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SedanChair posted:It seems like economists who understand the effects of "things that can mess up the simple model," while well-represented in academia outside of intro classrooms, are not so common in the media.
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Sep 28, 2014 13:40
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Hodgepodge posted:Always good to keep in mind, since so many younger libertarians got into it as a way of expressing themselves politically in stiflingly right-leaning environments, often as a way of presenting ideas like "maybe we should treat gay people like human beings" without being disowned. Yeah, I don't think there's necessarily anything shameful about being a libertarian when you're young, especially in light of the avalanche of poo poo that culture pours on us all about how capitalism and self-interest are good while government is simultaneously evil but also good, depending on who is talking and what they're talking about. That was me, once. I knew the system we had was utterly hosed up despite everyone's protestations to the contrary, but being inexperienced and insulated from real life, I misunderstood the cause. I got better, eventually, but it wasn't without help. Actually getting life experience helped, but so did the support of my friends and family (by support, I mean constant political discussions explaining why I was wrong, even if I came away from those arguments at the time believing I had won). Ironically, perhaps, what ultimately pushed me away was inconsistency from my fellow libertarians. I mean, if there's nothing else which libertarians pride themselves on, it's consistency; I actually used to say things like "the means justify the ends" like it was a deathblow to counterarguments back then. I was struck by how people who would advocate for getting the government out of business, even piecemeal, seemed much less eager to remove legislation which banned wildcat strikes, or closed shops, things which I believed would be fundamental rights for workers in a libertarian utopia where association was completely free and anything could be agreed to through contract. Apparently to them trade unions were evil parasites just as bad as government itself, rather than free assocations of a large number of individuals coming together to engage in robust contract negotiations with another association of a large number of individuals (corporations). What I saw as two sides of the same coin, equally important to the fulfillment of self-interest for all people, they saw as organised thuggery from the lazy to steal from the more deserving. Which to me seemed rather odd, given that I had up to that point thought the whole point of the ideology was that nobody deserved anything except by dint of what they could negotiate from others. That, perhaps, was the moment I began to realise there was something rotten in the state of libertopia, and I began to reevaluate the arguements and discussions I'd had with friends and family. Which is basically my point, that there are libertarians out there who got that way by being misguided, rather than just being horrible people, and I think those people are worth the effort to save. I'm glad people put the effort in for me.
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Sep 28, 2014 14:31
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BreakAtmo posted:I would be really interested in finding out how common each of these reasons are among self-professed libertarians. Like, are most of them just misguided? Or are the majority really just selfish, poor-hating assholes? It is probably a good deal, as American society at this point heavily favors Just World theory and has been going that way for close to two decades. So its no coincidence that Libertarianism has also had a rise in membership recently.
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Sep 28, 2014 15:13
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Watermelon City posted:That's great but most people never get beyond the required intro level economics courses. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was seriously taught the Laffer Curve and other neoliberal fairy tales in introduction to macroeconomics. Well the Laffer curve is just pseudoscience.
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Sep 28, 2014 17:15
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^^^ The Laffer Curve is sort of trivially true. There's just no reason to really mention it since it's common sense that 100% taxation isn't going to optimize government revenue.Watermelon City posted:That's great but most people never get beyond the required intro level economics courses. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was seriously taught the Laffer Curve and other neoliberal fairy tales in introduction to macroeconomics. My international economics class had us read Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat." 
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Sep 28, 2014 17:52
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QuarkJets posted:You must take the largest and most disgusting dumps ever if it really takes 13 hours to clean your bathroom. But yeah, if you're paying someone to clean your bathroom for 40 hours every week then that person really deserves a living wage twodot fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 18:41
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Ytlaya posted:^^^ The Laffer Curve is sort of trivially true. There's just no reason to really mention it since it's common sense that 100% taxation isn't going to optimize government revenue. That it's a curve and not a flat cliff is generally what people intend from the laffer curve. Also, that it peaks at like 30% and not 99%.
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Sep 28, 2014 19:00
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Dr. Stab posted:That it's a curve and not a flat cliff is generally what people intend from the laffer curve. Also, that it peaks at like 30% and not 99%. Please show data that support the assertion that the Laffer curve peaks around 30%. Economists around the world will be astounded.
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Sep 28, 2014 19:24
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Smiling Knight posted:Please show data that support the assertion that the Laffer curve peaks around 30%. Economists around the world will be astounded. He's saying that's what hacks are pushing
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Sep 28, 2014 19:29
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I had a very, very brief flirtation with libertarianism when I was 18/19. I was one of those douchebag "Look at me! I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative, both sides equally extreme and South Park is awesome  " types who was proud to not belong to a particular major party. But as I said, that lasted a very short amount of time, and one of the major cracks started occurring ironically when a friend of mine (who was a conservative) explained to me why liberals believe in Affirmative Action. Then I started paying attention to Rush Limbaugh and some random Fox News douches and decided that I probably shouldn't trust these guys on, well, anything.Helsing posted:The point is that they believe that in their perfect society the economy will operate at maximum efficiency, which will be better for everyone (note that most liberals, conservatives, social democrats and socialists also tend to believe this about their own preferred economic system). Do people on the left believe that though? I thought we're generally more practical rather than utopian. I assumed most liberals would agree that while our policies might make society better overall, that we still acknowledge that people on the high end will take a hit. From what I've encountered, it's generally conservatives/libertarians who say that their policies will make everyone happy.
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Sep 28, 2014 21:13
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twodot posted:And if someone is unable or unwilling to work 40 hours every week, should we still pay them a living wage? The reality is that a living minimum wage is just logically stupid. With our abundance of resources there is no need for people to go without food, shelter, et cetera, and there's also no logical need to tie those things to employment (and especially no need to tie those to the specific form of employment that involves 40 hours of work a week). However, there are political reasons why we can't just give people the things they need to survive, so having a living minimum wage turns out to be good policy, but this doesn't stop it from being a hack around stupid political problems. I would support a minimum income for all, regardless of your ability or willingness to work, yes. And then we can abolish the minimum wage. And then we can institute a universal healthcare policy and detach healthcare from employment, too. All of that, I would unironically support. And then I'll get a pet unicorn made of diamonds and I'll name him Butt Stallion If we're going to keep our goals more realistic, then a minimum wage pegged to a living wage is a solid step in the right direction that would help a lot of people and is totally possible
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Sep 28, 2014 21:49
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SedanChair posted:Well the Laffer curve is just pseudoscience. It's the frictional coefficient of whale semen on a frictionless plane of the economics world. It is certainly making a statement that's probably true in some fashion, but completely useless. The lack of rigor in the Laffer curve is astounding. It's 2 points on a graph, and then a line between them that may as well spell  in cursive. That would be just as rigorous as the actual Laffer curve.Proper branches of economics would have required him to support the points on his curve with actual data, but Supply Side Economics is not a proper branch of economics.
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Sep 29, 2014 02:36
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It's worth noting that Arthur Laffer popularized the concept with a literal napkin drawing in a meeting with Rumsfeld and Cheney. There's some actual cases that supporters cite, but those involved changing economic conditions and tax reforms other than simple rate changes. Also, there's nothing that says that this "optimal rate" has to be the same for all types of taxes, across all regions, in every time period, so good luck finding it.
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Sep 29, 2014 03:17
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Aerial Tollhouse posted:Also, there's nothing that says that this "optimal rate" has to be the same for all types of taxes, across all regions, in every time period, so good luck finding it. Which is why my favourite explanation of the Laffer curve is that it's a joke that got out of hand.
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Sep 29, 2014 03:41
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Aerial Tollhouse posted:It's worth noting that Arthur Laffer popularized the concept with a literal napkin drawing in a meeting with Rumsfeld and Cheney. I thought it was to Reagan himself?
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Sep 29, 2014 04:17
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ErIog posted:The lack of rigor in the Laffer curve is astounding. It's 2 points on a graph, and then a line between them that may as well spell
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Sep 29, 2014 04:23
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The other one is, too. There are government owned corporations, central bank revene and what not. Having a tax rate of zero would still not be zero revenue if the government has a share in every business.
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Sep 29, 2014 04:30
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It's funny how we're always on the right side of the graph and never get to the point where raising taxes would increase revenue. Why is that I wonder?
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Sep 29, 2014 04:41
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Babylon Astronaut posted:It's funny how we're always on the right side of the graph and never get to the point where raising taxes would increase revenue. Why is that I wonder? I don't know, it seems illogical. It's almost like it's being blindly used to support a political ideology or something.
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Sep 29, 2014 04:56
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Mr Interweb posted:
I didn't say that liberals think everyone will be happier I said that they think that the economy would be more efficient if they implemented more liberal policies and that this would make everyone better off. This is a fairly boilerplate liberal talking point in my experience: "Conservatives are driven by irrational fears or racist delusions and this causes them to do stupid things. We liberals are much more rational and if those stupid conservatives would stop getting in our way we could make capitalism eco and worker friendly." In some cases this position is entirely reasonable. There probably are liberal policies that would make the world better off even if they weren't part of a systematic programme. For that matter, there are probably some libertarian policies such as their position on the drug war that would be an improvement on the status quo even if were implemented without any additional alterations to society. As for utopianism, I find that most liberals to have a heavy streak of utopianism in their thinking for exactly the reasons specified above: they see the abuses of capitalism as being something that can be fixed within the system. Typically they justify this by looking at the extraordinary political conditions of the 1950s-70s and think that if we could just get back to the policies of that era then we'd be able to have a humane capitalism that raises everybody's living standards and doesn't rape the environment. When leftists, while I do self identify as one I tend to find my fellow leftists often have naive or utopian ideas about what a post-revolutionary society would look like. Many (though certainly not all) leftists have subscribed to the idea that society makes people bad, and that if we just removed all the bad things that happen under capitalism then people would revert to their angelic nature. So I would say that yes, all political ideologies tend to think that they have policies that can improve society in the short term (otherwise why would you bother to have an ideology at all?) and that most ideologies have at least some utopian elements in them, or at the very least have some adherents who have utopian ideas. My ultimate point here is that the reason we should reject libertarianism is because of the specific flaws it has, not the general characteristics that it shares with practically all organized political movements or doctrines.
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Sep 29, 2014 04:59
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eNeMeE posted:Which is why my favourite explanation of the Laffer curve is that it's a joke that got out of hand. It is a bit dangerous to laugh it off, though. I can't find the article I read about it, but it might have NSFWCorp that broke down the history of how Supply-Side came to be. It involved holding free lunches/dinners(oh the irony!) to try to spot economics students that could be supported and give voice to their cause of "less taxes" and "no regulation." The short version is that the reason we had Reagonomics was because of George P. Schultz. Everyone talks about Milton Friedman, but Friedman would have been yet another of a small, but vocal, group of anti-Keynesian nutters roaming the halls in Chicago. Schultz was part of the group that developed supply-side economics as a branch of economics along with Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. He later left to go to Bechtel Group, and when Bechtel decided they wanted their man in the White House, he and Caspar Weinburger left to go work on Reagan's campaign. Schultz introduced Friedman to Reagan, and it was love at first sight. From what I gather, mainstream economists at the time were a bit mystified by what happened with Reaganomics. The beauty of every piece of what happened is that nobody ever was paid to lie. They just cherry-picked the people who had demonstrated an ideology compatible with their business interests. Laffer producing his dumb curve without any scholarly merit to it, and then having it cited because it supported lowering taxes was all par for the course. The Laffer curve is only the most blatant example of it, and the entirety of supply-side economics was like that. Up until the Laffer curve it was mostly really bad scholarship about Chile, and that's why Herman Cain couldn't stop mentioning Chile during the 2012 GOP primaries. It was all an awkward attempt at a Reagan callback to a population that didn't remember any of the horrible underpinnings to supply-side economics. If anybody can find the article I'm talking about that details which society of economists was handing out free food I would be really appreciative. ErIog fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Sep 29, 2014 |
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Sep 29, 2014 04:59
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Vahakyla posted:The other one is, too. There are government owned corporations, central bank revene and what not. Yup. I also wonder what the "Laffer curve" would look like for a consumption tax (aside from being obvious bullshit).
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Sep 29, 2014 05:05
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Yup. In seriousness, most of the world is probably on the right hand side of such a thing due to already using ridiculously high and regressive consumption taxes, often in order to have lowered otherwise progressive income taxes.
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Sep 29, 2014 05:09
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ErIog posted:It is a bit dangerous to laugh it off, though. I'm pretty sure I read the same article, but I'm having no luck finding it.
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Sep 29, 2014 06:21
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eNeMeE posted:Yeah, I know. I just wish that was the explanation and some day soon someone will come out and say "C'mon guys, "Laffer" curve? Didn't you get it? Laugh!" but I know that's not actually what happened. We could just call it the  Curve on principle.
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Sep 29, 2014 07:14
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:Long time lurker, first time poster, but this article gave me so many warm, fuzzy feelings I had to share. Jeff Berwick... I knew that name sounded familiar. An agorist friend of mine recommended this video of him to me. The talk is supposed to be investment advice but it's more a pitch to get his gullible, privileged libertarian audience to renounce their worthless United Slaves of America citizenship and make haste for the free green pastures of Mexico and Chile while they still can. I couldn't stomach watching the whole thing, but I don't think he discloses his land-selling scheme in Chile. He mentions "other people" who have noticed opportunities outside America and that the audience can and should get in touch with these frontiersmen through his website. LolitaSama fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Sep 29, 2014 |
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Sep 29, 2014 13:37
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I've returned from hiatus. I can't locate my other thread so I'll start on this thread. Real life intruded and I don't have the luxury of posting on random internet forums as much as I might like. In any event, I actually like this forum. While I disagree with most of you, I genuinely find it to be especially well run and the discussions are substantive and interesting. And, evidenced by this thread, you all seem to having more than a passing familiarity with libertarian ideas. With that said, I want to discuss the subject of a minimum wage (or even minimum basic income). From what I have read on this thread, most of you are in favor of a minimum wage and/or basic guaranteed income. I find that support for either belies an ignorance of basic economics. I'd love if you could prove me wrong however. I favor an immediate abolition of all minimum wage laws. I don't understand how anyone could imagine that creating an artificial minimum legal wage rate could actually improve anyone's standard of living. A few points. In the first place, a worker will receive an income that is determined by the market. His marketable skills are valued based on the marginal productivity of his labor. If a worker can only provide $9 of value to an employer per hour, why on earth would that employer pay him $10 an hour? Businessmen are not running charities. The businessman is seeking profits which can only be done by satisfying consumer demands on the market. Therefore wages must be lower than the productivity of the labor. The marginal productivity of a laborer provides the upper limit of the wage rate that he or she can expect to receive. Therefore it can be reliably predicted that an unskilled laborer whose marginal productivity is lower than the minimum wage, for example a teen only worth $6 an hour, will be rendered perpetually unemployed. I can anticipate that some of you will argue that without a supposed floor for wage rates, the greedy businessmen will simply push wages as low as possible forcing workers to work for 50 cents an hour. The reason this won't happen is that competitive firms, in their competition with each other, will be in need of good workers. If an employer is paying his workers too little for their abilities (i.e. too much lower than the marginal productivity of their labor) then a competitor will bid them away from their current employer. Thus the wage rates for workers will inevitably rise towards the level of their marginal productivity but never exceeding it. It is an intellectual error to simply claim that all workers are worth, say, $10 an hour. How could you possibly know that? Only a free market for wage labor can possibly determine the per hour value of labor services. What minimum wage laws amount to really is compulsory unemployment, period. In a free society without a State that erects barriers to economic activity, all economic actors will have far more options than they do today. So it is furthermore wrong to assume that workers will have no recourse but to work for wages. On the contrary, each worker will have an ability to become an entrepreneur himself, risking his capital for the potential greater reward of future profits. It is a far riskier proposition than trading his labor for wages but without the regulatory barriers and bureaucratic red tape, the cost of entry into the market will be exponentially lower than it is today. A third option would be for workers to organize together and form mutualist coops, where workers pool their resources and collectively own the means of production. This would be an intermediate step between being a wage laborer and an entrepreneur. The potential for return on investment would be greater than that of a wage laborer but less than that of an entrepreneur. However the risk to a personal capital would be far lower than an entrepreneur. It would be, in a very real sense, voluntary socialism or even voluntary Marxism. All of these economic relationships are valid provided no one uses aggression against any other peaceful person. Minimum wage laws are immoral, they hurt the least skilled and most vulnerable in society. The only genuine way to sustainably raise the standard of living for workers is to improve their marginal productivity, thus allowing them to command a higher wage rate on the market. To this end, it is valuable to encourage young people to gain more work experience when they are younger, develop on the job training and skills that improve their value to employers. Improved skills expand ones economic opportunities. I thought this would be a good topic to get back into this discussion. Where am I going wrong? How can you rationally defend minimum wage laws and/or mandatory basic minimum income in light of economic law and logic?
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Sep 30, 2014 05:15
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jrodefeld posted:A third option would be for workers to organize together and form mutualist coops, where workers pool their resources and collectively own the means of production. This would be an intermediate step between being a wage laborer and an entrepreneur. The potential for return on investment would be greater than that of a wage laborer but less than that of an entrepreneur. However the risk to a personal capital would be far lower than an entrepreneur. It would be, in a very real sense, voluntary socialism or even voluntary Marxism. You're right, this is much better than a simple minimum wage. And better still, workers could confiscate not only the means of production from capitalists, but all their accrued wealth, bring them down to the shop floor, and share with them exactly the return on investment which they all receive. After all, business owners collude with the State in creating corporate entities, it's not like they are entitled to their wealth any more than a single mother is to her WIC benefits.
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Sep 30, 2014 05:22
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Welcome back, you adorable shitheel!
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Sep 30, 2014 05:24
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jrodefeld posted:I've returned from hiatus. I can't locate my other thread so I'll start on this thread. Real life intruded and I don't have the luxury of posting on random internet forums as much as I might like. In any event, I actually like this forum. While I disagree with most of you, I genuinely find it to be especially well run and the discussions are substantive and interesting. And, evidenced by this thread, you all seem to having more than a passing familiarity with libertarian ideas. Businesses are not running charities, you're correct on that point. Businesses do not and will not hire people out the goodness of their hearts. Businesses hire the fewest number of people at the lowest prices they can afford. Businesses do not need to bid for unskilled labor; there are massive numbers of people working minimum-wage, unskilled labor positions to make ends meet - and without a minimum wage, they simply don't. Even with the current minimum wage, they still don't, leading to many people working multiple jobs to stay afloat. Abolishing the minimum wage will not magically make more positions appear. quote:It is an intellectual error to simply claim that all workers are worth, say, $10 an hour. How could you possibly know that? Only a free market for wage labor can possibly determine the per hour value of labor services. What minimum wage laws amount to really is compulsory unemployment, period. quote:So it is furthermore wrong to assume that workers will have no recourse but to work for wages. On the contrary, each worker will have an ability to become an entrepreneur himself, risking his capital for the potential greater reward of future profits. It is a far riskier proposition than trading his labor for wages but without the regulatory barriers and bureaucratic red tape, the cost of entry into the market will be exponentially lower than it is today. tl;dr 
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Sep 30, 2014 05:31
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jrodefeld posted:I favor an immediate abolition of all minimum wage laws. I don't understand how anyone could imagine that creating an artificial minimum legal wage rate could actually improve anyone's standard of living. A few points. In the first place, a worker will receive an income that is determined by the market. His marketable skills are valued based on the marginal productivity of his labor. If a worker can only provide $9 of value to an employer per hour, why on earth would that employer pay him $10 an hour? Businessmen are not running charities. The businessman is seeking profits which can only be done by satisfying consumer demands on the market. Therefore wages must be lower than the productivity of the labor. The marginal productivity of a laborer provides the upper limit of the wage rate that he or she can expect to receive. Read this. Then try again. The idea that someone can only produce $6 per hour is ridiculous. Someone putting boxes onto shelves for eight hours a day is worth more than that, with no training. The amount of productivity that workers have is skyrocketing, thanks to improved management, technology, etc. Wages aren't following. Less than $10 per hour for any worker is absurd. So why aren't wages following? Because employers want to pay as little as they can. That's the governing factor here, not how much the people are worth. And there's so much excess labor right now that people leaving for the competition doesn't matter. Who cares if that minimum wage worker walks out the floor? There are plenty more where they came from. Your assumption of a free market for work only applies when there's a greater demand for skills than there is a supply. Right now that's false, for minimum wage jobs. And as for saying that all workers are worth some amount? No. All humans are worth living wage. Doesn't matter if they're blind, deaf, and lame, and can't produce work. We're all people, and we all deserve some modicum of care, compassion, and support from society. Sorry if that gets in the way of GLORIOUS CAPITALISM.
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Sep 30, 2014 05:38
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All right, jrodefeld, explain the appalling work conditions of the 1900s, like say the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, in which 150 people burned to death because their employers let combustible materials build up and they locked the drat doors from the outside to prevent revenue loss from unauthorized breaks. There's no way those women's labor wasn't worth enough to justify not locking them in a firetrap. There's no way that paying someone to sweep the floor would have bankrupted the company. There's no way those women wanted to be locked in, so by your theories they should have been bid away by any employer willing to shell out the pittance it cost to not make it a deathtrap. The resulting fire safety laws didn't put anyone out of business. That whole situation is impossible according to your theories, could never have happened...but it did! How were employers able to push mortal risks onto their employees to save a pittance for the business? There is no way that was an equitable value-for-value trade, how was it possible? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 05:44
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jrodefeld posted:In the first place, a worker will receive an income that is determined by the market. "The market" is aggregate human behavior, an irrational force of nature (even assuming that as individuals actors act in their rational self-interest). Why would it produce consistent, just results which value human life, without fail or catastrophe- unlike any other natural system?
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Sep 30, 2014 05:59
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Hey Jrodefeld. Welcome back. I'm going to disect your reply shortly, but, and I mean this with all honest to god sincerity. Thank you for using the dedicated libertarian thread. A big part of the reason you get dogpiled so badly is because you create a big sweeping thread that is all about you, and that pisses a lot of people off since its completely contrary to the spirit of D&D or the atmosphere thereof. This might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not. I'm genuinely glad you've decided to take the advice of some of the posters on these forums to heart when it comes to joining the discussion.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:02
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SedanChair posted:You're right, this is much better than a simple minimum wage. And better still, workers could confiscate not only the means of production from capitalists, but all their accrued wealth, bring them down to the shop floor, and share with them exactly the return on investment which they all receive. After all, business owners collude with the State in creating corporate entities, it's not like they are entitled to their wealth any more than a single mother is to her WIC benefits. SOME business owners collude with the State. There is a limited viability to any plan to retroactively redistribute all coercively redistributed wealth that occurred during a century of State control over the economy. Everyone is forced to deal with the system as it exists, to survive in the best manner they can. Now, as I've said before, if property was legitimately stolen and it can be proven to be stolen, then said property should returned to its original owner. However, the burden of proof must rest on those that want to overturn existing private property claims. It is an absurdity to assume that since big business tends to collude with the State that, during a period of libertarian reforms, all property owned by "the rich" or business owners, should be forcefully redistributed to all the employees and former employees of that individual. I would never make the claim that a woman on welfare for twenty years should then be forced to repay the money that was redistributed to her. There are indeed many that game the system, but there are many more that are trying to survive in a very unfair system. I don't begrudge anyone who takes unemployment benefits or disability or any other form of government handout. You can be a perfect libertarian in my view and take government handouts. This is a coercive system that exists and, provided you are doing whatever you can to reform it and oppose it, you should not have to put yourself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis every other American simply based on an abstract principle. Its like a game of basketball. I might oppose a rule that is set in place. But once the game is going, I am not going to allow myself to be stomped upon because I have an intellectual opposition to the rules of the game. You work to reform the system while surviving the best you can in an immoral, coercive society. Many businessmen fall into this category. They take advantage of the system as it exists. If they stand on principle and refuse special privileges they merely go out of business and lose out to any number of competitors who will gladly take a subsidy or two. This will all get sorted out in short order during a transition to a free economy. The State protections and privileges including the entity called the limited liability "corporation" will fall to the side and these businessmen will no longer have a shield to protect them from liability for their actions. They will either satisfy consumers on the market, or go out of business and look for a new occupation. To conclude, stolen property should be returned, but those that seek to overturn existed property claims must be expected to provide proof of theft. And, no, "theft of labor" as Marx would put it does not count. As I've explained elsewhere, since the worker provides his services to the employer voluntarily and they have reverse time preference orders, then no exploitation has occurred. The worker chooses to accept a stable, steady guaranteed income and basically subsidizes the entrepreneur who assumes the risk, the risk to his personal capital and the risk of bankruptcy.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:07
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Holy poo poo. Is this a safari?
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Sep 30, 2014 06:08
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jrodefeld posted:I'd love if you could prove me wrong however. Having seen your previous posts, there's really no point to discussion until you declare what constitutes a proof in your mind. I don't suppose you'd care to give us a glimmer?
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Sep 30, 2014 06:17
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jrod you seem to be focusing on wage laws, but I'd be interested in hearing your criticism of basic income/negative taxation since you brought it up in passing. I'm sure you're aware that Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek supported this idea.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:23
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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jrodefeld posted:SOME business owners collude with the State. There is a limited viability to any plan to retroactively redistribute all coercively redistributed wealth that occurred during a century of State control over the economy. Everyone is forced to deal with the system as it exists, to survive in the best manner they can. Now, as I've said before, if property was legitimately stolen and it can be proven to be stolen, then said property should returned to its original owner. However, the burden of proof must rest on those that want to overturn existing private property claims. What are your thoughts on the negroids?
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Sep 30, 2014 06:35
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theshim posted:Assuming there are other jobs available, of course. Do you know the percentage of the US labor force that earns the Federally mandated minimum wage? The answer is 4.3 percent. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct....76477589,d.cGE If workers are so helpless and businessmen so all powerful, we don't we see far more people being paid the minimum? Why are any workers being paid salaries of $30 to $40 an hour and higher? Why aren't theses businesses pushing down their wages to subsistence levels? The answer is obvious. Like I said, these workers have a high marginal productivity and are able to command higher wages on the market. Their employer knows the going wage rate that the market has set for your skill set and job position. They know that if they lowball you and offer you wages that are too low, you will simply leave and work for someone else. This is how it works for more than 95% of wage earners who earn more than the minimum wage. You take about asymmetry of the field but you absolutely discount the risk that is assumed by entrepreneurs and businessmen, provided they are not receiving subsidies from the State or are protected from failure (i.e. "too big to fail", Fed guaranteed banks). It is no small thing to lose a job, but you should never discount the personal catastrophe of losing a lifetime of savings in a failed business venture. A failed entrepreneur can lose everything, go DEEPLY into debt and face severe personal consequences for making an error in judgment or failing to accurately anticipate consumer demand. Have you ever tried to start a business? I have friends who run their own businesses. My mom earns a very meager salary running her own business and I can tell you from experience that the amount of money that is wasted on property taxes, on bureaucracy and on regulations is insane. It makes it almost not worth trying. Unless you have personal experience in starting a business don't think that you know the unnecessary hurdles and obstacles that the State places in your path. Of course in the absence of these obstacles that tilt the playing field in favor of entrenched business interests, the prospect of becoming an entrepreneur would be more attractive and more feasible for more people. What type of person is hurt by minimum wage laws? The mentally and physically handicapped. The unskilled young. The historically discriminated against. Black teenage unemployment exceeds 50% in many cities. Furthermore, the entire concept of a "living wage" is ludicrous on its face. The amount of money required to live for a teenager living at home is far lower than a man in his forties who is trying to raise a family. The minimum wage makes no such distinction. It merely asserts that it is illegal, and thus the State will use violence against anyone who hires a worker at a lower wage than an arbitrarily set amount. This is amoral. The problem for those who earn low or no wages is that their marginal productivity is too low. Instead of thinking that the poor need more "money", understand that what they really need is more skills which makes them more productive, which raises the wage rate they can command on the market and expands their economic opportunities.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:37
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