George Can't Work For You ... George Can't Sell To You

tuck-fheman (74) in government • 9 years ago (edited)

Click to enlarge

#minimum-wage #licensing #welfare-state #control

government minimum-wage licensing welfare-state control

9 years ago by tuck-fheman (74)

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!

Sort Order:

Trending

[-]

pharesim (74) · 9 years ago (edited)

Sane minimum wages do not destroy jobs. That argument is only used by conservative economists and corporations, and has been proved wrong every single time a minimum wage was introduced.

In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.

http://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-statement/

Isn't the real sad thing that we as a society need rules for things like that in the first place? :/ Look at the life of a worker in the 18th century. 12 hour days, 6 days per week, and they still struggled to feed their (big) families. We came a long way since then, but all improvements required force. First the workers had to force the government (they shot at each other for the 8 hour day, just imagine that!), which then forced the employers (50-100 years after the uprise began). Why can't people be nice? :D

$0.28

3 votes

[-]

fuzzyvest (62) · 9 years ago

We also have to remember who is most often providing the statistical data or leveraging various "esteemed" positions on various academic boards...etc for manipulating them

I am not well versed in this place, but know of many places where gov messes with the data in obvious ways to those looking. Dontbmake the mistakr of thinking scientific institutions are infallible / uncorruptible.

Just look into climategate as a small example.

$0.00

[-]

pharesim (74) · 9 years ago (edited)

We talked about climategate already, and I told you that the "gate" is vastly exaggerated. Some people quote mostly one sentence from one mail, and try to disprove the biggest part of the scientific community with it. If they had been right with their accusations, don't you think it would've changed something? It didn't, because the claims are wrong and the quotes out of context. Example? Here:

The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures:
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960.

Another one:

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going (Trenberth 2009).

In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm

$0.00

[-]

tuck-fheman (74) · 9 years ago

Isn't the real sad thing that we as a society need rules for things like that in the first place?

Perhaps that's why the person that created the comic suggested that very thing in the first image. :)

$0.00

[-]

pharesim (74) · 9 years ago (edited)

I know some people working in jobs affected by the recently introduced minimum wage, and they neither felt like it's binding them, nor do they need to receive welfare now.
The first picture should show the businessman tied up, but that wouldn't have fit the agenda of the creator and screwed up the final picture ;)

$0.00

[-]

xeldal (60) · 9 years ago

The only sane minimum wage is $0 per hour. Actually not even that. If I want to work for a negative rate, get your guns out of my face. : )

$0.00

[-]

pharesim (74) · 9 years ago (edited)

That's like saying "If I want to be a slave, let me". Sure. If you want, go somewhere, offer your work cheaper than the minimum wage, and in a lot of cases the employer will find a way (if you can convince him that you won't sue :D ).
Nobody checks all the contracts, it's up to the employee to care about his given rights.

Here in Germany minimum wages were introduced last year. It's quite low (~9$ or 1500$ a month), but affected 4 Million workers, 10% of all employees. A lot of which had to receive welfare in addition to their full time job, because you can't feed a family from 1000$. Hell, I'd have issues to get by with this amount all by myself.
They didn't collectively decide that their work is worth less than a living, they just didn't have a way to barter for more than 3-6$ because there's enough cheap workforce. It's not about qualification in those jobs, so the only lever an employee has is his wage.
The situation kept getting worse since years. If the branches like hairdressers, gastronomy, storage and logistics hadn't collectively decided to not pay enough for a living nobody would've cared. Now that it's in effect since a year they're all still in business, so it didn't hurt them like they claimed before.

$0.00

[-]

xeldal (60) · 9 years ago

I think you misrepresent what it is to be a slave. If I voluntarily agree to pay you for the opportunity to learn a skill, this is far from slavery, In fact the opposite. If I am free to leave or not participate any longer, I am not a slave. Slavery requires a gun; the threat of violence. Like a minimum wage law for example. : )

I'm finding it hard to pin down what your actual stance is. In one hand you're saying you support minimum wages laws and thereby the enforcement of such laws, in the other you seem to be saying you support skirting around them if such is your fancy where each involved party voluntarily agrees to a lesser wage.

"given rights" I'm not sure from the context how you mean this but it is a pet peeve for me to correct. Rights are not given they are inherent in your existence. A government doesn't give or grant you rights.

I'd recommend Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in one lesson' https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/ there is a section on minimum wage https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/#calibre_link-41

Trying to set minimums/maximums on wages is the same as issuing laws for price controls on goods and services. labor is a commodity. price controls have disastrous consequences, inefficiencies, artificial scarcity etc . The prior chapters discuss this in depth.

There is no point in arguing that as a result of the restriction scheme at least the price of farm products has been raised and “the farmers have more purchasing power.” They have got it only by taking just that much purchasing power away from the city buyer. (We have been over all this ground before in our analysis of “parity” prices.) To give farmers money for restricting production, or to give them the same amount of money for an artificially restricted production, is no different from forcing consumers or taxpayers to pay people for doing nothing at all. In each case the beneficiaries of such policies get “purchasing power.” But in each case someone else loses an exactly equivalent amount. The net loss to the community is the loss of production, because people are supported for not producing. Because there is less for everybody, because there is less to go around, real wages and real incomes must decline either through a fall in their monetary amount or through higher living costs.

$0.00