Minimum wage must be abolished!

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Jackster, Dec 24, 2013.

  1. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Donor

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    For that matter, why are we required to pay and be paid in federal reserve notes? A: Because it makes taxation & control easy for the government.

    Why do we have this system of employers and employees with reems of paperwork and laws surrounding the whole thing? It's antithetical to a free system. I should be able to work for gold or wampum if I like, and no IRS should be around knowing or caring what I earn or how I earn it.
     
  2. Jackster

    Jackster New Member

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    Agreed, that should be the first step. While big corporations pull the strings of govt, while govt feeds only certain industry/ companies which comes at the expense of others then there isnt a fair market place for business which means less opportunities for workers. Id like to see corporate donations stopped, a cap on donations per vote would be a good start. Govt needs to get out of the way - not saying it doesnt have a role, health and safety regulations are a must.
     
  3. Moi621

    Moi621 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Re.: Minimum wage must be abolished!


    Considering the differences in Cost of Living, and the need for minimum wage worker types in high cost of living areas:
    Minimum Wage should be regional.

    :ignore:
    SOAPBOX
    What is really needed is a Maximum Wage Law, inclusive of gifts, benefits like a health plan :wink:, bonuses
    at which point a 99% Tax Bracket is reached.
    :woot: A 21st Century Eisenhower Tax Code :clapping:




    Moi :oldman:

    [video=youtube;3Ml9VZW7V_U]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ml9VZW7V_U[/video]​








    No :flagcanada:
     
  4. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    I own my labor, therefore, I have the right to exchange my labor for whatever compensation I find acceptable. A minimum wage law makes it illegal for individuals to enter into voluntary employment contracts if the wage falls below a certain rate. If I want to work for five bucks an hour, then no one has the right to stop me.

    Do you not understand how supply and demand works? You cannot simply "choose" to pay someone whatever you desire. You have to pay them a market rate or they will work for one of your competitors. That's why the only way you can get people to work for nothing is to enslave them. Otherwise, you have to pay them some basic wage that they consent to be paid. As long no one is being coerced, there is no moral imperative for anyone to intervene on someone's behalf, especially when that intervention makes it illegal for them to voluntarily exchange their labor if it falls below some arbitrary level.

    What do you even mean by capitalism? You know that Karl Marx made that term up, right?
     
  5. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    When and where was "pure capitalism" tried, exactly?
     
  6. Curmudgeon

    Curmudgeon New Member

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    Yes. If employers resort to violence and force in enforcing their rights, then workers are fully justified in responding in kind. See the Homestead strike, The Battle of Blair Mountain, The Battle of Matewan and the Ludlow Massacre. The right wants a return to the days when they could bring in the Pinkerton's and have them gun down workers who dared protest working conditions that included 12 hours days 7 days a week for wages you could not feed and house yourself on as occurred in the Homestead strike. To those who claim that we could never return to such conditions in this country, all I have to say is you are very foolish and naive, most american employers would revert to 1890''s standards of safety and worker treatment in a heartbeat if they only could.
     
  7. Curmudgeon

    Curmudgeon New Member

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    When you have three workers available for every minimum wage job (as we do now), the market price will drop. You cannot support yourself on minimum wage as it is without federal subsidies (medicaid, Snap). We have had such periods in our history, and they proved violent and destructive of the middle class. The only people who do well in that kind of environment are those who are already in the upper 10% of the income heap, everyone else is a day away from starvation.
     
  8. bobov

    bobov New Member

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    Old. Moi, you've been hawking the communist line for years now. You say the same things. Twice in this Forum, I've shown you the data indicating that under Eisenhower the rich owned a much higher percent of US wealth than they do now. That had to be so because US wealth grew rapidly in those years, and somebody had to be doing it. It wasn't Joe Sixpack. His may have been the muscles, but the bold ideas and initiatives and planning and organization came from the upper crust. The Eisenhower Code had ample loopholes to reward people for creating jobs and rebuilding America. Have you forgotten the Great Depression? The resumption of the Depression after WW2? So where did the economic explosion that lasted from 1950 until Jimmy Carter come from? (See here.) It wasn't the guys at the corner tavern, Moi. Sap the ability of the job creators - yes, that's right, I said JOB CREATORS - to flourish, and the country goes with it. Eisenhower left wiggle-room, so nobody actually paid those high marginal rates. But you want every penny in the hands of our all-knowing all-seeing politicians! What, exactly, will they do with it?
     
  9. RtWngaFraud

    RtWngaFraud Banned

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    I guess you're saying government needs to step in and mandate a living wage, since it would put competition at a disadvantage, and since the free market fails to do so.
     
  10. BleedingHeadKen

    BleedingHeadKen Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Which periods were those when the middle class was being destroyed by low wages?

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    Which means mandating that some people won't be able to work because no one can afford to hire them. What do you do with such people?
     
  11. frodly

    frodly Well-Known Member

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    Master sure loves it when the house slaves come out in public and defend their right to (*)(*)(*)(*) all over them!! Thank you master for the pennies that fell out of that hole in your pocket!! Oh (*)(*)(*)(*) now you're beating me for not fixing that hole in your pocket!! I deserved that because I am not more skillful and harder working master. If I were as good and valuable and skillful as you master, I would be a master too, but I'm not so I am so so happy to serve you master.....

    PS. How hilarious and backwards does a group of people have to be to argue for the right to make less money? I am mad because it is illegal to be forced into overtly exploitative employment relations by market conditions!! :angered: Of course people are still forced into exploitative employment relationships, it is just that before they could rape you, now they have to give you a tissue to clean up with when they are done!! It is insane. But when people have been brainwashed by capitalist propaganda their entire life, and they internalize that propaganda, this is what we get.
     
  12. frodly

    frodly Well-Known Member

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    Yes it most certainly was. More nonsense which could only come from the mind of someone who has internalized every last drop of capitalist propaganda. The upper crust has innovated almost nothing. They may employ the person who does, and then reap the vast majority of the benefits from that innovation from time to time, but they are never the innovators. Bill Gates was not upper crust when he was an innovator. He was a normal guy working out of his garage. Now that he is a rich (*)(*)(*)(*), he doesn't innovate anything. He employs younger and hungrier people to do the innovating. Innovation and job creation comes mostly from the middle class and some from exceptional members of the lower classes as well, but never from the upper crust. In fact most jobs weren't even created by huge corporations over the last decades. They have been created by the expansion of small and medium sized businesses. That is a fact. I simply don't understand the mind of the sycophants who gobble up the lies of the worthless leaches that make up the very wealthy in this country and in this world.
     
  13. snakestretcher

    snakestretcher Banned

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    Blame them for a lack of personal responsibility and for making the wrong decisions? That is the smug, complacent conservative way.
     
  14. Jackster

    Jackster New Member

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    How hilarious it is that you expect people to run a half marathon before being allowed to run. How much money can you earn when you're not allowed to work? Of course some people can run a half marathon without ever running before, many need to build up to it. But NO..........YOU have to take away their right to trade/ barter their personal property. But we all get it, the more people we can FORCE to be dependent on the state the more votes for the collectivists.
     
  15. snakestretcher

    snakestretcher Banned

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    Yes, let's bring back slavery, abolish all wage control mechanisms and protection for workers from exploitation. That way the conservatives get what they always crave; more money.
     
  16. Jackster

    Jackster New Member

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    You already have, you take away a basic human right of trading their labor, taking away their opportunities, taking away their ability to earn independents while making the state their master. In their state of servitude they're most likely to praise their master in the way of votes for a few more scraps. But of course you're well aware of this.
     
  17. snakestretcher

    snakestretcher Banned

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    Ah yes; of course your method of 'taking away opportunities' involves no less than enforced poverty and literally giving the employer the whip-hand to pay his employees as little as he can get away with, in the knowledge that there will always be a pool of labour, and those desperate enough to work for slave-wages. That's why we have trades unions so that trading for labour doesn't give 'master' all the leverage.
     
  18. bobov

    bobov New Member

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    "Capitalist propaganda." You betcha!

    You're right about the middle class, but who pays the middle class, who sponsors its innovations, who brings those innovations to the public? Those people that Gates employees, what would they do if he or someone like him didn't pay them to innovate? Once an engineer has designed a new product, who sees to it that the product is made and reaches people? And those small businesses that create most of the jobs are all would-be large businesses. Who funds those small businesses? Who buys their products if they're B2B businesses? Who provides the infrastructure they need to operate? And since you deplore capitalism, why praise small business, which is the heart of capitalism?

    Here's one more bit of "capitalist propaganda." Capital is the foundation of human civilization. When people accumulate a surplus beyond what they need for physical survival, that surplus may be productively employed to build the things that make life easier and allow yet more surplus to be accumulated. Everything else in civilization, all the arts and sciences, could not exist without the capital which frees us from subsistence and which funds all innovation. Capitalists perform one inescapable function for civilization: they're the ones who accumulate those resources not required for survival and who deploy those resources in ways that benefit humanity. No one can be charitable without having a surplus to give. No one can do research or write a novel without having some surplus to consume while doing it. No one could build a road without the surplus having been first accumulated to pay for their labor. Huge amounts of money must be spent before society ever realizes any benefit from human labor of any sort. Capitalists are the stewards of those resources. They see to it that resources are invested to produce yet more resources, increasing society's total wealth.

    On the opposite side are liberals, concerned with neither accumulating surplus nor investing society's resources in meaningful ways. They are instead preoccupied with spending. They want to be kind and generous and compassionate, especially with other people's money. Because they prefer to spend and consume rather than add to society's resources, the ultimate end of their policies is the return of society to a subsistence economy. The relative wealth of the US has let liberals live in a dream that resources are unbounded and may be acquired without effort. They see no reason not to spend without thought for tomorrow. The glaring obvious flaw in their policy prescriptions is that they always assume money can be had as needed; for them, the only issue is the moral luster they think they acquire through open-handed spending.

    But where is the morality in pauperizing society? How will they be able to help anyone if they succeed in beggaring our economy? So yes, I'm a Capitalist. That means I think society should save and invest its wealth in ways that increase that wealth. That means I think increases in income must be justified by increases in productivity.
     
  19. Curmudgeon

    Curmudgeon New Member

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    1870's - 1890's, 1930's read your actual history.

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    People in that situation will starve anyway, since the wages they command are to low to survive on.
     
  20. RtWngaFraud

    RtWngaFraud Banned

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    I don't know. What do we do with the working poor? Just keep letting them generate massive amounts of profit that don't help them very much, if at all? Corporations can AFFORD a helluva a lot more than what they return to the very people that generate their massive profits, in most cases. Why should they be allowed to take so much profit, and return so little to society? What's the point?
     
  21. RtWngaFraud

    RtWngaFraud Banned

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    Looks good on paper. It isn't, in reality though. Try this on for size.

    If a prisoner is tortured, and finally relents and 'accepts' some ridiculous condition, in order for the torture to stop, or lessen, and hence the tortured and the recipient, 'agree' to terms (basically because they had little to no choice), how is that 'good'? You want to make it sound like some amicable and wonderful agreement was reached as a result of intense bargaining. It isn't. It's simply what the tyrant is willing to 'offer', in lieu of starvation, and I say, big f'n deal. You get richer, and I MIGHT be able to tread water.

    Treading water is the same as drowning. It's just that the drowning occurs a little sooner.
     
  22. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    I own my labor and I can exchange it for whatever price I want. What right do you have to tell me otherwise?
     
  23. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    I guess people are too stupid to determine, for themselves, whether or not something is "exploitative" or whether or not it's preferable to being unemployed? You and the other elitists get to decide for them?
     
  24. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    This is a blatant strawman. You should be ashamed to even try this tactic.

    Wage controls are price controls, and price controls are proven to distort markets by creating artificial shortages and surpluses, the latter of which appears in the form of unemployed people. That is why you're not asking for a minimum wage of $100 an hour, because you tacitly acknowledge that there is a negative effect from raising the minimum wage. If raising the minimum wage was categorically the 'right' thing to do, then we would just raise it to infinity and ride the wave of economic growth forever. But sustainable economic growth and development comes from the rule of law and private property rights, not feel-good, price-fixing schemes that distort the market.
     
  25. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

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    The beginning of the era of federal supremacy and progressive government in the US.

    Part of the post-fed, progressive era of politics in the US.
     

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