What business hires employees they don't need? If you lay people off because the minimum wage is raised, who takes over the work those people did?
Instead of busboys clearing tables and dishwashers washing them, businesses go to disposable plates and self-cleanup. Instead of baggers, customers bag groceries themselves at stores. Instead of people taking your order, you punch it into a machine yourself. You get the picture.
But then whatever services they provided will be unavailable & someone will jump in & fill that gap
If the price of a service gets to high, people don't use that service anymore. If house cleaning gets too expensive, I buy a cleaning robot or clean less frequently. If lawn care gets too expensive, I get rid of my lawn and replace it with something that doesn't require maintenance. If my tax preparer gets too expensive, I buy software and do it myself. If pizza delivery gets too expensive, I just buy a frozen pizza and make it myself.
People make these calculations every day. Just because money is no object to you doesn't mean others live similarly lavishly or ignorantly.
Orwell, is a democratic socialist. He was criticizing stalin's russia
That's the usual problem with socialists and progressives: they promise to deliver the impossible, either because they are deluded (Orwell) or simply liars (Stalin).
You cannot have democracy (in the sense of a free society) and socialism in the same political system. What you can have is a tyranny of the majority and socialism, which soon degrades into a simple tyranny.
Whatever you force McDonalds to give workers in a minimum wage raise will be paid for by McDonalds customers in higher prices, even if McDonalds doesn't fire people. Since McDonalds customers are predominantly lower income, it's basically a regressive tax.
And when slaves cost more money to keep alive than they produce in value, their owners get rid of them. That's one of the reasons slavery ended in many parts of the world: it wasn't profitable anymore.
when you combine Mincome that met the "living wage" criteria, with abolishing the minimum wage
A basic income is fundamentally different from the minimum wage in that tax payers bear the burden. That's the correct way of providing income guarantees; minimum wage attempts to shift the burden of welfare programs to a small group of businesses.
If a basic income serves as a replacement for welfare and other government programs, it can be a good thing. Ask your progressive friends why they aren't making it happen, instead of this minimum wage nonsense.
Employers will take any opportunity to lower wages, but employees can't switch jobs as easily.
Really? Is "I quit" so hard to say?
Of course, if you lack skills that make you employable, you will have a hard time to find another job. But why should individual employers be burdened with paying for your lack of skills? If hard-to-employ people need financial help, it should be provided as welfare, and people should vote for it explicitly.
What raises in minimum wage really are is an attempt to sneak in tax increases without anybody noticing. And, ironically, minimum wage increases are regressive: high income people don't notice them because they generally don't do business with businesses employing minimum wage workers anyway.
Given that Walmart's profit margin is about 3.3%, a 5% increase in cost is astronomical and would make them totally uncompetitive, given that other retailers have similar profit margins. So, while the GP got the terminology wrong, a 5% increase is huge.
Because wages are generally only a fraction of the cost of goods sold, raising wages doesn't result in anywhere near as much of an increase in prices. Raising Walmart's minimum by ~50% would result in 1.1% price increases
Actually, raising Walmart's minimum by 50% would likely result in most of the people currently receiving less than that wage getting fired. Even if the 1.1% figure were correct, 1.1% is about a third of their profit margin.
My guess would be that a large chunk of the workforce having significantly more spending money would help most companies sell *more* product, even with a minor price increase.
If the money is passed on to consumers as higher prices, then those other consumers will have less to spend, exactly by the amount you redistribute through the minimum wage, so that argument just doesn't work. If the cost of the minimum wage is born by investors, it's even worse, because the money they invest would have gone to purchases that actually generate new jobs.
"Proprietary" means someone owns it and can control who does and doesn't use it. Languages are proprietary because of patents, copyrights, or trade secrets. Neither Java nor C# are proprietary (although legal uncertainty surrounds both).
Actually, I'd have to dispute your claim that proprietary languages don't do well.
Except ObjC, which leads one to think Swift might do really well also.
Objective-C is not proprietary. Neither Apple nor NeXT invented it, they didn't develop the core libraries, and there are multiple implementations. Of course, Objective-C hasn't done all that well: outside Apple, hardly anybody uses it anymore, for the simple reason that it's been obsolete for a long time.
I really don't see the downside in making sure people's medical expenses are more or less covered when they get sick.
The downside is that people don't have to bother making prudent decisions: they are effectively covered no matter what, and if they pick a bad insurance company, they just switch later. As a result, both insurance buyers and insurance providers can be as stupid and wasteful as they like and be assured that they get bailed out. And the people who actually are prudent with their insurance choices and health care get stuck with the bill.
I used to be on a high deductible plan and be quite prudent about my health care spending; not anymore. Now I tell the doctor to do everything and anything he can. Why not? There is no incentive for me to save money anymore.
BTW, Obama sucks at getting his programs through Congress.
That's because he is thoroughly incompetent both in terms of negotiating and as an administrator.
I regard it as a flawed step forward. I believe this will help millions of Americans, and once we get used to universal coverage we might be able to change it for the better.
It's a "step forward" only if you think that bankrupting and totally wrecking the current system will make people want single payer and you think that's a good thing. Why you think that's a good thing is, however, mystifying.
Apple definitely needed to do something because Objective-C was really getting long in the tooth. As far as new languages go, at first glance, this looks nicer than what the other players have to offer (Java, C#, Go).
However, proprietary languages don't tend to fare particularly well. If this gets an open source implementation and isn't patent encumbered, however, it might also be a good thing for Linux.
Not after you were sick. But an insurance company that got a bad reputation would start losing healthy customers and money.
That's how it would work under a free market system. It didn't work that way pre-ACA: pre-ACA, as post-ACA, market mechanisms didn't operate for health insurance companies, largely because of a perverse incentive system created by the federal government.
The real reform we should have gotten would have been to give the tax breaks we used to give employers to individuals (employers could still give their employees money for health insurance, of course) and transition the system to an individual market. Furthermore, while employers might have special "risk pools" on hiring, the contracts between insurance companies and employees should have become individual contracts that are intrinsically portable.
Instead, the ACA keeps all the b.s. tax breaks and still doesn't give us portable insurance. All you get is a lousy, tiny, overpriced, subsidized niche market for people who otherwise fall through the cracks.
Unfortunately, the politicians in power can redraw the voting district lines to help prevent the opposing party from being able to overtake the incumbents.
"penix1" blames the ills of US politics on the supposed fact that money buys congressional districts. You claim that gerrymandering keeps politicians in power. Which is it? They can't both be true. If incumbents stay in power through gerrymandering, once elected, representatives could simply give donors the finger and do what they want.
Fact is that incumbents always have an advantage, in any democracy, and that's not even necessarily a big thing since it helps with a bit of continuity and stability. But from US election statistics, it's clear that neither money nor gerrymandering has a dominant effect on elections.
You were not going to be able to go to another insurance company.
Not after you were sick. But an insurance company that got a bad reputation would start losing healthy customers and money. Any insurance system that provides legal guarantees that individuals can switch insurance companies after they have a claim cannot work, because it rewards bad insurance companies.
Under the ACA, you're much better protected from having your coverage cancelled
Individually you benefit when you get sick, but at the cost of everybody else and the health of the entire system. In the end, we all lose.
In other words, the complaints you have about the ACA, however valid, also apply to the system before the ACA.
Yes, the system before ACA was broken, but the ACA failed to address its problems; instead, the ACA was merely a fig leaf for even more tax payer handouts to insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and the elderly, as well as a stealth increase in welfare. ACA is a political "thank you" by Obama to his rich donors, plus vote buying; it represents everything that's wrong with money in US politics.
but that's because the ACA was battered
That might be a valid argument if ACA opponents actually had had input on the legislation and if it had passed both houses as a compromise. But that's not what happened. The Obama administration authored and pushed through the ACA against the strong and universal objections of Republicans.
Therefore, the only people to blame for this turd of legislation and crony capitalism, and the missed opportunity to fix the US health care system, lies with the Obama administration.
It depends on whether you perceive what the property company is doing as productive, or exploiting their middleman position to extort fees they've done nothing to earn
Offering you a pile of sh*t for $1000 doesn't make me a "rent seeker", it merely makes me a bad businessman. It only becomes rent seeking (via extortion) if I put a gun to your head and force you to buy it.
The company can't "extort" anything because their customers can simply move. And it's up to their customers to decide whether the company is "productive" or not, not you or me.
Says the person who draws a distinction between "rent seeking" and "business decisions", as if one were not an instance of the other.
Well, I think your problem is clear: you don't see yourself as a participant in a free market, you see yourself as helplessly at the mercy of big businesses, with no control and no choice in any decision (of course, your helplessness is really just laziness). Naturally, if you hold such silly beliefs, you reach the conclusion that any business decision that costs you money is "rent seeking".
However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.
Nope, sorry, it's not. The Economist explanation is vague, but if you look at the examples, you see that in each case the customer is forced to engage in business transactions that are disadvantageous to them. The Economist's use of the term is only "more general" in that it includes illegal force in addition to legal force.
Nobody is forcing anybody to rent from the company in TFA, either through illegal or through legal means. The company is just effectively raising its prices, and its customers can stay or walk away.
And we don't even know why they are raising their prices; their costs may be going up and they may be doing this in lieu of raining rents.
I've reviewed the thread and can't find any references to Europe besides yours.
Well, that's because you have been vague and evasive in your examples:
The most brazen in the States is gerrymandering... Here whole political parties...
You were talking about a party-based democracy in which (implied) significant political parties have disappeared, and you referred to Europe in other threads. In any case, it is also the proper counterexample, regardless of whether you were referring to Elbonia, Canada, or some European nation. Don't blame me for responding as best I can to your vague and evasive statements. Feel free to clarify.
In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.
Your problem is that you don't understand what those definitions actually mean. None of those definitions apply to this situation.
a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner
There is nothing "frivolous" about being clear when making economic and political statements, like you did. The situation you describe is not "rent seeking".
I was going to preemptively point out that people like you would come out of the woodwork, but then decided it wasn't worth the hassle. Anybody with half a brain understands that going to college and where you go to college is indeed a choice anybody can make freely.
In economics (see public choice theory), rent-seeking is spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth.
Stop using economic terms you don't understand. This is a business decision in a competitive market. It's probably a lousy business decision that will anger customers and lead to loss of revenue, but it's still just a business decision. If you don't like it, don't do business with them, nobody is forcing you.
What they actually want to do is secretly up the rent by externalising the cost. By establishing artificial internet access monopolies who will have to charge their tenants extra for the goods provided, they can pay the artificial monopoly costs. Basically their intent is to stick it too their tenants and hide the extra costs.
"Internet access monopolies"? "Monopoly costs"? "Externalizing the cost"? Cut the crap.
They offer apartments for rent, and they are considering cutting back service in order to make more money. That's what companies do. And they are wondering how the market is going to respond.
Anybody who doesn't like what they are doing can rent somewhere else. If their college has an exclusive contract with them (unlikely but possible), people can choose a different college. There is no "monopoly" involved, nor is there any meaningful "cost externalization".
Responses to this fall into two categories: people who choose to rent somewhere else and cost them money, and people who are going to whine and still rent with them. They only should care about the first, not the second.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, folks, you need to stop being terrified by everything.
Obviously yes. Why do you even ask?
Instead of busboys clearing tables and dishwashers washing them, businesses go to disposable plates and self-cleanup. Instead of baggers, customers bag groceries themselves at stores. Instead of people taking your order, you punch it into a machine yourself. You get the picture.
If the price of a service gets to high, people don't use that service anymore. If house cleaning gets too expensive, I buy a cleaning robot or clean less frequently. If lawn care gets too expensive, I get rid of my lawn and replace it with something that doesn't require maintenance. If my tax preparer gets too expensive, I buy software and do it myself. If pizza delivery gets too expensive, I just buy a frozen pizza and make it myself.
People make these calculations every day. Just because money is no object to you doesn't mean others live similarly lavishly or ignorantly.
That's the usual problem with socialists and progressives: they promise to deliver the impossible, either because they are deluded (Orwell) or simply liars (Stalin).
You cannot have democracy (in the sense of a free society) and socialism in the same political system. What you can have is a tyranny of the majority and socialism, which soon degrades into a simple tyranny.
Why not get some facts:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
The US already has a pretty high minimum wage. Germany and the Scandinavian countries don't have one at all.
Whatever you force McDonalds to give workers in a minimum wage raise will be paid for by McDonalds customers in higher prices, even if McDonalds doesn't fire people. Since McDonalds customers are predominantly lower income, it's basically a regressive tax.
And when slaves cost more money to keep alive than they produce in value, their owners get rid of them. That's one of the reasons slavery ended in many parts of the world: it wasn't profitable anymore.
A basic income is fundamentally different from the minimum wage in that tax payers bear the burden. That's the correct way of providing income guarantees; minimum wage attempts to shift the burden of welfare programs to a small group of businesses.
If a basic income serves as a replacement for welfare and other government programs, it can be a good thing. Ask your progressive friends why they aren't making it happen, instead of this minimum wage nonsense.
The gullible tool is you, since you seem to believe the fiction that raising the minimum wage will result in more people earning a "living wage."
Really? Is "I quit" so hard to say?
Of course, if you lack skills that make you employable, you will have a hard time to find another job. But why should individual employers be burdened with paying for your lack of skills? If hard-to-employ people need financial help, it should be provided as welfare, and people should vote for it explicitly.
What raises in minimum wage really are is an attempt to sneak in tax increases without anybody noticing. And, ironically, minimum wage increases are regressive: high income people don't notice them because they generally don't do business with businesses employing minimum wage workers anyway.
Given that Walmart's profit margin is about 3.3%, a 5% increase in cost is astronomical and would make them totally uncompetitive, given that other retailers have similar profit margins. So, while the GP got the terminology wrong, a 5% increase is huge.
Actually, raising Walmart's minimum by 50% would likely result in most of the people currently receiving less than that wage getting fired. Even if the 1.1% figure were correct, 1.1% is about a third of their profit margin.
If the money is passed on to consumers as higher prices, then those other consumers will have less to spend, exactly by the amount you redistribute through the minimum wage, so that argument just doesn't work. If the cost of the minimum wage is born by investors, it's even worse, because the money they invest would have gone to purchases that actually generate new jobs.
"Proprietary" means someone owns it and can control who does and doesn't use it. Languages are proprietary because of patents, copyrights, or trade secrets. Neither Java nor C# are proprietary (although legal uncertainty surrounds both).
Well, examples?
Objective-C is not proprietary. Neither Apple nor NeXT invented it, they didn't develop the core libraries, and there are multiple implementations. Of course, Objective-C hasn't done all that well: outside Apple, hardly anybody uses it anymore, for the simple reason that it's been obsolete for a long time.
The downside is that people don't have to bother making prudent decisions: they are effectively covered no matter what, and if they pick a bad insurance company, they just switch later. As a result, both insurance buyers and insurance providers can be as stupid and wasteful as they like and be assured that they get bailed out. And the people who actually are prudent with their insurance choices and health care get stuck with the bill.
I used to be on a high deductible plan and be quite prudent about my health care spending; not anymore. Now I tell the doctor to do everything and anything he can. Why not? There is no incentive for me to save money anymore.
That's because he is thoroughly incompetent both in terms of negotiating and as an administrator.
It's a "step forward" only if you think that bankrupting and totally wrecking the current system will make people want single payer and you think that's a good thing. Why you think that's a good thing is, however, mystifying.
Apple definitely needed to do something because Objective-C was really getting long in the tooth. As far as new languages go, at first glance, this looks nicer than what the other players have to offer (Java, C#, Go).
However, proprietary languages don't tend to fare particularly well. If this gets an open source implementation and isn't patent encumbered, however, it might also be a good thing for Linux.
Sorry, I need to clarify:
That's how it would work under a free market system. It didn't work that way pre-ACA: pre-ACA, as post-ACA, market mechanisms didn't operate for health insurance companies, largely because of a perverse incentive system created by the federal government.
The real reform we should have gotten would have been to give the tax breaks we used to give employers to individuals (employers could still give their employees money for health insurance, of course) and transition the system to an individual market. Furthermore, while employers might have special "risk pools" on hiring, the contracts between insurance companies and employees should have become individual contracts that are intrinsically portable.
Instead, the ACA keeps all the b.s. tax breaks and still doesn't give us portable insurance. All you get is a lousy, tiny, overpriced, subsidized niche market for people who otherwise fall through the cracks.
"penix1" blames the ills of US politics on the supposed fact that money buys congressional districts. You claim that gerrymandering keeps politicians in power. Which is it? They can't both be true. If incumbents stay in power through gerrymandering, once elected, representatives could simply give donors the finger and do what they want.
Fact is that incumbents always have an advantage, in any democracy, and that's not even necessarily a big thing since it helps with a bit of continuity and stability. But from US election statistics, it's clear that neither money nor gerrymandering has a dominant effect on elections.
Not after you were sick. But an insurance company that got a bad reputation would start losing healthy customers and money. Any insurance system that provides legal guarantees that individuals can switch insurance companies after they have a claim cannot work, because it rewards bad insurance companies.
Individually you benefit when you get sick, but at the cost of everybody else and the health of the entire system. In the end, we all lose.
Yes, the system before ACA was broken, but the ACA failed to address its problems; instead, the ACA was merely a fig leaf for even more tax payer handouts to insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and the elderly, as well as a stealth increase in welfare. ACA is a political "thank you" by Obama to his rich donors, plus vote buying; it represents everything that's wrong with money in US politics.
That might be a valid argument if ACA opponents actually had had input on the legislation and if it had passed both houses as a compromise. But that's not what happened. The Obama administration authored and pushed through the ACA against the strong and universal objections of Republicans.
Therefore, the only people to blame for this turd of legislation and crony capitalism, and the missed opportunity to fix the US health care system, lies with the Obama administration.
Offering you a pile of sh*t for $1000 doesn't make me a "rent seeker", it merely makes me a bad businessman. It only becomes rent seeking (via extortion) if I put a gun to your head and force you to buy it.
The company can't "extort" anything because their customers can simply move. And it's up to their customers to decide whether the company is "productive" or not, not you or me.
Well, I think your problem is clear: you don't see yourself as a participant in a free market, you see yourself as helplessly at the mercy of big businesses, with no control and no choice in any decision (of course, your helplessness is really just laziness). Naturally, if you hold such silly beliefs, you reach the conclusion that any business decision that costs you money is "rent seeking".
Nope, sorry, it's not. The Economist explanation is vague, but if you look at the examples, you see that in each case the customer is forced to engage in business transactions that are disadvantageous to them. The Economist's use of the term is only "more general" in that it includes illegal force in addition to legal force.
Nobody is forcing anybody to rent from the company in TFA, either through illegal or through legal means. The company is just effectively raising its prices, and its customers can stay or walk away.
And we don't even know why they are raising their prices; their costs may be going up and they may be doing this in lieu of raining rents.
Well, that's because you have been vague and evasive in your examples:
You were talking about a party-based democracy in which (implied) significant political parties have disappeared, and you referred to Europe in other threads. In any case, it is also the proper counterexample, regardless of whether you were referring to Elbonia, Canada, or some European nation. Don't blame me for responding as best I can to your vague and evasive statements. Feel free to clarify.
Your problem is that you don't understand what those definitions actually mean. None of those definitions apply to this situation.
There is nothing "frivolous" about being clear when making economic and political statements, like you did. The situation you describe is not "rent seeking".
I was going to preemptively point out that people like you would come out of the woodwork, but then decided it wasn't worth the hassle. Anybody with half a brain understands that going to college and where you go to college is indeed a choice anybody can make freely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Stop using economic terms you don't understand. This is a business decision in a competitive market. It's probably a lousy business decision that will anger customers and lead to loss of revenue, but it's still just a business decision. If you don't like it, don't do business with them, nobody is forcing you.
"Internet access monopolies"? "Monopoly costs"? "Externalizing the cost"? Cut the crap.
They offer apartments for rent, and they are considering cutting back service in order to make more money. That's what companies do. And they are wondering how the market is going to respond.
Anybody who doesn't like what they are doing can rent somewhere else. If their college has an exclusive contract with them (unlikely but possible), people can choose a different college. There is no "monopoly" involved, nor is there any meaningful "cost externalization".
Responses to this fall into two categories: people who choose to rent somewhere else and cost them money, and people who are going to whine and still rent with them. They only should care about the first, not the second.