Just an other perk for the perps.
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.

I was just saying, although I do think that they can be rooted out.
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.

The AFL and CIO (they were separate in those days) had many officers come in and buy birthday or anniversary presents for their wives or children which were paid for from the fund reserved for the rank and file.

The Constitution already has rules they were supposed to have to follow. They rationalize their way around them, following Constitutional procedures through declining momentum with no concern for, let alone reliance on, the principles of limiting government power and the reasons for it. The Constitution did not stop the statist trend because that is driven by bad philosophy. The Constitution is not self-enforcing. Politicians in states hold the same bad premises as those in Washington, and so do those who vote for them.

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.

I have said it may be the only hope we have of starting over would be if an asteroid struck DC but Kim Jung Dumb would do.

Since there is no 'real money' there and only fiat currency that has been borrowed paying off the debt would eliminate all money in circulation. This does not mean that real money could not be created, it must be based on something tangible to trade. If I traded my Jeep to you for your product, you took the title because you didn't want the Jeep at the time and traded it to someone else who traded the title again to someone who wanted the Jeep and they came back to me and wanted the redeem the title for the Jeep and I told them there was no Jeep what was all the trading based on? A lie that caught the last person who received a worthless title for his labor and production. What will he do with the worthless title? Especially if the rest of the populace catch on. He was the one who was robbed by those who had been trading what was believed to be something of value and all connected to the trading interaction were taking the chance of being caught with nothing for their labor.

I disagree. The whole point of the Convention of States is to put some rules in place they HAVE to follow, as there is no recourse, such as a balanced budget amendment and term limits. That would put a serious dent in the current dynamic, as right now they have the ability to do just as you describe, and the soft heads keep sending them back even in the face of total failure and abandonment of their responsibilities.

Uh, some issues ere..a) I don't think they can be decimated, because no one knows who they are. Many theories, including many wealthy people. Do they pull the strings? I don't know. So how can they be decimated when no one knows who they are? 2) holding any politicians to their constitutional duties is just the problem, once elected they forget everything they promised, said and proposed, in favor of "the party". What would be changed to hold them accountable? Other than maybe add a recall provision at the Convention of States....

What if the shadow govt. was decimated and the elected were held to their constitutional duties.

No matter how much borrowed money was printed up, wouldnt there still be the original amount of real money there? I do agree that retiring the debt would collapse the economy, because the expansion was financed by that printed and borrowed money.

So they both (Union higher ups) arrived in black caddy's.

IF the amortized cost of a piece of equipment that does a specific task falls below the cost of having a human do the exact same task, the human is history. As technology makes computational power and memory cheaper and cheaper, automation can become smarter and accomplish more of what a human can do. Setting minimum wage at $15 simply speeds up the development of automation by make more and more automation cost effective right now.

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.

Government coercion distorts the economy, making problems worse, which is then exploited to rationalize more controls. But the economics of wages and wage controls is different than appealing to opposition to progress in automation. Arguments against wage controls focusing on automation accelerated as the inevitable response from business is temporizing, evading the fundamental premises and pandering to anti-technology, and will only accelerate government controls on automation in addition to wages. Conservatives doing this will not challenge the appeals to altruism in imposing wage controls as the root of the problem. Their evasion obstructs the ethical problem from being publicly discussed.

It ends when most people understand the philosophy of reason and individualism. Until then, it will not end and means of minimizing it will continue to decrease.

The artificial focus on particular people as opposed to philosophical ideas driving political trends is typical of conservatives. We don't have to wonder about what would happen. Everyone in Washington came from somewhere else and would be replaced by the same kind of people from somewhere else with the same ideas, voted into office by the same people with the same bad premises. Calling for changing rules and voting procedures, as if the "convention of states" were our savior, is just as irrelevant.

Currency manipulation is a powerful political tool. Once currency is disconnected from a hard asset like gold manipulation becomes a lot easier. Inflation/devaluation enables borrowing and paying back at a discount without calling it such. As the devaluation rate and interest rate approach one another the effect approaches free money. Politically a side benefit is the ability to use this effect as a means of gaining voter support for things like minimum wage increases which only exacerbate the problem.

Great observation. And just a bit scary.

Most people are looters when it comes to legalized theft and they will always find an excuse for their behavior while blaming the producers. It will never end. At best you might be able to minimize it's impact.

When every dollar in the economy is borrowed (fiat currency from a private bank) there is no way to pay back the debt without collapsing the economy. There would be no money left in circulation because it is all debt and in order to pay it off all money must be returned to the bank. Plus the country would still owe the interest on the debt. Paying it down reduces the interest but takes money out of circulation sending the economy into a tail spin because there isn't enough money to acquire goods. The unpayable debt still exists. Would anyone borrow money they knew they could never repay knowing that the lenders have an armed force (IRS) to collect if you try to quit paying? I believe this used to be called "Loan Sharking"!

Waaay back in time, when I was newly married, I used to work for a company that supplied gifts to the union members. Everything from cheap watches with the union logo on the dial to very expensive jewelry and household appliances. I was always amused by the fact the union higher-ups often came in with noted mob figures.. The only way to tell them apart was that the mob guys always arrived in big black Caddies, which was sort of their trademark.

I would like an elaboration on this point.

I think there are players in the background, who would just produce another crop of them. AS CG says below, the "shadow government" would activate and the results might be the same, unless a popular Constitutional Party (and not the rabble that currently call themselves that, who would place as many crazy restrictions on people as the rest of the control freaks), based on our liberties and inherent personal freedoms, arose quickly and decisively. I don't even know if we can do that even with the cesspool still there, but it is that or a Convention of States.

"everyone in a position of leadership was killed"
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.

"humans are replaced when they are too expensive "
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.

I, too, have often wondered what would happen if during a Joint Session of Congress our nation's capitol was decimated and everyone in a position of leadership was killed, similar to Tom Clancy's book Executive Orders. It begs the question: could elimination of the cesspool that is Washington, D.C. allow our nation to return to Constitutional roots with new elections or would it do nothing more than simply change the players?