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VitalSigns posted:He come on, no true Libertarian would assume someone is in a gang just because he's black, that's collectivist thinking and Libertarianism is an individualist ideology that rejects all group structures such as races or classes, there are only individuals.  You guys are just pulling quotes from an old Freep thread and putting his name on it to rile him up, right? R-right? 
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Feb 4, 2016 04:57
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:As long as CripDRO and BloodDRO and NegDROes in general stay on their side of town, I'm sure he'd have no problem with them. All we want is to be left alone! Why would they stay on their side of town if there is a market demand for their services elsewhere?
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Feb 4, 2016 05:00
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Nolanar posted:
Haha, oh you sweet summer child. Next time he pops up ask him about how black women are welfare queens!
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Feb 4, 2016 05:03
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e: wrong thread LOL
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Feb 4, 2016 05:07
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Who What Now posted:Haha, oh you sweet summer child. Next time he pops up ask him about how black women are welfare queens! I've been kicking around these threads for a while now. But in the past Jrod has been at least able to lie to himself about being a racist. "I'm not racist, but around blacks never relax" should be enough to get even him to reevaluate his ahahaha, I can't do it. Stephen Molyneaux could advocate for repealing the 13th amendment and reinstating the fugitive slave act with "I'm doing this because I hate black people, for being black" as his slogan, and JRod would find some way to say that we're the real racists for wanting to ban blacks from unpaid employment.
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Feb 4, 2016 05:13
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The authoritarian mindset requires that evil be unitary: if he can conceive of racism as something bad, he can only associate it with the Great State-an.
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Feb 4, 2016 05:21
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Nessus posted:Is that really jrode? If so, I wonder why he feels this need to go back to Berchtesgaden so often... does the place have... family importance to them, perhaps? No, I think jrod uses the same username on every forum he preaches on.
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Feb 4, 2016 05:23
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Nessus posted:Is that really jrode? If so, I wonder why he feels this need to go back to Berchtesgaden so often... does the place have... family importance to them, perhaps? Actually, that reminds me of a few questions I have for JRod. So, JRod. Is there an age-difference between your parents? Say... 23 years or so? Is your father still alive? Ever heard anyone in the family talking about Brazil at any point?
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Feb 4, 2016 05:38
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Jrod, what's your favorite Sci-Fi series, how do you feel about Firefly, and which series was better: Buffy or Angel?
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Feb 4, 2016 05:41
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if you HAD to ship one star wars character and one star trek character, which would you choose this question is for jrode ONLY
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Feb 4, 2016 05:43
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Feb 4, 2016 07:44
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What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know.
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Feb 4, 2016 18:12
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Jrod doesn't like any online game that has countermeasures for hacking. It's HIS computer and HIS Perfectly Legitimately Acquired copy of the game, he should be allowed to manipulate it any way he wants!
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Feb 4, 2016 18:34
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Dr Pepper posted:What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know. Bioshock 1, but only the first twenty minutes of it.
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Feb 4, 2016 18:39
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Dr Pepper posted:What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know. Eve online. His multi-year evangelical mission on these forums has been entirely to get Goonswarm to stop being all collectivist and ruining his utopia.
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Feb 4, 2016 18:51
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Dr Pepper posted:What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know. Resident Evil 5.
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Feb 4, 2016 18:52
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Dr Pepper posted:What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know. Hatred
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Feb 4, 2016 20:46
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Who What Now posted:Bioshock 1, but only the first twenty minutes of it. Naw it's clearly Bioshock 2. He thinks that Dr. Lamb's anti-individualist, hyper-collectivist cult accurately represents statists and their goals.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:47
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Dr Pepper posted:What video games do you like to play Jrod. Very important to know. Which one is easier to pirate/distribute through online forums?
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Feb 4, 2016 22:02
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Resident Evil 5. Bwahahaha, this is probably the most accurate one.
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Feb 4, 2016 22:05
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Resident Evil 5. This is remarkablely subtle and I love it.
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Feb 4, 2016 22:23
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Ravenfood posted:Alright you ignorant fucker. I've got two things to say to your dumbass self, and I'll start with the simpler one. Given that you didn't quote any of my posts here, I don't understand what you are referring to. I WILL respond to your post if you explain what you are talking about a bit better. Also, the "I'm so contemptuous of you" type of replies are tiring. I fully support the free society because I believe it will lead to the best outcomes for all of society, including the poor, the sick, and the elderly. You could call this a consequentialist argument if you like, but I certainly have utilitarian concerns. Simply because a person subscribes to a deontological framework for their concepts of rights and just law does not in any way mean that they don't care at all what the results of those policies will be. The problem is that, to eschew a principled rights-based approach in favor of a pure sort of utilitarianism is extremely dangerous. What some of you are doing is isolating a small portion of a particular post that I typed, and overreact to what I said while claiming the moral high-ground. I think we could have much more productive discussion if you'd drop the histrionics. Like I said, though, I'm happy to reply to your argument if you'd kindly tell me what the hell you are talking about.
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Feb 5, 2016 08:28
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ok, so you're not even reading your own posts at this point. gently caress you.
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Feb 5, 2016 08:30
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jrodefeld posted:Like I said, though, I'm happy to reply to your argument if you'd kindly tell me what the hell you are talking about.
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Feb 5, 2016 08:37
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jrodefeld posted:Given that you didn't quote any of my posts here, I don't understand what you are referring to. I WILL respond to your post if you explain what you are talking about a bit better. Okay well do you care about the consequences or not. You're trying to have it both ways: you claim that DRO-warlordism will lead to the best possible world, but when confronted with evidence that universal health care is unambiguously superior to the unregulated marker by every metric (except insurance company profit), or with the inarguable fact that drug safety was and is worse in times and places without the FDA, or with the undeniable evidence that mandatory vaccination saves millions of lives, then you can just switch to "oh but it would be immoral because consent and government and taxes" jrodefeld posted:The problem is that, to eschew a principled rights-based approach in favor of a pure sort of utilitarianism is extremely dangerous. Then why do you quote Human Action at us, which is explicitly a pure utilitarian argument, which even has a section explaining why Von Mises completely rejects deontological ethics as arbitrary and worthless. Actually while we're on the subject, it's a bit bizarre that you appeal to complete subjectivism with respect to things like "is GSK's new thalidomide drug for morning sickness as safe as they claim it is" yet you think there's an objective deontological ethics out there somewhere. E: Seriously what's the deal with this. How can you claim there exists an objective, knowable ethics if all values are completely subjective. At least when Von Mises appeals to subjectivism he's doing it as part of an overall subjective argument (that we can't define what the best of all possible worlds is, but it will emerge naturally as the aggregate outcome of individual decisions) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 08:45
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Just think of those poor black people today, forced to waste their most productive years on "kindergarten" and "basic literacy," it's a goddamn crime I tell you as a man who sympathizes with the following list of great thinkers who by some strange coincidence all supported Apartheid, some quite viciously. This is Exhibit A of a completely disingenuous reply to my argument. You didn't even attempt to understand what I wrote, constructed a straw-man from your own imagination and proceeded to beat up on it. Nobody said that anyone should drop out of school. Nobody said anything about child labor. We are talking about 15, 16, 17, 18 year old young adults. There are marginalized groups in society that are disproportionately effected by minimum wage laws. Teenagers tend to have higher unemployment than the average for adults since they lack experience and maturity. Blacks tend to have higher unemployment for a variety of factors including a history of discrimination, often worse schools, often living in higher crime areas or coming from broken homes. Many of these factors combine to create a situation where blacks have lower productivity and less advantages in breaking into the labor force on average than do more privileged groups. There are literally no prominent libertarians that I am aware of who supported Apartheid. And, just to be clear, we're speaking about actual historical apartheid like in South Africa not some hypothetical future circumstance that you are CHOOSING to call apartheid in an effort to poison the well, right? In that particular post, aside from the economists who contributed to the studies on the effects of minimum wage that I linked to, the two libertarian thinkers (or libertarian-like) I mentioned were Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. Both men, as it turns out, are black and participated in the Civil Rights movement against real domestic oppression so don't impugn their anti-racism credentials. I'll let you look through all the links, books and articles you can find by Williams and Sowell and I want you to put actions where your mouth is and demonstrate chapter and verse where any of them supported Apartheid in any way, shape or form. I'll be waiting with baited breathe for you to present your findings.
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Feb 5, 2016 08:46
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Why is it that the children of the rich don't have to break into the labor market, and are just assumed to be of great value with great prospects for education and are granted free university, living expenses, the ability to take unpaid internships to get connections, etc whereas the children of the poor are expected to quit school early and work their way up the ladder starting as cotton-pickers jrod?
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Feb 5, 2016 08:48
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jrodefeld posted:There are literally no prominent libertarians that I am aware of who supported Apartheid. VitalSigns posted:Why is it that the children of the rich don't have to break into the labor market, and are just assumed to be of great value with great prospects for education and are granted free university, living expenses, the ability to take unpaid internships to get connections, etc whereas the children of the poor are expected to quit school early and work their way up the ladder starting as cotton-pickers jrod?
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Feb 5, 2016 08:54
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Right, primarily low income minorities should be coerced into taking poo poo wage jobs instead of focusing on education, I can think of no adverse effects of this policy.
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Feb 5, 2016 08:58
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jrodefeld posted:Like I said, though, I'm happy to reply to your argument if you'd kindly tell me what the hell you are talking about. He appears to be talking about healthcare, so probably he was responding to the last post that you made about healthcare. But ignoring that for a second, I made several respectful replies to you with direct quotes. If you don't understand what this other guy is talking about because he didn't bother quoting you, then why not reply to my posts instead? Nothing that I've written was an overreaction or insulting, and I was careful to quote you along the way so as to minimize confusion. Here, I'm going to copy-paste my last post to you. It was a completely genuine, not insulting response that was served without any outrage and to which you didn't respond at all. jrodefeld posted:Again, you all are mixing up different things. If someone sells you something that they claim is cancer medicine, but turns out to be nothing of the sort, then they have committed fraud. Knowing deception in a supposedly "voluntary" transaction would be illegal in a libertarian society. The person who sold you the "medicine" has stolen your money because you never would have parted with it if you knew the truth about the product that was sold. What if someone sells something that they believe is cancer medicine, but it's actually just Zima? What if I think that forcing bleach into an autistic kid's butthole will cure their autism. Maybe I market it as something goofy-sounding, like Miracle Mineral Supplement, and then I instruct desperate parents on how it will cure their child's autism. I have no reason to believe that it works, but I believe that it does and I'm happy to sell this poo poo to people who are just as gullible as I am 1) Who's going to stop me? Certainly the parents won't, since the kind of person who would actually buy and use my magic potion on their child is gullible enough to keep on believing that everything's fine even while their child is crying and thrashing around from having bleach forced into their rear end in a top hat. 2) Even if someone decides that I'm a fraudster, how the gently caress are they going to prove that I defrauded them? I believe that it works so we're just two adults engaging in a voluntary transaction, right? The tragic thing is that this is not an absurd hypothetical, Miracle Mineral Supplement is a real thing being sold by real people to real, real gullible parents as an autism cure. Obviously it doesn't work. In your ideal world, people selling this poo poo to each other wouldn't face repercussions, since they're just engaging in voluntary interactions with each other. jrodefeld posted:In all seriousness, can't you see the potential problem with this? Don't you think that a political institution that has the power to ban medical treatments and drugs would be pressured to keep out good and effective medicine from the market if they would undermine the profits of the most politically well-connected medical and drug companies? Don't you have any concern for the millions of people who have died from diseases because the FDA wouldn't allow them to access medical treatments that are widely available in other countries? I could see this problem occurring if 1) the FDA had worldwide jurisdiction and 2) the FDA controlled all drug-related information. But in reality, the FDA doesn't actually have that kind of power. In reality, researchers have enormous incentives (prestigious and economic) to publicize amazing new medical treatments, especially if they're effective. Why do you suppose that it's always the people who refuse to subject their treatments to scientific review who complain the loudest about FDA regulation? Here you are claiming that the FDA prohibits the sale of drugs that would have saved millions of lives. Can you cite, specifically, these drugs? I bet that you can't. That's a totally bullshit claim. I'm willing to admit that there is some number of lives lost due to experimental treatments having to go through a scientific gauntlet, but the fact that you immediately jumped to "millions of lives lost" instantly tells me that you don't know what you're talking about and that you're just pulling numbers out of your rear end. It also tells me that you haven't weighed the lives lost against the lives saved by requiring drugs to be proven safe before they're widely marketed and sold. quote:If you are dying with cancer or some other horrible disease, what moral justification is there for preventing them from trying cutting edge, but yet experimental treatments? No one stops you from trying such treatments. The FDA only prevents you from marketing and selling unapproved treatments. You're free to treat yourself in whatever way you want, the FDA won't stop you. This just makes it seem like you don't know what the FDA actually does. quote:It takes a long time sometimes for new treatments to become widely acknowledged as effective medicine, especially if they are radically different from the prevailing orthodoxy. For example, in cancer treatment today, Chemotherapy is a mainstay of treatment. It is very expensive (ask Caros) and the providers can make a lot of money by selling it. Newer treatments that are in their early stages of development will do away with most, if not all, of radiation therapy towards a more targeted approach. There are three big problems with your hypothesis 1) You're assuming that the people selling the current cancer drugs are not developing new cancer drugs, and that they wouldn't benefit from the sale of such drugs. You've made an incorrect assumption. 2) You're assuming, again, that the FDA controls whether or not information about new treatments or drugs gets published. They don't. They only restrict the sale of drugs. Publishing proof of a drug's effectiveness is something else entirely that the FDA has no control over. If a new drug was scientifically proven to be an effective, superior alternative and the FDA was rejecting it for "nah we don't wanna" reasons, there would be widespread outrage and a bunch of dudes would get fired by politicians seeking political points. 3) If a publicly-funded organization like the FDA is going to be pressured by big drug manufacturers to not approve new treatments, then what do you think is going to happen if drugs are rated by privately-funded organizations? The pressure will be the same, but without public money there will be way more incentive to follow the edicts of drug manufacturers. It doesn't matter if you have a dozen or a hundred rating agencies, ultimately a few will rise to the top as the most popular and these agencies will wind up getting corrupted by monied interests because they won't be able to exist otherwise. That's how the real world works and shoving your fingers in your ears and shouting "FREE MARKET" over and over doesn't change that. The best way to reduce the corrupting influence of monied interests is to create publicly funded organizations that aren't beholden to them. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:02
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Nessus posted:Now out of curiosity, is the operative term here "I am aware of" - meaning that you have deliberately avoided gaining that knowledge - or is it "prominent," thus meaning that (by shifting rhetorical focus) any libertarian who spoke favorably of apartheid would by definition not be prominent? "Murray Rothbard posted:There is no question that black nationalism is a lot more libertarian than the compulsory integration pushed by King, the NAACP, and white liberals. But there are deep problems with black nationalism, which Malcolm never had a chance to explore. The most fundamental: black nationalism in what territory? A nation has to have territory, and blacks are only one-fifth of the American nation. “Black nationalism” within the United States is then only a phony nationalism, and beginning to look like a drive for an aggravated form of coerced parasitism over the white population. The territorial question was at least faced by the Black Belt thesis of the Communist Party of the USA during the 1920s: Black Belt slave counties of the South. There were two grave problems with this doctrine: (a) what do you do with the existing usually majority white population in these areas, and (b) as time has gone on since 1865, more and more blacks have moved out of the historic Black Belt, and have taken over various inner cities in the North. Rather than integrating schools, businesses, and neighborhoods, blacks should go back to Africa where their E: His second suggestion, by the way, is literal apartheid: declare majority black areas independent countries, revoke black citizenship in the rest of the country, require black laborers to have work permits but never allow them to immigrate or become citizens but that obviously has lots of problems with maintaining control like we saw in South Africa so shipping them all off to another continent is the logical conclusion. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:06
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jrodefeld posted:Given that you didn't quote any of my posts here, I don't understand what you are referring to. I WILL respond to your post if you explain what you are talking about a bit better. While I will not address point B directly here, I think it is very clear that for you, medical ethics and the actual functioning of healthcare are just thought experiments. Likewise, medical care and the care of people thereof. You forget that for others, it is a practical reality, and people tend to get mad when someone with zero practical experience and zero appreciation for consequences shows up and begins making assertions that would directly negatively impact the lives of most of the people around them. You've ignored any historical tendencies and statistical trends so far, so people try with personal anecdotes and you ignore those as well. You (supposedly) base your entire philosophical concept on the idea that "humans are rational" and yet refuse to see any evidence of irrationality. If your philosophy is based on unsound premises, it is an unsound philosophy! And then you use your unsound philosophy to argue that people at their most vulnerable and irrational should be stripped of the bare modicum of protection that we currently offer them. And while that may be bad on the face of it, you do that forgetting that it isn't a thought experiment to some people and some people are already caused significant distress watching many of the people around them suffer from the lack of adequate protection. e: Rothbard was also strongly opposed to disinvestment. I'm not very up on apartheid history, but I thought disinvestment was given a lot of credit in its role for weakening a lot of the practical and political pro-apartheid power centers in SA at the time. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:09
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jrodefeld posted:I fully support the free society because I believe it will lead to the best outcomes for all of society, including the poor, the sick, and the elderly. Why in the world would you think this? This is the great mystery. You can't even connect the dots yourself, how the one thing could possibly lead to these other things. That's why you go looking for mises articles all the time, to renew your faith in something that doesn't make any sense.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:26
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1000101 posted:What good is working a job if the wage isn't suitable to sustain a minimal standard of living? Approximately 4% of the US domestic working force earns the current minimum wage. I don't at all mean to demean this group of people because I want everyone, including those with the least working experience and productivity to have the maximum opportunity to move up to a comfortable middle class existence. But I can't help them by destroying the first rung on the ladder. That hurts the most vulnerable people disproportionately. The reason I mention the 4% statistic is that advocates of raising the minimum wage tend of overemphasize the number of people this policy will supposedly help. Earning a very low wage is obviously not desirable, but if it allows you to become more productive, demonstrate traits that employers will find valuable such as reliability, honesty, hard work and so forth you have a viable path to earning higher and higher incomes and moving up towards a more and more comfortable standard of living. Listen, we can't sit here and magically wish that people who have very few marketable skills and very low productivity earn a middle class salary. Both the libertarians and the left progressives want to eliminate poverty and allow people to move up and out of dire straights toward a comfortable standard of living where their basic needs are fulfilled. But it is the libertarians who actually have a feasible way of attaining that goal. The leftists who harp about a "living wage" are greatly hurting the very people they assume they are helping. The ONLY way to actually raise wages is to increase the productivity of the labor of the worker. When entrepreneurs start a business, their goal is to be profitable which make the capital investment and risk worthwhile. To be profitable, their incoming earnings must exceed their outgoing expenditures. To that end, the businessman prices the cost of capital goods, of office space and every other commodity that is needed to produce the good or service that he or she is selling. This is done VERY carefully to stay within budget and maximize profits. And remember, that profits and losses are determined by consumers who have choices on the market. The consumer tries to satisfy his or her needs and desires and each purchase is a vote of confidence in that product or service vis a vis competing products. More profits in one sector of the economy send signals to other entrepreneurs that they need to invest in manufacturing products and services in that sector and cut back on manufacturing in areas that are taking losses or at least are less profitable. This is how human needs are most adequately met in the market. Prices send signals that more accurately reflect the best distribution of scarce resources in an economy in satisfying our shared human needs and desires far better than any central planning State could ever do. Hayek called this the "pretense of knowledge". Libertarians understand the limit to "planning" of society and how commerce permits important knowledge about an economy to be revealed far more effectively and accurately. WIth central planning, resources inevitably are mismanaged and misallocated and we might have far too much investment in, say, housing (sound familiar?) than would be indicated through laissez-faire market signals, interest rates and the price mechanism. Businessmen don't have carte-blanche to set wages or prices for their products at any rate they want unless some benevolent democratic State forces them not to make "obscene" profits or lower wages to so-called "slave-wages" (itself a gross misnomer). This is a leftist fallacy that needs to be understood as such. Why would the cost of labor be exempt from these economic calculations? The entrepreneur very carefully determines what the value of individual capital goods is with very scientific specificity. He determines if they add more value than they detract from the efficient enterprise. Why would he not have to judge the cost of labor in the exact same way? If the additional value of an additional worker is $7 and hour, he is not going to hire them for $!5 an hour and take an $8 an hour loss for every hour worked. If you think this is the case, then you are living in a fantasy and you don't know how reality works. Ceterus paribus (all things being equal), if the price of something is raised people will buy less of it. Maybe the customers would prefer three cashiers at the local grocery store and perhaps it would thus add additional profits if they were hired at $8 an hour. But at $15 (which is what Bernie Sanders and most Progressives are advocating we raise the minimum wage to) they simply cannot justify the expense in light of the marginally increased productivity and additional consumer satisfaction they would receive. So they stick with one cashier. At the same time, there are 16-21 year old young adults in the neighborhood who are unemployed. They may want to be employed and earn a few bucks to go out to eat, go on a date, see a movie or just create a small savings so that when they move out of their parents house they've got a leg up on everyone else. Most importantly they would have developed a work history and track record of employment that will help them when they apply for higher paying jobs in the future. Your policies price these young people out of the workforce entirely. Thanks to you and your policies, some of these kids will get involved in gangs, and possibly be hurt or killed. They might have a criminal record instead of a work history by the time they are 22. This is just one example but you have to realize the type of detrimental effect these policies are having on society's most vulnerable. And what the hell is "suitable to sustain a minimal standard of living"? This varies State by State. It varies by age group. It varies between single and married people. It varies based on if you have children and how many children you have. The idea you can determine what a minimum "living wage" is for all of society is absolutely ludicrous. You are lumping together people as diverse as a thiry-five year old man with a wife, a mortgage and seven children with a seventeen year old who has virtually no expenses and just wants a bit of disposable income or to fund a savings account. If you price a "living wage" by the standard of the married with children man of thirty-five, then you are virtually guaranteeing the teenager or early twenty-something without college degree will never find employment. And yes, I recognize that for whatever reason there are adults out there who have very low skills and low productivity. The answer in that case is to assist in them gaining more skills to become more productive and more desirable to employers. One of the best ways to do that is for them to take a job at the best wage they can get on the market (which may be lower than the current minimum wage) and prove themselves to be worth more, and ever more. If you raise the minimum wage, you are literally dooming these people to a life of welfare dependency, frequent substance abuse problems, crime and even imprisonment.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:29
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It's like you never read anything anyone said last time you brought up minimum wage. A minimum wage job doesn't prepare one to move up the ladder, it prepares one to take two minimum wage jobs when one has dependents. A minimum wage job is often just about having a body there, that requirement doesn't go away even if the body has to be paid a slightly greater portion of the revenue. A minimum wage job that pays less than the cost of living damns people to a life of needing public aid. If you want to find in-depth arguments making a better case for these statements than you've ever made for anything in your life but eugenics, go back to the last time you talked about minimum wage. Or the time before that. Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:46
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Workers don't have a productivity stat; this isn't a video game where you have to grind out levels on lovely jobs before you gain access to the good jobs. If I have two identical sixteen-year-olds making furniture, one using hand tools, the other powered machinery in an assembly line, the one using the machinery is more productive. It's not something inherent.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:47
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jrodefeld posted:The ONLY way to actually raise wages is to increase the productivity of the labor of the worker.  Guess they're just not working hard enough yet
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Feb 5, 2016 10:01
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jrodefeld posted:Approximately 4% of the US domestic working force earns the current minimum wage. I don't at all mean to demean this group of people because I want everyone, including those with the least working experience and productivity to have the maximum opportunity to move up to a comfortable middle class existence. But I can't help them by destroying the first rung on the ladder. That hurts the most vulnerable people disproportionately. It's always hilarious when anti-minwage people bring this up because you guys always do this in a way that is mathematically incorrect. If you increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15, then you need to include everyone who makes less than $15 as being helped by the minimum wage increase, not just the people who are currently making the minimum wage. You also have to include all of the people who are dependents of people making an income less than the new proposed minimum wage. Somehow these points always fly over the heads of everyone trying to make the "it won't help that many people" argument, and then when these points are brought up they just move on to some other fallacy. quote:Earning a very low wage is obviously not desirable, but if it allows you to become more productive, demonstrate traits that employers will find valuable such as reliability, honesty, hard work and so forth you have a viable path to earning higher and higher incomes and moving up towards a more and more comfortable standard of living. A person's wage is often unrelated to their productivity, reliability, honesty, etc. quote:Listen, we can't sit here and magically wish that people who have very few marketable skills and very low productivity earn a middle class salary. Both the libertarians and the left progressives want to eliminate poverty and allow people to move up and out of dire straights toward a comfortable standard of living where their basic needs are fulfilled. You have no evidence to back up your assertion that people who make a low wage are unproductive. Unskilled is not the same as unproductive. But hey, you know what? Left progressives don't actually want a minimum wage. Left progressives want a mincome. You can pay workers whatever you feel they're worth, but people making less than a subsistence income (either because they're unproductive, or unskilled, or disabled or old or whatever) should receive an additional income so that they can at least continue to survive. quote:WIth central planning, resources inevitably are mismanaged and misallocated and we might have far too much investment in, say, housing (sound familiar?) than would be indicated through laissez-faire market signals, interest rates and the price mechanism. There are countless examples of the market mismanaging and misallocating resources. The free market is essentially a chaotic system, and assuming that a chaotic system will result in an optimal solution by default is laughable. quote:And what the hell is "suitable to sustain a minimal standard of living"? This varies State by State. It varies by age group. It varies between single and married people. It varies based on if you have children and how many children you have. The idea you can determine what a minimum "living wage" is for all of society is absolutely ludicrous. That's true, it does vary, but it's something that we can accurately estimate and we can supplement incomes accordingly. That would be ideal quote:If you raise the minimum wage, you are literally dooming these people to a life of welfare dependency, frequent substance abuse problems, crime and even imprisonment. lol it's a little absurd and more than a little insulting to assume that someone who is unemployed is also prone to frequent substance abuse problems and crime
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Feb 5, 2016 10:14
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Here's a question for jrode: Why are you still here? I mean this sincerely: what do you hope to still accomplish here? If it's to still try and convince people about the merits of libertarianism or win people over, I don't understand how you could rationally see that's still possible. You've been posting here literally for years now. Pretty much anyone who posts or has posted in DnD knows about you by now. Despite spending countless paragraphs and pages of posts to (selectively) debate people, there's little if any evidence of you winning people over to your side; if anything, you've only managed to alienate more people and drive people away from libertarianism by demonstrating it as an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology. At best, you've served as a rhetorical punching bag for people to flex their debating muscles and practice as a living strawman for libertarianism while they still remain unconvinced. At worst, you're a constant target of scorn and contempt as people outright disparage you for your racist, sociopathic views and mock you for being publicly scammed multiple times and illegally selling bootlegged movies while still praising the values and ideology that abused you in the first place. So, again, if you haven't seen any positive gains in your efforts at all in the past several years, why do you still post here? What do you see that you've accomplished from being here at SomethingAwful? What is your rationale for continuing to stay despite being very blatantly unwelcome here? Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 10:16
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VitalSigns posted:The Neumark and Washer study you're citing is old (2006) and critiques of their methods already exist Meta-studies showed that the minimum wage studies with the strongest statistical power were clustered at or near zero employment effect, for example  If you're going to post old studies at least be aware of subsequent results and criticism of those studies. [/quote] I don't think a study from 2006 qualifies it as "old" and the other study I referenced was newer than that, taking data from the Great Recession after 2008. I think this is a good time to talk about the limits of empirical studies when looking at social phenomenon. Empiricism in the hard sciences is pretty straightforward because studies can be conducted with great specificity and are easily reproducible by other scientists. In contrast, human behavior in a complex economy is much more difficult to evaluate purely on an empirical basis. I've studied this issue for a while, and what has come up again and again is an empirical economist releases a paper that purports to prove a specific assertion, and then subsequent economists find it impossible to reproduce the results found because they cannot isolate the variables with regards to human action in a complex environment. This doesn't mean that it is worthless to have studies which demonstrate economic principles at work, but to approach economics like you do hard sciences is problematic. If we approach the issue of minimum wage laws and their effects like a hard scientist would regarding, say, the speed of gravity or something like that we'd claim that we can have no relevant information about the problem before running empirical tests. We form a hypothesis and then test and test to see if our hypothesis is being validated. Then other scientists will run their own tests and see if the tests are reproducible. With economics, given the trouble with reproducing the results of studies given the number of variables which cannot be adequately controlled for, such an empirical model proves lacking. At best, economic studies can serve to demonstrate an economic principle or law that has been earlier deduced using logic and an understanding about human action, about incentives and things of that nature. So your critique of the study I wrote states the following: "Of the studies they reviewed, 40 analyzed U.S. data. Fourteen of these found negative employment effects; thirteen found no effects; one found positive effects; and twelve, a mixture of negative, positive, and no effects." I think it is extremely important to remember what these studies are looking at. They are not looking at whether there is a statistically meaningful negative employment effect of having a minimum wage at all versus having NO minimum wage. They are looking at the effects of raising the minimum wage from, say, $6.75 to $7.25. This is not the relevant comparison to ME. I am interested in the employment effects of having a minimum wage AT ALL versus eliminating it completely. Given the time frame that an economist might examine, and depending on the variables that are considered and controlled for (as best as can be in a complex economy) it is not hard for them to downplay the negative employment effects of a very small minimum wage increase. I maintain that, through all the studies I have read and my understanding of the labor market literature over the decades, that the preponderance of evidence, even according to the narrow scope of these studies, indicates a negative employment effect to raises in the minimum wage. There are a few more things I think it is important to say on this subject. The national unemployment figures are bogus for a number of reasons related to political pressure to make the numbers look better. If a person has been unemployed past a certain amount of time, even if they WANT to find work were it available but they eventually stop looking, they are not counted as being unemployed. There are a large number of groups that are made up of lower skilled people who have been unemployed for a long time due to the minimum wage laws and these accumulated casualties of these laws are not considered in these studies. Another thing to consider is the way in which political pressure, as in advocacy for a particular policy has corrupted the economic profession and clouded the impartial scientific judgment of many of the economists who participate in the studies that purport to show no negative effects of minimum wage laws. The modern economy is incredibly complex and it is extremely easy to subtly adjust one variable and/or limit the scope of the study such that the negative repercussions of the minimum wage are disguised. A prominent example of this is economist Joseph Stiglitz, who in his 1993 book "Economics" wrote: quote:"Price floors have predictable effects too…. If government attempts to raise the minimum wage higher than the equilibrium wage, the demand for workers will be reduced and the supply increased. There will be an excess supply of labor. Of course, those who are lucky enough to get a job will be better off at the higher wage than at the market equilibrium wage; but there are others, who might have been employed at the lower market equilibrium wage, who cannot find employment and are worse off." Yet his views quickly changed when he got a job as Chief Economic Adviser for the Clinton administration. There is every incentive for economists to sacrifice rational economic reasoning for political expediency and the advancement of their own careers. So since there are some studies showing negative employment effects from the minimum wage and others showing none, are we to throw up our hands and say that we just don't have a loving clue about this important topic? Hardly. There is a role for sound economic reasoning and logical deduction. There is a very important reason why statements of economic law by Austrian economists are preceded by the latin phrase ceterus paribus, which as I've stated means "all things being equal". We cannot control for every variable in a complex economy, so to logically understand what is going on we have to compare apples to apples. We have to hold everything else constant in order to isolate the role of the minimum wage in employment. What if we had a very deep depression and just as we were in recovery, the minimum wage was raised by a dollar? Then unemployment dropped. Would you say that the minimum wage was the CAUSE of the drop in unemployment? Or was the drop in unemployment more likely attributed to the overall economic recovery which resulted from innumerable other factors? Maybe the unemployment rate would have dropped even faster if the minimum wage hadn't been raised. These are the sorts of things that these studies find difficult to adequately control for. However, with recourse to economic law, we know that demand curves slope downward and as the price of a good increases, the demand for that good will decrease with all other things being equal. It is true that if a price increase is tiny enough there won't be any obvious decrease in demand that is generally visible. If the minimum wage was increased by five cents, you could not produce any study that would show employers laying off massive numbers of workers in the next six months. Maybe a few workers will be let go over an entire State by companies who are barely making ends meet and even the tiniest increase in their cost of doing business will hurt them. These won't register with the empirical economists but the insidious effect of slow and steady increases in the minimum wage will accumulate. Maybe these workers will eventually find their way back into the workforce, and maybe they'll be resigned to permanent unemployment. I'll refrain from any further elaboration but these are a few thoughts that I think are valuable.
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Feb 5, 2016 10:28
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