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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
We could use some more folks like this here in the states. Instead of Best Buy though we could just empty the 1%ers bank accounts and hang those that resist. Might make some progress
and nothing to wipe their asses with
Don't get sick, fuckers.
I wonder if Juan Valdez got one.
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.
Runaway inflation at its finest, a African country that starts with a "Zed" is a textbook case of this.
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
Food, shelter and health care are necessary for life.
TV sets are necessary only for effective distribution of propaganda.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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).
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!
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/
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.
That they 3an hold session and join in
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.
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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!
Every day in Saudi Arabia, the United States no.1 ally, the worst Crimes against Humanity imaginably are perpetrated against victims of the regime. However, Saudi Arabia is not on Slashdot's "bash this nation" list, any more than the racist terror state known as Israel. But every day here, we expect the owners of Slashdot to find ANY excuse to demonise those nations on Obama's sh*t list, like Cuba, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.
This is supposed to be a site pushing stories of interest to 'nerds', but we now see instead the crudest of political agendas, so ANY excuse is used to justify vile propaganda against the peoples of nations America would love bomb and/or invade. The US war machine grows ever more massive with each passing year, and the US war machine is armed with ever more sickening weapons of total extermination as its budget balloons. At no time in Human History has a major power converted its entire economic and social systems into supporting and lionising its military capabilities without that nation eventually indulging in large scale atrocities against its neighbours. For the USA, its neighbours include every nation on this Earth.
America has carried acts of genocide South of the border on many previous occasions, and without doubt, if a larger series of wars are started across our planet, the USA will launch one of the largest unprovoked attacks in Human History against Venezuela to secure its oil reserves for their war machine. The propaganda against this nation that never ceases in America's mainstream media (and George Soros pseudo independent outlets) is in readiness for that time, grooming American citizens to EXPECT US military action.
How do you feel about Slashdot's owners perverting the purpose of this site to push their political agendas? Clearly many Americans cannot wait for the time when their war machine is fully unleashed upon the World. They cannot understand why you would accumulate 'might' if you do not intend to use that might to destroy and enslave others. Great wars do not happen because one or two powerful monsters inflict them on the rest of us- they happen because the monsters successfully groom a significant chunk of the population to actively anticipate them, and work to gain the passive support of most of the rest.
BTW, Europeans, even those that support America, LOATH with all their hearts America's racist and fascist attitude towards Cuba and South America. When Slashdot attacks Venezuela for instance, most non-Americans see this for the vile despicable racist propaganda it is. Only those Europeans on the ultra-right, who dream of the return of slavery and 'empire', congratulate Americans for attacking Cuba and South America.
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!
> 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?
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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
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).
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".
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.
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
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.
Yes, those jobs and more don't exist anymore in the US. Remember movie theater ushers who would escort you to your seats?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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 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.
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?
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...
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :(
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!