30 Dollar Minimum Wage

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?

It was never a matter of rights. It was a matter of force, power, and violence.

Anybody who has ever became free knows that it is through ferocity. Freedom is won, and earned. “Freedom isn’t free”.

And we’re back to square one, the law of the jungle, might makes right, amoralism.

And sometimes, or at least occasionally, the poor slaves, serfs and wage slaves are more powerful, and can outwit the rich few.

And just as they made the world a better place to live in yesterday, at least for themselves, they can make the world a better place to live in today.

If it was ‘right’, or at least made sense to partly emancipate themselves yesterday, it may and arguably is right/makes sense to more fully emancipate themselves today.

Maybe. :evilfun: Just following your lead. :evilfun:

There is no freedom in civility and you’re describing freedom from that of a civilized and constrained man. There is no deep thought, imaginings, fantasies in being free. Freedom is more doing, less thinking. Contemplation restricts doing, thus restricts freedom.

There’s degrees of hierarchy, master/slave is the starkest one, serf/lord is a little less stark.
Wage slave/capitalist is a form of hierarchy too, a little less stark than serf/lord.
Hierarchies are often bad, at least for the ones on the bottom, but they’re not always bad, like the hierarchy that exists between parent/child, or between wise, just leader/follower.
But just because you or your ancestors consented to a hierarchy, or a hierarchy was imposed upon you or them, doesn’t mean you can’t or it wouldn’t be in your best interests to rebel, doesn’t mean it would be necessarily ‘immoral’ or ‘irresponsible’ to rebel.
If we didn’t rebel in the feudal age, well, we’d still be in the feudal age, and that wouldn’t be very good.
Not all capitalism and capitalists are bad, not all socialism or workers are good.
But to the degree capitlaism has been found to be bad and can be oppoosed, it ought to be, just because some of this was consented to by our ancestors, or is being consented to now, doesn’t mean it’s in our best interests.
Fundamentally we never consented to any of this, this system, we were all born into it, I wasn’t asked if I’d like to be a citizen of Canada, you weren’t asked if you’d like to be a citizen of the US or the UK.

African Americans didn’t ‘earn’ their freedom so much as it was given to them by the unionists from the confederates, so I guess they don’t ‘deserve’ it, by your standard, and they should still be slaves.

How did people become serfs?
Were their ancestors defeated in battle by stronger, smarter or luckier adversaries?
Did their ancestors lose their freedom in a relatively ‘free’ agraian, predinustrial market through sheer incompetence or bad luck?
Perhaps all of the above.
Whatever the case may be, they were serfs because of ‘decisions’ they or their ancestors made, so I guess they had no right to rebel, and the responsibility to submit.

It’s not that government is my God, to the degree government is oppressive and can be resisted, it should be resisted.
However, a democratic government is less likely to be oppressive than a megacorporation owned by just a handful of individuals.
The more participatory the government, or the corporation, the more I’m inclined to trust it.
Our democracy isn’t very participatory, because it’s representative and manipulated by corporations, and so isn’t very trustworthy.
If more people voted for a broader range of parties and better parties, I’d be more inclined to trust it. Instead, essentially what we have is a two party dictatorship.
Both parties are demonstrably beholden to the corporations, with only slight and stylistic differences between them.

What does it mean for the middle class to be shrinking?
It means the prices of things in general, or essential goods and services like food and housing are rising more than their wages, so they can buy less and less stuff in general, or stuff they need, and that’s exactly what’s occurring.
I’ve already used a couple of statistics to prove this point.
If the standard of living for the middle and working classes was visibly growing, then I probably wouldn’t be complaining, but it’s not, even tho the economy as a whole visibly is, and that’s what tends to happen under a capitalism with little-no safety net.
A few exceptions to the rule like computers and cell phones cheapening doesn’t disprove the rule.

Are you serious? It sounds like you are, in which case I guess you “deserve” such a society, but I will do everything in my power to stop things for me regressing back to some illiterate Trump-like fantasy about how everything used to be better when it objectively wasn’t (but don’t worry, I have very little power with which to fight this fight). I wish there was a way for you to forge your own 3rd world disaster just so you could realise how misguided your rose-tinted nostalgic prayers are - I’m sure you wish the same thing with an entirely different expectation.

You can keep saying if there was no government then things would progress and it still wouldn’t be true. You need to stop praying.

The fantasy that people would have more buying power without taxation shows complete economic ignorance. Let me explain how this actually works under your dream scenario:

  1. Company tax expenses decrease to zero
  2. Revenues are initially the same, profits increase proportionally to the decrease in tax expense
  3. The company now has the option to increase wage expenses back up (hire more staff and/or pay the current ones more) so that their profits remain unchanged (though there’s less reason to keep profits down than if tax was applied to them before), or to enjoy the extra drawings and spend it on themselves, or to invest in growth of the business.
  4. Employees have the option to ask for the aforementioned payrise, and are more likely to get it if they cannot be easily replaced by someone who will do the same job for less if the role is a highly skilled one. Unskilled employees are less likely to get it, but still might depending on the philosophy of the employer - they already have more income if they used to incur direct taxes and things are cheaper if there used to be indirect taxes on them. Initial higher spending power.

~this is where you stop thinking~

  1. What happens when spending power increases? Supply temporarily dwindles because it can’t adjust to an immediate change quickly enough, demand for the same products increases because people now have the money to buy them.
  2. What happens when supply dwindles and demand increases? Prices are increased to mitigate stock shortages and to take advantage of higher demand: inflation!

What did you think would happen when more money was introduced into the private sector? Why would this be ANY different to governments increasing money supply through quantitative easing, which you guys all love to hate on?! I thought you said you understood economics and were even masterful at it?

You can have any amount of total money supply, and it will still be allocated to all the goods and services that we currently have the infrastructure to offer, in the proportions that we currently see that merely reflect the current power imbalance and what resources are physically accessible. More money supply = all goods and services scale up in price in the same proportion and likewise they proportionally decrease with less money supply. Any disruptions always eventually resolve back to the same imbalance, regardless of their nature and extent.

But who says any of the above would happen at all when we have all these government services that were in demand but have now disappeared?

Either they are immediately bought up by private buyers, new businesses are formed to cater to the same demand for which the government formerly provided the supply, or you are going on incur the aforementioned inflation because the money supply was increased in the private sector. If the business is not picked up or replaced, GDP decreases, and with that the country’s borrowing power may also decrease because they now have less wealth to back the credit arrangements with other countries that all countries heavily rely on. If it is picked up, then there’s no extra money like you imagined.

Either way, no extra spending power. None of your fantasy comes true.

Taxation doesn’t actually affect the wealth proportions that naturally emerge due to the private sector, all it does is act as just another market force in just the same way as a major supplier on whom your business relies or a highly paid indispensable employee. If anything, taking away taxation only increases the speed at which these proportions spiral inequality in favour of an increasingly small minority. But that’s going to be quick anyway once technology significantly starts replacing the need for humans to do work that a machine can do better.

I say let gamblers risk, win and lose their bets… but to an extent. $10,000? To some that’s nothing, maybe a holiday to others, probably not that life-changing even to someone who is poor - though enough perhaps to get somebody who has nothing back in the game. $10m? Wow, nice! Life-changing to most, a big lottery win that we often see, go nuts! $10trillion in winnings? Once sums get high enough they start to have significant effects on the economy, and their absence in certain areas becomes noticeable. Like I said, let there be inequality, reward people when it is beneficial to everyone to do so, but how much is enough reward? When it stops being beneficial to everyone and starts being more detrimental just for the sake of rewarding one person - that’s when we have a problem.

No exaggeration, you assume too much.

Smart phones aren’t “just here now” whatever happens. If the technology needed for them to operate cannot be bought, maintained and upgraded, they don’t work anymore, SORRY! If credit “crunches”, floors drop out from markets, nobody has confidence to lend anymore, since modern transactions are now utterly at the whim of lending and borrowing, things can’t keep working the way they do anymore. This even goes for all the things you clearly take for granted - even energy and food. It’s entirely possible for them to stop getting to everyone, even today, if nobody can afford to pay anybody to operate things anymore. This would be less so for renewable energy, but you just can’t profit quite as much from something of which you can’t control the supply! - hence why non-renewable energy just won’t go away. But thanks to entropy, even renewable energy sources break eventually.

Our only chance to maintain our current conditions after a big enough market crash, without government to bail out the most important services, would be if people who worked in those important services all agreed to work for free: becoming even more clearly the slaves we all always were to the market.

You have a messed up notion of civility. Civility is picking up the pieces of incivility, such as abandoning a baby on a doorstep - an absolutely immoral act no question, and any parents who do such a thing do not escape blame for their actions. But civility isn’t black and white, it isn’t EITHER one party’s fault OR another’s. To be civil would be to ensure the health and safety of that baby to whatever extent possible (not necessarily taking care of the baby yourself) - what any moral person would do regardless of the immorality of the action that required their morality. The household at which the baby is abandoned have a civil responsibility should such a thing happen to them, and they are also to blame if they do not fulfill this responsibility. They shouldn’t have to, but incivility happens and it only gets worse if it is responded to with incivility.

As such the primary blame is obviously with the parents. Obviously. Don’t stupidly assume I would just blame the wrong people. But those who don’t respond to incivility with civility can also be secondarily to blame for their immoral actions. You don’t seem to get how moral systems can be bigger than just one individual, I’m kinda concerned that you don’t appear to have a conscience from some of the things you say.

Nobody is ever free in society. Period.

As soon as you cooperate with another, compromise is required and you each mutually benefit from the distribution of labour amounting to a better outcome than if you both went it alone - or even worse if you competed with one another and you each actively tried to undercut the other. Maximum individual freedom is only possible to a hermit, but they cannot be free to enjoy the benefits of working with others, nor are they free to break physical laws, nor are they free from the natural dangers around them from which a society would protect them. To socialised individuals, working with others actually increases the overall feeling of freedom because it exceeds the freedom felt from going it alone.

All these restrictions that society “imposes” on poor Libertarians are there to result in the maximum freedom across all these types of freedom to and freedom from, for the most possible people. This has become skewed in favour of the rich, of course. But even they are never entirely free. You might as well blame the frontal lobes in your brain for restricting the freedom of your limbic system #-o The whole brain, like an economy is a system, each part dependent on every other to achieve the overall result that you enjoy - debts are owed all around, whether you understand the connection or not.

Just because you aren’t aware of, don’t appreciate, or have unrealistic expectations about certain parts of society, doesn’t mean you have a revolutionary new understanding of it that if only everyone else could see, we’d all be better off. You just need to do a lot more thinking, and learn a lot more context.

It really gets me how all these people obsessed with maximising freedom actually have very little understanding of what it actually is and how it works. In many ways it doesn’t even exist. In the only way that it can really be said to exist, you lot all seem to think that just because restrictions to freedom are more cleverly hidden in certain ways of arranging economies, that they don’t exist and that those ways are better. So naive.