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jrodefeld posted:How do you know how much a worker is worth? Serious, how do you know? A product on the market is worth what people will voluntarily pay for it. Your argument here is exactly the same as if I said "You know how much a Sony Playstation 4 is REALLY worth? $900." No it's not. It's worth $400 because that is what people are willing to pay for it on the market. People might be willing to buy even more of it if it was selling for $300 but then Sony would not make a profit. So the market has decided that the price for a new video game console is $400 because people are willing to pay that much and Sony is willing to sell it for that much. I would like you to think of the argument you make here but in reverse. Given that there is a labour market we can trivially see that people do not get paid as wages the full value of (the products of) the labour they produce, because other factors, such as the state of competition on the relevant labour market, play a role in determining this eventual wage rate. This is similar to how while a playstation 4s material, labour and production costs might come out to $900, its market value is $400. We can equally trivially establish that employers, both individually and collectively, have an interest in the wage rate in any given market being lower rather than higher. Let's call the difference in the value produced by labour and the wage rate the surplus value. What are your thoughts on the surplus value in general, what are your thoughts on the incentive of employers to minimize the wage in an effort to maximize the surplus value and what are your thoughts on the trend of the last 40 years where almost the entirety of the gains in productivity are captured by employers through the surplus value rather than employees through their wages. Lastly, what are your thoughts on wage rates below sustenance level and the interplay between previously mentioned surplus value dynamics and this phenomenon?
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Oct 1, 2014 16:58
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Talmonis posted:They also don't count economic coercion as agression. I'm personally sympathetic to this and yeah, it's not like megacorps won't hold you hostage given the chance. Basic income solves for this though and anything past that is basically nerds whining about how they're not allowed to RTS the economy. And basic income can be justified as the most cost effective and prevention based form of law enforcement ever, so caring about the poor isn't really required to support it. You just have to not be totally motivated by spite, which is alot to ask of Americans. Of course in the socialist system we totally need that goes past basic income D&Ders would end up in charge because the proletariat would see their superiority in their wall scrolls and imported anime. Not much different from libertarians who embrace Rand as a get rich quick fantasy solution to their otherwise frustrating lives. DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 16:59
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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VitalSigns posted:Yes. Are you saying that's an impossible definition? Yes, it's an impossible definition. By that definition if you refuse to give someone X at the rate they demand, if they need X, you're economically coercing them. It's an absurd burden to put on any individual because if we accept that economically coercing people is a thing we ought not to do it puts you on the wrong side of ethics just for refusing to transact. VitalSigns posted:While climbing, I come across somebody dangling from a rope over a precipice. "Oh I'll haul you up" I say, "but only if you promise me a million dollars in exchange and agree to work off your debt to me if you don't have the cash." With no other option, he agrees. Is this a legitimate contract to you, agreed to voluntarily without any coercion? Do I legitimately own this person now (or, if you believe in the statist concept of bankruptcy courts, so I at least get everything he can't shield in bankruptcy?) I'm comfortable with almost any resolution to this stupid hypothetical, to be honest. "No, because JFC you can't legally contract to be a slave", "No, because being in fear for your life and with no other options and with literally no ability to find other options this is actually extortion", or "Sure. Should have used a better safety rig or done some more pullups if you were going to put yourself in this dumb situation." are all ok. To me a better hypothetical is: while driving, I see a dude hitch hiking. I don't know poo poo about him except that he says he needs to get to <City> and if I don't take him he'll have to do...something...maybe wait for someone else or walk farther. Am I obligated to pick him up? If I want $100 to do it do I have to do it for $20 just because he only wants to pay $20?
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Oct 1, 2014 17:02
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wateroverfire posted:I'm comfortable with almost any resolution to this stupid hypothetical, to be honest. "No, because JFC you can't legally contract to be a slave", "No, because being in fear for your life and with no other options and with literally no ability to find other options this is actually extortion", or "Sure. Should have used a better safety rig or done some more pullups if you were going to put yourself in this dumb situation." are all ok. Well there we go then, threatening to fire somebody who already can't pay his medical bills due to your negligence, throwing him out on the street without any way to buy food, wihout any ability to get a job until he heals, and without any source of income save the eventual payoff after a long uncertain lawsuit...unless he agrees to forgo the money that you owe him by right, sure sounds like actual extortion of someone in fear for their life with no other options! Glad to have you aboard, comrade. wateroverfire posted:Yes, it's an impossible definition. By that definition if you refuse to give someone X at the rate they demand, if they need X, you're economically coercing them. It's an absurd burden to put on any individual because if we accept that economically coercing people is a thing we ought not to do it puts you on the wrong side of ethics just for refusing to transact. So is taxation an absurd burden because it puts people on the wrong side of ethics (not to mention prison bars) just for refusing to transact?
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Oct 1, 2014 17:17
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wateroverfire posted:Yes, it's an impossible definition. By that definition if you refuse to give someone X at the rate they demand, if they need X, you're economically coercing them. It's an absurd burden to put on any individual because if we accept that economically coercing people is a thing we ought not to do it puts you on the wrong side of ethics just for refusing to transact. So close and yet so far.
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Oct 1, 2014 17:18
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wateroverfire posted:So to summarize the action so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M24wFd6D4k As far as roads go, none other than right-wing kingpin Rush Limbaugh has constantly advocated for the idea of private roads. These awful opinions aren't really as fringe-y on the Right as you wish they were.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:27
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Yeah forget about criticizing minarchists for opposing state funding of disaster relief, let's talk about the (Reagan-created, and therefore Ron Paul and JBS-created) GOP opposing volcano monitoring.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:32
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VitalSigns posted:stuff Let's try not to be obtuse and also keep things rational. If I complain about X and I get fired for it, that's retaliation. Because I did a thing and the company did a thing to punish me in response. If the company has a policy of firing people who complain about X to stop them from complaining about X, that's coercion. The company doesn't want me to do a thing, so they let it be known that they will retaliate because I did that thing. This type of thing is literally coercion, in contrast to economic coercion. If I tell the company I want them to hire me for $50,000 per year and they say they'll only do it for $30,000, or that they don't want to hire me at any price, and I need the money, that's economic coercion. Because some entity refused to provide me a benefit on my terms and I don't have a specific right to that benefit from them (I'm not an employee being withheld wages, a supplier waiting to get paid, etc). We're not going to disagree that many instances of literal coercion are immoral and are or should be illegal, and even on which things are literal coercion. We are absolutely going to disagree that economic coercion is immoral or even a useful concept, because by the definition every negotiation and every failed transaction is economic coercion. Every time you choose not to pay someone to do something, and they asked you to, you're economically coercing them because they needed money (or whatever other thing) and you deprived them of the option of having yours, despite the fact that you had no obligation to hire them them to do whatever it was i n the first place. VitalSigns posted:So is taxation an absurd burden because it puts people on the wrong side of ethics (not to mention prison bars) just for refusing to transact? Why would it be? That doesn't follow from anything we've been talking about.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:34
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Mr Interweb posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M24wFd6D4k There are private roads all over the place, though? It's a thing that is appropriate sometimes. What's so bad about the idea of private roads?
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Oct 1, 2014 18:39
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wateroverfire posted:There are private roads all over the place, though? It's a thing that is appropriate sometimes. What's so bad about the idea of private roads? I know! Instead of using public funds to build roads everyone can use for free we'll add another burden to people by making them pay more money than they already do to get where they're going because I hate the concept of government!
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Oct 1, 2014 18:41
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wateroverfire posted:There are private roads all over the place, though? It's a thing that is appropriate sometimes. What's so bad about the idea of private roads? In and of themselves private roads aren't especially problematic. Replacing all public roads with private roads as part of an ideological libertarian quest for no-government-ever purity however is pretty problematic.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:41
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wateroverfire posted:There are private roads all over the place, though? It's a thing that is appropriate sometimes. What's so bad about the idea of private roads? Well, no one's saying that having private roads exist on their own is a bad thing. But replacing all public roads with private roads? Yeah, that's a problem.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:50
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Caros posted:In and of themselves private roads aren't especially problematic. Replacing all public roads with private roads as part of an ideological libertarian quest for no-government-ever purity however is pretty problematic. I agree that seems both unnecessary and pretty dumb. Raskolnikov38 posted:I know! Instead of using public funds to build roads everyone can use for free we'll add another burden to people by making them pay more money than they already do to get where they're going because I hate the concept of government! Public funds come from the public. Roads are expensive as poo poo up front to build, and sometimes costly to maintain. If your government can't borrow at low real interest rates and your tax base is too small to (or doesn't want to) put the money up front, or there are other spending priorities that need to be funded, you might consider getting a private company to build and maintain your road in exchange for a toll. That way the capital needed to fund the road is coming from elsewhere and the economic risk associated with maintaining the road is put off onto the company instead of dumped on your town or whatever. It's the only way some projects can get done.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:53
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Or the government can just realize that not every loan is going to be interest free, borrow the money and make it a publically owned toll road to repay the loan. Toll roads aren't ideal but as you note sometimes are neccessary. The problem is that libertopia demands that all roads be privatized toll roads which no one not already madly in love with Mises wants.
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Oct 1, 2014 19:11
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AlternateAccount posted:Holy poo poo, the level of deliberate obtuseness in this thread is loving staggering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle And certainly a society built on the non-aggression principle will never err in following said principle, no sir. All consequences of actions are completely tied to their purpose, nothing unintended ever occurs. Lets all just put on our imagination caps and become libertarians. To say "libertarianism ends all war" is as reasonable as to say "vegetarianism ends all war". People are going to break your precious non-aggression principle whether you like it or not, and claiming otherwise isn't realistic. quote:And yes, there's massive scale strawmanning. It's like asking every Republican to answer for the very worst, out-of-context Rush Limbaugh quotes you can possibly dig up. Complete nonsense. Do you really think the average libertarian is an advocate for children as property? Not all libertarians, but jrodefield does, and so do many other libertarians, which is why you're seeing arguments against ideas with which you already disagree. I think that you need to look up the definition of a strawman argument, you clearly don't know what that means. Or you just haven't bothered to read the thread and are making some lovely assumptions It's natural for a small philosophical movement like libertarianism to have people who have conflicting views on various issues. Instead of railing about how we're arguing against the "wrong" type of libertarianism, how about you summarize your own flavor so that we can talk about that? You keep saying that the common arguments have "obvious solutions", but you've never stopped to actually state what those solutions are or to state your own definition of libertarianism. Are you afraid that we'll poke holes in your final solutions? wateroverfire posted:Let's try not to be obtuse and also keep things rational. We're talking about libertarianism, the entire idea is obtuse and irrational. Praxeology is loving moronic and unrealistic, yet it's the basis of your entire ideology. "Let's try not to be obtuse and also keep things rational, I just want to tell you about how the Earth is flat and is at the center of the universe" QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 19:12
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So, wateroverfire, what does your version of small-L libertopia do to prevent pollution in a deregulated market?
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Oct 1, 2014 19:21
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wateroverfire posted:Why would it be? That doesn't follow from anything we've been talking about. Because taxation is an example of a mandatory transaction, which you declared is immoral and absurd. "if we accept that economically coercing people is a thing we ought not to do it puts you on the wrong side of ethics just for refusing to transact" is just one of those conservative phrases that kind of sounds good at first, but the second you really think about we go "hey giving someone an ethical black mark for refusing to transact is something we actually do all the time, and for good reason", so it doesn't make the concept of economic coercion absurd at all. The President of Harvard may not want any blacks at his school, but we not only expect but also require him to transact with black people instead of discriminating against them. It's perfectly legitimate to say "if you want to profit from someone's labor and give them orders, you can't lock them in a deathtrap/give them diseases/pay them starvation wages." And anyway, no one is forced to hire anyone, you're making that up. If you don't like labor laws you're free to avoid them by not-hiring to your heart's content.
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Oct 1, 2014 19:38
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wateroverfire posted:If I tell the company I want them to hire me for $50,000 per year and they say they'll only do it for $30,000, or that they don't want to hire me at any price, and I need the money, that's economic coercion. Because some entity refused to provide me a benefit on my terms and I don't have a specific right to that benefit from them (I'm not an employee being withheld wages, a supplier waiting to get paid, etc). You just don't GET IT. Apparently, any economic transaction in which I don't get precisely what I want for not a penny more than I think is arbitrarily fair, it's economic coercion and terrible. Having the government deprive you of property or freedom due to not paying taxes/fees is somehow an acceptable form of the same. Somehow throwing people in prison or kicking in their doors for simply not paying a cost(which is mandatory & non-negotiable) is acceptable when we do it to ourselves, but no one else should have that ability. (Really, no one should, but whatever.) QuarkJets posted:And certainly a society built on the non-aggression principle will never err in following said principle, no sir. So if a principle cannot be applied to perfection, it cannot be used to advise decision making? Hmm. And I never said it "ends all war" but I'd rather that war was only waged in cases of pure defense. I mean, other nations manage this, I'd say there are more than a few examples to learn from.
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Oct 1, 2014 19:55
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AlternateAccount posted:Having the government deprive you of property or freedom due to not paying taxes/fees is somehow an acceptable form of the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usN3rpfFoGA&t=31s Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 20:05
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AlternateAccount posted:You just don't GET IT. Apparently, any economic transaction in which I don't get precisely what I want for not a penny more than I think is arbitrarily fair, it's economic coercion and terrible. Uh huh, because that is exactly what we are talking about! It is economic coersion when a CEO is only paid $20 million instead of $20 million and one cent. Wait, no it isn't. We're talking about a specific everyday situation in which employers use the threat of being able to easily replace low wage workers to drive down the wages of those workers to poverty levels. Specifically we are talking about the fact that employers can and will leverage the threat of homelessness or starvation to their advantage when it comes to getting lower and lower wages, not as an evil, machiavellian plot but as an inherent part of the business process. What we are talking about is that we as a society have decided to implement a minimum wage to say "No employers, you have to pay at least this much regardless of how great your leverage is." And guess what, we're allowed to do this in the same way that we are also allowed to say "Yes you have to serve the darkies at the lunch counter" and "No you can't slap your secretaries rear end and call her sweetheart." quote:Having the government deprive you of property or freedom due to not paying taxes/fees is somehow an acceptable form of the same. Do you have a problem with the government depriving you of property or freedom when you steal from someone? How about if you go out in the street and take a pick axe to the road? If you don't pay your taxes you are STEALING from society. Property is a social construct between people, the only reason your house is your house is because society as a whole agrees that it is. In the same way that we agree that your property is in fact your property, we have also socially agreed that people will pay taxes mandated by our form of socially accepted government. If you do not pay your taxes, you are in effect stealing from society, and you can and are punished in much the same way as if you'd stolen from an individal. quote:Somehow throwing people in prison or kicking in their doors for simply not paying a cost(which is mandatory & non-negotiable) is acceptable when we do it to ourselves, but no one else should have that ability. (Really, no one should, but whatever.) I would also have someone kick in my door if I stopped paying my mandatory Condo fee. My Condo fee is negotiable, but only through a democratic process, just like taxation is in fact negotiable on a much larger scale. Do you also object to Condo fees? Keep in mind that if your answer is that I could simply choose not to live there, that you are fully capable of choosing not to live here either. quote:So if a principle cannot be applied to perfection, it cannot be used to advise decision making? Hmm. The problem is less that the non-aggression principle is flawed and more that it is pointless and says nothing of value. Here, let me quote it from Mises: quote:The non-aggression principle (also called the non-aggression axiom, or the anti-coercion or zero aggression principle or non-initiation of force) is an ethical stance which asserts that "aggression" is inherently illegitimate. "Aggression" is defined as the "initiation" of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property. In contrast to pacifism, the non-aggression principle does not preclude violent self-defense. The principle is a deontological (or rule-based) ethical stance. Okay, are there any posters in here who disagree that the Non-Aggression Principle is actually a bad thing overall? I'd honestly be surprised to hear if there is more than 1-2 posters who think that this definition of the NAP is problematic. Don't initiate physical force agaisnt someone, or their property, or threaten to do so or use fraud. That pretty much sounds like what we have now doesn't it? I know that legally I am not allowed to do any of those things. I would be arrested if I initiated physical force against someone. So where is the disagreement if it isn't with the NAP? Its in what constitutes force. You argue that taxation is a form of force. But the NAP doesn't actually say poo poo about that, it says that you shouldn't aggress against people, which we agree with. What you're doing instead is trying to redefine things that you don't like as force. You are arguing that taxation is theft, because if you can pretend that it is theft, then it is a form of aggression and is thus inherently immoral. Guess what, you don't need the NAP for that my friend. If people actually agreed with you from the get go that taxation was theft, then it would already be socially unacceptable. In short, what you are doing is simply arguing over what belongs to who. I don't believe that your tax money belongs to you, and neither do the vast majority of people in the world. Taxation isn't theft by any definition but your own twisted attempt to manipulate people.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:14
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That the essence of libertarianism boils downs to idiots gettin' real mad over the federal withholdings line on their paycheck will never not be hilarious.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:18
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I've not gone so far to argue the "taxation is theft" angle. Not sure this is really worth going into to any length, since I doubt we will find any common ground on the idea that taxation is inherently universally legitimate and that the amount of personal property that the government can lay claim to is up to and including 100%. It's not. Perhaps we can start with examples from the preset and throughout history of fees and taxation used as punitive and specifically anti-competitive measures and go from there. The disagreement with the NAP is the application of it in interactions from the government to people and from the government to foreign entities. For example, I am not a fan of "limited kinetic actions" or "We tortured some folks."
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Oct 1, 2014 20:25
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Orange Devil posted:I would like you to think of the argument you make here but in reverse. Given that there is a labour market we can trivially see that people do not get paid as wages the full value of (the products of) the labour they produce, because other factors, such as the state of competition on the relevant labour market, play a role in determining this eventual wage rate. This is similar to how while a playstation 4s material, labour and production costs might come out to $900, its market value is $400. We can equally trivially establish that employers, both individually and collectively, have an interest in the wage rate in any given market being lower rather than higher. These leading questions are stupid. I promise that libertarians, like most people in this instance, don't share your values regarding the notion of exploitation. And to repeat, economically speaking surplus exists on both sides of the market. Every time a consumer buys a product from a corporation they are paying less than that product is really worth to them. Sometimes substantially. It's called consumer surplus. The fact that consumer surplus exists in the labor market just isn't that interesting to non Marxists. Jrodefeld is exactly right to call people out for silly "but everyone must be worth more than X because I say so" arguments. It's trivially the case that young people, old people, sick people etc may have an economic value approaching zero. And there is nothing guaranteeing that the economic value of regular people must be a living wage.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:26
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asdf32 posted:And to repeat, economically speaking surplus exists on both sides of the market. Most of the counterarguments and general worldviews that exist in this entire subforum are entirely dependent on wealth being a completely zero-sum concept.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:30
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Rhjamiz posted:So, wateroverfire, what does your version of small-L libertopia do to prevent pollution in a deregulated market? It would embrace a set of technocratic measures like having a carbon market and limiting important point sources of pollution and etc. It would probably also enforce the use of agreed-upon best practices for handling and storing hazardous waste and things like that, maybe by making them preconditions for buying commercial insurance or getting zoning permits. Basically my guiding principle would be "we don't have to be dumb about this." and deregulating down to the bone is not a high priority for me. VitalSigns posted:Because taxation is an example of a mandatory transaction, which you declared is immoral and absurd. The absurdity comes from defining coercion in such a way that if someone goes "Give me $10 to clean your windshield" and you go "no" you're being coercive and somehow doing something wrong. Taxation is an example of a mandatory transaction that is totally different from that and not at all what we're talking about. There's nothing wrong with taxation in principle (according to me), though we probably disagree on how much and what for. QuarkJets posted:Stuff. First, any utopian ideology is subject to the same criticisms people are making of libertarianism (creates unjust edge cases, relies on unrealistic assumptions, etc). Second, when the topic is socialism the flood of #notallsocialists posts is pretty heavy so LOL at anyone complaining when the other side seems too fuzzy and won't be pinned down. Third, if you want my lazy man's interpretation of libertarianism here it is: The appropriate size and scope of government is whatever is required to have well functioning markets, protect property rights, and carry out functions only a government can do efficiently like national defense, maintaining order, providing health care insurance, enforcing some environmental regulations, etc. I'm not committed to being super doctrinaire about it but the principle would be "enough to get it done, but no more, and when there isn't a clear public interest hands off my vices". Fourth, though, I'm not a libertarian.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:34
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AlternateAccount posted:Most of the counterarguments and general worldviews that exist in this entire subforum are entirely dependent on wealth being a completely zero-sum concept. Are you suggesting that "a rising tide lifts all boats"?
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Oct 1, 2014 20:34
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asdf32 posted:Jrodefeld is exactly right to call people out for silly "but everyone must be worth more than X because I say so" arguments. It's trivially the case that young people, old people, sick people etc may have an economic value approaching zero. And there is nothing guaranteeing that the economic value of regular people must be a living wage.  It's reassuring when ya'll are honest. When your ideology views human beings primarily in terms of their "economic value", it's really easy to determine that it's monstrous.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:35
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LolitaSama posted:I apologize in advance for rambling on a bit, but this gets me worked up. Thanks for the explanation. The LCR comparison seems apt.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:41
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Rhjamiz posted:Are you suggesting that "a rising tide lifts all boats"? Not at all, but nice try. What I am suggesting is that wealth is not finite, and one person getting richer does not depend on someone else getting poor.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:44
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wateroverfire posted:Fourth, though, I'm not a libertarian.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:44
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Caros posted:Wait, no it isn't. We're talking about a specific everyday situation in which employers use the threat of being able to easily replace low wage workers to drive down the wages of those workers to poverty levels. Specifically we are talking about the fact that employers can and will leverage the threat of homelessness or starvation to their advantage when it comes to getting lower and lower wages, not as an evil, machiavellian plot but as an inherent part of the business process. Except in the most contrived of cases this is not a thing that employers can do, though. Employers offer as much money as it takes to get acceptable people. That is pretty much the end of it at the low end of the wage distribution. There are too many employers with too many positions for them to be leveraging much of anything and a worker's risk of starvation or whatever is both 100% unknown to the potential employer and 100% out of his or her control.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:44
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wateroverfire posted:Third, if you want my lazy man's interpretation of libertarianism here it is: This strikes me as a recipe for stalling, if not outright-freezing, social progress on a national level, and downright rolling it back in certain *cough*formerconfederate*cough* parts of the nation, as well as entrenching wealth in the hands of whoever has it now, while narrowing the opportunities of those who don't to ever rise. wateroverfire posted:Except in the most contrived of cases this is not a thing that employers can do, though. Employers offer as much money as it takes to get acceptable people. That is pretty much the end of it at the low end of the wage distribution. There are too many employers with too many positions for them to be leveraging much of anything and a worker's risk of starvation or whatever is both 100% unknown to the potential employer and 100% out of his or her control. Ah yes, all those silicon valley giants actively colluding to keep market pressures from raising wages and thus labor costs: totally not a thing that happened. Oh wait, not "low end of the wage distribution," so I guess it doesn't really count. Whew, was worried for a minute that we might not live in the best of all possible worlds after all! Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 20:45
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AlternateAccount posted:Not at all, but nice try. What I am suggesting is that wealth is not finite, and one person getting richer does not depend on someone else getting poor. I would agree, but I would argue that libertarian policies only benefit the already-wealthy at the expense of the poor. It creates no new wealth for the impoverished and puts them at a severe disadvantage.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:48
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Captain_Maclaine posted:This strikes me as a recipe for stalling, if not outright-freezing, social progress on a national level, and downright rolling it back in certain *cough*formerconfederate*cough* parts of the nation, as well as entrenching wealth in the hands of whoever has it now, while narrowing the opportunities of those who don't to ever rise. How's that? What is "social progress" the way you're using it? edit: I thought we weren't concerned with the wages of high-flying 1%er software engineers when speaking about economic coercion, though?
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Oct 1, 2014 20:49
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Captain_Maclaine posted:This strikes me as a recipe for stalling, if not outright-freezing, social progress on a national level, and downright rolling it back in certain *cough*formerconfederate*cough* parts of the nation, as well as entrenching wealth in the hands of whoever has it now, while narrowing the opportunities of those who don't to ever rise. Opportunity is not something that can only be provided and managed out of the kind hands of government.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:49
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Talmonis posted:
Where did you get that from? Seriously?
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Oct 1, 2014 20:49
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Rhjamiz posted:I would agree, but I would argue that libertarian policies only benefit the already-wealthy at the expense of the poor. It creates no new wealth for the impoverished and puts them at a severe disadvantage. I would argue that government policy has no role in creating wealth(and actually functionally cannot do so) or providing advantage.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:50
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asdf32 posted:Where did you get that from? Seriously? Well, you see he thinks libertarianism only values people economically so when you mentioned economic value, your point sailed right over his head.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:52
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asdf32 posted:Where did you get that from? Seriously? asdf32 posted:It's trivially the case that young people, old people, sick people etc may have an economic value approaching zero
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Oct 1, 2014 20:52
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asdf32 posted:It's trivially the case that young people, old people, sick people etc may have an economic value approaching zero. Yeah, but that's why we provide old people with a basic income in the form of social security, and children a basic income in the form of food stamps and subsidized school meals. Obviously these are inadequate and should be expanded, but we clearly already don't rely on infants and seniors earning the minimum wage so this is just a red herring. Obviously also a fully universal basic income would be better than the minimum wage that ties you to a job, but until I get my gumdrop-farting unicorn we're stuck with the minimum wage as the only politically feasible tool to keep workers out of penury. asdf32 posted:And there is nothing guaranteeing that the economic value of regular people must be a living wage. No, but we know that it's greater than $5.15 an hour despite what the usual suspects claimed at the time we raised the minimum wage, because if a cashier or a janitor only brought in $5.15 an hour worth of profits then their positions would vanish at $7.25 an hour and they haven't. Tell you what, when the minimum wage gets so high that every janitor in the country is let go and our stores become a squalid mess, then we'll know we pushed the minimum wage higher than productivity and it's time to scale it back. Do you object to collective bargaining too, because workers are trying to set the price of their work higher than what they could individually negotiate? For the employer, whether the union goes on strike at this wage or whether the government says "no one may work for you at this wage", either way the employer has the choice to do without workers or to pay more. It's just that strikes are much more vulnerable to underhanded strike-breaking tactics. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 20:53
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