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Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann quoted "Literally, if we took away the minimum wage-if conceivably it was gone-we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

We hear about and see in our own personal lives where people who once high paying and respectable jobs are now working in at fast food restaurants and retail clothing stores.

I do like having a minimum wage, since it helps protect the lower income class. However, considering how the economy is now and seeing many jobs being offered offshore, removing the min. wage law may actually help keep jobs within the states.

And wasn't one of the top causes of The Great Depression had to do with Herbert Hoover keeping wages from decreasing which ultimately lead to extremely high unemployment rate?

What are your thoughts on this?

It sounds like you're saying that a reduction or elimination of the minimum wage is what is keeping skilled workers unemployed. Last time I checked, skilled workers who are typically paid anywhere between $20 and $100 an hour are not affected by the minimum wage.

I guess I should had been more clear. If the more 'skilled' workers applied for a job which normally people with GED would apply for, who would you hire? One with a degree or a GED? Now the only way they would get hired is if they where paid less then the minimum, but mainly, it may help bring back business that has been sent overseas.

There's two reasons we should get rid of minimum wage. One is moral, the other is economic.

Moral:

If two consenting adults want to have sex, beat each other with whips or pour candle wax on each other, that's their business. If it's a voluntary act between two consenting adults, we should allow it to happen and no third parties have the right to interfere with them. This applies to minimum wage too. If one person wants to pay another person less than minimum wage, that's between them and we have no right to interfere as long as it's voluntary.

Economic:

Let's say that all I can do is make widgets. I can make 1 widget per hour and these widgets can be sold for $5. Therefore, my labor is worth $5 an hour. What happens when there's a law that says I can't be paid less than $7 an hour? I can't get a job. No one is going to hire me and take a loss of $2 an hour. Minimum wage laws aren't going to raise my wages. Minimum wage laws are going to keep me unemployed. If I want to work for $5 an hour and I'm forced by law not to then the law is making me worse off because I preferred to work rather than get nothing, or welfare. A family of three on welfare receives the equivalent of about a $3 an hour job. I could earn more money and be a productive member of society without minimum wage laws.

bitcoin2cash:

You are ignoring the externalities. I don't want to hear you whipping your wife all night long. I want to sleep. Likewise, I don't want people doing my job for less since it puts me out of business. You may say tough shit, but the harm to me is very real.

On the economic side, remember that cartels make for higher prices than a free market. Why? The price of maximum profitability is higher than the equilibrium price. Likewise: the total amount of wages paid out is probably higher with min wage than without.

What ought to be done is to encourage people to become apprentices / study so that they become so attractive that they are worth more than min wage.

The problem is the economy is bad, even people who has master degrees are working in min wage jobs right now. Many employers are not able to hire more employees and had to dissolve their company due to the fact that they are paying out more then money coming in.

I'm opposed to the minimum wage, but in reality repealing it would have almost zero effect.  There are relatively few minimum wage jobs as it is, as most unskilled jobs pay more.  Most of the unemployed are unemployed because they have a certain skillset, and will chose to remain on unemployment insurance payments so long as they last rather than take a lower wage job.  If we were to repeal both the minimum wage laws and restrict or repeal unemployment insurance, there might be some measurable effects.  But the truth of the matter is that most of the unemployed can find minimum wage work, but won't because they are accustomed to a higher wage and better working conditions than a minimum wage job.

Well, it's a matter of property rights. I should be able to sell my labor for less than $7 an hour if I want to. It's my body, damn it.

Right and as a business owner I would like to outlaw competition so I can charge whatever I want.

Actually, you can.  Minimum wage laws have exceptions.

Independent contractor baby. You're not an employee, so the laws don't apply.

The one with the GED, the one with the degree will leave as soon as a better job becomes available.  The one with the GED will not.

But the key phrase is when "better job becomes available".. . I mean how is this going to happen? What's needs to be done? I thought Bachmann might have the right idea by killing min wage, it just might help create new jobs. If min wages were dropped, maybe even the prices of consumer products would drop as well which would ultimately keep money circling instead of stashed away in piggy bank. It just seems if we keep things the way they are, it's just a matter of time before we have another depression.

Another?

I don't think this is considering one now is it?

Checked the unemployment figures lately?

I heard of people even lieing about their degree (downgrading it) on their resume for that very reason.

Where I live, minimum wage mostly only applies when you're actually working for an hourly rate. I've done piecework jobs where you can make less than minimum if you don't work efficiently and it's all above board. Potentially I guess you can make less than minimum wage at a salaried job as well depending on how many hours you put in. And then there's the independent contractor thing too.

I'm not making the argument that underbidding is always wrong. I'm just making the argument that it is not always right, by claiming that the libertarianist argument that if two people want to make a deal without externalities then the rest of the world should GTFO, is not applicable, since there are externalities.

Personally, I think that the interests of the negotiating parties should be weighted carefully against the interests of the third parties, and that the current trade offs (min wage, but monopoly illegal) are well thought out.

In this case, externalities are irrelevant. You only have the right not to be negatively affected when it's damaging you or your property physically. You don't have the right to a liveable wage.

Externalities are irrelevant. I am sure there are engineers who wish that there were very few engineers by law and that they were able to charge extortionate amounts of money for their labour, but that would be contrary to the efficient allocation of resources provided by the marketplace. Likewise, I am sure those working slightly above minimum wage like having less cheap competition to drive their wages down, but then the difference would be made up in cheaper goods and the lack of unemployment.

not having a liveable wage would damage me physically

You have the right to the ability to earn a living wage (I cannot force you to work for less) but not the right TO a living wage (you cannot force me to pay you more)

"You have the right to the ability to earn a living wage (I cannot force you to work for less) but not the right TO a living wage (you cannot force me to pay you more)"

It doesn't change the fact that undercutting min wage would damage me physically

And? Taxing me to pay for your grandma's hip replacement damages me physically and you don't seem to mind that.

But I DO mind! I think it is bad that this is so. But the good that she receives is greater than the harm that you receive (IMO).

Crazy thought: You negotiate your own salary, and pay for your own grandma's surgery, and I'll stay the fuck out of your pocket if you stay the fuck out of mine. Deal?

The problem is, a rule that you can't do things that harm other people would eliminate almost everything we could ever do. Almost every action creates winners and losers. If I buy a Ford and not a Honda, Ford wins and Honda loses. What if Honda is doing really badly and is in danger of bankruptcy -- should we start requiring people to buy Hondas even if they're more expensive and they like them less? (And have crappy transmissions that fall apart right after the warranty expires due to a manufacturing defect, but I digress.)

You can't hold people responsible for that kind of indirect physical harm. Otherwise, nobody could ever do anything. Think about how many professional buggy drivers, saddle and whip manufacturers, horseshoe makers, and the like were harmed physically by the introduction of the automobile. Should we have banned it?

exactly.

You can recognize it as something undesirable, while still sometimes allowing it, and sometimes not, depending on the magnitude of the good and bad effects

There are many reasons to support repealing minimum wage laws, but as to the OP question, "Would it help?" I'm really not convinced that it would.

The biggest issue facing our economy is not inflexibility of labor, it's malinvestment of capitol. Allowing workers to sell their labor more cheaply might create more jobs or even (inshallah) lead to diversification of the economy and a revivial of the manufacturing sector, but the more likely short-term effect would be slashing of wages for workers in struggling communities, increasing dependence on government services and general poverty, and, as always, opportunities and excuses for subsidized business interests to pocket the difference.

What I like about this scenario is that it increases incentives for workers to opt-in to microbusiness, homebrew community development and solidarity; what I dislike about this scenario is the general indifference to unnecessary suffering.

Now, long-term, yes. Minimum wage laws are bad, and aren't needed in a libertarian society in any case. But in the short term, would it help? I would have to see some convincing evidence to believe that the good would outweigh the bad.

Let me rephrase that. You only have the right not to be negatively affected when it's directly damaging you or your property physically.

Except it's not undesirable. It just happens to have negative effects on one person. The net effect on everyone is a plus.

Sometimes it makes sense to reduce the effects of the harm. Using the example of people who lost their jobs due to the introduction of the automobile, minimum wage laws would be like a tax on automobiles to keep their price too high to allow them to compete with carriages. The bad way is to try to prevent the transaction rather than reducing the harm it does. Helping those harmed directly, for example by retraining people whose jobs were eliminated by the introduction of the automobile would have been much more sensible.

Minimum wage laws are in the bad category -- the aim to prevent the transaction rather than helping those harmed. It's important to understand that the only way a minimum wage law helps someone is if it prevents someone else from working at below that wage when that other person who have preferred to do so. That is, we help Jack make more money by preventing Jim from hiring Jeff for less than Jack is willing to work for. If we want to help Jack get higher wages, we should do things to make Jack's labor more valuable (such as supporting him while he works for low wages to build experience and references) and leave Jim and Jeff alone.

The minimum wage is in place so that people can earn enough money from a standard 40 hour/week job to have a basic standard of living.

And what of the people who earn $0/hour as a result of the minimum wage?

Nancy Pelosi has interns on her staff making no wage at all except possibly a tiny stipend. The rationale is that they are gaining valuable work experience that will allow them to attain gainful employment later. Why she can't see that the same principle applies to those who's productivity level is lower than the minimum wage is beyond me.   

Problem with the lack of a minimum wage is that the situation looks increasingly more and more like slavery.  As the race to the bottom prevails, if markets are left unfettered, even below subsistence levels of pay can be maintained with costs externalized to whatever social safety net (be it political or religious) may exist.

The idea that 50% of the people think there shouldn't be a minimum wage means one of the following to me:
1) People are unbelievably cruel and hateful and believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery by any other name
2) They are millionaires and also think that there is nothing wrong with slavery and grinding poverty due to their oligarchical disposition
3) They are trolling
4) They have no historical, political or economic understanding outside a Milton Friedman book
5) They believe in no fundamental value for human life and whatever you can get out of someone you should

I really don't see any other options for this.  Please post them here if you know of any even partially legitimate sounding reason for the elimination of the minimum wage that isn't the most obvious, flagrant and hideous face of class warfare by the top 0.1% against the rest of society.

Ahh! So now we have the real argument -- we need a minimum wage to prevent other laws from screwing things up. There is no screwed up regulation that can't be fixed by more regulation of something else, right?
Fixing prices is not within the legitimate moral authority of government, whether for labor or for anything else. Forcing me not to work for $1/hour (if I would prefer to) is no morally superior to forcing me to work for $1/hour (if I would prefer not to). It is telling someone what they cannot do, and backing it up by force, that makes people into slaves.

soyuz nyerushimyiy ryespublik svobodnyikh...

----

Many reasons, most of which have already been covered. But, to reiterate:

-If a person wants to work for a low wage, then that is no one else's damn business, and any individual that tries to prevent them from working by force for "their own good" is thoroughly evil and should be, situation depending, strung high from a street light or taken behind a building and shot. This really ought to be enough, but it seems certain people can't get out of the collectivist mindset.
-The "race to the bottom" idea is idiotic. As the somewhat more rational supporters of the minimum wage noted, the only people who would have even a chance of "racing to the bottom" would be those already working minimum wage, and most of THEM are either working very simple jobs that pay poorly regardless or are using the job to gain experience for a springboard to a better job. Yes, the wages for some would go down. No, this would not result in everyone being paid ten cents an hour in dangerous situations.
-The minimum wage is a huge block to employment. You say a person being paid less than $10 is like a slave, but a person making NO MONEY because the minimum wage blocks them from getting a job at all is better off? As I mentioned above, many people get these low paying jobs for the experience to ultimately get better jobs. But those same people can't get aforementioned jobs if there is a minimum wage making it unprofitable for a company to hire them, leaving them with the paradox of needing experience to be seen as worthwhile for hiring, but needing to have experience to get the job to get experience. This issue would not exist with no minimum wage (indeed, for all of the problems of the 19th century, unemployment because of a lack of experience was not one of them; a poor man could get a job in a factory or a railroad and, through a lifetime of hard work, eventually find himself managing the route or the factory).

Make no mistake, it woudn't solve everything. There are still regulatory barriers, central banks, etc in the way. But it would at the very least alleviate unemployment in a huge way, especially among students and the youth looking for jobs.

Hmmm. I think we are talking about different versions of history here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike

Pretty ironic that you would mention Andrew Carnegie, but whatever.

This is irrelevant. The strike had nothing to do with unemployment because of a lack of experience. The only unemployed were the ones who the union was blocking from getting jobs.

I don't have a complex, model backed reply, but I can say that going from $7.50 an hour to something less would really screw me over as far as finances go. Stuff is expensive these days - I don't mean luxuries, but the essentials. Gasoline & car expenses, food, living maintenance, health care (many Americans have NO insurance), and that's not even looking into the fiat currency inflation eating up people's retirement savings. And while I see a lot of the points being made here, and they may indeed work in a perfect world, I also believe that many (employers) would end up taking advantage of it not to hire new employees at a lower price, but to fatten their own bottom lines by slashing wages under the banner "like it or leave it". There has to be some system to look out for the little guy, or you end up with a system like in China where you see people working for a pittance. Just my two cents...

I understand, I really do. But imagine what would happen if you (or if not you, the one or more of your coworkers) went from $7.50/hr to $0.00/hr?

That's what happens every time the minimum wage goes up.

Would you prefer going to $0.00 an hour with no chance of getting another job?

This is probably true but hard to say with any certainty. I know plenty of people with no degree or even GED who have drifted through plenty of "dead-end" jobs: Blockbuster, McDonalds, Securitas, Regal Cinemas....

The problem with supporting the minimum wage is that the situation looks increasingly more and more like slavery.  As the race to the bottom prevails, as we regulate markets (and therefore people), below subsistence level jobs will be erased and we will create unemployment depriving some workers of even the very little they could get.

The idea that 50% of the people think that there should be a minimum wage means one of the following to me:
1) People are unbelievably cruel and hateful and believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery by any other name
2) They are millionaires and also think that there is nothing wrong with slavery and grinding poverty due to their oligarchical disposition
3) They are trolling
4) They have no historical, political or economic understanding outside of a few Keynsianist economics classes and Paul Krugman articles
5) They believe fundamentally that humans are unable to know what's best for themselves and should not be allowed to voluntarily trade and exchange with other human beings



Edit: I'm not trying to be a troll, and would sincerely like to have a rational dialogue with you, but do you see how easy that is?

No. We need a minimum wage so long as there's any kind of safety net to stop people starving en-masse in the street, be it government-provided or charitable or even just assistance from more well-off relatives and friends. Otherwise employers' wage costs will end up getting subsidised by that safety net - they'll be able to employ workers for less than it costs to keep them healthy and fit for work - which is going to lead to some, errm, interesting distortions in the market for labour. You might be able to "solve" this by prohibiting anyone from providing this kind of support to anyone else, but this has the issues that it's unenforcable and will lead to people starving en-masse in the streets.

While the race to the bottom would indeed screw over lots of people currently working for the minimum wage, they're not the only ones it could affect. Suppose you're working 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of $7.25 a week, which is just enough for you to survive on, and when the minimum wage is removed your employer looks at all the unemployed people out there and decides he could get away with paying you $6 a week - not quite enough to make ends meet. What do you do? You get a second job - say, for 10 hours a week at $4/hour. Except that everyone else is doing the same too, and the resulting increase in labour supply pushes wages down further until you're now working 80 hours a week at $3.50/hour. (That's the optimistic version - if the amount of employment doesn't keep up, some people will end up working 0 hours a week for $0/hour as they get replaced by better employees that are suddenly desperate for more work.)

Of course - and this is the fun bit - said increase in labour supply makes it harder for the unemployed to get a job, counteracting the benefits of increasing the number of jobs available. In fact, removing the minimum wage may well make finding a job harder, not easier!

Mininum wage only "protects" people who already have a stable job.

But it hurts those who need the most "protection" - the unemployed. It lessens their chance to get their foot in the door and pushes more of them into a vicious cycle of long term unemployment.

Minimum wage is regressive and anti-social.

From what I've seen you post, I have no doubt that you have nothing but the best of intentions in mind and that you (are?) would be a fair employer in this kind of situation. However, I would be more inclined to agree with your point of view if there were some sort of way to prevent the aforementioned problem - if we eliminated minimum wage, what would there be to stop huge corporations like supergreedymegacorp inc. from treating people like dirt and hoarding every last penny for the capitalist class?


If wages were to sink so far that I would have to work most of every day to pay for the essentials, I would probably look for a new form of money-making activity. If starting my own business were obviously not viable (in this scenario we're discussing a dirt poor economy where this whole wage-cutting situation is necessary), I honestly can't say that relatively profitable criminal activity would be out of the question - and I guarantee you that I wouldn't be the only one with it on my mind. Perhaps that makes me a bad or immoral person - but life isn't worth living if you're miserable going through it every day and have no time for your family or for 'self' things. From my point of view, though, it's just the nature of man.

I wasn't responding to your "unemployment and experience" argument. I was responding to your Horatio Alger fantasies of robber-baron capitalism being a time where hard workers can rise to great wealth and prominence, when in fact most hard workers were dying in coal mines or being shot by either government or private militias for trying to organize.

That's where collective bargaining comes in. supergreedymegacorp inc only has the massive bargaining power because of its size. with collective bargaining, you take away that size advantage. Without the distortions placed on the market by state regulations, the two groups could come to an amicable arrangement, that benefited both parties.

I can agree with that - although I have a feeling a lot of other people are going to disagree with your stance on the place of unions. :P

I think it is a fallacy to assume that every step towards "liberty" is a step in the right direction, when it greatly matters what order things are done and how they are done. Repealing social safety net type programs without dismantling the state/corporate imperial power apparatus is incredibly fucked up. For instance -- look at the way both Reagan and Thatcher used Libertarian rhetoric to dismantle safety net type programs (while of course increasing the power of monopolists, increase the police state, increase the military-industrial complex, etc).

This is just the sweatshop thread in another guise.

When it comes to dismantling state capitalism, abolishing the minimum wage (and other safety net type programs) is pretty fucking low on my priority list (though I think that in practice maximum wage laws that limit the ability of any person at a corporation to earn more than say 15X more than anyone else employed by the corporation would work far better than minimum wage laws) -- I'd rather start from the other side and eliminate present forms of state intervention that weaken the bargaining power of labor, and which thereby coerce workers to sell their labor under incredibly warped conditions of unequal exchange --- I agree that the current labor market is incredibly warped, but it is warped towards the employing class, not against it.

Yes, but currently there are laws (like Taft-Hartley and even the Wagner Act) as well as other laws like "right to work" agreements etc that greatly limit collective bargaining power. Though we may have different interpretations of how we think a voluntarist society will eventually evolve, surely you will agree with me that among the capital-L Libertarian movement in the US there tends to be much more handwringing over things like minimum wage laws and safety-net programs that provide some kind of "soft-edge" to the predatoriness of state/corporate capitalism than many of the regulations that give corporations that power to exploit

Here is a very good analysis of what labor struggle in a free market could look like, combined with a critique of the labor analysis the Libertarian Right often uses

http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/C4SS-Labor.pdf

Even worse are the laws that give unions too much power, resulting in.. well, in GM.

riiight. because in an economy where workers have too much power, the rumneration scale looks like this

http://inspiredeconomist-com.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2011/01/SayonPay.gif

Right on.


Uh, which laws are these exactly?

I'll admit I haven't done a lot of study, and it's highly likely GM was run into the ground by a combination of factors.

But one needs only to look at how Kia has revitalized a - I believe Georgia? - town by building a factory, and then look at Detroit, to see the difference. I'll admit that may have as much to do with corporate policy as government, though.

What I do know is that these regulations distort the market, causing one group to be inherently more powerful than the other, and that never works well.

Pay disparity is often the result of government meddling. CEOs that drive up shareholder value through political entrepreneurship  get compensated accordingly. 

well see this is where we get into the sort of argument where all the beneficial outcomes of a "free market" are attributed to the market, and all the bad outcomes are attributed to "regulation". In any case, it still doesn't address the fact that myrkul claimed there was too much regulation is favor of unions/labor power. If that was the case, why would compensation be so skewed towards the ultra-elite?

The problem is that we don't have a free market. So either side can claim the benefits. That's why we need to reduce things to certain undeniable facts.

1. Human action is based on improving our position.
2. People that want to work for a certain amount of pay think that their position will be improved.
3. Employers will only pay as much as the employee can return in productivity.
4. Minimum wage forces low productivity workers to be unemployed.
5. If we didn't have minimum wages then employers would compete for employees and their wage would tends towards their productivity level rather than a race to the bottom, etc, etc.

These are all facts so therefore we can deduce that minimum wage only hurts low productivity workers. You know who tends to favor minimum wage workers? Unions, because it keeps competition out of the market. Instead of hiring a bunch of guys with shovels that can compete with a bulldozer operator without minimum wages, employers don't have that option so they hire bulldozer operators. Who loses? We do through higher prices, the unemployed low productivity workers lose because they don't have a job and employers lose because their costs are artificially raised.

Oh yea, even if this wasn't all true, it's still immoral to prevent adults from interacting however they want, be it gay sex or low wage work.

http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2011/07/06/minimum-wage-law-backfires-american-samoa

I should qualify my previous statements that I don't think that the minimum wage law would affect many people.  It's still true, but aparently it would affect an entire protectorage state.

This is only true if there is true consent -- ie; a relative equality of power on both sides of the table. This is not the case currently at labor vs capital owner negotiations.

Again,

http://c4ss.org/content/4163

(and that is a market anarchist site BTW)

A relative equality of power is not required for there to be true consent. True consent simply requires each side to understand the deal sufficiently to genuinely believe that they are better off taking the deal than rejecting it.

But surely you wouldn't argue that someone handing over their wallet in exchange for not being shot was consensual, even if the person really truly preferred being a little poorer to being dead. So presumably your opinion would be that they did not have the third option, which is to say "no, i'd rather not give you my money /or/ be shot" and walk away.

However, since we cannot walk away from the table of "making a living" completely -- (those born landless are forced to sell our labor to the owning class to literally survive) there must be mechanisms for making that relationship as equal as possible.

Normally I would agree with you lemonginger, but it's one thing to have an option of getting paid the min. wage then to actually had been paid. There people who "could" be working for less then the min, but instead they are now sitting at home still looking for a job. If not here in the states, employers would offer less to other countries.

I came from a very poor family who immigrated here in the states legally, working for less then min wage. I'm no where close to being rich.
Both of my parents were making more money off the books for less then min wage then to had kept sitting at home looking for a job that was never going to pay them at least the min.

I'm not an economist and never really had any interest in the economy until these recent years, but I'm starting to feel killing the minimum wage would help the economy a great deal. It may bring back a lot of the jobs back to the states and maybe even pay more then what they are offering offshore (no more import shipping cost).  

Exactly.

No, I wouldn't say that was consensual. But I didn't think we were talking about cases where one of the "negotiators" uses or threatens force against the other.

You are equating the use or threat of force, which is illegitimate, with not getting the benefits if you opt out of a deal, which is legitimate. It will always be the case that if you opt out of a mutually beneficial deal, you will lose the benefits that deal would have given you.

The only thing that matters is a lack of threat of violence. That's true consent.

Don't take this deal and starve is definitely a threat of violence.

No, it's not.

Assuming the speaker will somehow induce you into starving, then yes. Or if the reason you would starve would is something out of the ordinary (for example, you landed on his island due to a plane crash), then yes. But if the result of your failure to take the deal would be your starving through no fault of the offeror and not through any emergency, then no.

Otherwise, people could never do anything and others would always be forced to provide for their every survival need. After all, not doing things for them would mean they starve and therefore be a threat of violence. If a person doesn't take any action to obtain food for themselves, if you don't give them free food, they will starve. If they have no place to live and won't do anything to get one, if you don't let them live with you, they will freeze. And so on.

Nature starves people who don't act to secure food, not the people who didn't feed them.

If the land is all owned by the ruling class then it is very similar to having landed on their island.

Never ceases to amuse me how the property is theft crowd ignore the fact that they could always just... I don't know... buy the damn land.

The crux of the island example is that it's a short-term emergency that deviates from the normal course of human life and that all you want is to survive and get out of the other person's zone of control. The same reasoning wouldn't apply if it was the situation worldwide and you had no place else to go.

I do agree in theory that a similar argument could be made in the situation where the entire accessible universe of property is owned by a group of people who make the cost of land so high that everyone becomes effectively a slave. However, our world has vast amounts of unimproved property that is available for nearly nothing. A friend of mine bought 200 acres in Australia just so he could say he had "a couple of hundred acres", it cost him less than a month's salary. Actually, now that I think about it, it might have been 2,000.

Nobody (but myrkul) wants to live on unimproved property in the middle of nowhere, of course. So we're not talking about a fair share of what nature provided everyone for free but an entitlement to the improvements provided by people. It seems like a much less convincing argument once you realize that.

Speak for yourself, bub. ;)

I fixed it.

Of course, if you do want to do that, you can fairly easily do so.

And then I'll be one of the 'Landed ruling class', right?

Yes, which kind of shows the silliness of that argument as applied to the world we currently live in.

It is even better than that - the reason the ruling class IS the ruling class is because of their accumulation of capital and land. From feudalism to corporate capitalism, the rulers are those that can have wealth without work.


First off, you are ignoring the second part of Proudhon's statement which is that "Property is freedom".

Secondly, One is born into a poor family (through no fault of their own). They have no option to grow/gather food on unimproved land, because there is none left their only option is to sell their labor to those who own land (or other means of production). That is, they are wage slaves. There are many places in the world, where a semi-skilled laborer could work their whole lives and never be able to save enough capital to buy the means of production that they are using, or the land it sits on.

Anarchy does not simply mean "absence of the State" (however you define it) but "without rulers" or "contrary to authority". This was true in the 18th Century and is especially true now as the post-structuralists and others have given us a far more sophisticated understanding of how discipline/authoritarianism have pervaded nearly every aspect of our existence.

(Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice)

--

At the end of the day, what all these arguments boil down to is a disagreement about the "stickiness" of property rights. You advocate for a highly-sticky perpetual property system, I am arguing for the least sticky property system whereby use alone gives one property rates that quickly degrade to common ownership(or non-ownership if you prefer) when not being used.

--

To go back to the original assertion, there is plenty of opportunity for firms to pay under the minimum wage. Either through unpaid overtime, under the table cash payments, "uniform cleaning fees" and other such deductions, etc. Much of the agricultural labor in this country is done for near or less to minimum wage. Much of the small scale construction work as well.

In any case, cutting wages may make sense for an individual firm but in aggregate, it would just reduce aggregate demand for products, putting us back into the same situation as befoire.

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC9

Read this:


Investing in and running a business is just as much work as digging a ditch with a shovel.

I hear this all the time from you guys, and it's just plain not true. In a stable or deflationary currency market, savings is easier than you may think, and undeveloped land is relatively cheap.


Indeed they do.

Here's the problem with use-based property systems: When does it degrade? you say 'quickly'. How quickly? Overnight? Over the weekend? What if I go on vacation for a month? Or my hunting cabin in the woods that I use every fall? The market already has fairly clear standards for when a property has been abandoned.

I'm born with a $10 million trust fund given to me by my parents who earned a bunch of wealth under an illegitimate corporate-state-capitalist system. I give it to a hedge fund manager who invests it, lops off a percentage of the profits every year, and I take a fixed income out of it that is greater than the median income of the whole country, which is the richest country on earth.

You can argue that allowing ones capital to be used by those making goods and services is valuable and deserves recompense, as without it the whole magic productivity engine of capitalism would fail, but don't insult our intelligence by saying it is "just as much work" as manual labor.

It just as much qualifies as work as manual labor. If not, why not?

It's not a unique problem. The same issue arises for perpetual-ownership claims. If I build a fence around 10,000 acres of unclaimed land and claim I'm using it as a nature preserve and charging others entrance to any of it, is it mine? There is no absolute standard of how much "labor-mixing" gives one ownership.

Rules for property ownership will always follow social consensus (true no matter how sticky or unsticky they are). If you go on vacation and a squatter moves into your house, it is highly unlikely the community will recognize his claim to your house.

(Carson in  JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES L VOLUME 20, NO. 1 (WINTER 2006): 97–136)

If you earn money from manual labour, you're getting money from providing your skills and labour in order to do work; what you have to offer comes from you. If you instead earn money from pre-existing wealth, you're using your control of assets external to yourself that are required to do productive work in order to skim some money off the top. What makes you a better person to decide how those assets should be used than anyone else, such that you should be able to profit from controlling that decision?

That money had to come from somewhere, yes? It isn't elephants all the way down.

That pre-existing wealth was earned by that person by providing value. It's that person's earned labor in the end.

Really? So how much is the labor of a ditch digger worth if there are no shovels? How much is the labor of a ditch digger worth if there are no irrigation systems that require ditches? Some of the value comes from the laborer, but some of the value comes from the circumstances that make that particular labor valuable, which is external to the laborer.

Precisely what a ditch digger does. He controls a shovel that he did not make. He extends an irrigation system that brings water to farms he did not build.

It has nothing to do with who is the "better person". You don't have to be a good person to deserve to profit from the invention of the shovel, the construction of farms, and whatever other environment you are lucky enough to be born into. A computer programmer doesn't have to earn the right to benefit from the technology of his society that he is born into by pure luck. Otherwise, every single person alive today would start out in greater debt than they could ever repay. The universe we are born into provides us its bounty for free, not fairly, but none of us really deserve what we get -- we just do because that's how the world works.

Not quite. There will be problems with every system. The problems that cannot be fixed by the free market are unfixable without unintended consequences that are actually worse. It's the best of all available options, but far from problem free.

To borrow a quote, "It's the worst way to run things, except every other way ever tried."

Nice pic, is there an article associated with it?



+1


I think Sanarchists and Canarchists are completely opposite. This needs to be emphasized. Otherwise people, including myself mistakenly associate anarchy with Canarchy. If on the other hand they associated anarchy with Sanarchy, then the community opinion might be dramatically different. It seems historically Sanarchy has been hijacked by Canarchists. The only thing they have in common is the "absence of state". Otherwise they are ideologically opposite. IMO one is the left without government the other is the right without government.

I view Sanarchy as the adherence to Marxism economics, without infringements upon personal expression and interaction.



Interesting assertion. I'm interested to know the basis of this. Cutting wages will result in less consumption of the wage-earners, yes? But what stops an increase in employer consumption to offset this?

2006 version of this report I believe
http://www.faireconomy.org/executive_excess_reports


Nah, historically anarcho-socialists have been slaughtered by authoritarian socialists (spanish civil war, ukraine, etc). Anarcho-capitalism is relatively new and relative US invention (at least as a school of political philosophy) -- most of the world still views anarchy/anarchism/libertarianism as being socialist movements from the Left, since that's what they have historically been. I don't think anarcho-capitalists have hijacked much.

I don't think they are inherently incompatible views -- likely a broad "anarchy" could develop in many different directions and likely some of those we can't envision. I'm more concerned with the "how we get there" piece of the disagreement than "what thing will look like once we are there"



Well, Marx's vision of the final stage of Communism was essentially anarchist, when the State withers away. But the dictatorship of the proletariat has always been a bit of a sticking point (and was the reason anarchists broke from Marxism in the first place). Honestly, i think Marx was a much better critic of Industrial Capitalism (perhaps the best) than a political visionary.

I think the incompatibility arises from how each ideology defines property. Canarchy advocates for extremely strong property rights. I'm not to sure about Sanarchy, it seems that they vary from weak property rights to no property rights. Nonetheless, this has the effect of completely changing how each society will function. One is where control is defined by 'capital' and the other is based somewhat on 'public opinion'. If I own all the capital then I can do whatever I want with it. Compared with; if I misuse my capital, others can take it from me despite having no prior 'right' to it.


I largely agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Marx only proposed the Vanguard towards the later end of his life. He proposed it as a method to implement Communism. I view this a distinct idea separate from everything else Marx contributed. Further I view Marxism as two separate subjects, the economics and the 'worship of commune'. Its unfortunate that there is a lot of misinformation about Marxism.

I do think that he has contributed some good ideas to economics. Communal ownership of the "means of production" does put an interesting perspective upon property rights. But he didn't like markets ? I'm not to sure about this. I think "fair markets" are one of the best ways to exchange economic information.

I agree with his "Theory of labor value". But sometimes exploitation is apart of life. For example take a group of people. They all have a share in a communal resource. One comes up with an idea to do something productive with the resource. Consequently they receive a larger share of the profit, despite everyone putting in equal effort. That is fair to me, because if that idea didn't occur in the first place there would be no profit to argue over. Then again that might not be exploitation.

An interesting consequence in the various views of property rights (in Sanarchy) is that the end result of some versions of Sanarchy is very similer to what a Canarchist would want. All versions of Canarchy allow groups to from socialised communes if they buy the property first. Only a number of Sanarchists, I think a minority, would allow capitalists to do the same. That number would allow communes, if they democratically voted, to form a hirachal system with uneven division of resources, with money, investment, savings, hiring other people and so on.

A typical Ancap would expect the capitalist communes to outcompete and eventually become the majority anyway. Creating the same result which he originally wanted.

At some point some miniscule portion of it did, sometimes centuries ago. Remember that there's a lot of inherited wealth out there.

Possibly.

If there's no shovels or no ditches that need digging then no-one can make money digging ditches. My point is that if someone makes money digging ditches, the reason they earn that money and someone else doesn't is because they're skilled at ditch-digging. However, if someone makes money from providing access to money or scarce resources they control, the reason they earn that money is not because they're particularly good at doing so but because they're the ones that own that money or those resources. (About the only saving grace of this system is that if someone's really, spectacularly incompetent they'll lose their wealth to someone that is.)

Again, these are things that whole societies receive the benefits from rather than one particular person.

Exactly. So why are you obsessively focused on one small factor and ignoring the universe of other much more significant factors? The only explanation I can think of is that you think of progress as a zero sum game and therefore you focus on the cases where X gets something rather than Y. But you are missing the forest for the trees. The world is not a zero sum game, and the important factors are the ones that lift society as a whole. You are obsessed with helping the ditch digger at the expense of the CEO and missing the fact that fact that real progress lifts everyone and that is what you should be focusing on -- how can you lift all of society further and faster.

really? the rising tide lifts all boats argument?

Not precisely. Essentially, I'm saying he's making the same mistake behind the "rising tide lifts all boats arguments" but in reverse.

Congratulations. You've missed the entire point of my argument whilst spotting why I wasn't complaining about the existence of wealth disparity in general. The issue here is not that the ditch digger has more money than the CEO, but that the poor have to justify their money in the eyes of the market in a way that the rich don't. If a ditch digger fails to dig efficiently they'd get the sack, but there's no way of sacking the wealthy if they enrich themselves at the expense of real progress - the only way they can lose their wealth is through gross incompetence. This doesn't really help "lift all of society further and faster". (Edit: Also, there's a lot more opportunity for someone who'd be better at digging ditches to replace someone who's worse at it than for someone who'd be better at investing large sums of money usefully to replace someone that's worse at it.)

CEOs are actually a good example. They can run company after company into the ground through bad management and still leave each job with lots of money, because the other board members that appoint them are also members of the CEO class and in on the take. You've got an entire group of people enriching themselves at the expenses of driving others down.

As an example of the other side of things, I actually have a lot of respect for Warren Buffett. He really does seem to have got where he is by investing money sensibly in a way that benefits society in the long run. Of course, he's not very popular on these forums...

Corporate law enables this, not simply cronyism. Just thought I'd mention that.

It seems the entire point changes fairly regularly.

How can a ditch digger lose money that's in his bank account? And even the wealthiest person can be fired.

The same is true for a ditch digger. Generally, no matter how bad a job he does, he still gets paid for his time. He can work for company after company getting paid for however long it takes them to figure out he's a lousy ditch digger.

This also means that, from a Sanarchist point of view Canarchy would evolve into Sanarchy because the socialist communes would outcompete the capitalist organizations around them.  The issue is the redistribution of wealth that has been acquired through force, without this a Canarchist society would rather quickly evolve into feudalism.

A wealthy person who makes his money from investments cannot be fired.  His capital can be confiscated but that is a different matter entirely.

If he makes bad investments, his capital is gonna run out fast. If he makes good investments (the companies he finances make profits) he is helping people to help people. I fail to see the problem here.

Yes, that is why asking how existing wealth should be dealt with is one of my litmus tests for whether or not I think that an anarcho-capitalist is serious about building a better world, or whether they are just arguing for an intensification of the status quo.

The only wealth that has been truly acquired by force is government property (one could argue that any business subsidized by government funds was too, but that's not important, as I'll show later). Any government property is immediately up for grabs upon the dissolution of the government, and most likely, immediately homesteaded by those who use it (That should make you happy, lemon). Any property which was subsidised by the government is likewise now wholly owned by those who use it.

Businesses which required government subsidies would quickly fail, giving those resources back to the ones who are best able to use them. (or at least better)

+1

There are lots of min wage jobs in my area.  People can not live on that wage, and with unemployment payments others that would do it, decide not to.  A repeal would make little difference unless you allowed illegals to work on the books for min wage. 

On the eastern shore of Maryland there are not enough people to pick crops at $10 an hour.

So you essentially don't believe that the current shape of the playing field or how it got there matters at all? Even Rothbard argues that quite a few corporations should be turned over to their workers and universities to their students.

For example, a variety of military-industrial complex corporations (let's say lockheed martin) could no doubt be retooled to make civilian stuff rather than military warplanes, but what of the fact that shareholders and management have made their capital supplying the State with weapons? Now they get rewarded with the ownership of tons of useful capital and they get to keep all their ill-gotten gains?

--

I would argue that if current wealth imbalances are left like they are any attempt at anarcho-capitalism will quickly devolve into a sort of hyper-feudalism. You can't essentially admit that all land/capital was taken illegitimately (by defining current markets as unfree). If the market is to serve as the only/ultimate decision making tool for aggregating choices and preferences, then it makes a huge difference if some people have a lot more of that decision making power.

--

Also,this article is a good examination of different libertarian attitudes towards redistribution

http://mutualist.org/id45.html

Also, can some AnCaps tell me if they agree or disagree with Rothbard in this piece?

http://murrayrothbard.com/confiscation-and-the-homestead-principle/

Who has more decision making power? 1 man with 5 billion dollars, or 6 billion people, each with 1 dollar?

That billionaire has to please those billions of people if he wants to keep (or increase) his fortune.

Keep in mind that during the sort of shake-up that would surround a transition to AnCap (or anything, really), fortunes are made and lost very rapidly. It's extremely unlikely that the balance of monetary or even material distribution would be the same.


That's actually what I based my opinion of 'public property should go to those who use it' on. For the most part, when I say subsidized industries, I mean those like the railways, which can't support themselves. For industries like Lockheed-martin, Yes, they did supply weapons to the Gov't. But when you like to make jet planes, who's going to pay you the most to make jet planes?

Really?

Are you sure? Yours sounds a lot more like a Van Mises - "just privatize and let the market sort it out since it's such a mess and we can't possibly sort it out any better than that" On the contrary - Rothbard in that article:

(seems directly counter to your oh well, who else where they going to sell to argument)

(seems to argue that companies that are even doing tiny business in things like chemical weapons should be wholly forfeit or subject to massive sanctions under a libertarian property scheme)

(then he goes on to argue for *shock* reparations to be paid to all descendents of slaves

(He also argues for an intermediate step of, right now, nationalizing all companies that get over 50% of their revenue from the public)

I guess I'm more Mises than Rothbard,then... I'd be in favor of drawing a strict line between public and private, and then letting the workers have the public stuff, and let the market sort the private.

As to culpability for things like Agent Orange, and Napalm, and the MOAB, I'm not much one for punishing old wrongs. It's better to move on, I think. Especially with wounds as old as slavery.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt as I give von Mises in this situation because I think that you both tend to believe that giant and evil corporations are so much only emergent in state-corporate (dare I say fascist) socioeconomic systems that a true free market would make mincemeat of them very quickly. I'm obviously much more circumspect in that regard and think that the argument kinda stinks of saying well, first we'll steal all the land and capital and THEN we'll say okay, from here on out, this will be a free market. (ie; I think you are arguing it because you honestly believe such a market, would, regardless of starting point quickly improve the wellbeing of a lot of people. I think that such a market, in absence of redsitribution, has the potential to become an even more unshakable oligarchy thna we have now)

Regardless, I've said before and I'll say again that it would give me more confidence if anarcho-capitalists knew their OWN theorists and knew that many of them advocated things like turning companies over to their workers, slave reparations, etc.

--

I wonder though, if a free market will reach optimal outcomes so quickly in a true free market, why not just turn all companies over to their workers, turn all land over to its users (as much as such a thing is possible - ie; make that the default attitude, rather than a leave things as they are attitude unless some egregious recent breach of property can be irrefutably demonstated) -- ie; make it so new property claims have the burden of proof since we call all agree nearly everything is inextricably bound up in a violent and coercive socioeconomic system at the moment.

The problem with that is that you're taking honestly earned capital away from people in order to make sure that you also catch the bad guys... throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm more a fan of the 'let a hundred guilty men go free, than punish a single innocent one' school.

Would unemployment go down? Absolutely.

Should we get rid of it? Hell no.

I'm convinced that overseas sweatshop labor's days are limited. Revolutions are going to happen all over Asia and the people are going to demand a better living. Especially when all those Chinese university graduates realize what communism actually is and what they are doing. Instead of getting rid of our minimum wage, we should be pushing for other countries such as China and India to have a good minimum wage. You should be able to live when you work and are contributing to society.

I'm sure that you have no concept of just how many ways this is wrong.

Explain. What's wrong at least being able to live on what you work for?

As old?  We are yet slaves.

I can't explain it to you, because you would first have to understand why it's not a realistic expectation that the United States or Europe has either the right or the ability to compel the people of other nations to accept our concept of a 'living wage' or anything else.  You are a self-admitted socialist; which, by definition, requires the use of force (or credible threats of force) upon those who dissent in order to achieve the common goals of socialism to any effective degree.  There is no such thing as a voluntary state, but a voluntary socialist state is impossible by it's own definitions.

I don't think realistically that we can get China to have a living wage through our foreign policy (although tariffs could put more weight), but I believe at the very least our could at least stick up for what is right. I think it's despicable that we are appeasing China by ignoring Tibet's calls for independence.

Believe me when I say "been there, said that" on right-libertarianism. I even did door-to-door campaigning for a Libertarian Party Senator once. I'd say I understand economics pretty well, I took a microeconomics course. In the end I just feel that the hierachy and conditions capitalism itself creates is unjust.

The idea of a completely voluntary society, especially based in capitalism, is also unrealistic. When you create a system of haves and have-nots, the economy is not very voluntary. Besides, everything that has led us to capitalism was itself even less voluntary. Feudalism, slavery, etc. very non-voluntary systems have created permanent distinctions between people.

Thomas Paine is thought of as a hero of right-libertarianism (he is still one of my favorite writers), but you should read one of his more forgotten works Agrarian Justice, which discusses the fairness of the property system and proposed the forerunner to a social security system. Basically, land used to belong to everyone before civilization developed, it is only through force that it has gotten in the hands of some (creating wealth, but also poverty.) What is voluntary about that?

So I accept your criticism (though I never claimed it to be voluntary) that all forms of socialism, including the form I proposed on a different thread (despite it also maintaining a large amount of private property), require force. I reject the notion that this has or will ever be avoided though. Isn't force required to maintain private property too?

Screw you.  I should get to decide the terms and conditions under which I will work, not you.  Take your fairy tale bullshit somewhere else.

So, you don't understand the difference between the force a mugger uses to take your wallet and the force that you use to keep him from taking it? Force is force? There's no difference?

Doesn't it require force to prevent people from raping you in the street?

Honestly, this should be considered a symptom of dementia. Is it now considered violent and immoral to defend your own person?

Actually it's a legal and moral duty to defend yourself.

No, all you have to do is hold up a book of government laws. It repels criminals like the Bible repels vampires.

Sorry for taking away your freedom to work for next nothing in a sweatshop factory, just like those workers in China and India "decided" on the terms of their wages. Forgive me <3

They actually like their sweatshop jobs because it gives them a first step on a ladder of future careers. In this country, you can't even build experience because of the lack of entry-level jobs. There are a lack of auto mechanics because there are no longer service station attendants that used to work below minimum wage. The majority of technicians started at that job -- now it's gone.

You want to hurt these people more than anything. You will hurt them more if you mandate a minimum wage.

Everyone has the option to not work. So, if someone is working in a sweatshop rather than not working it all, they must prefer that. You're essentially saying, "Who cares what you want? I know what's better for you than you do."

uhmmm.... no one is forced to be an "employee". Likewise no one as a right to be an employee either.

Being an employee is subservience and a unique trick of government. People should be working for themselves through voluntary partnership not Master/slave-Guardian/Ward relationships.

Yes, that statement was really broad. I was not thinking of personal mugging and raping in that statement, I was talking about the state that protects the capitalist system and the non-voluntary forces that established private property. There is a distinction of protecting your person and personal belongings and protecting the establishment. That statement was a failed conclusion to my point: 100% voluntary society cannot be accomplished. Something has to give. Just like rights, there can't be the right to murder someone and the right to not be murdered mutually existing. You must uphold the rights that are most fair. (I have a feeling this is going to be a criticized analogy too :P but it's really not that important because this is about some claim I never made and has nothing to do with the issue at hand.)

What is most fair? Could it not be giving everyone a unilateral right to their labor, property and person?

Well I don't advocate for capitalist enterprise either, I think we would be much better off with co-operative corporations. I still think that as long as the "employee" system is alive you should at least be able to live on what you make. Situations with or without minimum wages have flaws for workers as we have both pointed out to each other, yet in both situations management is basically in the same fine condition.

Ninja'd.

+1.

That's why we have to make a distinction between the initiation of force vs. the response of force. A completely voluntary society means that no person may initiate force, nothing more. By denying you the right to murder me, I'm not initiating force, I'm responding with it, to your attempts to murder me.


What is "the establishment"? If I own a business and build it up from zero empolyees to 10,000 employees at what point does my business, offices, equipment, etc suddenly become "the establishment". All of my property is my personal belongings.

If I choose to take a summer internship or apprenticeship making 2USD/hr, far less than what you'd consider a "living wage" I'm sure, who are you to stand in my way and deny me that opportunity? On a side not, have you been to China?

I have said that the most fair system are mostly competitive markets with co-operatives. If you want a principle statement, I'd say that it's most fair when people as a society value every single human being's life, say/power in a democratic system, liberty, personal property, and economic status.

Internships are a different story. I am not an expert on minimum wage law, but I do not think that internships are included in the law, and if they are they shouldn't be. This isn't about me telling you personally what I think is best for you...this is about trying to protect the living status of working families. I think ideally (in the capitalist system) that the minimum wage should just be a legally backed guarantee. I don't think it should be a crime to want to be underpaid/exploited, but that's not usually the problem. There are also problems of stores such as Wal-Mart forcing their employees to do unpaid overtime even though the rest of the time they are being paid minimum wage. This not about me or anyone else concerned about exploitation being a control freak, this is about fighting a legitimate problem of impoverished living conditions here and especially abroad.

I have not been to China.

Know what the problem there is?

No Unions. Walmart will fire anyone who even breathes the word 'union'. In this economy, that gives them a lot of pull.

Unions can help, but ultimately they are not as productive to workers as co-operatives are. Anti-union behavior should also be illegal, and it's even worse in places like Columbia and China. I know that Coca-Cola used to hire paramilitaries to murder union workers in their bottling plants in Columbia.

Whoa... [citation needed]!

I first found out about on a documentary on the issue on TV.

http://killercoke.org/
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/colombia0106/
http://usleap.org/usleap-campaigns/colombia-murder-and-impunity/more-information-colombia/background-violence-against-
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/business/31coke.html

Hmmm.... Glad I drink Dew.

Well the problem is you're trying to decide "how things should be" for everyone else.  Perhaps your idea of a "living wage" is insufficient for some, yet more than enough for others.  Additionally, you'll have to constantly be making loopholes and exceptions for internships, for people working part-time, for those who are doing it just for the lolz, or who just want to feel productive.  This centrally planned, one-size-fits-all method is unjust, inefficient, and very inflexible. 

I have been to China, and what I saw was tons of new construction, the capital stock being built up, happy people busy with the fervor of creating new products and services.  I saw one city with a number of 20+ story buildings which had not existed five years ago, and everywhere the prosperity seems to be growing.  In many ways, their economic situation is better than that of first world countries where it's getting more and more difficult to actually find a job, and students are graduating with a mortgage worth of student loans.   

If you want to establish a community where all the employers agree to pay at least $x/hr for work, then by all means go ahead.  I think your rate of prosperity growth will drastically lag behind those who do not impose these kinds of restrictions, but hey, prove me wrong.  All I ask is that you don't force me to be a part of this community. 

Making a law that says everyone must have a 5 million euro house doesn't mean everyone gets a 5 million euro house.

uhhh, you do realize China is not a good example here since they are literally building empty skyscrapers and maintaining gigantic empty malls right? It is like a simulacrum of progress. Besides the fact that China in many ways represents the worst aspects of centralized authoritarian tendencies now tied to the most destructive aspects of capitalism.

China is essentially in the middle of a wild speculative bubble financed with unpayable US debt and collapsing all phases of corporate capitalism - from the wild west, to industrialization and robber barons, to financial ponzi schemes in one strange pyrotechnic orgy of unsustainable growth - though not so unsustainable that they won't be able to knock the US out of its economic supremacy role rather soon

I agree with everything you said in bold. It's very much flawed, and it is a central decision (other than States can add their own minimum wage) which I am ultimately against. Even still, I believe it is worth the flaws. At this point my view will probably come across as ignorance to you, but I truly believe it does more than enough good in the protection of real, struggling families to make up for the people "who are doing it just for the lolz." Like I've said at least twice on this thread, this is not my ideal. In a society with co-operatives, a minimum wage is not necessary.

I have more things to say about China, but the post above me will suffice for now.

This is all you need say. Nothing's stopping them from starting co-ops now.

Why don't we cut to the chase and just take the next Free Market step and instead of "killing the minimum wage" we kill people that are unemployed?  After all they are not unemployed due to a boom and bust cycle brought to you by Wall St and fueled by their buddies in the Federal Reserve they are unemployed because they are lazy and worthless parasites.

So unemployment will be punishable by death.  This is so simple a solution that I'm shocked that nobody is proposing it. 

Ok since I've solved this world problem onto the next topic.

This HAS to be Trolling. If not, please exit the gene pool immediately, you're fouling the water.

Why be afraid to see the conclusions of your beliefs freemarketeers?

 ::) Not even going to dignify that with an answer.

By posting yet not posting an answer says everything.

When I was a younger man, and new to the union world, I used to eat this crap up.  Then my wife applied for a job there, just to piss me off.  She had a BS in Biology at the time and even with the low wages (not minimum, BTW) for a cashier; to this day she will tell you that it was the best job she has ever had.  She worked at Wal-Mart for four years as a cashier, for a Vet clinic for seven years as a vet assistant, and five years at Proctor & Gamble as a lab tech in their microbiology lab testing the anti-microbial effects of both P&G products as well as competitors.  The stories that she would tell me honestly shocked me.  Wal-Mart would go out of their way to improve the lives of their 'associates' in ways that I've never even heard of another employer doing.  For example, what my wife earned wouldn't have supported a single mother, and there were several that worked as cashiers at the Wal-Mart that she worked at.  The corporate office would sponser 'meetings' with the part-time & low wage employees to inform them of state and federal grants & programs that they might be eligible for, and would provide for the forms and some legal help to apply.  This is exactly why there are twice as many working poor who receive state and federal benefits such as welfare or food stamps at Wal-Mart than Target or KMart.  Granted, that might cost Wal-Mart next to nothing to help apply, rather than just raise their wages, but it's not something that they have to do, and even informing someone that external help might be available is more than half the trouble.

They would do other, less noble, things as well for their 'associates', such as have regular 'pep rallies' to improve moral.  As well as a (voluntary) daily exercise routine, intended to stretch out the legs of those who stand all day for a living, preventing chronic stress health problems later.  And no, they didn't save enough from the health care plan doing this to pay for the costs of having the manager and 20+ employees do this for 7 minutes each start of shift.

They also provided for a discount for direct family members, and a card for said family members.  Lots of retail chains give the employee a token discount during and after their shift, but who gives the spouse a discount card for 10% discount on everything in the store, all of the time and honors coupons and sales while doing so?  The only thing that I bought there in those four years that was not covered by that discount card was milk.  But baby formula was.

So anymore I tend to get a bit sideways when I see tis kind of anti Wal-MArt propoganda being presented without citations as if they were commonly accepted facts.  I've been a member of a union for nigh on 20 years now, and Wal-Mart has done more for my family than you can ever know; and that goes beyond what Wal-Mart does for everyone by the simple act of trying to sell everything that they can cheaper than anyone else.

Don't get me started on their optional health plans.  They were great.  The only fault that I could find with them, if it can be called a fault, is that they exposed the actual costs of health care to the associate, and then gave them the option of not buying in.

Oh, do shut up. How would this 'death penalty' be enforced without a State?

Awful sweet of them to assist their workers in getting on the dole rather than paying them a living wage.  Not that the problem is that they are insured against destitution and starvation, but rather we enable companies to pay people a minimum wage that is impossible to live on.

Notice you didn't mention Wal-Mart taking out life insurance polices on it's workers...?  Were those news stories all fraudulent or did you just obfuscate them on purpose?  Or were you unaware?

Wow.  Ok, so you are a "market fundamentalist"?  I see the light now.

You believe that a Market can exist without a State.  Good luck with that. 

To believe such things you're already showing pure immunity from facts so I don't know if anything can be said.  If I think you could be swayed from your dogma into the realm of reality I'd ask for an example of where this has ever happened or how it could ever happen but I know that that would be fruitless.  If you'd even considered the construction of such a system you'd realize it to be impossible so once again, I guess we are at an impasse; unless you have some ground-breaking revelation or insight into philosophy, etc that would make this possible.  If so, please don't dally in posting it here.

I am very glad that it has worked out for you. I am not saying that all Wal-Mart stores are ordered to be living hell for their employees, but they can (or can't) be. That is a fault of a hierarchical profit system.

Let me ask you this: is slavery, at it's very premise, an evil institution? I would hope you say yes. Yet, there were good people who were slave owners (also you would have to guarantee living conditions for your slaves if you wanted them to work.) Some slave owners treated their slaves well. Some did not. But do the good slave owners, regardless of whether or not they were in the majority, justify the existence of a slavery institution? I believe the corporate institution is obviously a step up from slavery, but I believe the same rules apply, most of us just have not realized it yet.

The market is the sum total of all voluntary human actions. By definition it exists outside of, and one might even say in spite of, the State.

My family wasn't some exception.


Maybe the corporate structure is inheriently flawed, as it's certainly amoral, but that isn't the implication of your statements.  Whether you intended it to mean it or not, your words implicated Wal-Mart as some kind of corporate criminal.  Which is an opinion that I encounter often within the union culture.  I never see those people shopping at wal-mart, but I've seen many of my union brothers who wouldn't raise their voices in support of my position shopping there.  I am offended by this kind of propoganda, in part, because I now understand that I was a victim of it.  And so are you.  I would imagine that, considering your youth, this is an opinion that you have picked up from either family or peers.  Well, they are victims too.  The truth shall set you free.


The terms 'good' and 'evil' are very subjective, but I'll hazard miscommunications and say, yes.


The corporate institution isn't rationally comparable to the systemic subjigation of an entire race/culture/religion of people over the course of generations.  Just trying to make this comparision drops your credibility about three points in my opinion.  I shouldn't even have to support that position.  Such a statement is comparable to violating Godwin's Law, as anyone who trys to play that card loses the argument by default.

You're breaking Metagodwin's Law by making that comparison.

This was not about comparing corporations to slavery to make the corporate model seem bad, I said and agree that they are on very different levels of immorality. I used slavery as an example of an inherently immoral institution that can be used by genuinely good people to provide exceptions to the majority or a majority that even still would not justify the existence of the institution. And no, you do not have to support my position.

As for Wal-Mart, I was not trying to convict every Wal-Mart store, and I'm not going to deny that you and many other people had a good experience. I do not believe that the cases of wrong labor practices done by Wal-Mart are necessarily the majority of cases. I do believe that those cases have happened (and are not just union propaganda), however, I do believe that they are incriminating evidence against the corporate model when co-operatives, which I believe to be a much more just model (just as corporations are more just than slavery) could be used instead.

The former, due to both the communication effort required for the 6 billion people to organise themselves and to information asymmetry. If there's some critical information required to make a decision, each of the 6 billion people either has to discover it themselves or trust someone else, and the latter hands power over to those they trust. The man with 5 billion dollars only has to discover it once, and can pay people to assist him which incentivises them to behave in a trustworthy fashion. It's the same reason that the SEC restricts some forms of investments to "accredited investors".


That's quite simple really. The market would ensure that those unable to support themselves financially would be unable to obtain food and would starve to death. (Of course, in practice this wouldn't work and state intervention would be required, but that's true of the market in general anyway.)

Well, some well-reasoned and logical responses.
In the first instance, you're right, communication does indeed pose a problem, and does even now. However, in the market, when one party is injured, it's not just them that stop dealing with the inuring party. Word of mouth is a pretty powerful force, especially in a small community. The world is getting smaller, and information only has to go through 5 or six hops to get all the way around the world. Imagine what it would be like in an even more connected world. Piss off the wrong people, and you're penniless.

In the second one, What you've described is essentially the enforcement mechanism in an AnCap society. Unemployment would only come to those with truly nothing to offer, and for those few unfortunates, charities, or more likely employers who are willing to train, would take care of them. Shunning, excluding someone from interactions, would only come as a result of failing to enter arbitration. So while death by starvation is possible, it's not likely to come from simple unemployment.

They work them because they have to to feed their families, not because they like them. Dunno why I'd bother posting this on a forum of people who have never had real jobs, let alone factory or labor ones before though.

Ahh, passive-aggressiveness.

When logic fails.

I've worked them.  I was working for $7.50 an hour; married to a spouse still going in school for her degree, when she had our first child.  I had a two bedroom house, one car, one tv and a computer with Internet access (this wasn't a given at the time, I didn't know the Internet actually had pictures yet, I was an early adopter) phone service, etc.  It is and was possible to raise a family on wages close to minimum wage.  For reference, my first child was born in 2000.  I had zero debt (beyond my mortgage) until my daughter was born.  Kids are freaking expensive.

Information can spread very quickly, yes - the trouble is that it's not necessarily accurate or truthful information. Have you ever heard the saying "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"? In order for this to work the way you'd hope, each person would have to have the ability and time to personally verify the information they receive - and even that might not be enough due to social pressure to ignore contradictory facts. Worse still, if someone owns a significant chunk of the media they can and do direct this social pressure.

That's the problem with your idea. It's not doing something immoral that leads to you being penniless, it's crossing the wrong person. Could be that you kicked up too much of a fuss about them scamming you or robbing you or raping you or beating you up. So long as the influential evildoers stick to doing it to people with much less social influence then themselves, they can essentially get away with it - crossing them carries too much risk and those with the influence to damage them have no incentive to do so.

That would require the way people think to change in ways that, frankly, are probably never going to happen. Currently whether someone's seen as having "nothing to offer" is determined by extraneous factors like skin colour, gender, class markers, etc, and while attempts to get some of these factors ignored have met with limited sucess no-one's managed to shake off this kind of thinking.

This just creates incentive for consumers to find unbiased news sources, and for news sources to be unbiased. Of course, the flaw here is that the people have to know they need unbiased sources, which puts incentive on the both news sources and the consumers of the news sources, to get the word out.


Bigotry is another issue entirely, and IMO, a self correcting one. If indeed the brown guy has better qualifications than the white guy, then the bigot is setting himself up to fail to his competitor, who hires based on qualifications, not skin color or accent.

The problem is that all the problems with obtaining accurate information in general also apply to obtaining accurate information about the bias of news sources. If your source of news falsely tells you that the other news sources are less trustworthy and the people around you agree, how do you know this is wrong? What's more, if they're good they can create social pressure to trust that news source and emotional investment in it to the point that evidence they're unreliable is just rationalised away by their followers. (Usual rationalization: "All the other news organisations must be just as biased, so I may as well stick with the one that's just been proven to lie through their teeth".)

That's one of the evils thing about bigotry: it isn't self-correcting like that. In most circumstances it's not just important to hire someone that's well-qualified but someone who's perceived to be well-qualified by others, so ignoring race and hiring the most well-qualified person is potentially setting yourself up to fail.

Good point, but as I've pointed out earlier, it's relatively easy to spot bias. If all else fails, Look for sponsorship. Truly listener supported programing is almost guaranteed to give you better information than one sponsored by the companies it's supposed to be watch-dogging.


But most people aren't that bigoted, even in the US, where we had slavery almost within living memory, people don't give a shit if the technician servicing their cable is black or white, as long as they don't fuck up the install.

It is so easy to judge and insult people on the internet who you know nothing about, isn't it?  I've done plenty of manual labor jobs (sheet rocking, demolition, framing, windshield repair and replacement, lumber yard boy, etc.) but went to school because I didn't want to do that stuff for the rest of my life.  Stop attempting ad hominem attacks when you run out of logic, it only makes you appear intellectually bankrupt and fucking pathetic to boot.

The minimum wage is extremely necessary, a lot of the people earning it are students making it though college so that later they can become professionals, and going though very difficult economic times, with the elimination of minimum wage you would reduce the number of professionals and skilled people increasing the number of unskilled people exactly what is not needed, for the economy to prosper skilled persons are needed, and before persons become skilled they have to struggle if the struggle is too big they do not survive.

What is needed it to stop bailing out banks and enterprises that are failures with the money of the people, and heavier taxes for the very rich and same ones that print money, and make the laws, laws which are convenient to them.

I believe in exponential taxes, no taxes for people under a certain income, and as income increase so do taxes in a real way without heavy tax loopholes.

The average person does not take advantage of such loopholes, I guess by stop  the welfare of large corporations and heavy taxing incomes of millions, and changing the economy from a debt based economy to one based on savings and production, the economy would be well.

trying to save a penny to destroy a dollar is nonsense, it is like saving money on an oil change and later destroying a fine engine.

The sentiment isn't the problem, it's the unintended consequences.  And reality doesn't support your position that the minimum wage is necessary so that college students can work their way through and earn a higher wage.  The only students that I have ever met working minimum wage were either working on campus or in a co-op program.  What you just described is just a back-door subsidy of higher education, which already costs way too much.

Of course not, it has nothing to do with the minimum wage, the market-based resource allocation will not work after productivity has passed certain level

see my other post at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33267.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33267.0)

Well the only student employment programs that have subsidy are work study, and it is a tiny subsidy since most of the time it is the minimum wage that is being subsidy in a small percentage. however that majority of student employment programs are not subsidy, and some even generate profits, since the student are basically subcontractors in some cases, it is true also in the last case it is a little over minimum wage that students make, The great benefit for them on working on campus is not so much the extra money but the greater flexibility that allows them to work around their schedules, since flexibility does not normally exist on traditional jobs.

The lack of the flexibility of most jobs is the number one reason adult universities exist in which it is the other way around, the university works around your schedule, but that costs a premium most people can not afford, it is usually the other way around for students they need work that allows them to get around their school schedules, and those are minimum wages jobs or close to it.

Sure it would.

Ad hominem plus I'm sure I've done more back breaking labor than you have, digging septic line ditches, hauling bags of concrete mix, etc and I still say your ideology is dead from the neck up.

Mininum wage only "protects" people who already have a stable job.

But it hurts those who need the most "protection" - the unemployed. It lessens their chance to get their foot in the door and pushes more of them into a vicious cycle of long term unemployment.

Minimum wage is regressive and anti-social.

Its wrong in my opinion to remove the minimum wage. Yes it can cut off the unemployment rate however if more workers are working with a very low salary with a very difficult type of job that would just sound really unfair. Minimum wage is created to create a quite far amount for every workers tho we all know that isnt perfect

Minimum wages only 'protect' all low wage citizens from virtual slavery imposed by corporations. This very low number ensures that (if your state isn't an asshole) any employer you would work with, would pay you enough to actually survive in that particular economy.  This ain't just for the citizens, this is also for the government as well. We all get taxed, and mightily, on those wages, and if they don't pay you enough, the state is going to end up subsidizing the gaps in your existence anyway. So, the state/Fed would rather see the business owners stimulate the economy by actually allowing the value to trickle down, rather than accumulate at the top. Despite this, major corporations have lobbied, and money talks.

 Hence corporate welfare, the scenario where tax payers end up footing the bill for the missing part of worker wages. I'm pointing out McDs, WalMart, but it's the lot of them. Corporations are already skirting their tax bills by and large, the insult to injury that is having to pay food stamps for someone with a full time job, because the guys that hired them don't give them enough to survive. Corps want ever-increasing profits for the shareholders, to usher in ever-increasing valuation of their asset.  You can do this a few ways.

Charge more, but that doesn't fly in the age of dying retail.
Pay your workers less, which has been the norm, and
Ask your workers to do more for the same pay, which is the new trick of low wage worker exploitation. Clever ways to not account for overtime, or subtle policies that have workers doing things outside of their job description (which is a federally regulated thing, your job description per industry is actually a listed thing, for legal purposes). Don't do it, get wrote up or fired. It's a slick system. And with most American apparently being one check away from insolvency, who has time or the appetite for risk to switch jobs?

The nerve to deny a man a fair days pay, for a fair days work, is regressive and antisocial.

It's okay to be part of the minimum wage community because you have no tax. (That's in my country, I'm not sure with other places) I'm a minimum wage earner and I currently enjoy what I'm doing because of the possibilities that I could do and be thankful that I have a job is what keeps me going, it's not all about the money. I thank Bitcoin for being a part of my sources of income too.

In most countries you unfortunately are taxed. In the EU most countries have a tax threshold set below the minimum, so you have to be employed half-time to avoid it.
In some countries the tax threshold is set below the level of welfare. This means that if you are poor and receive welfare throughout the year, you'll come up above the threshold! That's one of the dumbest laws, but who am I to argue?

Minimum wage in globalized environment keeps atleast some of the GDP in countries used as source of cheap labor. Would its abolishment in States lead to elimination of unemployment? It is very likely.

However, side effects cannot be underestimated. Before such decision, government should conduct studies on impacts.

Your words sound like a sentence Especially for those countries where the minimum wage is much lower than the minimum subsistence minimum, with the retirement age increasing every year. How to live in such conditions to a simple worker whose health is not so much already.

It is wrong for many countries. Minimum wage is needed for many poor families and their life. Minimum wage can help lower income families which in many countries are the majority so removing the minimum wage can only do harm to the majority of the population in many countries of the world. Killing the minimum wage can make the saying "rich are getting richer while poor are getting poorer" more evident and can bring many discontent to population of a country which can be translated into rage on the roads. Killing the minimum wage it is plain wrong.

In a globalized capitalist world, getting rid of min wage is stepping back a lot. People worldwide will always want to buy their items at the cheapest price possible if you give them the possibility, meaning that the workers are gonna be paid less and less so the items remain cheap. Might solve unemployment in the short run but in the middle/long-run? and lower wages = lower prices = increase in the demand = more consumption = more pollution and also = bigger margins in the hands of the same ppl. Bc don't forget that theories are always good on paper, but the system is always going to be corrupted at some point. In a nutshell I think killing minimum wage is just giving more power to capitalism and raise the risk of poverty in the country. Look at countries in Southern Asia, India, or Africa that have a very low min wage and a big black market. And then you can say goodbye to your skilled worker for sure.
I might be wrong, but I think a lot of expatriated skilled workers left their country because they wanted to discover the world and open their mind at some point, and not because they couldn't find a job in their home country (or at least it's not the majority)

I think current debates should pay more attention to the positive effects of an increase in the minimum wage on living standards, on health and educational outcomes, on reducing inequality and on poverty reduction among low-wage households, rather than on employment effects.

Killing the minimum wage is not a good idea, but it is also not a good idea to aggressively raise the minimum wage. As increasing minimum wage by a large amount forces prices to go up which results in less value for more money.

Why do people have more children than they can afford to raise?  It's a little selfish to bank on everyone else paying for them.  If you're future prospects aren't better than a minimum wage job, maybe you should rethink if a having children is a responsible decision.

On the surface it may seem that a very high minimum wage would be good for people.  But the minimum wage is forcing low skill workers out of a job.  If some one is not able to produce more than minimum wage then a company is unable to hire them - otherwise the company would lose money and go out of business.  If the minimum wage is too high the worker would then be displaced my automation and robots etc.

To referring to the Bachman quote, it's literally true.  No minimum wage means essentially no unemployment.  Everyone's employable at $0.01/hr!  So while it "solves" unemployment, the real question is if that is the outcome we want.

Personally, I've always felt that we should try to minimize the number of jobs, not maximize them, but what do I know...

It will still be a no.Because even if you try to increase the minimum wage or just kill it the ones who will benefit from it will be the people with good jobs.How about lower class jobs.Still it can not sustain their everyday life barely because of prices on goods and commodities.

It's bullshit, bcz people won't go to work for cents. So, unemployment will be the same. It could also grow because employers will cut a wage and many people will leave their jobs.

Specialty in work always differ. Some jobs are harder than the others.

I think it would very extremely interesting if the minimum wage was taken away. Companies would not be able to just set the pay to the lowest possible because they would not longer get any more employees. I think that wages would most likely go up. Its all supply and demand.

If employers cut their wages, and workers quit, what happens to the wages?  Workers may quit, and are likely to look for another job that pays more.  In fact, that's exactly how the labor market works already.  So employers don't have monoposony power over their employees overall, they have to pay enough that their trained employees won't quit en masse.  We already know that, in general, that market labor rate is higher than the minimum rate anyway.  My daughter was offered over the minimum rate to work at a fast food restaurant without any work experience at all.

nope. it will just be the same. different jobs have different payments. minimum wages keep industries alive

I really don't know if killing the minimum wage may help. there are times even if wages increase, the price of consumables also increases so there was no change on it's effect to those people that needs it.

I have always felt that minimum wages are against fair competition. If the requirement is abolished, then more jobs can be created. The rate of unemployment will get reduced and the government can cut back on welfare spending. If you feel that you are not getting paid enough for a particular job, then the best solution is to resign from that job and find another one. Plain and simple.

I don't think so. We just need to learn how to live in harmony with nature.

This system was introduced to "protect" labor from underestimation of earnings. Previously, many companies set too low prices for the work done, especially when it comes to physical labor. This indicator is also used as a tool to combat poverty. Undoubtedly, it is quite difficult to live on this salary, but there is still a possibility. At the same time, citizens are obliged to pay all deductions and taxes even with a minimum earnings of 100%

Yes. For example, in my country raised the minimum wage, but in the end nothing has changed. Prices for all goods are so up too. And in the end, people can hardly live on this minimum wage.

Maybe it would work in the US, but in other countries where the minimum wage is already so low, removing it would be pretty bad for minimum wage workers. Companies would potentially give super low wages to their workers, and more people would just slump into poverty.

Maybe? i think it is a hard question because if at the same level and same job two different person will receive different salary/wage that would be disastrous for the company as its employees will ask for more money.