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Venezuela: Cheap Television Sets For All!
solareagle writes "Venezuelan President Maduro has declared war on 'bourgeois parasites' by taking over Daka, an electronics retailer similar to Best Buy. USA Today reports, 'National guardsmen, some of whom had assault rifles, were positioned around outlets of [Daka] ... Maduro has ordered to lower prices or face prosecution. Thousands of people lined up at the Daka stores hoping for a bargain after the government forced the companies to charge "fair" prices. "I want a Sony plasma television for the house," said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator who waited seven hours outside a Caracas store ... "It's going to be so cheap!" "This is for the good of the nation," Maduro said, referring to the military's occupation of Daka. "Leave nothing on the shelves, nothing in the warehouses Let nothing remain in stock!" Maduro said his seizures are the 'tip of the iceberg' and that other stores would be next if they did not comply with his orders.'"
Is this real?
People said that the characters in Atlas Shrugged were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts and that real life is totally not like that... I guess they never went to Venezuela.
They also said that Ayn Rand would leave us in some sort of post-apocalyptic world with no police, firemen, schools, or anything basic services. Who knew that the entire city government of Detroit for the last 40 years were all a bunch of secret Ayn Rand worshipers who have finally put her dreams into action!?!?!?!??
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Get it now, because no one in their right might is going to import electronics into Venezuela anytime soon.
Isn't vaguely socialist dictatorship great?
My calendar is obviously wrong, and this is Slashdot's April the first sense of humour...
Good luck with that.
'National guardsmen, some of whom had assault rifles, were positioned around outlets of [Daka] ...
FIRE! Sale
and nothing to wipe their asses with
Don't get sick, fuckers.
Once everyone has a TV then the government can broadcast propaganda to everyone.
In which case they should be free.
Yes and as stupid as it sounds. This will work for a short while. Every person of means is probably desperately trying to leave. Once the "bargains" are gone, there will be no more product. Price controls drive growth into the ground and set the stage to inflation when they are released. Next comes wage control, then shortages, rise in crime (fueled by black markets), persecution of the wealthy, then hollowing out the middle class, and finally riots and needless death.
Prices are so high in Venezuela because of inflation and exchange control. A dollar is worth 6.30 Bs according to the government but it's nearly impossible to get them, so you have to search in the black market where it goes for at least 60 Bs. This store (Daka) though wasn't importing merchandise, so the prices were not just, but since it was allied with the government, it was allowed to sell at whatever prices: something happened, either they screwed up or this is just an election ploy (there are elections next month). Now, the rest of the affected stores ARE importing, and why would they do it now? Since Venezuela's production is nearly zero, this will only lead to broke merchants, and less market fluidity. And these "cheap television sets"? They are being sold at three or four times their price in the black market. As ussual, Chavists are breaking this country apart.
Oblivion Awaits
at least not sane ones. If anyone knows the background on this though I'd love to hear it. This sounds more like a political attack on the owner of the store. I'm all for getting electronics into the hands of those less fortunate. But do it like Britain used to do with the old Z (that's Zed)x, not like this...
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The idea is sound: No companies should be allowed to exploit its consumers.
However, the execution is flawed. Now, instead of 1 provider (Daka) there are 0 providers. Reducing supply and keeping demand the same means there will be worse prices and black markets.
The proper execution:
- Provide a government subsidy to Daka's competitor.
- If there is no competitor, offer a tax holiday (~1-5 years) to anyone who wants to create one.
- Forbid anyone who owns a share in Daka from selling it to anyone else for the duration of the tax holiday.
- Forbid anyone who owns a share in Daka from buying a share in the competitor for the duration of the tax holiday.
since when is it a national right to have big screen tvs...or tvs of any size?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
OH TOTALLY! When I think of the Venezuelan dictatorship, the very very first thing that springs to mind is how the tea party worships Hugo Chavez like a bunch of mindless drones!!
Thank God-Emperor Obama that Rachel Maddow and Sean Penn have exposed those evil tea partiers and their evil affiliation with the pro-free market radical libertarian venezuelan evil dictators!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Thailand last non-elected Prime Minister tried to buy popularity in a similar way, by capping sugar prices very low. The penalty he introduced was 7 years in prison!
Sugar producers smuggled the sugar and sold it across the border, others abandoned crops since it wasn't worth the cost of the fertilizer.
There was a sugar shortage after that.
(comment snipped due to NSA surveillance).
Without Zimbabwe, I'd never have achieved my dream of becoming a Trillionaire.
Suck on that, Bill Gates.
at least not sane ones
You may indulge some high-minded socialist fantasy, but the millions of muppets your side takes its support from are exactly this kind of feral animal, and you know it.
If anyone knows the background on this
Election coming up. Maduro is buying votes.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
This would be a good start. Everything you have over 500 million? Gone. Belongs to the other 99% now.
Thanks for doing your part so well. You rich have truely served your purpose for the greater good.
But nah. never happen. instead it's going to get more and more unequal until people have to die.
We're pretty much past the point where that happened other times in history. So we're getting overdue.
It's gonna get nasty and violent. The wealth WILL be redistributed. And the longer it takes the worse it will be.
Should be entertaining at least. Hope i see it in my lifetime.
That seems like an odd example. I thought that Sinclair hated government involvement in business (unless he could get money without losing control, anyway).
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Detroit has been run by Democrats for decades.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
more the educational one. The UK gov't pushed heavy on computers in education. In the States Apple practically gave them away, and Microsoft famously turned defeat into victory when they 'gave' millions of Windows licenses to schools as part of their Anti-trust settlement with Sun/Java.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
history has shown siding with the rich works much, much better. I'm not asking that rhetorically either. What's so different about Valenzuela that buying votes this way would work (meekly hoping for a rational, well informed answer instead of more Ayn Rand inspired wargaharble... :( ).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So the forklift that lifts your lardass out of you parent's basement is finally working again?
don't worry when they mean "all" it means friends of the soldiers(who can then resell for the real street price, since supplies are very, very limited, due to nobody, not even government, exchanging money at the official rate! that's what I gathered.).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Great journalism. Report on what one person outside the shop hopes, instead of what actually happened in the shop.
Daka has five shops in the whole of Venezuela.
It's very hard to know what's happening in Venezuela when you don't live there. Most of the media is owned by foreign (US) companies, so it's hard to know what sources to trust. Coverage in foreign media is often just ridiculous.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I'm not american.. but I'm taking a stab here that the point L. J. Beauregard was making is that unless the Tea Party wants to be on the receiving end of a spectacle such as this, they'd do well in NOT trying to sabotage any policies attempting to provide "Food, shelter and health care". And perhaps a dig at them watching Fox News *shrug*.
The second amendment works for everyone friendo, better get started because we did a long time ago
Yup, just like Obama is buying votes with Obamacare. Or rather, subsidies (exceptions) for those effected by Obamacare. Don't work in a union or vote Democrat? Well, no subsidies for you! Dependence, fear, and love; Either way, you will vote Democrat in next election...or else!
But why stop there? Free food, shelter, health care, cell phones, gasoline, TVs (how will you get YOUR propaganda to them if they don't have TVs?), cars (everyone deserves a luxury car), education, a house, money, a computer, an iPad, an iPad 2, an "XBONE", free abortions (free is cheaper than having to pay for birth control!), vacations, alcohol (beer summits for all!), and tickets to Disney world. Don't worry about how we'll pay for it. Money is already free, right, just take it from someone that has more than you. YOU deserve it, because you're such a great guy! :-) And you shouldn't have to pay taxes. I mean, taxes are only for rich people, and rich people are anyone that makes more than you.
You got one.
What you gonna do about his 5-50-500-5000 friends who came with him?
The masses will win.
Even if you kill them all. Congrats. You can no longer run your city, state, country.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/06/news/economy/minimum-wage-seatac-new-jersey/
You could have at least posted the link. Boy oh boy! Are those states fucked. Mass exodus, watch it come! Sure sucks to run a business in those states. Run like hell while you still can!
Some people like running water and heat too.
> It's not safe to do legitimate business in Venezuela anymore.
He seized five shops in a country of 29 million people. Don't you think you're being a little alarmist proclaiming the end of imports?
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Pay close attention to what's happening in Venezuela, and every other country that has attempted to enforce price or income controls. Prosperity can't legislated or mandated.
Of course prosperity cannot be legislated. You can only legislate more fair income distribution. That's actually the only purpose of taxes. Minimum wage is very important part of that equation, along with appropriate tax structure (ie. progressive taxes, instead of flat taxes).
Price controls, on the other hand, do not mix well with free market and tend to be extremely poor choice in almost all cases. Price controls only make sense if there exist no private sector economy - ie. communism. And even then, they result in shortages (due to black market) without rationing.
So while you are correct on price controls, that has nothing to do with minimum wages. Too much increase in minimum wages drives inflation, but again, that has nothing to do with what Venezuelaâ(TM)s government is doing.
Hello from Australia.
Minimum wage here is $16.37 AUD ($15.23 USD).
Seems pretty prosperous.
VZ is a trial balloon for the US government, they can pull stunts which are less bad than down there, and they seem like JP Morgan.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Comes with an activation fee, requiring an online activation of the set involving contacting the manufacturer's activation partner to purchase a turn-on code, after purchased from the store, payable in Bitcoins.
With a rebate available, upon submisison of the receipt showing the dollar amount actually paid for the set.
That's dinner impressive word salad there. You forgot the randomly capitalIzed words...
He forgot to add: " If you like your current TV set, you can keep your current TV set. "
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Maybe that's got more to do with having vast mineral wealth, a robust diversified economy, and a well-educated hard-working population than it a wage floor on the books.
Venezuela sells oil to the world and receives US dollars in exchange. Dollars are NOT freely available for the common citizen. They are granted through much bureaucratic processes (institutions named CADIVI, SICAD and so on). Foreign exchange controls have set an official rate of 6,3 BsF per 1 US dollar, which are hardly obtainable as previously mentioned. A black market that widely operates outside the foreign exchange controls have set the price at around almost TEN times that amount (60,00 BsF as of today). Since Venezuela's inflation rates are going through the roof, people want to protect their money by obtaining dollars instead. Small businesses have imported goods using black market dollars [again, dollars are seldom available to the common folk], thus having to inflate prices ten times to protect their investments. This workaround upset the government and a crackdown ensued. Thus, many of these businesses are forced to sell at ludicrously low prices and subsequently shut down for good. Protip: there's a hefty election day in less than a month. With a raging food shortage that has been going on for many months, this was seen as a populist move to turn the balance back on their favour at the expense of dozens of legit businesses that got caught in this loop. Greetings from warm, sunny, and recently HDMI'zed Venezuela.
> Every day in Saudi Arabia
The Saudi regime doesn't act like crazy paranoid nutbags out to get us or out to convince their own citizens that we are out to get them.
That does alter the equation a bit.
As far as "atttacks on Venezeula" go, I see much more of that in European news sources as American ones just tend to ingore Venezeula and leave them to their self inflicted misery.
If anything, you're the frothing bigot here distorting reality by whatever means necessary to justify your little hate-gasm.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In the western world, the more TV you watch, the more likely you are to be a poor person. Ever wonder why the ads for TV during the daytime hours are either focused on the elderly, for the unemployed or people collecting disability? Despite how poor people get in the western world, they still find a way to scrape up enough money to pay the cable bill.
Prosperity can, in fact, be legislated (I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
But you certainly don't do it by basically taking all goods currently present in the country, and splitting them equally among everyone, all while printing money.
Destruction caused by the nature is more devastating than the destruction caused by the human being.
Yes, because it's been such a disaster in the countries that have implemented it.
The UK, Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand - some of the many countries that have set minimum wage at $10+ an hour. And many of those countries have socialist healthcare too! Scandalous!!
I like massages with happy endings, and my guess is that so do 150 million other Americans.
"His name was James Damore."
Free-market/Austrian economics predicts that inflationary expansion of fiat currency inevitably results in government implementation of price controls. We are just conditioned to see the Venezuelan version as ridiculous whereas the 'Murican version is far, far more damaging.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
And you are praying that it happens in the USA, just so you can say that the first black president ruined America. Your fellow tea baggers are doing their best to make it a self fulfilling prophecy.
Exactly. It's like saying Saudi Arabia is prosperous. Not to mention Australia is in the middle of the mother-of-all property bubbles right now.
Except Australia could be doing better, in particular the poor. Here's a quick recap of studies by Stossel on minimum wage in Australia. I also recommend you check out the Roy Morgan polls and studies regarding unemployment and under-employment in Australia.
Quote:
In a 2004 study published in the Australian Economic Review, economist Andrew Leigh looked at what happened after Western Australia increased its minimum wage compared to the rest of Australia.
He found: "Relative to the rest of Australia, the [percentage of people employed] in Western Australia fell following each of six [minimum wage] rises." (Study here [1], update here [2].)
Another Australian economist, John Humphrey, summarizes [3] the findings this way:
"[Leigh found] that for each 1 percent increase in the minimum wage we can expect... [to lose] 96,000 jobs" in Australia.
[1] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum%20Wages%20(AER).pdf
[2] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum_wages_reply.pdf
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4064106.html
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
I don't think he was suggesting that the minimum wage was responsible for prosperity. He was merely pointing out that a (reasonable) minimum wage doesn't inevitably destroy prosperity the way the OP suggested it did.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Minimum wage is a bit of a weird thing economically. In the standard way of thinking it punishes the poor because they're unable to generate enough revenue to justify the minimum wage and thus go unemployed. In practice it tends to work differently since employers hiring bottom level employees aren't calculating the additional revenue as much as they're looking to fill a hole in their business.
They'll generally pay whatever is required, within reason, to fill that position. If the minimum wage goes up all those people at the bottom get a raise. If necessary prices go up as well and you get some inflation to compensate but the main effect is a mild wealth transfer to the poor.
I stole this Sig
Didn't Sony stop making plasma TVs some time ago?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
at least not sane ones.
Before you make that claim, shouldn't you at least check with both of them first?
The US has those things. If Australia can prosper with (in spite of?) a high minimum wage, why not the US?
SeaTac isn't a state, you dumb fucker. It's an airport. The minimum wage hike does not apply to the entire state of Washington. Please stop fucking dogs long enough to find your glasses and read your own link.
A minimum wage doesn't destroy prosperity but it doesn't create it either. A minimum wage simply raises the price of all goods and services, nullifying its intended benefit [of raising the living standards of the lower to lower-middle class]. Think someone working for minimum wage can afford property in Sydney? Ever compared the cost of goods and services there to the USA? Or compared the prices of US cities with a high minimum wage, such as San Francisco? (even before the tech boom).
It's gonna get nasty and violent. The wealth WILL be redistributed. And the longer it takes the worse it will be.
Should be entertaining at least. Hope i see it in my lifetime.
Yes, the wealth will be redistributed... those with more power will acquire more wealth. When the inequality gets too large, the people currently with a lot of power will discover that they now have none... and a new group will rise to take their place.
A nation with equally distributed wealth is a nation with no power or incentive. Humans abhor a power vacuum.
Muppets on all sides of this one... smash and grab from Best Buy, and by extension the economy on one side, and destroying the environment and the middle class on the other. Extremism, tribalism and simplistic catchphrases are the enemy here.
You can only legislate more fair income distribution. That's actually the only purpose of taxes.
I've been thinking /. posters are dumber than average people for years. I think that statment proves it.
Don't debate idiots, they bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. This guy is a top tier idiot.
1. gov't can print as much money as it wants to pay for services it provides (army, etc.), which
2. causes money supply to increase above GDP, which
3. devalues money in hand, which
4. drives inflation, which
5. causes people to spend, spend, spend and the rich will move their money into other assets, which
6. results in only the poor using the currency, which
7. results in poor wealth redistribution
The solution is taxes, to cut inflation, thus increasing confidence in the currency, thus allowing for better wealth distribution than pure inflation spiral (which is still better than deflationary spiral with finite resources, like gold)
Perhaps the only retard is yourself, not realizing why government *has* taxes. And perhaps you are the orignal parent hiding behind AC with that terrible poast that minimum wage increase is same as price controls?? Because that was a rather dumb poast.
I am also not debating you. I am educating you. Though you may be resistant to concepts of abstract thought.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or ... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
I make it, the government gets it.
More like you make it, your employer takes 50%, your insurance takes 10%, the government takes 10%, and your wife gets the rest.
In 30 years, current Venezuela will be held as the prime example of how they ran a thinly-veiled dictatorship while the rest of the world looked the other side and refused to call a spade a spade. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where critics of the government never appear on live, unedited TV. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the president forcefully takes control of the media airwaves every day. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the government openly threatens its workers with dismissal if they're found to be voting "for the counter-revolution". It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the next election day (Dec.8) has been officially declared "Day of Fealty to Chavez".
um.. you do realize what would happen shortly thereafter right? Hint: it's not the radiant socialist utopia you're hoping for.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or ... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
I understand and have sympathy for that argument. But in practice even a free employee needs things like paperwork, supervision, and co-workers. An employee so unproductive as to not justify the minimum wage could easily cause negative revenue.
There's a reason not every business accepts unpaid interns, lowering/eliminating the minimum wage probably won't make an appreciable dent in unemployment.
I stole this Sig
The problem with debating this in terms of the minimum wage is that the value of money isn't a constant. An argument which works when the currency has a certain value might not work when the currency has a different value, even if the minimum wage stays exactly the same.
If you want to see what's really going on, you have to look at the wage in terms of individual productivity. If the minimum wage is significantly lower than the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising the minimum wage will increase the country's overall productivity (an income distribution which is more proportional to individual productivity results in fewer people wasting money on extravagances like gold toilet seats). But if the minimum wage is close to the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising it will simply result in their jobs disappearing. An employer would lose money hiring a worker because he'd end up paying the worker more money than he got back in terms of productivity.
While I do think the U.S. minimum wage is too low, this is the crucial aspect those arguing for a "living wage" as the minimum wage are missing. Raise the minimum wage beyond a certain point and you don't magically create wealth for the working poor. You simply put them out of work (and the average wage goes up because these people disappear from the denominator). For the minimum wage to work while keeping the lowest-wage workers in a job, it has to remain slightly lower than the productivity generated by those workers. Otherwise an employer is simply better off not hiring them. If that productivity is below what would be considered a "living wage", then you have to choose between paying them less than a living wage, or not giving them a job at all.
and arson was pointing out that people like chavez are the result of socialist/government corruption gone too far... and the majority of libertarians do NOT take fox news seriously. The ones who do are the neo-conservatives.
I just checked my Daka "Black Friday" flyer ads and I didn't see what kind of deals I can get. Does anyone know?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Whether they are or are not is a separate issue from whether the government should be involved in (re)distributing/forcing its preferred option at taxpayer expense.
No true scotsman... Seems like most socialist governments cross the corruption line pretty quickly.. This is because too much power is centralized in one place. In fact, one thing keeping the USA from collapsing into a venezuela tomorrow is the fact the power is distributed across the fortune 100, which are hashing it out with the federal government with the left hand while shaking hands with the (neo)right.
The Australian property situation is concerning, and rather depressing if you're looking to get into the market. But to call it the "mother-of-all property bubbles" isn't fair. It's nothing on the Japanese asset bubble in the early '90s, and probably not as bad as what's going on in HK now.
As by Chuck Chunder (21021) points out above:
I don't think he was suggesting that the minimum wage was responsible for prosperity.
He was merely pointing out that a (reasonable) minimum wage doesn't inevitably destroy prosperity the way the OP suggested it did.
I will take time to read those links this weekend.
I'm not in any doubt that increases in the minimum wage decrease available jobs - but there's obviously a point where a wage is not a tennable position, where even if a person was to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, they would not be able to support themselves, let alone improve their education and options.
At this point, the options for said worker seem to be either a) Welfare, b) Enforce a minimum wage, or c) Let the worker die slowly of starvation.
Since c) doesn't work out well for anyone involved, due to people wanting to not die slowly of starvation and resorting to crime instead, western countries have tended to some combination of a) and b). I'd like to see an option d), but I suspect one doesn't exist, which is why we make do with imperfect solutions and the various follow on effects.
They're sock puppets for her political (and perhaps psychosexual) theories.
As we can plainly see, they are not theories any more. They are apparently a how-to manual.
I know that sucking Ayn Rand's pole
You may want to do a little more research on who SHE was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
About the wonders of socialism. About the mandated cheap TVs, then quickly the lack of TVs.
Venezuela has been in a war with well, not exactly the USA since they started resisting the empire. After the overthrow failed and other conventional political attacks they migrated to banking and economic warfare.
It doesn't matter how clever the government of Venezuela is, they can't be smart enough to defend against everything. They were able to outwit the USA against the previous classic attacks; but their strength has not been in administrating and economics. If they did... then the type of attack would switch again.
I'm not sure how one combats the massively powerful international banking cartel and all the other aligned forces.
Only thing is it's not getting more unequal. Income maybe, but income doesn't equal wealth. Wealth has actually been spreading in the US, but not thanks to any government, rather thanks to capitalism. Government has actually been slowing that down in the form of tariffs, wage floors, and price controls.
- Tariffs increase the cost of goods and reduce domestic production (imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another - this has been empirically proven numerous times.)
- Wage floors increase unemployment and reduce purchasing power of the poor by making goods they buy more expensive. (A poor person is more likely to balk at a tomato rising in price from $.60 to $1 in order to make up for increased labor costs than Bill Gates would, and the poor person is also now less likely to be able to find a job. See the lump of labor.)
- Price controls restrict supply and artificially create scarcity of wealth (lines at the gas pump in the 70's.)
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Anyways, we'll see the result of what happens in Venezuela. I think what's going to happen is they are creating a very bad situation of the first and third item I described that governments can do to reduce the distribution of wealth: Since shops in Venezuela are required to sell at prices well below their worth in the actual exchange rate, they'll be effectively forbidden from importing goods. The result will be fewer material goods in the country, which means that as these goods break and depreciate, the poor will become even less wealthy.
If things turn out the way I'm pretty sure they are (their bonds have already collapsed as a direct result of this, by the way) then I'd hope you'll see why your war against the 1% is a pretty bad idea. Sure, they'll lose their wealth, but you'll lose a lot more than that. You'll get to declare that you won a war, but you'll be permanently much worse off than when you started it.
If I'm wrong, well then, viva la revolucion.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Hey Loser - instead of complaining about the rich, why don't you get off your fat ass and get rich yourself - oh wait, that takes intelligence, a work ethic, a willingness to sacrifice some of the "me" stuff - like beer, sports tickets (only 4 payments of $49.95 for NFL Sundays!), dirt bikes and other `toys`, so the money can be invested. Instead, you bitch about how the rich have more than their 'fair share' of all those things you don't have and won't get up off the couch to earn. The "rich" already pay more than their fair share of taxes to support your lazy ass; and the nice thing about money is that it is easy to move (to a different state, or a different country if need be) - so fuck your 99%. I was one, but I got better...
Yes, those jobs and more don't exist anymore in the US. Remember movie theater ushers who would escort you to your seats?
You mean the way the Venezuelan government is providing food, shelter and health care (and TVs!) to their citizens?
Yes, theirs definitely seems to be a model shaping up nicely...
Jesus Howard Christ, Democrats are stupid.
You do realize, of course, that minimum wage is a price control on labor.
We already have abolished the minimum, for all intents and purpose. They're called illegal immigrants, they work for less than min wage, and it has resulted in tens of millions of jobs.
And does the Australian minimum wage earner have twice the lifestyle of a US minimum wage worker? Does the number really matter or is it what the money buys? Look at all the Zimbabwean trillionaires. That country should be a paradise, right?
How about option e) where the worker learns new skills, which leads to a job above minimum wage.
Australia makes 20% of GDP from mining. They are selling their future on truckload at a time. When the mining dries up, then what?
Also, take a look at the price of ipads across the world. Australia is 20% more expensive than the US. And that isn't limited to IPADs. It is most everything.
Finally, the minimum wage noted is for those over 21. For those under 21, it's less. A 17 year old, for example, is $9.46. Consider the cost of goods is 20% higher in AUS than the US, that means our minimum wage high school worker does better.
In the US, the median income for a person with a high school education is $35,000. That works out to $17.50/hour. A PhD is about 2.5X that. Overall, seems pretty fair.
This would be the mother of all property bubbles that sees the price of housing still below its peak from 7 years ago despite a rising population and a collapse in construction of new homes?
There is no property bubble in Australia. Saving rates are at their highest in 25 years. Real wages have continue to grow. The economy is doing it tougher than it was during the 2000s pre GFC but it is far from broken.
Pssssh, plebe. I'm a multi-hundred-trillionaire.
Maduro said a group of embassy officials that his government had been following for months was "dedicated to meeting with the Venezuelan extreme right, to financing it and feeding its actions to sabotage the electrical system and the Venezuela economy." ... The last time Venezuela expelled US diplomats was on 5 March, when it ejected two military attaches for allegedly trying to destabilise the nation. That move came several hours before Maduro announced that Chavez had died of cancer.
Obviously our embassy rejected the accusations as unfounded, but considering our government's long track record in the region, their word isn't exactly worth much.
....as they do in North Korea. And then government provided tablets with bolivarian internet. We know the rest of the story.
For the record, this is exactly what socialists DO.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
The minimum wage for youth in Australia is $7.74 AUD for 16 year olds up to $16.00 AUD for 21 year olds. Also apprentices in Australia earn less than the $16.37 AUD wage as well.
I'm trying to think of a well-run, successful, wealthy, free country with a black leader... ...well, surely there's one somewhere... ...bummer, dude.
I'm pretty sure that ruining things is one area where black people don't need any help from Whitey.
Not really.
For some of the domestic stuff those are mostly jobs that would not have existed otherwise (though I'm not sure if it's expected for minimum wage to apply to 'odd jobs' anyways). But for farming the fruit would still get picked, it would just get picked by more mechanized and higher priced labour. The jobs would still be there, the food would simply get a bit more expensive.
I stole this Sig
If you keep the minimum wage low enough (relative to the rest of the economy), it won't destroy prosperity. It also won't really have much of an effect. As you raise it, you'll get more and more negative consequences.
There is no evidence that a minimum wage helps people at any level. The best one can say about it is that it may not do harm if it's low enough.
The food will rise in price, but the jobs might not be there.
Once, wheat was harvested by hand, now it is done by machine. What once took 2 days for 1 man to do, a modern combine can do in about 8 minutes.
McDonalds has been looking into automatic burger machines, they would complely replace the staff in the back from having to cook and assemble the burgers.
At $7.25/hr, it makes sense to use humans for that.
At $15/hr, it might well be worth installing machines to replace some of those jobs. If they replace just 4 jobs per McDonalds with new machines, that is tens of thousands of jobs lost across the country.
What if half of the fast food restaurants swapped out a few workers each for machines?
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/
There are other ways to pick fruit and other ways to cook food, not all involve hiring people.
Those people protesting for higher pay would be wise to keep that in mind.
There will certainly be some labour reduction via mechanization but the same mechanization often creates new jobs in other fields. And the unemployed people either take those new jobs or the jobs vacated by the people who took those new jobs.
I stole this Sig
That's the sort of reasoning that underlies minimum wage, but there's little evidence it works that way. Individual small businesses making short term plans may "pay whatever is required". That's because businesses don't optimize perfectly and instantly. Long term, however, they do.
European grocery stores already don't have baggers or shopping cart attendants. Raise the cost of hiring further, and you're going to see more self-checkout. Go even higher, and grocery stores are going to move to RFID checkout. Even higher, and they are going to go to stores based on fully robotic warehousing systems.
In the end, it's cheaper for most businesses to (1) either have customers do part of the work (whose time is cheaper than that of a full time employee), or (2) to automate. You don't help people by creating incentives for eliminating their jobs.
free yourself of its tyranny!
And frankly, the people losing their jobs to this? They aren't going to be building or maintaining the machines that replace them, if they could, they wouldn't be working at McDonalds.
If the people at McDonalds had any other job options, they would already be doing that. They are generally working for minimum wage due to a lack of other choices, not because they want to be.
AU$1.85 for a loaf of bread
AU$0.99 for a litre of milk
This is in Townsville, a northern city ~2000km from the markets in our state capital. Can't remember other prices, but a Danish girl I knew said there was a bewildering array of brands here compared with anywhere else in the world she had been, which seemed quite strange given the size of my city.
I've been told that the price of generic computer hardware and electronics isn't bad here either, although the US companies seem to want to charge a premium, even for software sold directly over the internet (this was recently a story on Slashdot)... why is anyones guess.
So you're saying having no minimum wage would lower prices? Sweden has no minimum wage, and prices there are pretty ridiculous.
can you do the same thing up here to them... pretty please?
Now they just need to provide cheap bread...
I guess you could easily offer everyone some basic level of prosperity. A set of clothes once per year, free cheap meals, a mattress in some warm place. Actually every western country already does that, AND MORE. It's just done in indirect way. ANd by wasting way more resources for it than would actually be necessary.
Could you tell me more about the ZX thing you mentioned?
So basically, you want to steal money from other people because you want their money without their efforts?
Because when the minimum wage is so low that it only just or does not even cover rent and food, then the worker doesn't have the time or energy to learn new skills.
Go work twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, for months at a time, while still keeping the rest of your life running, and then tell me when and how you're going to study. Add in the risk of taking out a student loan for something that may be useless, and/or not having the connections to leverage that education, and suddenly getting education looks like a stupidly big risk.
But fuck, you probably live in a nice middle class suburb, with a gigantic army of friends and family to fall back on if Shit Goes Wrong. Maybe you clawed your way up from nothing, and if you did - good for you! But, if you did - I bet you had help. I would bet my entire bank account that if that's you, you owe people a thousand favours for everything from unpaid childcare, to introducing you to the right people, to that guy who you a chance, when your accent and miniscule CV said that you were probably a bad bet.
Don't get me wrong, that charity is awesome - the willingness to help other people out makes me believe in the human race, that we might not be completely fucked - but to rely on that, to tell someone whose struggling on the poverty line to rely on that charity - literally the kindness of strangers, the _chance_ that someone _might_ help them out, and fuck them if the dice rolls against them, when the alternative is to simply pay them a fucking decent living wage in the first place?
Fuck that noise. If you believe in relying on mere luck, and leaving people to die in your own goddamn country just because they were unlucky - then you're a fucking psychopath and need to be locked up.
Lol. Once again the "starting wars for oil" fiction.
Socialism is a lie. The fact that Sweden and other Scandinavian countries are doing better than you is an illusion. They're just evil commies. Can't be doing better. The market will serve freedom better than any government can make. All hail freedom! Market freedom! Nobody was ever oppressed by being poor, they were just lazy!
State run stores were selling the same products for 1/5th the price. The excuses about exchange rate issues seem dubious because those stores would have been in the same situation. People were upset about being fleeced, and the government is there to serve them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't interrupt this with facts.
For the Aussie minimum wage earner I'd say the free medical care, low taxes that they get, that's a good start. The unemployment benefit is an added bonus if your income is that low you can still get it.
Not that the unemployment benefit has kept pace with the price of living, or even the old age pension.
State run stores were selling the same products for 1/5th the price. The excuses about exchange rate issues seem dubious because those stores would have been in the same situation. People were upset about being fleeced, and the government is there to serve them.
This makes no sense. No one was forced to buy a product at 5 times the price offered elsewhere. More likely, the state run store advertises a bogus 'official price' for a product, but *unfortunately* never has any available at that price.
I'm hoping my state creates an auto store that advertises Ferrari's for $10,000. Of course they will never have any for that price. But they can use the power of the state to make my local Ferrari dealer sell me the last ones they will ever have to me for that price. Yes we can!!
This seems relevant to your question. Perhaps they're just following the example of the US of A...
Time for businesses to go out of business there and stop selling completely.
Then the government *cough* black market *cough* can step in.
If you're a socialist, the right way to get 90" plasma screens is to go to the UN and get it written up as a human right...
Ok question, why would anyone buy from these retailers at 5x the price? Why would not everyone just go to the state store and get their TV for 1/5 the cost? How do you explain this?
I wonder, where is the American left. Sean Penn where are you to defend Maduro ?
Periodic examples of Leftist despotism are useful demonstrations of why extreme Left-wing (sorry, TPers, the US Democratic Party is Rightist by global standards) governments are bad.
The US should stay out of this one other and exercise the "popcorn option" lest it anoint the despot with the gift of Yanqui Opposition.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Most people making below minimum wage are effectively trainees, or live with their parents, or use the job as a second job or second income in a family. They don't need to get enough money from a job to "live a reasonable life without government subsidy". By imposing a minimum wage, you simply take away job opportunities that they would otherwise have had.
Of course we will. And then other jobs will be below-living-wage jobs. Web design and PC maintenance, for example, will likely become the equivalent of baggers and cart handlers.
"We" should simply stop trying to impose price controls; they pretty much always hurt.
If these people could be getting better jobs, they would already be getting them. Most of them are inexperienced and need a job history and experience before they can get better paying jobs, and that opportunity exactly what you destroy by imposing "living wages".
... with other people's money is a time-honored political ploy. This is just a more obvious example than the usual.
It doesn't nullify anything. It allows the lowest earners to afford the necessities. Increase in minimum wage only makes nominal changes to prices.
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
This is ridiculous cherrypicking.
By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
I don't know what minimum wage Zimbabwe had, but it could have been $30,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars per hour.
...to succeed on their own?
There's no legitimate study that proves raising the minimum wage does anything but cause low (normal) inflation. Prices are high in SF because demand is high and costs are high, like in any other large population center. Minimum wage is raised in SF because low income workers would be unable to live in the area. A 2 hour commute in each direction to work at a gas station is economically impossible.
At this point, the options for said worker seem to be either a) Welfare, b) Enforce a minimum wage, or c) Let the worker die slowly of starvation.
Since c) doesn't work out well for anyone involved, due to people wanting to not die slowly of starvation and resorting to crime instead, western countries have tended to some combination of a) and b). I'd like to see an option d), but I suspect one doesn't exist, which is why we make do with imperfect solutions and the various follow on effects.
Option d) has existed for a long time, and in some cases is tied in with your reason for choosing a) and b). In communist countries, they kill the starving masses before they have a chance to turn to crime (or revolt).
Increasing minimum wage typically causes some inflation, but not of the same order as the minimum wage increase itself. Australia has higher prices than the US, but the minimum wage is still higher in purchasing power as well (not twice, but still by a good 50%).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
I'm sure the people running the American auto manufacturers into the dirt over the last 50 years had nothing to do with ruining the city. Or even if they did, they were probably Democrats too.
How is the cost of living?
Very high, isn't it. Think these things may have something to do with each other?
http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/cost-of-living-rankings
http://m.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/cost-of-living-in-australia-is-among-the-highest-in-the-world/story-fni0cx12-1226677641006
Why, you'd almost think that high minimum wage gets absorbed by how expensive everything has become - even domestically-sourced things like rent or meat.
Prosperity comes from innovation, entrepreneurs, and hard work. And, a government/marketplace friendly to them. Never from an enforced cost structure. See also: Germany, 1950 - 1991.
Extremism, tribalism and simplistic catchphrases
What's scary is those same traits seem to be at work in the US as well.
I can't wait for Obama's term to end so people will maybe stop trying to twist every political discussion into something about racism.
There, you now have the basic jist infecting you.
A minimum wage simply raises the price of all goods and services, nullifying its intended benefit [of raising the living standards of the lower to lower-middle class].
Sort of, but not quite.
By putting a floor on the cost of employing the lowest rung of workers (small businesses are exempt, as are those working on commission/tipped) you raise the cost of everything that involves employing the very poor. So the CEO has to pay more for his cleaning maid, as well as most people that buy things made by minimum-wage factory workers. The effects are far-reaching, but the burden isn't solely on those receiving minimum wage. That is: If anyone earning above minimum wage buys anything from companies employing the minimum wage earners, it's a net gain for the minimum wage earners, ideally.
Without minimum wage laws, do you really think it would be significantly cheaper to live in NY?
Perhaps they, the vast majority of them employed, well educated, middle class individuals concerned about their country, or hard working college students worried about whether they'll be able to find a job after leaving school, didn't foresee the media finding the few exceptions and having all portrayed as a bunch of unemployed neo-hippies?
I'm sorry, I tend to read - like about the demographics of the actual participants - before forming opinions. It's a terrible habit and I need to stop it.
Why the hell would Chinese shops prefer won?
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by hiring productive workers to figure out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
FTFY. Unless you've got examples of rich guys that actually, you know, do productive work.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Maybe, Jeff Bezos has a buddy in the real Amazon. If they can't buy brick and mortar TVs, then ship 'em in.
I bet you want to tell me about death panels in Obamacare too, ay?
As FDR said, "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
Why the hell would you think otherwise? Just what the hell did your mother do to you as a child? If you work full-time, and we can debate how to define full-time if you want, you ought to be paid enough to have a roof over your head, food on the table, means to transport yourself, health insurance and a little left over for some entertainment.
If you don't work hard enough, if you aren't deserving, you should be fired. Businesses that rely on this modern slave labor system of paying effectively nothing, putting their employees on food stamps, etc. ought to die. They're a fucking drain.
Or how many households decided only one parent really needed to work. Less feral children, talk about something that is sure to benefit everyone.
There's more to these numbers than you would have us believe.
Many Americans and Europeans may have trouble with the idea of "official" and "real" exchange rates. You can go in to any bank and purchase or sell currency, you can trade larger amounts on foreign exchange markets. You find the price never varies much place to place at a given time, because you can always go elsewhere. If Citibank wants more for Euros than Deutsche Bank, well you can buy them from Deutsche Bank even if you are in America. The currencies truly float, their value against each other varying all the time based on trading.
This is not the case in a place with a fixed currency like Venezuela. The government says "You can buy X amount of our currency for Y amount of foreign currency," with the foreign currency usually being US Dollars. Ok, easy enough to understand, and generally the government is happy to sell you as much of their currency as you want at that rate. The problem is when you try to go the other way. The government won't buy their currency back and give you dollars. In and of itself that makes sense, governments generally sell their currency to other people, they don't buy it back, since they are the ones who generate and control it.
So you say ok, well I'll sell that currency on the foreign exchange markets. Ahh well here's where your problem comes in: Those markets don't value the currency the same as the government that sold it does. You have to give them a whole lot more of it to get the same amount of dollars (or other currency). So you have two rates: The real one and the official one. The real one being the rate things actually trade for on markets.
Well government who implement currency controls don't like this. That is why they are implementing currency controls, to try and fix prices (it doesn't work, but they are still trying). Hence they usually restrict or ban trading like this. That then of course leads to a black market, where things are even higher, since the people involved are skirting the law.
This is just the kind of thing that happens with fixed currencies/price controls. While it might seem to be workable internally, it doesn't work on a global scale since other countries don't value your currency the same and they don't sell goods directly in your currency.
Everything seems prosperous when you're in growing bubble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB5ihHGsm2o
ayottesoftware.com
As the cost of technology falls those jobs are gone anyway. Minimum wage just affects the calculus. Low wages (both as percentage of productivity per hour, and in real dollars) cripple demand. Where demand leads supply will follow, with fewer jobs and lower wages. Minimum wage isn't a magic bullet, but (in the US) 75% of worker productivity is not retained by the worker.
Uhh, the cost of housing and property probably drives the high prices in SF and NYC as much or more than the high minimum wages -- the minimum wage earners aren't driving up the prices of office rentals and retail space -- the people making much higher wages than minimum are...
You're perhaps not wrong as such but your standards of measure are so ridiculous as to make your assertions meaningless. Cell phone, tv and pc? Obvious consumerist items benefiting more from tech advance and chinese slavery than wealth increase. How about home ownership, birth weight and savings. Those are actually sober measures and the US has declined at an outrageous rate in those measures except perhaps for home ownership through the government deregulation of banks. That has turned out well hasn't it? I suspect that if home ownership was pro rated based on the amount of actual equity of the homeowner then that measure would show a decline as well.
(I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
This amounts to a tautology, as "minarchist" in the common use excludes anarchists, and the state monopoly over defensive force is pretty much the only element separating minarchists from anarchists. There are plenty of libertarians who recognize that private property can be protected in the absence of governments through private security and arbitration; they just aren't considered minarchists.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
My point was that the vast majority of people, including most libertarians, do agree that government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity. I'll grant you that it could have been worded better.
Anarcho-capitalists are such a tiny minority, and their concepts are so obviously utopian, that I'm not concerned about not giving them their due.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Actually, it was not the very rich who did that - all of us did. If you work for a living, and you do something productive, than you contribute to that. It's the rank and file workers who create wealth, not the people owning the companies. The latter mostly just get rich by pocketing a significant part of that wealth.
So, no, trying to reduce said pocketing is not going to ruin the economy or to make it produce less. What does ruin the economy is when you start treating it as a basket that is magically filled by invisible gnomes, and goods can be taken out and redistributed at will with no accounting whatsoever, which is precisely what they're now doing in Venezuela.
Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity
Even if true (and I'm not saying it is), that is hardly "legislating prosperity". That would only be removing one of many possible obstacles to prosperity. The actual prosperity is created by the people, not the law. At best the law reduces the likelihood that someone other than the government will get away with destroying whatever prosperity you've managed to create.
(The fact that many people persist in thinking it necessary to have government protect property rights, when governments are, by a large margin, the greatest violators of property rights around, is truly awe-inspiring. No lesser thief could brazenly take half your income year after year with no fear for the consequences.)
An example of attempting to legislate prosperity would be the minimum wage or the proposal for a basic income. You can legislate people money but you can't legislate them wealth. The more freely you hand out money, the less it's worth.
P.S. That word "utopian", it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Anarcho-capitalists are well aware that a society without government would not be perfect, any more than any other society can be said to be perfect. We don't even necessarily believe that an aggression-free society is an achievable goal. We simply refuse to legitimize aggression, which would contribute to the imperfection. What we find inexplicable is how others manage to justify to themselves the idea that there is any legitimacy at all in harming those who have not harmed them first. That's really all there is to our position: if someone hasn't harmed you, and doesn't want to get involved with you, leave them well enough alone!
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Go work twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, for months at a time, while still keeping the rest of your life running, and then tell me when and how you're going to study. Add in the risk of taking out a student loan for something that may be useless, and/or not having the connections to leverage that education, and suddenly getting education looks like a stupidly big risk.
But fuck
Look, if I'm too busy to study, I'm too busy to do that. Plus, ew.
Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
I see it as an assumption that the lowest income workers don't have the bargaining power to receive a fair wage, so the government steps in and makes sure they get that wage. I also see it as a moral belief that if you work full time you should be able to afford to support yourself.
I stole this Sig
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
It is when you add the "right to work" to the picture.
On the other hand, we've been saying that people who don't work should get unemployment benefits, so long as they are looking for a job (but can't find it). So you are guaranteed either these, or minimum income. Which, again, is a basic income guarantee for all practical purposes.
If you include long term unemployment benefits I suppose that does become a basic income guarantee, and it's something I wouldn't mind though I'm not sure they are a necessary pairing particularly since minimum wage should be higher than the unemployment for the bottom workers.
I stole this Sig
In the US, minimum wage doesn't preclude employer paid health care, people making minimum wage often pay close to ZERO taxes in the US, and the get unemployment too. So again, do Aussie min wage earners live twice the lifestyle that US min wage earners do? Does the concept of buying power mean anything?
You mean like Steve Jobs hiring Steve Wozniak? As I recall, both of them became rich.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
One thing to keep in mind is that as things have been progressing, usually in America we replace things before they're actually beyond their useful life. For example, I just got rid of a 55" bottom up projection TV I had from 14 years ago. It still works fine and even works as intended by design - I just didn't want it anymore. People do this all the time with their computers as well.
In cases like this, you can safely measure it in terms of how much you paid for it over how long you actually used it. When things like that are cheap, then your purchasing power is high. That is what we currently have in terms of homes in most areas, actually, whether you rent or own. Areas like New York are expensive, but they've always been expensive because so many people actually want to live there. People there live paycheck to paycheck not because they are forced to, but because they choose to. If you want to live that lifestyle, it's going to cost you.
If you think the prices for rent are oppressive there, just go somewhere else where you can live within your means. I'd like to live in Florida myself, and you can buy real estate cheap there. I'm actually wanting to move to Australia myself, but the purchasing power there isn't very good. Sure, they have a $15 an hour minimum wage, but stuff is so expensive there as a result of that wage that it is hard for even those of higher wages to afford stuff, and likewise it can even be hard to import luxury goods there. Case in point: (read the comments from those who actually live there)
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/2153223/ask-slashdot-package-redirection-service-for-shipping-to-australia
I think it's much easier to live on $7 minimum wage in the US than $15 minimum wage in Oz. They are a perfect example of why wage floors don't accomplish their goals and instead make things worse. Though so long as I land a good enough job prior to arrival it won't bother me as I try not to let politics influence my decision on where I live.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
Could be, but is it only fatcats that live in rural areas, or only fatcats that traveled between states using roads? As I recall, the first transcontinental railroad was a private effort that everybody benefited from. Also I know many people in Washington state who would never drive a car to Arizona, instead they opt for the smaller airports that can run as cheap as $50 for a round trip flight - all privately run - compared to using your government built interstate highway system costs much more than that in fuel alone (also forgetting the whole time is money thing, maintenance, and the food needed along the trip.)
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
I think that depends on where you live. For example, I pay $32 a month for 50/10 in Arizona for cable internet. My phone service with t-mobile is $23 a month for completely unlimited everything - or rather, $115 a month after all taxes and fees for 5 lines. Try finding better prices than those in other countries. Canada I already know is much worse. Japan, Australia, and the UK also being more expensive.
Also google fiber is difficult to top, though I don't have that myself.
Let me tell you a little secret about ISP costs: The Telecommunications Workers Union wants to keep them high, and so do local governments (the higher they are, the more tax revenue they get.) In areas where these aren't a factor, broadband prices are cheaper.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient.
I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion. And then there are the Wozniaks of the world. Sure, Woz didn't run the company, but he's one of the 1% that the occupy movement is so eager to declare war on - yet without him, there never would have been an Apple to have invented that ipad that they made a big deal about when another occupier stole it.
I personally don't have any plans to ever strike it rich, rather I tire of people always looking for some nameless face to blame all of life's problems on. If I don't speak up, who will? They can't for the same reason that I can't speak out about why as a white guy I'm not the cause of all of black America's problems. Same shit, different crowd, so many people refuse to take responsibility for themselves its pathetic.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
People aren't earning below the minimum wage (unless they are employed by a company breaking the law) so no they aren't any of those things. You can't pretend that the minimum wage is somehow artificially manipulating the job market when the government is willing to subsidise people with low earnings because the market is already manipulated.
Nearly 20% of UK households receive housing benefit. Nothing like 20% of UK households are entirely unemployed so your world view where the only low paid workers are trainees, living with parents or working for shits and giggles is nothing more than a fiction you seemed to have confused with reality.
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient. I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion.
You need to move one step further and realize that 1) engineer is also a rank and file worker, and 2) the person can be both a productive worker and a rent-seeking capitalist at the same time. Insofar as they are performing managerial, R&D, engineering etc work, they definitely do produce wealth. But above and beyond that, when they get the portion of the company's income out of proportion to their contribution to its wealth production, they are living off other people's labor. This scale is flexible, and tends to go to either extreme depending on company size: in small businesses, even those with hired workers, most of the owner's income is "sweat of the brow", and in large companies, the owners tend to be rewarded grossly disproportionally to their contribution, if any.
This leads to the obvious way of dealing with that disparity: just tax capital gains more - more than "sweat of the brow" income, anyway (and make the tax on the latter completely flat, with basic deductions). Woz and other guys like him, insofar as they are doing great engineering work, they should be rewarded by being paid accordingly. OTOH, some rich guy who's living entirely off dividends on his stocks, he does not contribute much if anything - so let's tax him and use that money for social projects that benefit the people who are creating the wealth that backs those dividends in the first place.
Obviously, I mean "people earning below a proposed minimum wage". Geez, use your head.
I don't know how the UK works, and I really don't care; European economies are so broken that anything is possible.
In the US, the majority of minimum wage earners are younger than 24 yo, have no higher education, and work in food service (where they get supplemental income in tips).
And public benefits / welfare are preferable to a higher minimum wage. A higher minimum wage attempts to place the burden of welfare disproportionately on business employing low-wage workers, and they will simply respond by eliminating jobs and/or passing the costs on. If you want to help low-income people, do it via taxation and redistribution, don't try to sneak it in via these kinds of market manipulations. Of course you know full well that people would likely vote against increasing public assistance financed through higher taxes, which is why people like you engage in this kind of deception.
Steve Jobs was worth an estimated $8.3B in 2010.
Steve Wozniak is estimated to be worth $100M, which is about 1.2% of Jobs' wealth.
My point is made.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Well, another socialist dictator running an economy further in the ground, not, that we didn't see it coupla hundred times...
Somehow, she ends up in all these types of stories. Maybe there is a reason. But, don't expect those who grew up in a bubble of the virtues of Socialism or Collectivism to understand. Their last original thought was right before they were indoctrinated by their Socialist Professors. BTW, Ayn's best book was The Fountainhead. Go into any independent book store and ask for it.
Oh so Woz isn't rich then?
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The point I was making is that being productive is not as lucrative as exploiting the productivity of others.
But let's look at Woz's $100M fortune, then. Did he make most of that money by doing productive work at Apple, or was it instead a result of the astronomical valuation of Apple stock over the many years since 1987 when he last did any work at Apple?
So sure, let's say that Woz making two orders of magnitude less money than his business "partner" nonetheless puts the two of them in the same financial bracket. Then consider that an overwhelming majority of even Woz's money came not from his work at Apple but from financial investments in Apple. Are we saying that holding onto shares of stock is productive work?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Hello from Australia. Minimum wage here is $16.37 AUD ($15.23 USD). Seems pretty prosperous.
Sure, until you want to buy or rent somewhere to live.
Source: Live here too. And http://www.rs.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=sp&s=wa&u=perth
You need to move one step further and realize that 1) engineer is also a rank and file worker
I don't think you realize that management isn't a rent-seeking role or necessarily even a leadership role, rather it is just a job function that keeps the operational and logistical cogs turning, and can in fact be taken up by anybody from time to time.
Bill Gates would be a rank and file worker throughout his entire career at the company under your definition.
When I say rank and file, I'm going by the actual meaning of the term based on its military origins. Somebody like Wozniak rarely involved himself in management (though he certainly partook in many management functions) but he certainly wasn't a rank and file employee. The military definition of the term is quite literally those lower in rank, i.e. those who perhaps haven't been with the company long or haven't really advanced anywhere significant within the company.
If I start my own business and run a one man operation, I'd also be a rank and file employee under your idealism. Reality is that I would be wearing many hats.
when they get the portion of the company's income out of proportion to their contribution to its wealth production, they are living off other people's labor.
That's kind of dumb actually. That would be like you hiring somebody to weed your yard, then suddenly that guy saying "Hey, I think I contribute more to your wealth than you're paying me, so now you must pay me more. Who cares if the other guy will do it for less, you have to pay me anyways, so sayeth the people's revolution."
Really what's happening in that exchange is somebody might be better at weeding yards than you are, so his time spent weeding yards is worth less to him than your time spent weeding your own yard is worth to you. So it works out to your mutual advantage to have him to it instead and you just pay him.
"Rank and file" work within companies works this way.
so let's tax him and use that money for social projects that benefit the people who are creating the wealth that backs those dividends in the first place.
These almost always go into projects that nobody actually wants. I mean who really benefits from NEA funds for example? The christians were pissed about piss christ. It didn't bother me insofar as its message, but I'm trying to figure out why somebody deserves to get paid to piss in a jar with a jesus statue in it when it doesn't have any value that somebody would actually pay for it. I mean really, how does a jesus statue in a jar of piss add to our domestic wealth?
It's just throwing money away. Public works is a better idea in principle, but it too was just a waste. The Keynesians have time and time again been proven wrong throughout history - especially in the 80's when stagflation happened, and under Keynesian theory stagflation is impossible. So they replaced that with New Keynesian theory, which too has been taking continuous beatings as the economy does things that their models never account for.
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I don't think you realize that management isn't a rent-seeking role or necessarily even a leadership role, rather it is just a job function that keeps the operational and logistical cogs turning, and can in fact be taken up by anybody from time to time.
I do - that's precisely why I have been talking about "owners", not "leaders".
Yes, I did mess up the terminology somewhat. You're right that CEO, for example, is not "rank and file", but he still performs managerial functions that do contribute to overall wealth generation. Of course, CEOs today are generally paid well in excess of what they actually produce, and they often also own significant portions of stock, as well. Like I said, this is a smooth scale, it's not binary. For example, most of my income is my wage, but I also own stocks, including dividend-paying stocks - and those dividends are me cashing in on the efforts of people who work for those companies; so, to some extent, I'm also a rent seeker.
Really what's happening in that exchange is somebody might be better at weeding yards than you are, so his time spent weeding yards is worth less to him than your time spent weeding your own yard is worth to you. So it works out to your mutual advantage to have him to it instead and you just pay him.
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced. Note that this is not at all about what is "fair" or "not fair" about compensation goes. The point is that people work to produce a product or a service, and said product or service is then sold for a price higher than the cost of non-labor inputs (material etc). What enables this higher price is the productive labor that went into the product or service, and it is possible to estimate, in theory, how much each worker has contributed - even if it's difficult in practice because the volume of information that needs to be processed is very large. If some person gets a part of that profit margin who has not contributed any effort towards the value increase that made it possible, then the only logical conclusion is that they are leeching off everyone else who did contribute.
These almost always go into projects that nobody actually wants.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
I think that most people will disagree with you here. I don't really see much point in discussing this disagreement, as well, as it is a matter of dogma among libertarians.
Note, though, that my proposed scheme did not talk at all about what the taxes would be spent on, only about how to procure them. The decision on what the government should be paying for is a separate topic, and even if you are a hardline minarchist who believes that the only legitimate government expenses are courts, police and military, it still leaves the question of where the money for those should come from. And I would still stand by my assertion that it makes more sense to tax people more on rent and less on labor, even from the libertarian perspective.
This so called strategy that Maduro is using is not real. The owners of the store are long time collaborators to the regime. The untold story is that this guys sold their inventory and store to the government and left to Panama where they opened a brand new electronic store. On the other hand, Maduro calls the masses to take the store merchandise while being protected by the militaries. Now he comes out with this cheap prices strategy when in reality is just sending a message to the remaining big store owners: Either play with me or that is the fate of your store. Looking at it from the strategy point of view is brilliant but the consequences will be disastrous for the people of Venezuela, my birth country :(
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced.
That's the nice thing about a free market though, is if you don't like your compensation and you are good enough at your job, you can find somebody who will offer what you want. The whole reason most of us take weekends off is because Henry Ford wanted to reduce employee turnover, so he offered incentives beyond pay (which by the way, pay isn't actually a good work incentive, rather if rank and file workers aren't being paid enough then they tend to be more dissatisfied, but raising their pay doesn't raise their satisfaction in most cases) and part of those incentives was a fixed work schedule. It worked extremely well by getting him both the type of employees he wanted and got to keep them. Other employers caught on and soon it became the mainstream.
Now keep that in mind and then keep in mind what happens in a planned economy. In a planned economy, it's pretty much you just do as you're told. Poor saps are often given illusions of everything being perfect when it's all centrally planned, and start their wars against the "bourgeois". Every single time in history when "the people" "the poor" or "the downtrodden" win these wars though, without fail, when their revolutions succeed they always end up worse than before they started that war. This is why I mock the occupy movement for example - they foolishly know not what they ask for. Most of them are very ignorant of history, and are even more ignorant of economics (seriously, pollsters have found them heavily lacking in education.) I'm very much pro free speech so I'm in favor of them being out there, but I'll be ever vigilant in opposing their ideals.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
The interstate highway is probably a good thing, though it's being misused. Remember how it used to be legal to drink at age 18? Sure as shit you're old enough to pay taxes at age 18, but the federal government holds interstate highway funding hostage for any state that doesn't push that age to 21. They do that and similar things with it.
ITER could very well be a waste. Tell me, what do we have to show for it so far?
Public schools are definitely wasteful. Not that I disagree with the idea of publicly funded education - quite the opposite, education is critical for building strong economies - but ours is perhaps the worst managed one there is, and unions are largely to blame. I really like the idea of a voucher system myself - private schools can reject the problem kids (who caused me a ton of grief during my school years, so I have zero sympathy for them) and the problem kids can stay in the public system where they belong. You can't just let the problem kids drag down everybody else with impunity, which unfortunately we allow to happen rampantly, and it needs to stop.
Private schools have been well proven to provide a superior education at a lower cost, so it boggles the mind why some people are so opposed to making them more available to the public. I agree with the concerns about religious schools (I'm very much atheist) but that problem can be solved by denying vouchers to schools that don't meet academic standards in *all* sciences.
On the topic of unions; I'd much prefer European style unions to what we have in the US. In the US, unions ARE rent seeking businesses in the purest form - they don't give a shit about the workers, they just want somebody to collect dues from and then do just the minimum to make the workers think they're on their side. Look at what the teamsters union did to hostess; I don't think forcing them out of business was exactly in the interests of the workers, but the union leadership declared it a victory anyways,
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To clarify, I am not arguing in favor of centralized planning - I lived in the country where such was practiced, so I know how exactly it sucks in practice. I do accept a great deal of Marxist economic analysis, simply because it makes sense - but I don't accept the measures that they propose based on that analysis.
I do approach all kinds of government regulation from a "moderated libertarian" perspective - that is, begin with maximized theoretical freedom - "everything goes" - and then look at the practical effects of that approach and whether they do result in significant problems; then introduce just as much regulation as is necessary to correct those problems, but balancing the limitations it places on personal freedom with the social value of the objectives that it achieves (which may include more practical personal freedom for other people).
Market regulation in a capitalist, from that perspective, is necessary for two reasons. Both stem from the fact that capital is, by definition, "wealth that creates wealth", and therefore its owner can utilize the very fact of said ownership to produce more wealth. Beyond a certain limit (at which point we call the person who is the owner of the assets a "capitalist"), this is basically self-sustaining growth.
Now, this is not an issue per se, but it does mean that capital tends to accumulate in the hands of the few people who already own it. It is possible for a person with no capital to accumulate enough wealth to break into that circle, through a lot of effort and luck (being in the right place at the right time etc), so social mobility is better than it is in e.g. a feudal society, where any rank elevation is "invite only"; but it's still low enough to cause visible stratification into classes.
The first problem that directly stems of said narrow accumulation of wealth is a tendency to form cartels or otherwise monopolizing the market, as Adam Smith has already noted early on. This is natural, since monopolies are virtually always more market efficient (from perspective of people participating in them, of course, not their customers), and so it is rational to seek their formation. However, when there are many small players, the organizational overhead is big enough that monopolization is hard if not outright impossible; OTOH, with relatively few big players, informal agreements are relatively easy to arrange, and monopolization becomes only a matter of time - as we've seen many times in our history. The effect of monopoly is far-reaching - by raising barriers to entry to the market, it also raises barriers to the existing social elevators, further reinforcing stratification and income divide.
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere. Basically, once you have significantly more money than everyone else, there is a motivation to move the political system closer to one-dollar-one-vote. In a representative republic, this is trivial to implement, most obviously by funding elected representatives to pursue your agenda (which also tends to be the most cost efficient method), but also by investing into propaganda, and even outright vote buying. However, an even more cost-efficient way is to ditch democracy altogether, and replace it with an autocratic pro-big-business regime - the pattern that we see time and again in Latin American and African countries in reaction to leftist trends in democratic politics.
There's one more thing, which is not a clearly articulated issue, just something to keep in mind. As is often noted, pure "to everyone according to their need" communism is non-achievable, at least in a scarcity society, because it goes contrary to human nature, as greed is a part of it. What is often ignored, however, is that this same human nature also has some other hardwired behaviors, and one of them is altruism, which includes a desire for "fairness" (there are a number of psychological experiments
That bit of madness has put more in prison...more than the rest of the industrialized world, and primarily black folks. Meanwhile, if you have a blue uniform, you can rape and murder and violate rights and ignore court rulings (like in Boston) with impunity.
Don't oversimplify; correlation and causation are easily confused!
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere.
Actually that doesn't happen in practice. I think you're confusing wealth and money (they are very different things) but when I see, for example, people decry about how some rich folks have trillions hidden in offshore accounts and are therefore "hoarding" wealth, that doesn't hold up.
Money sitting in some offshore account doesn't in any way equate to wealth. It's just a number on a ledger. There was some marxist group a few years ago who released a study indicating that all of this money could end world poverty 4 times over....only it can't actually do that. You see, they based this study purely on government figures that say "if you have at least x money, then you are above poverty" and figured that they could reach that amount four times over with this money.
Perhaps the math works, but there's a big huge hole in that reasoning: Money can't just magically turn into material wealth, it has to be traded. Somebody somewhere has to actually farm food or manufacture useful things. Pulling that money out of those accounts doesn't do that - the fundamental problem of scarce resources hasn't gone away, rather the medium of exchange has expanded. The actual result of that would simply be inflation, or that since there's more money in more people's hands, the money itself would now be worth less, and those government figures about what constitutes poverty would simply rise.
Here's a nifty car analogy: You own a car. Would owning another car exactly like it add to your personal wealth? (presuming you weren't going to sell it or allow anybody else to use it) Not really. Why would you want a second car after you already own one? That concept applies to money as well. Adding more of something one already has plenty of simply brings in diminishing returns of actual worth. This is simultaneously why minimum wages don't increase wealth, and in fact have the opposite effect.
Another consideration to make is how poor people who win the lottery seldom remain rich. The fact is that most people don't know how to manage money. I myself actually live better off than many people who make a fair bit more money than I do, and it's entirely due to how I manage my personal finances.
Unions can be both beneficial and harmful. Their original purpose was to organize workers so that they had bargaining power that was on par with that on their employer when the latter is a major business. When they go beyond that level and monopolize the labor market, they are just as harmful as business monopolies.
That's a common misconception: The very first labor unions were intended to stem the growth of "yellow goods"; goods that were made by "chinamen". This was later extended to stemming the growth of black made goods in order to keep the wages of white people high. The original labor unions were very much rooted in racism. It wasn't until about the 30's that the modern impression of what most people think of as labor unions began, though most of the things that you hear "thank a union" for weren't actually brought about by labor unions (think this list which is just flat out dead wrong for almost all of these, for example Henry Ford started the 5 day 8 hour work week, not labor unions.)
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