healthy human societies function is the root of all their terrible ideas. The comment about keeping track of all the help someone didn’t deserve as a child is a perfect example. Your parents (assuming they weren’t dead beats) worked to earn enough “deserving” (aka “privilege” to leftists when trying to use the idea to their advantage) so that they could live a “livable” life according to the balance of their own abilities and desires. Privilege/deserving is EARNED, and as a child you are the direct result and only possible outcome of the choices your parents made and the actions they took. And it is the same for them and their parents, and so on and so forth. There is no randomness about it. It could only have happened that way because that is the way it happened. A parent spends their earned deserving on the child, and in a healthy culture/family there are no ledgers for this sort of thing. Likewise, the amount of deserving a parent or family patriarch/matriarch/bread-winner can spend or transfer to their child is of course limited by that which the parent has earned themselves to spend. This makes up part of what is a cultural inheritance as it occurs across a society’s population.

If you want to derail that by talking about rich people not earning their keep and just exploiting everyone or taking advantage of X loophole, then we can also talk about disability and welfare fraud, and in the case of your $30/hr per person idea we can speak directly to the examples you have given. So, one parent works full-time or both parents work part time, but if both parents work full-time but only one $30/hr income is actually required, then the parents could use the additional income to become rich by any number of means. This would be no different than your idea of greedy employers, the money comes from the people. If $30/hr is livable for a 4 person family, then isn’t $60/hr unreasonable to expect from the taxpayer for the same 4 person family, and if not then surely it won’t be unreasonable when they use that money to invest and become financially independent and no longer have to work and become the very rich people you are whining you aren’t one of? Like exactly how it is today? And if you think as you say that you would expect people who are currently making $30 an hour would get raises accordingly, then how do you expect you will maintain employment levels while simultaneously increasing costs to the employers? Could it possibly be that producers/suppliers have to raise their prices to compensate and then the precious $30/hr becomes the new $15/hr? Keeping in mind that if you fix taxation (even you yourself mentioned LOWERING taxes, fancy that, not very socialist of you. Just for the things you want, right?) there will be no need to impose a $30 min wage. The ironic thing is that leftist social experiments were responsible for the switch from comfortable one income families to required two or more income families today. Leftists are the people that blindly push for X change and then two generations down the road the same type of people start crying about the state of things. So they blindly push for another short-sighted change. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Those that cannot EARN their deserving exist only due to the compassion and earned deserving of others. This is also what is left of natural selection and darwinism. Socialists think they can usurp this earned deserving by taking it by force. They don’t understand that “socialism” occurs as a natural mechanism within a healthy and homogeneous society, usually within a family unit. If we fixed the things that appear in the first paragraph of the OP we would solve many of the problems (and others that the leftists are causing, like disintegration of traditions, morals and family values which religion and culture are downstream of) we have because the society would be more capable of taking care of itself as it once largely did. You wouldn’t need to mandate a $30 an hour minimum wage because the society would return to a state where one full or two partial incomes would provide enough deserving to support that system. Mandating a $30/hr minimum wage when the market is not ready for it not only forces an unnatural cultural state (which is why imposed socialism ALWAYS fails) it presumes the undeserved have a right to take from those that have earned deserving, and it presumes to elevate the virtue of compassion (of course in their own twisted and intolerant way) to the exclusion of all others . If you fix the actual problems and maintain a healthy society, those that earn deserving will support those that can’t/don’t to whatever level is healthy for that society. Sorry it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, but it is the height of stupidity and arrogance to think that we can out think a nature determined by our evolution that has ruled us since our very beginning, which by the way, we barely understand. Especially since forced socialism has been tried many times and always ends tragically. But you’re smarter than even that right? Socialists think they are more enlightened but they are still bound by human nature which includes stupidity, greed, dishonesty, vice, violence and hypocrisy. What’s the excuse we always hear when giving examples of failed socialist states? “That wasn’t real socialism, we know better than X, we will do it right”.

The exact dollar figures were the issue when he made claims about exact dollar figures. The feat was to live on $600 like wrong claimed was possible which he never showed in any fashion of budget how that would work out. There is no range of money beyond $600 when that is one’s budget, so wrong needed to provide what he specifically claimed regarding the $200 as well as the rest of his easy breezy use of that $600 to live high on the hog.

We used to have no minimum wage and child labour laws, no obligatory education, no welfare - we already know how it looks, just read a history book. You think you’re a Libertarian of sorts no doubt, but you’re unknowingly just advocating Feudalism, which it would turn into very quickly. Do Americans even get taught European history prior to their country’s hostile takeover? The most actually free countries in the world are third world shitholes, the experiments have already been done and still continue today - learn about Pinochet’s recent presidency as a good example - there’s very good reason why we don’t go for Tea Party nonsense in more developed parts of the world, where the best performing nations are actually more Social Democratic with welfare systems - fact.

If things were still like how you want them to become again, unless you have noble ancestry and statistically I’m willing to guess you don’t, you’d be working the fields or some modern equivalent as a serf and living in a shanty town, walking through streets glazed in human waste, dying early from easily treatable diseases like in the third world. Then you can work as hard as you like! After all, if you didn’t, you’d not provide enough for your vassals (essentially the military) and have enough left over to feed yourself and your family, which will be larger due to lack of education and to make up for all the premature deaths. Those in power in the West say North Korea, which resembles this, is Communist - it’s actually more Feudalist if people actually cared to learn the actual definitions of each term.

We’ve moved on, keep up! There’s a reason your position is anti-popular, particularly by the educated, who for some obviously conspiratorial reason tend to be left wing :wink: . It must be because they have no life experience (unlike the minority of right wingers also in education and the many left wingers who have experienced the world of work for many years, right?) and not because they actually know things! #-o

The educated left even read about attempts at achieving Socialism as a gateway to Communism and all the difficulties in orchestrating such a revolution (the same difficulties with all the same violence that has always occurred throughout history when significant socio-economic change was attempted e.g. the hostile acquisition of America to install its notion of Classical Liberalism). As such we know the difference between something run by the people, and some top-down dictatorship that called itself “Communism” - I already explained and you sympathised with how progressive things are appropriated by the opposition to mean their opposite. We know it wasn’t actually Communism because we know what Communism actually is compared to that which it was named after, which failed horribly because it was actually Totalitarianism.

I’ve already explained the rationale behind what you’re still calling “taking cuts and pieces from the successful”. Necessarily, for every winner there is a loser - that’s fine. Let me repeat, let there be inequality and reward for the productive, but for God’s sake let there be controls to curtail the degree to which winners can absolutely dominate the losers. The unplanned market demonstrably can’t do it itself without its inbuilt, inevitable, periodic and catastrophic market crashes bringing the whole system back into the 3rd world, which they would without the unappreciated government safety nets that we enjoy (and suffer) today, just to re-level the playing field to an extent. In order to keep but also control inequality such that we can maintain some semblance of social mobility and utilisation of talent that would otherwise be lost to lack of opportunity, there needs to be redistribution - aka a wage expense to not only direct employees but also the rest of the economy for its indirect part in you acquiring all your riches as an employer - aka TAX.

Personal responsibility is inbuilt in my propositions here (even with application to capitalists! Crazy) - it is still very much required, you are not alone in its advocation. My point about the biology of behaviour is not to be overlooked however, it’s not as simple as just saying “take responsibility”, it’s pre-determined that many won’t just because of biology. You can’t avoid that, even if you were to arrange things such that they literally died out like in non-human species. Nature’s crap-shoot for excellence inevitably results in losers as well as winners, except we have the ability to allow them to live out a life of minimal dignity, we only need to choose to do so (the left) or not (the right).

Maybe I’ve not properly explained, but the pool of unemployment plays a necessary role in the economy. 1) There’s those who will never be fit for useful economic participation, the disabled, the elderly, infants etc. - we need to pay for them to stay out if anything. 2) There’s those who can be educated to be useful, we need to pay for that if they can’t themselves (teacher salaries need to be high enough to justify how difficult they can be, burnout is particularly high for such an essential job), and 3) there’s those who are able and willing to work but can’t get anything yet - this maintains a level of competitive strain for people to keep their job and work hard at it to justify their employment over someone who is after their job. The second category cannot be overlooked in case there is talent that would otherwise be lost, and I’m not in favour of the third - I don’t think fear is the optimal incentive to work, but this is the valuable role unemployment currently plays for our economy and it’s in our own interests to pay for it. It even helps stem inflation: see the Phillips curve.

But there’s also the overstated category of 4) “able but not willing”, which everybody likes to focus on. In reality, this group is going to exist: there will exist people willing to sacrifice their dignity, social status and their position on the ladder of sexual desirability (moreso with males) just to not have to work. On one hand you just have to accept that due to the importance of the first 3 categories, the 4th will exist as an unfortunate side effect and that’s just tough, because it can only be managed to a very limited extent without oppressive measures that spill over and negatively affect other parties too. On the other hand I’m absolutely in favour of personal freedom, including the freedom to not work - cue the incoming hate towards my position here. Admit this though: not all valuable productivity has its place within paid work - there is a lot of creativity that could go on here but can’t because the necessity to enter into paid work is so high. And yes, I support the right to live with minimal dignity despite being out of work and sacrificing social and sexual status like I said, I’m sorry. They are a minority and this is cheap to fund, just let them be. On the whole though, the unemployed are very very much worth their pay.

Finally, robots! Technological creativity is replacing human necessity in the workplace, it’s actually increasingly cheaper and better to not pay us to work, to even pay us to not work when a machine can. Back to my aversion to the third category, the further justification is here: if there wasn’t the pressure to accept a bum deal to perform unskilled work that this category is all after just to get a foot in the door, it would be more economical for employers to invest in machinery to do the job instead of having to pay higher wages just to reignite the incentive for this category to still try.
Again, pay the unemployed to not search for work if they don’t have something skilled to offer, pay for machinery to do it instead.

This is going to happen anyway - eventually to skilled work too.
Technology is encroaching more and more, the pool of unemployed will only grow as a result, particularly once a certain threshold is hit.
What will you rightists do then? Deny them welfare and let them suffer and starve just to prove a point about responsibility? Do you have an ounce of civility? Soon it will affect you types too, and what then? Will you then be in favour of welfare or suicide?

Accept reality. Leftism is necessarily the future because of this, any perceived rise in its popularity is only the beginning of an adjustment to the coming reality, whether or not such a rise is actually happening at all. The future is happening though.

I’ve stolen the following from someone young advocates of the right seem to worship at the moment: Jordan Peterson. He speaks of iterative trading games coming to adopt a pareto distribution where the median and modal wealth quickly approaches literally zero, and the end result is all the wealth ending up in the hands of 1 person - just like a game of monopoly. This has been simulated even where the outcomes of the trades are random, and the same result happens. Our current inequality would have happened even if it was all just luck - and due to determinism in my opinion all skill and ability actually is entirely luck: you don’t choose your initial conditions, and every subsequent decision to change these conditions or otherwise is necessarily the result of your luck in these initial conditions. That’s all it is. Rightists need to get off their high horse and respect the realities of nature, your philosophies are all just manifestations of the fundamental attribution error.

If you’ve not yet read and appreciated my position @Inconvenient Reality, then do read and appreciate the above. These are far better arguments than I see being presented by other leftists here (and most other places I’ve come across too). They can be very wishy-washy, but the above should all be abundantly clear, logical and very real.

Democracy can only work when peoples incomes are somewhat equal.
When the richest are worth as much as a small country, and the poorest don’t have a pot to piss in, the rich can just buy the politicians and the courts, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Democracy doesn’t work without equality.
Of course we’re not all equal and we shouldn’t make the exact same amount of money, but the gap between rich and poor has never been higher in the history of the world as it is now.
The gap between the richest and poorest class in say Ancient Athens pales in comparison to the chasm we have now. It seems the more wealth humanity has…the more concentrated it gets.
The game is rigged.

The minimum wage should be increased to 30 dollars, and after that adjusted for inflation annually.
Either that or government should takeover some or all of the food and housing industries, so we can have cheap, affordable rents and food.
If healthcare and education are universal, and they are in Canada, and most of the developed world, food and housing should be universal too, as they’re far more essential.

The argument you’re making just is not realistic.

The living standard keeps going up in the Western world, mostly due to technological advancement. It’s not getting lower. The shrinking of the middle class isn’t necessarily a bad thing when put into the context of inflation. A century ago, making $50,000 per year meant you were rich. Today it means middle class. And it also depends on where you live, in a city or rural. As such, your broad claims don’t mean much without specific examples and contexts.

Everybody is ‘richer’ today.

Coming from the kettle, that sure is a rich suggestion.

If we’re to have absolute ‘freedom’, in the capitalist or ‘libertarian’ sense, since children and the mentally retarded can’t consent to anything, or take care of themselves, shouldn’t they be the property of their parents or caretakers?
While seniors and cripples may be able to consent, unless they’re rich, they can’t take care of themselves, so shouldn’t they be property of their children or caretakers?
And what about animals, if they can’t consent to anything they can’t have rights.

Perhaps criminals who’re going to be executed or locked up for life anyway should be sold into slavery, and captives of war.
Perhaps debtors who can’t possibly pay their debts in their lifetime should be sold into slavery as well.

Shouldn’t you be able to sell your children into slavery?
You should be able to sell yourself into slavery, shouldn’t you?
And of course the offspring of your property would be your property.

There are some prominent libertarians who’ve advocated for some or all of the above, such as Robert Nozick.
All of these practices are arguably the logical extention of libertarianism, we can see how following libertarian premises/principles to their logical conclusion would eventually lead to a kind of industrial or postindustrial feudalism.
If I own myself, then I have the right to sell myself into slavery, or sign a contract whereby a or the condition of breaking the contract, is that I become a slave.

It looked great. It would look great today too, if imposed.

Bullshit, the 21st Century is a different environment. If the US was stripped of government, taxes lowered, then society would actually progress. People would have several magnitudes more buying power. Everybody could afford healthcare, because of that same buying power. (Many would choose not to buy it though.) Deflation would occur too. People would increase their wealth as companies would be pressured into hiring workers. People would want to work, need to work, and companies would want, and need, to hire. Increased competition is good for those willing to work, the ones who matter.

Competition benefits the hard-working, risk-takers, men in general. As it stands now, socialism is weak, apathetic, whiny, more focused on avoiding work, voting yourselves money instead of making, creating, earning money. Socialistic compulsions are more likened to the decay of (feudalistic) society than anything else. Rather than people knowing that they must solve their own problems, in socialism they turn to authorities to fix problems for them, hence depending on monarchical representatives or theocratic, priestly authority. Turn to God to fix your problems. Pray harder.

All of that is inferior to capitalism. If you want something then the onus is upon you to get it. No voting for it. No praying for it. Only working for it.

Why should winners be curtailed? Somebody bets $10,000 in roulette. Who are you to say winning $10,000,000 is “too much”? That’s the loser mentality I’m talking about. Hands off his winnings. It’s not yours. You seem salty that another guy risked his $10,000 and won. While you risked $10,000 and lost? So now you have nothing and he has everything. That’s the result of gambling, winners and losers. But the losers, having nothing, now want to gang up and steal from the winner.

Exaggeration, humanity literally cannot go back to the third world with all the technology we now have at our disposal. Smart phones make it impossible to go back.

Civility implies that those who are closest to the disabled, children, vexed, are responsible for them. It’s like a mother or father abandoning their child on a doorstep. Rather than blame the deadbeat parent, you blame the person opening the door, for being inconsiderate and ‘hateful’. It’s not the person’s responsibility on the doorstep. And by ignoring the deadbeat parents, you are being immoral, by blaming the wrong people for the causes.

So it is with Capitalism too, economics and society. As long as you keep blaming the wrong people (the ones opening the door to the abandoned child), the more you are perpetuating the types of ills you denounce.

You have not reconciled the differences between personal liberty versus the socialistic compulsions. Obviously an individual cannot be ‘free’ when society (socialists) impose all matters of restrictions, beginning with taxation, and then proceeding to a mountain of laws and legal binding. If the government and third-party intervention already takes 22% of your lifetime earning and value, then isn’t that enough? For Gloominary, apparently not.

If socialists were rebuked, and people retained their earnings, then consumer buying power would go up. Socialistic and welfare programs would not be “needed”, except by those who can’t work, or refuse to work. But this still doesn’t the matter of responsibility by which people can’t work, or won’t work. If average people had more buying power then it would be possible for families to take care of their own disabled, the ones who cannot work. Thus it would not be the burden of the rest of society (who had no part in spawning or causing the disability).

Children are already the property of their parents, by law, or the property of a “guardian” who supplants the parent.

From my perspective, a parent has absolute authority over his/her own child, as an extension of his/her own self. Yes the parent can do what s/he wishes.

It’s socialists like yourself who believe “The Government” or “God” is a higher authority, and has the “Right” to stick its nose in, to interject between Parent and child.

So who is the real slave, if you cannot own yourself, if you cannot own your child?

Animals don’t have rights.

You’re not free unless you can sell yourself into slavery, if you choose to of course.

Mostly correct, I’d say the parent-child relationship is more immediate than the grandparent-grandchild relation.

If you were truly free then what would stop you from entering into any contract?

Did you guess it? “The Government”, “God”, “The State”, “Society” these are all restrictions to freedom.

Freedom means, hypothetically, that you could do anything you want (within your power and responsibility to do so). Freedom also means paying the price of consequences, winners and losers. Freedom does not mean rigging the game.

Why even use the word responsibility? That word does not align with freedom. True freedom has no constraints, especially not self-imposed ones.

You can’t know the difference between what is free, and what is not, without responsibility.

A free person wouldn’t give your existence, let alone your understanding of freedom, responsibility, or anything a second thought, not until you got in their way limiting them would they counteract your existence. Even then, they wouldn’t care one iota what you thought. Primal survival of the fittest would be true freedom now.

You’re talking out your ass.

So what, if anything, gave serfs the right to rebel against their feudal lords?

What gave Afro-American slaves the right to rebel against their white masters?