Minimum Wage - about to strike again
Its amazing to me that Democrats ignore the warnings, and even more amazing to me that people keep voting for them despite the warnings becoming reality.
- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
We are also finding that as we buy more and more from china at lower prices, it keeps the apparent price inflation here low for those items. Makes us think inflation is 2%, when its more like 10% in terms of increase in money supply
How many times must they bump up against price + profit, supply and demand, and the various laws of economics before they get it into their inane heads that IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. OK, Forrest Gump, I hear you, but the Union leaders are supposed to be smart guys -- or are they merely thugs as they are often portrayed?
I am guessing you were in Detroit and it was during it's hey day.
Those union guys with politicians help pushed wages and benefits beyond competitiveness.
It was next to impossible to fire slackers and the workers had no incentive to help the company.
Quality control suffered and now Detroit Is trying to rejoin the economy.
Seriously, though, the prevalence of new thought is reserved for societies which value and reward independent thought and hard work. Europe has been completely taken over by socialism as has Canada. The US is headed down that rabbit hole as well. Most of the rest of the world is mired in either communism or religious despotism. It's pretty hard to find good ideas when they are being systematically suppressed.
I think this is true, but it's true in the way a breeze might accelerate a tidal wave. The tidal wave is coming and its timing or impact won't be affected much by the wind.
If the only other alternative to a human is a $50/hr automated cost (expensive computers or software), then they could get a $15/hr wage and have little effect.
BUT, when it comes to order takers at fast food restaurants, cashiers, servers at restaurants and jobs like that, robots and automation are ripe to take them over.
I agree with all that, although it may be simplistic to say "people are replaced", as if people were born to do a certain type of work. It's like saying modern framing prices "replace" over a billion agricultural workers because workers are now expensive compared to tractors, fertilizers, and hybrid seeds.
I would say people have access to new tools to create things for one another and will be learning to use them to make more goods and services people want.
My only point about the tidal wave is that this his happening without regard to wage floor policy. Price floors always create surplus supply, which means would-be suppliers are prevented from trading with would-be buyers-- all around bad. New technologies shift the demand curve for labor to a lower price, but I just don't see this as pivotal to adoption of automation. Automation creates value and would be difficult to stop or accelerate significantly, even if we wanted to.
Example. If the amortized cost of a kiosk is $12 per hour to take orders at a fast food restaurant, and the prevailing wage for a human now is $8- the human gets to keep the job.
Change the minimum wage to $15, and it suddently makes the kiosk more attractive and in fact it will take over the job of the human.
Talk about $15 just speeds up the development and cost reduction efforts of automation and robots by forward looking people who want to sell the robots.
In your example, they set the wage floor at $15 but the amortized cost of the machine is $12. So you say all those jobs get handed from the person to the $12/hr machine, but that's not exactly true. There is some elasticity of demand. The market will demand less fast food and there will be fewer people plus robots doing the job, and fewer people served fast food.
I'm belaboring this nit-picking point because some people think of "jobs" as meal tickets to be rationed and the "economy" as this complex meal ticket generation machine whose workings only experts can understand. "Jobs" and the "economy" are just people serving one another. People don't like that word, but I think it's exactly what's happening. We either serve people because we're excited about how it will benefit us, how it will help customers and make them able and willing to give us even more, or because we're somehow roped, guilted, or physically forced into service.
I agree with your basic claim, but it sets off my jobs-as-meal-tickets peeve.
A good example is fast food. I usually eat out for lunch. Personally, I would much prefer a kiosk that just listened to what I wanted, and entered that into their system and took my money. Fast foor order takers seems to NOT listen to what I want, enter it wrong, and are slow.
As to servers, one is "obligated" to give them a tip, and they make a LOT of money as a group off those tips. I would like a tableside robot device to take my order and either a robot or a lower paid busboy to simply deliver the food. If anyone is going to get a tip, it should be the cook who is responsible for the safety and tastiness of the food.
That is expected from the collectivist "liberals", and conservatives are undermining their own support for capitalism -- to the extent they still support it at all. Discriminatory, confiscatory taxes in the name of targeting "The Rich" are opposed only because they harm "job creation", with property rights of the individual unmentioned. One version of this is arguments that higher state taxes on "The Rich" will drive businesses out of the state.
By implication, if someone is retired or otherwise not "serving" others by "creating jobs" then it is perfectly fine to seize what he has. But it does nothing for the economy either because the left is unaffected by the conservative appeal to "job creation": It already wants to control the economy anyway, deciding what jobs are politically acceptable and who will be subsidized or punished while controlling everyone to impose that -- so the problem of "job creation" is imagined to be irrelevant because they will raise taxes to get money to do that too. They always know how to turn every problem they create with government into an excuse to "fix" it with more government controls in an endless progression. Trump himself is already pushing "jobs" as a manipulative statist agenda.
Once again the consequences of the conservatives' morally craven Pragmatist arguments, this time against raising taxes while conceding the standard of a collectivist "job creation" as a matter of government policy, temporizes, evades fundamental principles, and condones by implication government control of jobs in addition to seizing the assets of anyone who has something to take.
Yes!! This one sentence summarizes it.
But unlike like the sanctimonious political speeches today "hoping" that the thugs in Charlotte will "come together" and move forward together in "love", we cannot "hope" that "someday people realize a reasoned approach is the only way to survive". It requires specific principles and concepts of reason be spread as the right philosophical ideas.
Me dino also wonders how many people in that photo would become or remain unemployed due to the hourly $15 minimum wage they demand.
I'll predict it shall be at least half of those useful idiots.
Perhaps the media needs to expose this story and report it daily to once and for all prove that $15/hr would do little harm. Maryland’s Montgomery County could/should be used as another test site to prove these theories one way or the other. But without massive media attention and reporting the truth the majority of voters will never understand the implications of their choices. I always wonder why the mainstream media covers the start of the movement to make these changes but never covers the results of what the people were coerced into changing. Just another Seattle experiment where the results will be ignored if they don't go the way they had hoped. I guess it's all about getting reelected, the hell with the people.
It interesting how so many of the issues come about that can be traced back to Term Limits. With Term Limits our representatives at all levels of government might concentrate more on making this a better country and actually teaching the people how and why, instead of what gets them votes for reelection from ignorant voters.
I would propose alterations to the ways in which campaign funding may be raised, with the primary stipulation being that only voters living within that Representative's voting area may contribute. This would lock out outside interests even including the very political party apparatus through which the Republican and Democratic Parties influence their respective members.
Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Subversive efforts to undermine our constitution and our rights should be a treasonous act.
I would start with Soros. Add Kissinger and Clinton's get out the water board and find out who's who.
I enjoy this discussion about whether it's even possible to make the Constitution self-enforcing.
When I mentioned a shadow gov't, I was not talking about a shadowy conspiracy of any sort. I meant that the US gov't has reasonable provisions to keep operating in the event many high-ranking leaders were killed.
https://nyti.ms/2uK0629
I have no problem with a backup gov't like this. My problem is regardless of who's in charge, there are always perverse incentives for more gov't , and there's no Constitution stopping them. evw says no constitution can overpower bad philosophy. I don't know if that's true, but IMHO we should certainly try.
Who is going to stop them from imposing more statism? The Constitution is ideas expressed on paper. The paper isn't going to do it and the ideas of how to interpret it and what they can get away with are in people's heads. The meaning of the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is no matter how clearly it states something else. If they don't want limitations on what government can do, because of the philosophical ideas they hold, then in accordance with the Pragmatist theory of government as a set of "tools", combined with their collectivist premises, they will not limit themselves. They haven't for over a century as they progressively reinterpret what they are allowed to do, and they won't stop now.
If the Constitution were bad and people understood and wanted something better, the Constitution would go. It is the same in the opposite direction. There is no divine duty imposed on the country or on politicians to stick with the Constitutional principles. What they do follows the currently dominant philosophical ideas of what is proper and acceptable. The trend is only a matter of time plus whatever else they can get away with.
That is also why it is unlikely that the politicians and their supporters would permit a setback for themselves through meaningful reform at all. They are today barely tolerating Trump and his amateur efforts to 'drain the swamp' remaining in office as they circumvent long established principles and procedure in their attempts to obstruct him and push him out of office -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- and the same power seeking mentality drives everything they do.
With a rejection of principles of limited government and protection of the rights of the individual, politicians and bureaucrats are at best following at least some procedures out of psychological/political momentum with a tacit agreement to follow rules even as they progressively undermine them over time. That momentum at best slows the progression until the day when it all breaks down in part or whole, typically under the guise of 'solving' some crisis. As it goes, piece by piece, the next step is always rationalized in some way made to sound acceptable to enough people so that they get away with it. When there is a sudden break rationalized by a crises they also find a way to make it look acceptable under the circumstances of the moment with an unprincipled Pragmatist mentality.
What seems at one point in time too unacceptably extreme to worry about later becomes routine and then there is no going back. We have seen this over and over, accumulating to the current mammoth government and still growing.
There are many, many examples of this. A recent one is the entrenchment of Obama's health care controls -- only ten years ago it was unthinkable, then the Democrats moved quickly and rammed it through, bucking a national uproar against them, resulting in even Massachusetts electing a Republican Senator replacing Kennedy. For seven years Republicans safely campaigned on repeated loud promises to repeal it. Now we are stuck with the unthinkable already entrenched as it is accepted on principle. The conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice wrote the opinion sanctioning it with his infamous convoluted "novel" theories in spite of what the Constitution says and once meant. Congress will now only tinker with Obamacare, and they can't even do that to remove some of the punishment even with Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress and the Presidency -- because none of them will challenge the welfare state mentality. If Clinton had been elected we would be fighting full socialized medicine now instead of in a few years later, which was the purpose of Obamacare to bring down on us.
This statist progression is all due to acceptance of altruistic-collectivist premises morally demanding it no matter who or what is sacrificed, which establishment intellectuals and their followers will not challenge. You can and must fight back in any way you can to slow down the imposition of progressively more statism, but with full recognition that that is all that can be done as long as almost no one is challenging the basic philosophical premises of the altruist-collectivism destroying our individual freedom.
Thanks for all of this comment, not just the quote part.
But I was talking about something more prosaic. That article link talks about shadow gov't set up after 9/11 to keep things running in case an attack knocks out top leadership. I have no reason to think there was anything sinister about this in itself. It seems a reasonable thing to do in a time when a single bomb could destroy an entire city. My point is the decisions they would make would not be pro-liberty.
I actually like the shadow gov't, and I think we should take it a step further. We should set out while we're calm and thinking coolly, what logical steps would we take if an entire US city were destroyed? How much freedom would we give up to deal with the crisis? How do we decide which particular freedoms to give up? To what extent are we willing to use WMD on non-combatants to make a point to the attacking govt or band of criminals. What institutions are capable of trying such an unthinkably heinous crime of attacking a US city?
Instead, I think the shadow gov't would restrict freedoms left and right as Rumsfeld said, "sweep it all up. Things related and not." Because the crisis will be a chance for an unelected body to give the gov't sweeping powers. 10 years later those powers for warrantless searches would be used to catch child molesters, bank robbers, people providing drugs, guns, foreign labor, or sex to otherwise law-abiding citizens, people murdering for insurance reasons, just everything.
Very well said, indeed!
That being said, with the expense of major naval ships, some Federalization is probably necessary. Although maybe not. Maybe this is a topic for further exploration...
1. Individual freedom of choice. People have the ability to reject the rules and constraints build into the Constitution. The Constitution only builds rules. The fallacy is that it can dictate human action as a result.
2. The system provides for its own change. And the system has been changed virtually since its inception, sometimes with good intent but more often with the intent to void the original provisions and constraints. Case in point are the bureaucracies which have been given effective Legislative powers, bloating the Executive far beyond its Constitutional authority.
3. The Judiciary intentionally overriding or reforming original Intent. This can be from a sense of activism, referral to foreign law, or other items. Provisions were made to rein in this type of action, but depends to a great extent on #4.
4. Corruption of elected officials. The adoption of partisan policies which contradict the Founding principles of this Nation pervert oversight of the Judiciary or Executive through Impeachment, just as they allow for the approval of similarly corrupted Judiciary nominees.
John Adams put it accurately and succinctly when he stated:
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
But on the military, the Founders wanted that, but they soon learned that freedom comes with a price that requires a standing, trained, efficient military, equipped to fight your most probable enemy, and have a reserve. That was painfully clear in the War of 1812, where the "militia" consistently proved it was an inept, corrupt group led by self serving idiots. Most "leaders" were fired within weeks of contact with the enemy, and the few professionals were drafted to positions of leadership and managed to save the day, just barely. That taught the country your really needed a strong, professional military and they immediately started building ships of the line for the navy and maintained a standing army. The Civil war was the next debacle that showed untrained, untested troops led by inept, self serving idiots, would fail, and it took 4 years to get the Norths act together. Only service by the odd "outstanding" individual on each side, kept things going. Fast forward through WW1 (a fluke as they had 4 years to prepare) to WW2 and on Dec7, 1941 we were again equipped with a small military, although FDR (whom I do NOT respect, but must give his due) was trying to grow to face the war he knew was coming. The first year was an unmitigated disaster. Same reasons. China has a huge army today and is not interested in our freedoms or security, only theirs. If they chose to invade (and they could easily) we would have a really hard time stopping them from rolling over us.
I did not find the "article link talking about a shadow govt" what were you referring to?
What did FDR do to try to prepare for WWII? The country overwhelmingly didn't want to be in it, but he kept pushing behind the scenes to make it necessary regardless of the lack of preparation. He provoked the Japanese into making the first move, not expecting it to be Pearl Harbor and leaving us terribly vulnerable both at Pearl Harbor and in our ability to fight after it came.
Ayn Rand wrote an insightful essay, including references to specific wars like WWI & II, "The Roots of War" in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and on the web at https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1966...
As to whether or not the US should have been involved in either WW I or WW II, that is a matter of perspective and there is certainly arguments to both sides with substantial merit. One can say with utmost certainty, however, that the world would look very different and certainly less free had the United States not intervened in both WW I and WW II. In WW I it was the opening of a new front against the Germans that finally broke that war from the bloody trench fighting which claimed millions. In WW II, without the aid of US destroyers, aircraft, and the lend-lease system, Britain would have eventually been starved out or forced to cede the continent of Africa (including India), pulling back their substantial Navy to defend the convoys. And without Britain to harass the Germans, the Russians would have had a much harder time of things. The world we know would be very, very different.
This isn't about complications of competing petty dictators and doesn't require 3 volumes of details to understand, however interesting the history may be for some purposes. Once the Allies were in WWI, Germany should have been held to its defeat without the pandering that let and helped it take off again, and Lenin not helped after his coup. Once WWII was under way because that was not done, Russia and Germany should have been allowed and encouraged to mutually destroy each other, followed by suppression of whatever was left of the "winner".
To understand the cause read "The Roots of War" and Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels about the cultural roots of Germany's war. They are far more informative and useful than details of European war history.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller - German pastor who spent seven years in concentration camps
It seems to me about everything we say the Founders wanted XYZ and put it the Constitution, but it turned out to be impractical in the modern world so we just abandoned it. I know a citizen militia can't provide missile defense. I don't think we should go overboard. But that should be the goal and "concept car" we model things off.
As you say about the Civil War, a citizen militia could not have forced an restive region that felt oppressed by the central gov't from breaking free. I actually think that is by design. They were the restive region wanting to break free.
I did not mean that. I was first talking about this article after Sept 11 that says the gov't set up a "shadow gov't" that would be activated in the event the president and many high-ranking leaders were killed. https://nyti.ms/2uK0629
I am saying I don't have a problem with having a doomsday backup plan to keep the gov't running normally in a major disaster. My problem is "normally" it runs with too much cost and power. In some the event of a major attack the normal gov't or, if activated, the shadow gov't, would use the emergency to restrict freedoms further.
I am less concerned with how statist our contingency plan for DC getting nuked is and more concerned with the prosaic statism in everyday decisions now. I understand the notion that "you never want to let a serious crisis go to waste", but I see this as a subset of not the central cause.
I guess if I gave it more though, I ought to be more concerned about the statist contingency planning.
I think I'm coming to ewv's thinking: bad philosophy is at the core.
Pragmatist John Dewey's Progressive Education, the Fabian Socialists, and many more were explicitly pushing exploitation of education to further the socialist goals a century ago. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s was only the cashing in.
Everyone has some philosophy, explicitly or implicitly, because as human beings who think in concepts we cannot live without having a broad view of the word and our relation to it. Those who don't critically examine and formulate their own beliefs and contrast them to other possibilities accept them by default, absorbing whatever is around them. Religion is a primitive form of philosophy. People act for all kinds of motives, consistently or not, with all kinds and degrees of knowledge, true or not. Underlying all of it is their general sense of life and the philosophical premises they have adopted or absorbed.
See Ayn Rand's "Philosophy and Sense of Life" in The Romantic Manifesto, the whole collection of essays in Philosophy: Who Needs It?, and the lead essay in For the New Intellectual.
Progressivism and Pragmatism did not start in education in the 1960s. They began under European influence in the19th century and spread, at first among a small group of intellectuals and then from them to the general population over time, in more or less technical forms of influence. The beginning of Pragmatism in Cambridge over a hundred years ago spread in and from Harvard, where it was academically centered, to all the professions, permeating everything from there.
Read Louis Menands's best seller The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America to see how widespread it has become -- in the courts, politics, science, education, social science and everywhere else. Menand is sympathetic to Pragmatism, and those reading this book who don't already know what is wrong with Pragmatism will find themselves intellectually at home with it, without realizing from where and how they got their premises, precisely because it is so ingrained in the culture now. Those who do understand will be appalled at how deep it has penetrated everywhere.
To understand Pragmatism, what its roots were, what is wrong with it, and the contrast with Ayn Rand's philosophy, listen to Leonard Peikoff's lectures on the history of philosophy. Pragmatism is covered in lectures 7&8 of part 2.
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/95/found...
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/96/moder...
This is the kind of systematic knowledge that should be taught in every school and sought be every intellectually serious adult who never learned it.
I think there is a "shadow government" that would be activated. I suspect its decisions following that tragedy would not be in the direction of respecting the Constitution. When elections came around, people would not elect people promising Constitutional limitations on gov't power.
Rearranging mechanisms does not change this. If an amendment to the Constitution were serious enough to meaningfully limit government it would not pass. In particular no balanced budget amendment without loopholes would pass, if any at all. Conservatives objecting to particular people and publicizing laundry wish-lists of new procedures while appealing to "tradition" are doing nothing to reverse the more than a century old altruist-collectivist-statist trend.