But then, why do I complain? I'm in Europe! If the US descends into medieval times, we can take over as the leading power in international development again.
You mean having countries like Germany that ban gay marriage, gay adoption, and limit choice to the first trimester? You mean a continent in which many nations have God in their constitutions and law, have state churches, ban embryonic stem cell research, and subsidize churches massively with public funds?
Hint: If you want to see what it's like when religion rules, take a good look at the Middle East.
I don't have to. I used to live in a place like that. In Europe. A continent full of ignorant people subservient to government authority. Like you, apparently.
Yes, yes it is. It's not the only difference between the 2 systems but it's a major one.
The health sector has profit margins between -11% (medical practitioners), 4.3% (hospitals), and 21% (major drug manufacturers), so it isn't a "major component" even numerically.
More importantly, though, that profit represents the investments and risks needed to run those businesses. If government takes over those functions, that cost is still paid. So, even if government managed to be just as efficient as a private business, you'd still pay for this, you just don't think you do because it doesn't show up on any balance sheet.
This is simply not true. Source [wsj.com]
The WSJ talks about growth in spending, not absolute spending.
Furthermore, my point isn't that the US private system is better than the public system; the US private system sucks as well. My point is that the public system is so costly and inefficient that proposing covering all Americans at Finland-like costs is delusional.
The problem with trying to have his discussion with you is that you're misinformed about facts, and make claims that are not consistent with reality.
Your problem is apparently that you simply can't read and can't do basic math.
I hate to break it to you, but there is extensive evidence that there is never very much difference between humans and other primates at any level of development. The differences are minuscule compared to the similarities.
I hate to break it to you, but that is wrong. While there are no gross anatomical differences during early development, there clearly are later in development. Furthermore, there are molecular, biochemical, and genetic differences from the beginning, including drug interactions and common genetic abnormalities. So, there clearly are many reasons to study human embryos even early on. It is just that for these studies, they didn't have to use human embryos.
Zernicka-Goetz, who spoke to reporters in London, said a wealth of new information could be discovered if human embryos could be grown in a lab dish for just a few days more.
I don't particularly approve of the legal restrictions. Nevertheless, for early development, there is no significant difference between humans and primates (or even many other mammals) at the level of these studies, so they wouldn't have to use human embryos.
Labor participation rate is the lowest in the past 30 years.
That is correct. However, it is irrelevant. I didn't claim the economy was rosy or that labor participation rates were good, I said that the statement that the number of jobs has decreased is wrong. That is, even with the decrease in labor participation rates, we still don't have "fewer jobs".
Having said that... if you do want to talk about labor participation rates:
The only reason the total number of jobs have risen is due to population growth. That doesn't help.
Much of the fall of labor participation rates in the US is simply due to demographics: people are getting older. Another contributing factor is a large drop among young age groups; the latter is due to in large part due to longer education, and in smaller part to pricing entry-level workers out of the market. Labor force participation rates among older workers are actually up.
Pricing young workers out of the market and redirecting them into college is deliberate progressive policy, and it's a lousy idea. But it's a lousy idea that's not caused by automation.
You assume infinite demand. Jobs exist to service demand.
Of course, I do, because it's true.
But clearly any single individual cannot use infinite resources, even if it's available to them.
Even if this line of reasoning were valid, that particular reasoning is false. In order for demand to exceed the supply of labor, it's sufficient for every person to want more than the equivalent of one person working for them.
You assume all jobs can be done by all people. This is clearly false.
Not at all. Almost everybody can do many jobs that are useful that require nearly no skills: dish washing, cleaning, weeding, clearing rocks, security, maid service, delivery, giving people rides, caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, dog sitting, manual harvesting of fruit, manual crafts; even the disabled usually can do something useful that requires little skill: proofreading, marketing, phone answering, Mechanical Turk, etc. Furthermore, when you automate existing jobs, you get both more resources and more demand for paying for such jobs.
What keeps people from working is not a lack of demand, it's price fixing (including regulation) and welfare. That is, government price fixing keeps labor costs artificially high (through regulations and minimum wages). It also keeps the cost of living artificially high (through standards, zoning, regulation). And if welfare pays more than someone could earn through work, they will obviously choose not to work.
The last point is particularly worth pointing out. In Singapore (lower household income than the US), maybe 10% of households have full-time maids, an arrangement that makes sense in particular for elderly and busy professionals; a typical maid gets $900/month plus free food and housing. In the US, you need to double or triple that salary, deal with a mountain of paperwork, and I don't even want to think of the tax and liability consequences of having them live with you in lieu of some salary. Of course, progressives call this an "unalloyed good".
Uber and the gig economy have been trying to liberate some of those jobs again from the clutches of government price fixing, but fear not, government price fixing will somehow prohibit that because there are large groups of voters, in particular among progressives, who prefer policies that prohibit many of their fellow citizens from working, for selfish reasons.
The point about public insurance -. even if it's not a single payer model - is that as its funded by a public entity and is non-profit, obviously it's going to be cheaper than an insurance ran by a company for profit.
You're thinking of healthcare prices as cost+profit, and assume that if you deliver health care via a non-profit entity, prices will drop to cost. That's not how economics works. The difference between the Finnish and the US system isn't profits. In fact, most of the differences are simply consumer choice and government-imposed price fixing.
Point being, if you replaced medicare and medicaid with some type of single public insurance that would still be free/cheap for people of low income, but open for everyone (at a cost for those making above a certain amount if you wish to avoid tax-funding it), it would be cheaper.
You keep saying that but that doesn't make it true. In fact, we know what the per-patient spending for a fully public, non-profit, non-insurance, single payer system is in the US: it's about three times what it is in Finland, and (despite your claims) even significantly higher than private insurance in the US. Obviously, if you covered everybody with that system, medical spending would likely go up, not down, and it certainly wouldn't go down to Finnish levels. And the reason spending is higher is because Americans consume health care differently. It may not be rational (neither were those big old 60's automobiles), but it's a choice Americans happen to make.
What I really can't figure out is why Europeans constantly feel a need to chime in on US political issues; you have enough problems of your own, why do you stick your noses into American problems?
Small, ethnically homogeneous countries are quite different on many dimensions from larger and more ethnically diverse countries.
mention "ass end of Europe" - what does that have to do with anything,
It refers to the fact that Finland's geographic situation and history is rather exceptional and very different from the US. It's also expresses a certain disapproval for how Finland has used its position in the past.
The US system, as was outlined in the post you replied to (but seemingly didn't read) is inherently broken.
I agree completely that the US health care system is broken. But covering everybody with national single payer health care isn't going to fix the US health care system.
Are you somewhat patriotic yourself?
No, I actually dislike the country I was born in.
Do you take criticism of the US personally? Does it feel like stabbing in your heart or stomach when someone besmirches the pristine name of the US? It sure as hell sounds like it.
Much simpler than that: I've emigrated once, I don't want Europe's bad political ideas to follow me to the US.
He's done nothing to be called a "run of the mill European nationalist".
Well, why do people like him and you have such an obsession with US politics? What business of yours is it how the US organizes its health care system? I don't even vote anymore in Europe since I left, let alone participate in European political discussions. Why don't you mind your own business?
I said you could establish a better functioning universal system if you controlled the pricing better and/or eliminated the insurance companies from base level medical care and treated it
You aren't listening. The US has a public system, a system that already has eliminated insurance companies, and that already has controlled prices. And that public system is horrifically expensive. The fact that the massive public health care system in the US is unable to achieve the kind of price controls that the Finnish system can achieve is not going to get fixed by eliminating the private healthcare system in the US.
The "private" health care system in the US also has its problems, but that's because it isn't really a private system at all; it's little more than a privately administered public system, with massive monopolies and few free market components left to it.
Depends on how you look at it. While the average household income in the US is significantly higher, it is top-biased.
We're talking about medians; they are not "top biased".
The average income for the bottom 20% is higher in Finland at $13253/year vs $11194/year in the US. Suffice it to say that it is not the top 20% who need universal health care.
I'm sorry, but you don't understand the numbers you're quoting: that's not "average income", it's "disposable income", and it excludes "in-kind benefits".
In any case, the US has much larger per capita social spending than Finland, so the bottom 20% in the US are likely going to be a lot better off than the bottom 20% in Finland. On top of that, the fact that the US does not have universal health care but targets its health care based on need means that there is more money for those who need it, while high income earners in the US are forced to pay for their healthcare themselves. That seems like a more sensible system, doesn't it?
There's plenty of countries larger than Finland with effective and efficient single-payer health care.
You're Finnish, I'm originally from one of those other countries. Why don't you stick to opining about the system you are actually familiar with?
We get comparable treatment results and universal coverage (at about 3500 dollars a year per capita) than the US does when it comes to life expectancy, cancer survival rates (in fact, with certain types of cancers we're ahead of the US even) and so on.
How nice for you. Finnish incomes are also thousands of dollars less per year compared to Americans, and that already takes into account the money you "save" on medical care; sounds like you're getting a bad deal.
Furthermore, you're living in a tiny, sparsely populated monoculture at the ass end of Europe. The rest of the world doesn't work like your country. In fact, the US already has a large single payer, public health care system. It spends more per capita than Finland, but only manages to cover 1/3 of the population. Scaling that up to the whole population wouldn't reduce medical spending, it would massively increase it.
Just my 2 cents, feel free to mod me down for being a socialist scum now.
No, you're just a run of the mill European nationalist who knows little about the rest of the world.
When Bernie is elected, he'll disrupt the medical cartel.
Bernie wants to make all of US health care as efficient as the VA and Medicare, meaning he will about triple the cost per patient. And doctors and hospitals will love him for it.
"250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors"
Fuck fighting terrorism. This deserves more attention.
In the sense that people should be aware of it, yes. Every trip to the doctor is a risk. Prevention is much better than any kind of medical intervention.
In the sense that these errors are avoidable, no. Medicine is intrinsically inexact and difficult.
Look, I fully agree with your generalization because as a normal person I don't have to be concerned with a public image. Once you are in the public spotlight the game changes, and everything you do will be scrutinized because at that level you sell your image. Celebrities, including CEOs
CEO is a job title in a certain form of business organization. Being a CEO doesn't make you a "celebrity" or mean that you make a high salary. The real issue here is that "someone posted a rant on Facebook" takes on a political dimension to ignorant people when that someone happens to have a three letter job title. This kind of crap shouldn't be on Slashdot. As for "selling your image", displeasing the social justice thought police will likely get you fired from many positions in Silicon Valley, not just the CxO positions.
The problem is that he's a CEO of a corporation, very much a representative of it, not just a private citizen
No, the problem is that a bunch of jerks like you go trolling around on Facebook looking for things to be offended by and using social media to blow them out of any proportion. The problem is that words like "CEO" and "company" cause people like you to become hysterical and fetch the pitchforks. This sort of bullshit should never have been on Slashdot.
"In my company, we care only for ourselves and will use very ugly, unsociable bullying against those weaker than ourselves
Which is, of course, exactly what you just did. You're at least as much of an asshole as that guy.
There were totalitarian capitalist states in WWII, before we conquered them and changed their governments
By the way, which ones? Nazi Germany and Japan were fascist states; they were strongly and explicitly anti-capitalist. In fact, if you look at the NSDAP economic party platform, it is nearly identical to Sanders' economic platform: limits on trade and immigration, free health care, free education, government-guaranteed retirement, strong limits on "speculation" and "unearned income", nationalization of some industries, policies that favor small businesses over big businesses, etc.
Capitalism is compatible with servitude and aristocracy, as long as it's understood that only certain people have capital. That's actually fairly close to true in many capitalist economies, and what aristocracy does is reduce social and economic mobility (it usually doesn't eliminate it). It isn't really the endgame of pure capitalism, but it's compatible with it.
It seems to me you are confusing Third Position Economics with capitalism. Third position economics lets people keep private property, but capital, investment, and production is strongly directed and managed by the government (monarchies and aristocracies had similar policies) Third position economics is expressly anti-capitalist; that's why it has its name: it is supposed to be a different path from either socialism or capitalism. Third Way Economics takes a similar view.
An absolutist state can have a free market and can run a capitalist economy.
That's debatable; in any case, it wouldn't be a "pure capitalist economy", and the intrusions into individual liberties would be due to the state, not due to capitalism.
For capitalism to work most efficiently,
We're not debating "efficient capitalism" but "pure capitalism". Pure capitalism is not the most efficient economic system. The most efficient economic system is central planning with perfect information.
as many people as possible have to be able to start businesses and try out their ideas in the marketplace. This means that people need access to education, affordable health care, and some sort of assurance that their families will survive a total business failure.
Even if we stipulate those premises, it doesn't logically follow that government is a good way of providing these guarantees. In fact, pure capitalism is likely to provide better and cheaper education, affordable health care, and safety nets than government-based systems.
The comments mark the latest example of a male tech CEO making aggressive, insensitive and tone-deaf remarks about people less fortunate than them
Yeah, Woodward sounds like a jerk, but what does his being male, tech, or CEO have to do with any of this? And since when is being a CEO a matter of luck, as opposed to a matter of risk taking and business acumen? And since when is Willow Glen a "tony" neighborhood, rather than your average, slightly out of the way, Silicon Valley suburban area?
How do you think Ivana Trump or Hillary Clinton would behave if they found illegal street vendors in front of their mansions? Of course, they wouldn't get into a shouting match with street vendors, not that any street vendors would even venture into their exclusive neighborhoods, they'd send their lackeys to do it for them.
And let's not forget that the reason these street vendors are "disadvantaged" is because government regulations impose costly and onerous licensing requirements on them in the first place.
Now perhaps you could stop waving your hands and describe the negative effects on job growth of an actual new regulation in that period of time.
Excessive regulations and labor costs slow economic growth, and hence make recessions worse, and make recoveries slower. The degree to which this happens is related to the volume and nature of regulations in effect during a time period, not to the increase or decrease during that time period. The effects will obviously be particularly visible when a lot of people lose their jobs at about the same time and then don't get rehired in full time positions when the recession is over. Also, the effects are likely to be non-linear: there is a level of regulations and government-imposed labor costs at which an economy simply collapses.
The time frame of the "recovery" is just under a decade.
No, it's actually not. You simply tried to derail the discussion into a discussion about the recovery and your dissatisfaction with it. But, as I was saying, you're right to be dissatisfied with this recovery: it is particularly slow, just not due to automation or technology, but because it takes place in an environment of excessive regulations and government imposed labor costs.
You are making a great many unsupported assertions.
They are quite supported; you're simply ignorant of basic facts.
What are these mysterious increased regulations?
Nothing mysterious about it. The size of the Federal Register is a good indicator; there are many other indicators. You have to be living in a fantasy land not to recognize the massive increase in regulations over the last few decades.
Why are the results similar between locations that recently increased the minimum wage and those that didn't?
Minimum wage increases only affect that part of the population that naturally earns less than the minimum wage, usually only a small fraction of the population. When you look at the right populations, the effect is clear.
Your job growth figures don't mean much to economic well being when many of the added jobs don't meet the cost of living and many more don't pay what the jobs that disappeared in the crash did. It's just so much whistling past the graveyard.
Yes, and that economic graveyard is being created by the same people who keep complaining about automation, and jobs being shipped out of the country, and inequality, and the poor economy, and whose solution is more government interference in markets. It's a positive feedback loop of economic destruction, and it has killed democracies before.
Now, what about the sluggish recovery and the growth in low paying, part time jobs? They are real and lamentable. But they aren't due to automation, they are due to increased labor regulations and labor costs. More automation is simply an effect, not a cause.
I used to trust the National Geographic, but since most of it was sold to R. Murdoch, I take anything from NG with a big grain of salt. Hang on, no - I just believe the opposite.
All that says is that you are intellectually lazy. National Geographic, in fact, isn't the source of this claim, they simply report it. You can track the information to the source.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean having countries like Germany that ban gay marriage, gay adoption, and limit choice to the first trimester? You mean a continent in which many nations have God in their constitutions and law, have state churches, ban embryonic stem cell research, and subsidize churches massively with public funds?
I don't have to. I used to live in a place like that. In Europe. A continent full of ignorant people subservient to government authority. Like you, apparently.
Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, and other countries like that are much more into "imaginary friends" as the basis of research legislation:
http://www.mbbnet.umn.edu/scma...
http://www.techinsider.io/what...
The health sector has profit margins between -11% (medical practitioners), 4.3% (hospitals), and 21% (major drug manufacturers), so it isn't a "major component" even numerically.
More importantly, though, that profit represents the investments and risks needed to run those businesses. If government takes over those functions, that cost is still paid. So, even if government managed to be just as efficient as a private business, you'd still pay for this, you just don't think you do because it doesn't show up on any balance sheet.
The WSJ talks about growth in spending, not absolute spending.
Furthermore, my point isn't that the US private system is better than the public system; the US private system sucks as well. My point is that the public system is so costly and inefficient that proposing covering all Americans at Finland-like costs is delusional.
Your problem is apparently that you simply can't read and can't do basic math.
I hate to break it to you, but that is wrong. While there are no gross anatomical differences during early development, there clearly are later in development. Furthermore, there are molecular, biochemical, and genetic differences from the beginning, including drug interactions and common genetic abnormalities. So, there clearly are many reasons to study human embryos even early on. It is just that for these studies, they didn't have to use human embryos.
I don't particularly approve of the legal restrictions. Nevertheless, for early development, there is no significant difference between humans and primates (or even many other mammals) at the level of these studies, so they wouldn't have to use human embryos.
That is correct. However, it is irrelevant. I didn't claim the economy was rosy or that labor participation rates were good, I said that the statement that the number of jobs has decreased is wrong. That is, even with the decrease in labor participation rates, we still don't have "fewer jobs".
Having said that... if you do want to talk about labor participation rates:
Much of the fall of labor participation rates in the US is simply due to demographics: people are getting older. Another contributing factor is a large drop among young age groups; the latter is due to in large part due to longer education, and in smaller part to pricing entry-level workers out of the market. Labor force participation rates among older workers are actually up.
Pricing young workers out of the market and redirecting them into college is deliberate progressive policy, and it's a lousy idea. But it's a lousy idea that's not caused by automation.
Of course, I do, because it's true.
Even if this line of reasoning were valid, that particular reasoning is false. In order for demand to exceed the supply of labor, it's sufficient for every person to want more than the equivalent of one person working for them.
Not at all. Almost everybody can do many jobs that are useful that require nearly no skills: dish washing, cleaning, weeding, clearing rocks, security, maid service, delivery, giving people rides, caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, dog sitting, manual harvesting of fruit, manual crafts; even the disabled usually can do something useful that requires little skill: proofreading, marketing, phone answering, Mechanical Turk, etc. Furthermore, when you automate existing jobs, you get both more resources and more demand for paying for such jobs.
What keeps people from working is not a lack of demand, it's price fixing (including regulation) and welfare. That is, government price fixing keeps labor costs artificially high (through regulations and minimum wages). It also keeps the cost of living artificially high (through standards, zoning, regulation). And if welfare pays more than someone could earn through work, they will obviously choose not to work.
The last point is particularly worth pointing out. In Singapore (lower household income than the US), maybe 10% of households have full-time maids, an arrangement that makes sense in particular for elderly and busy professionals; a typical maid gets $900/month plus free food and housing. In the US, you need to double or triple that salary, deal with a mountain of paperwork, and I don't even want to think of the tax and liability consequences of having them live with you in lieu of some salary. Of course, progressives call this an "unalloyed good".
Uber and the gig economy have been trying to liberate some of those jobs again from the clutches of government price fixing, but fear not, government price fixing will somehow prohibit that because there are large groups of voters, in particular among progressives, who prefer policies that prohibit many of their fellow citizens from working, for selfish reasons.
You're thinking of healthcare prices as cost+profit, and assume that if you deliver health care via a non-profit entity, prices will drop to cost. That's not how economics works. The difference between the Finnish and the US system isn't profits. In fact, most of the differences are simply consumer choice and government-imposed price fixing.
You keep saying that but that doesn't make it true. In fact, we know what the per-patient spending for a fully public, non-profit, non-insurance, single payer system is in the US: it's about three times what it is in Finland, and (despite your claims) even significantly higher than private insurance in the US. Obviously, if you covered everybody with that system, medical spending would likely go up, not down, and it certainly wouldn't go down to Finnish levels. And the reason spending is higher is because Americans consume health care differently. It may not be rational (neither were those big old 60's automobiles), but it's a choice Americans happen to make.
What I really can't figure out is why Europeans constantly feel a need to chime in on US political issues; you have enough problems of your own, why do you stick your noses into American problems?
Small, ethnically homogeneous countries are quite different on many dimensions from larger and more ethnically diverse countries.
It refers to the fact that Finland's geographic situation and history is rather exceptional and very different from the US. It's also expresses a certain disapproval for how Finland has used its position in the past.
I agree completely that the US health care system is broken. But covering everybody with national single payer health care isn't going to fix the US health care system.
No, I actually dislike the country I was born in.
Much simpler than that: I've emigrated once, I don't want Europe's bad political ideas to follow me to the US.
Well, why do people like him and you have such an obsession with US politics? What business of yours is it how the US organizes its health care system? I don't even vote anymore in Europe since I left, let alone participate in European political discussions. Why don't you mind your own business?
You aren't listening. The US has a public system, a system that already has eliminated insurance companies, and that already has controlled prices. And that public system is horrifically expensive. The fact that the massive public health care system in the US is unable to achieve the kind of price controls that the Finnish system can achieve is not going to get fixed by eliminating the private healthcare system in the US.
The "private" health care system in the US also has its problems, but that's because it isn't really a private system at all; it's little more than a privately administered public system, with massive monopolies and few free market components left to it.
We're talking about medians; they are not "top biased".
I'm sorry, but you don't understand the numbers you're quoting: that's not "average income", it's "disposable income", and it excludes "in-kind benefits".
In any case, the US has much larger per capita social spending than Finland, so the bottom 20% in the US are likely going to be a lot better off than the bottom 20% in Finland. On top of that, the fact that the US does not have universal health care but targets its health care based on need means that there is more money for those who need it, while high income earners in the US are forced to pay for their healthcare themselves. That seems like a more sensible system, doesn't it?
You're Finnish, I'm originally from one of those other countries. Why don't you stick to opining about the system you are actually familiar with?
How nice for you. Finnish incomes are also thousands of dollars less per year compared to Americans, and that already takes into account the money you "save" on medical care; sounds like you're getting a bad deal.
Furthermore, you're living in a tiny, sparsely populated monoculture at the ass end of Europe. The rest of the world doesn't work like your country. In fact, the US already has a large single payer, public health care system. It spends more per capita than Finland, but only manages to cover 1/3 of the population. Scaling that up to the whole population wouldn't reduce medical spending, it would massively increase it.
No, you're just a run of the mill European nationalist who knows little about the rest of the world.
Bernie wants to make all of US health care as efficient as the VA and Medicare, meaning he will about triple the cost per patient. And doctors and hospitals will love him for it.
In the sense that people should be aware of it, yes. Every trip to the doctor is a risk. Prevention is much better than any kind of medical intervention.
In the sense that these errors are avoidable, no. Medicine is intrinsically inexact and difficult.
CEO is a job title in a certain form of business organization. Being a CEO doesn't make you a "celebrity" or mean that you make a high salary. The real issue here is that "someone posted a rant on Facebook" takes on a political dimension to ignorant people when that someone happens to have a three letter job title. This kind of crap shouldn't be on Slashdot. As for "selling your image", displeasing the social justice thought police will likely get you fired from many positions in Silicon Valley, not just the CxO positions.
No, the problem is that a bunch of jerks like you go trolling around on Facebook looking for things to be offended by and using social media to blow them out of any proportion. The problem is that words like "CEO" and "company" cause people like you to become hysterical and fetch the pitchforks. This sort of bullshit should never have been on Slashdot.
Which is, of course, exactly what you just did. You're at least as much of an asshole as that guy.
By the way, which ones? Nazi Germany and Japan were fascist states; they were strongly and explicitly anti-capitalist. In fact, if you look at the NSDAP economic party platform, it is nearly identical to Sanders' economic platform: limits on trade and immigration, free health care, free education, government-guaranteed retirement, strong limits on "speculation" and "unearned income", nationalization of some industries, policies that favor small businesses over big businesses, etc.
It seems to me you are confusing Third Position Economics with capitalism. Third position economics lets people keep private property, but capital, investment, and production is strongly directed and managed by the government (monarchies and aristocracies had similar policies) Third position economics is expressly anti-capitalist; that's why it has its name: it is supposed to be a different path from either socialism or capitalism. Third Way Economics takes a similar view.
That's debatable; in any case, it wouldn't be a "pure capitalist economy", and the intrusions into individual liberties would be due to the state, not due to capitalism.
We're not debating "efficient capitalism" but "pure capitalism". Pure capitalism is not the most efficient economic system. The most efficient economic system is central planning with perfect information.
Even if we stipulate those premises, it doesn't logically follow that government is a good way of providing these guarantees. In fact, pure capitalism is likely to provide better and cheaper education, affordable health care, and safety nets than government-based systems.
Yeah, Woodward sounds like a jerk, but what does his being male, tech, or CEO have to do with any of this? And since when is being a CEO a matter of luck, as opposed to a matter of risk taking and business acumen? And since when is Willow Glen a "tony" neighborhood, rather than your average, slightly out of the way, Silicon Valley suburban area?
How do you think Ivana Trump or Hillary Clinton would behave if they found illegal street vendors in front of their mansions? Of course, they wouldn't get into a shouting match with street vendors, not that any street vendors would even venture into their exclusive neighborhoods, they'd send their lackeys to do it for them.
And let's not forget that the reason these street vendors are "disadvantaged" is because government regulations impose costly and onerous licensing requirements on them in the first place.
Excessive regulations and labor costs slow economic growth, and hence make recessions worse, and make recoveries slower. The degree to which this happens is related to the volume and nature of regulations in effect during a time period, not to the increase or decrease during that time period. The effects will obviously be particularly visible when a lot of people lose their jobs at about the same time and then don't get rehired in full time positions when the recession is over. Also, the effects are likely to be non-linear: there is a level of regulations and government-imposed labor costs at which an economy simply collapses.
No, it's actually not. You simply tried to derail the discussion into a discussion about the recovery and your dissatisfaction with it. But, as I was saying, you're right to be dissatisfied with this recovery: it is particularly slow, just not due to automation or technology, but because it takes place in an environment of excessive regulations and government imposed labor costs.
So you deny facts because of your political agenda. Thanks for clearing that up.
They are quite supported; you're simply ignorant of basic facts.
Nothing mysterious about it. The size of the Federal Register is a good indicator; there are many other indicators. You have to be living in a fantasy land not to recognize the massive increase in regulations over the last few decades.
Minimum wage increases only affect that part of the population that naturally earns less than the minimum wage, usually only a small fraction of the population. When you look at the right populations, the effect is clear.
Yes, and that economic graveyard is being created by the same people who keep complaining about automation, and jobs being shipped out of the country, and inequality, and the poor economy, and whose solution is more government interference in markets. It's a positive feedback loop of economic destruction, and it has killed democracies before.
I simply pointed out that saying that there are "even fewer jobs" is factually wrong. Why do you persist in denying clear, simple facts?
First, let's reiterate again: you have been putting up straw men; the fact remains that we have more full time employees today than ever before.. So statements about "even fewer jobs" are nonsense.
Now, what about the sluggish recovery and the growth in low paying, part time jobs? They are real and lamentable. But they aren't due to automation, they are due to increased labor regulations and labor costs. More automation is simply an effect, not a cause.
Source? None. This is your magical belief that somehow the last recession and recovery are different from all prior ones.
Fact is that the number of jobs hasn't been decreasing, and the rest is just your handwaving.
All that says is that you are intellectually lazy. National Geographic, in fact, isn't the source of this claim, they simply report it. You can track the information to the source.