We don't even have to get to monopoly levels to see private industry engaging in politics to limit and hamper new entrants to the market.
You are correct about that. Government should have as little power as possible to regulate trade so that private industry can not use government power to hamper new entrants into the market.
The only time your investment in the stock market is going to a company seeking funding to do anything like create jobs, is when you buy stock directly from the company.
And people only buy stock directly from a company because...they believe they will profit from selling it to someone else later. The secondary market drives the primary one.
Capitalism can achieve all of those things but it does lead to monopolies. There is plenty of historical examples including our own robber baron periods here in the USA
Unfortunately the "robber baron" concept is a myth.
Take Standard Oil for example. It had 4% of the market in 1870. Its output and market share grew as its superior efficiency dramatically lowered its refining costs (by 1897, they were less than one-tenth of their level in 1869), and it passed on the efficiency savings in sharply reduced prices for refined oil (which fell from over 30 cents per gallon in 1869, to 10 cents in 1874, to 8 cents in 1885, and to 5.9 cents in 1897). Although Standard Oil's efficiencies did allow it to dominate the oil industry (85% market share), it never achieved a total monopoly (in 1911, the year of the Supreme Court decision against it, Standard Oil had roughly 150 competitors, including Texaco and Gulf).
One of Rockefeller's harshest critics was journalist Ida Tarbell, whose brother was the treasurer of the Pure Oil Company, which could not compete with Standard Oil's low prices. She published a series of hypercritical articles in McClure's magazine in 1902 and 1903, which were turned into a book entitled The History of the Standard Oil Company, a classic of antibusiness propaganda.
Or take the Union Pacific (UP) and the Central Pacific (CP) railroads. These were not created by capitalist processes, but were state socialist creations by The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. For each mile of track built Congress gave these companies a section of land - most of which would be sold - as well as a sizable loan: $16,000 per mile for track built on flat prairie land; $32,000 for hilly terrain; and $48,000 in the mountains. Compare with the privately built Great Northern transcontinental railroad.
Or take Cornelius Vanderbilt, who invented ways to make travel and shipping cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. He cut the New York-Hartford fare from $8 to $1.
if you hadn't noticed there has been a jobs problem of late, capitalism isn't exactly a panacea.
Nothing in the world is perfect (including government), however you may want to compare the US unemployment rate of 6.1% with the French unemployment rate of 10.1% or the Spanish unemployment rate of 26% (France and Spain are ranked only "Moderately Free" by the Index of Economic Freedom).
And capitalism frequesntly just leads to fewer jobs because it is more profitable to do more with less workers involved.
Where is your data on this? The number of employed people in the US has always tended upwards with only a blip during the most recent financial crisis.
Of course you are correct that US employee productivity per hour rises all the time due to investment in productive capital.
There are only three countries in the world with higher productivity per employee hour than the US. One is Norway, which gets 20% of GDP from oil, and none of those countries have more than 3 million workers. Ireland is one, and it is currently rated "Mostly Free" by the Index of Economic Freedom, as is Luxembourg.
one person with $1,000,000 doesn't spend as much money in the same way that 20 people with $50,000 each would.
One person with $1 million would invest that money into capital, producing new jobs and technology. That capital would be spent on business goods, salaries, etc. All of my savings are in stocks, for example. The "paradox of thrift" is also a myth.
There certainly are Indian and South Korean animation studios.
Transformers 4 was mostly done by Industrial Lights & Magic, although now that I take a close look it was actually co-produced by Paramount and China Movie Channel. It was also mostly shot with Canadian IMAX cameras.
Regarding Bollywood, Dhoom 3 did $8 million and Chennai Express did $5 million in US box-office. I think that Bollywood movies are still a bit too cheesy for US audiences, although clearly Indian producers could make US-targetted movies if they wanted to.
Capitalism is a system designed to reward capitalists.
Capitalism is a system designed to assure private property rights. Through assuring protection of private property from appropriation form the state, the risk of investment is lowered, thus encouraging investment. Investment provides the capital that allows new types of jobs to be created and technology to be improved.
Thus capitalism rewards capitalist investors with enhanced returns on capital, rewards laborers with better and more well paying jobs because of improvements in their productivity due to higher levels of capital investment, and rewards consumers with improved products and technologies.
Monopoly is the natural end state of Capitalism. The big fish eat all the smaller fish, until there's only one big fish left.
Where is the evidence for this? Private property protection encourages competition because it incentivizes investment in new companies and technologies. We see this for example in accelerating Fortune 500 turnover and the turnover of the DJIA. For example, today we barely recognize the former DJIA companies Owens-Illinois Glass or Central Leather. The economic term for this is creative destruction.
Many large companies exist today created from scratch that did not exist 50 years ago (Starbucks, Best Buy, FedEx, Dell, Cisco, Sysco, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, ARM, AMD, Intel, Nvidia).
It is particularly difficult for a large organization to remain competitive over a long period of time. They build up too many entrenched internal power centers and often become blind to market change and technological change. See IBM for a company that started as mainly a hardware company, but has totally lost that market and is mainly a software consulting company today.
On the other hand, when the commanding heights of the economy are in the hands of the state, it is easy for the government to enforce monopolies of state-owned enterprises through regulation.
while the poor starve to death
Most actual deaths of people due to starvation occur in countries with low levels of economic freedom, not in countries that embrace private property rights and capitalism. Recent famines in Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, DRC, Ethiopia, and North Korea are occurring in states ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom as being "Mostly Unfree" or "Repressed", with many having a long recent history or even still being ruled by governments that claim allegiance to Marxist socialism (for example, Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or the Workers' Party of Korea).
Since Amazon is probably well aware of the law in Seattle and they are going forward with it, apparently the numbers work OK.
I think the point is that restaurants that already have delivery drivers (such as pizza parlors) may be more willing to outsource delivery to Amazon in order to not have to pay the higher minimum wage to the delivery people on their payroll.
[BTW, why should I worry about the minimum wage rise? I'm not a young, low-skill worker. If they loose their job, it is not my problem...until they decide to become self-employed entrepreneurs and rob me at gun point]
I went to some "young Mensan" meetings back in the 1980's. I ended up dating a very nice (and smart) girl and had a good time.
In the 2010's, I'm not sure there is much point in joining Mensa to meet people for romantic reasons, especially given the large number of "meetup" style events available, plus online dating sites allow one to signal intelligence pretty easily if not explicitly.
There are many signals that people look for in romantic engagements that people prefer to not receive explicitly, including money, intelligence, and power. For example, women on average may like rich men, but if you show up at a date and give a woman a $100 bill to signal your wealth, it is not likely to be received well.
"Similarly, almost 53% of all C++ build errors were classified as dependency-related. The most common such errors were using an undeclared identifier and missing class variables."
OK, why can't a compiler just Google for the dependency?
Identify everything with a unique ID. When you need to reference it, your system searches all your code (and any other code repositories) for the unique ID.
If power is removed from government, some other entities will gain that power and become the new evil that must be fought.
I believe there are occasional market externalities that need to be dealt with via government. However the problem is that most people feel everything is a market externality that needs to be dealt with via government, thus government has too much power.
What is keeping YOU from competing with your local cable provider on higher-quality Internet connectivity? If you could prove to investors that your offering would be profitable, and they would invest in you because rich people like making money.
But then you would have to go to your local cable franchise board (set up because people feel that cable service is a "natural monopoly" that is not amenable to market forces, which is BS), and then you would have to fight against government power to be able to legally offer a service that people want.
Politicians are patently not answerable at the ballot box, by and large, or so many unpopular bits of legislation would not be passing.
I regularly vote against politicians who pass legislation I don't agree with. Why everyone else is sheep and votes for the incumbents is unclear to me!
starting with removing the corrupting influence of money
I have news for you, the corrupting influence of money will remain AS LONG AS POLITICIANS HAVE POWER. Money will "route around" such "campaign finance reforms". That is why all the campaign finance reforms put in place since the 1970's have consistently achieved nothing (except for allowing incumbents to hold on to power more strongly).
Politicians are always answerable at the ballot box. If you vote for politicians who promise to REMOVE POWER FROM GOVERNMENT, you will REMOVE THE POTENTIAL FOR CORRUPTION.
Most of our "Internet problems" are last mile problems. These are not national problems. You need to show up to your local government meetings and work on last mile access. I suggest local government reduce barriers to entries for new local ISPs (my suggestion). Or perhaps local governments should build open FTTH (which of course would be open to corruption to the contractors who build it, but perhaps that is better). But local is where to deal with this issue.
You don't need a test for a U-235 gun-type fission weapon. It is too simple to make. "Little Boy" was never tested. But purifying U-235 is a huge industrial undertaking.
And it probably isn't too hard to work out the implosion mechanisms for a plutonium fission weapon either.
Getting fusion-boosted weapons to work might be a tad bit harder to do without practical experience.
I can confirm that the Panasonic TC-L65WT600 65" 4K UHDTV can play 60 fps 4K over its HDMI 2.0 connector (yes, I actually have access to 4K/60p content and a 4K/60p video server). I have seen it for as low as $3500 on BestBuy.com.
WW2 reduced private spending. The private component of GDP fell after 1941, and while the war lasted, private output never recovered to its pre-Pearl Harbor level. In 1943, real private GDP was 14% lower than it had been in 1941.
It was the end of WW2 (and perhaps co-indicdent with the destruction of Fascism and death of FDR, both large concerns of business leaders before the war) that allowed private spending to return to pre-war levels.
There were actually some economists who thought that the end of WW2 would plunge the world into another Great Depression due to the end of massive government defense spending. US government spending was cut nearly in half from 1945 ($118B) to 1947 ($57B). But the private economy boomed after WW2 despite the dramatic cuts in government spending.
These folks simply do not understand that the underlying goal is to drive U.S. wages to third world levels by introducing large labor surpluses.
It is unlikely that any surplus of labor would lead employers to pay significantly less than the productivity of a worker, especially in sectors such as computer programming where barriers to entry are low and new firms can rapidly form.
It is possible that labor surpluses could actually lower the prices of goods and services in general, which can benefit consumers.
for those who talk about expanding the economy to accommodate millions of new workers; how's that working for you?
Research suggests that "U.S. natives (especially high-skill natives) appear to have benefited from greater availability and reduced prices of nongraded goods and services that are intensive in low-skill labor"
Complimentary labor from low-skilled immigrants makes things better for high-skilled natives, although it may have a small negative effect on the earnings of low-skilled natives (especially those that drop out of high school).
BTW, I know several women in tech fields who only have the opportunity to work because of the low cost of services from immigrant nannies for their young children, immigrant house cleaners, etc.
Your argument is that the United States should be the only country in the world with open immigration?
Okay... lets do that. And then lets see how long your welfare and entitlement programs last with millions crossing the border and suddenly getting full social security benefits, EBT, etc.
I'm sure plenty of people would like to move to the US to work even if they do not get any entitlement benefits. Ethically, that would probably be better than forcing people to stay in places where they live at under $1 per day...
Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year.
Warren Buffet's main business is insurance, so he would like to encourage you to try to put your heritable funds into non-taxable insurance rather than into funds your children will directly inherit.
The "value" of stock is by no means connected to real world revenue of the issuing corporations anymore. It's just dependent on expectations of stock traders and whether or not they have any "faith" in the paper.
Actually equities price to earnings ratio (P/E) is highly correlated with 20-year annualized returns, (see graph here).
You don't pay employer taxes when you hire a contractor.
The IRS says "There is no "magic" or set number of factors that "makes" the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination."
But you can submit Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding (PDF) with the IRS. The IRS will review the facts and circumstances and officially determine the worker's status. Be aware that it can take at least six months to get a determination.
I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Sam Walton's low prices
I would prefer for tax transfers to "top up" low income people rather than distort the market through price floors on labor, that may lead to less employment of the less productive, and may raise prices for all.
I feel that it is better to take a few dollars from a rich person through taxes than to say to a person who only produces $9 per hour that they can't have a job because the wage floor is $10 per hour.
Moreover, wages are a price signal, and perhaps people should know that not finishing high school and getting additional post-secondary training or education does not lead to $10 per hour wages, but more like $5 per hour.
Your examples of Communism had little to do with actual communism
I prefer to look at real-world track records.
Capitalism (economic freedom and secure private property rights) has a great record of dramatically expanding economic growth and delivering tremendous technological innovation. It has also lead to income and/or wealth inequality, but even the poorest of capitalist countries experience improvements in well-being over time.
Attempts to "fix" capitalism through reductions in economic freedom (such as labor rigidities such as high wage floors, costly firing, etc.) and also overly high levels of redistribution generally find a point of diminishing returns and often are retrenched (see Germany's Hartz reforms).
The track records of attempts to have "common ownership" of the means of production has generally lead to violence, poverty, and lack of innovation. I would like to suggest that this is because the ownership is never truly "common", the ownership resides in political power, of politicians (elected or not) who are rent-seekers on the means of production, and they may have political needs to maintain power that is greater than economic profit of the means of production.
This is opposed to capitalism where ownership resides in those who put their actual capital at risk and are seeking actual profit by meeting the needs of customers.
CEO's may not always represent the best interests of shareholders, but shareholders can always sell their shares and invest elsewhere. It is typically difficult to exit a "common ownership" system.
China is informative, where common ownership is being converted into capitalist ownership, with great reductions in poverty along with higher levels of income inequality.
Seattle's unemployment among those who are age 16-24 is *lower* than the national average. How is that possible?!
The greater Seattle area has a lot of economic production (Microsoft, etc.) so I'm not surprised that highly-educated, high-income workers are demanding the service of lower-income workers. It is possible that the market-clearing wage for low-educated workers age 16-24 is around $10/hour or perhaps not that far below that level. Whether it is around $15/hour remains to be seen.
If the artificial wage floor is raised above the market-clearing wage, there will be enhanced unemployment of those who are least productive, typically the least experienced and educated.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't even have to get to monopoly levels to see private industry engaging in politics to limit and hamper new entrants to the market.
You are correct about that. Government should have as little power as possible to regulate trade so that private industry can not use government power to hamper new entrants into the market.
The only time your investment in the stock market is going to a company seeking funding to do anything like create jobs, is when you buy stock directly from the company.
And people only buy stock directly from a company because...they believe they will profit from selling it to someone else later. The secondary market drives the primary one.
Capitalism can achieve all of those things but it does lead to monopolies. There is plenty of historical examples including our own robber baron periods here in the USA
Unfortunately the "robber baron" concept is a myth.
Take Standard Oil for example. It had 4% of the market in 1870. Its output and market share grew as its superior efficiency dramatically lowered its refining costs (by 1897, they were less than one-tenth of their level in 1869), and it passed on the efficiency savings in sharply reduced prices for refined oil (which fell from over 30 cents per gallon in 1869, to 10 cents in 1874, to 8 cents in 1885, and to 5.9 cents in 1897). Although Standard Oil's efficiencies did allow it to dominate the oil industry (85% market share), it never achieved a total monopoly (in 1911, the year of the Supreme Court decision against it, Standard Oil had roughly 150 competitors, including Texaco and Gulf).
One of Rockefeller's harshest critics was journalist Ida Tarbell, whose brother was the treasurer of the Pure Oil Company, which could not compete with Standard Oil's low prices. She published a series of hypercritical articles in McClure's magazine in 1902 and 1903, which were turned into a book entitled The History of the Standard Oil Company, a classic of antibusiness propaganda.
Or take the Union Pacific (UP) and the Central Pacific (CP) railroads. These were not created by capitalist processes, but were state socialist creations by The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. For each mile of track built Congress gave these companies a section of land - most of which would be sold - as well as a sizable loan: $16,000 per mile for track built on flat prairie land; $32,000 for hilly terrain; and $48,000 in the mountains. Compare with the privately built Great Northern transcontinental railroad.
Or take Cornelius Vanderbilt, who invented ways to make travel and shipping cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. He cut the New York-Hartford fare from $8 to $1.
if you hadn't noticed there has been a jobs problem of late, capitalism isn't exactly a panacea.
Nothing in the world is perfect (including government), however you may want to compare the US unemployment rate of 6.1% with the French unemployment rate of 10.1% or the Spanish unemployment rate of 26% (France and Spain are ranked only "Moderately Free" by the Index of Economic Freedom).
And capitalism frequesntly just leads to fewer jobs because it is more profitable to do more with less workers involved.
Where is your data on this? The number of employed people in the US has always tended upwards with only a blip during the most recent financial crisis.
Of course you are correct that US employee productivity per hour rises all the time due to investment in productive capital.
There are only three countries in the world with higher productivity per employee hour than the US. One is Norway, which gets 20% of GDP from oil, and none of those countries have more than 3 million workers. Ireland is one, and it is currently rated "Mostly Free" by the Index of Economic Freedom, as is Luxembourg.
one person with $1,000,000 doesn't spend as much money in the same way that 20 people with $50,000 each would.
One person with $1 million would invest that money into capital, producing new jobs and technology. That capital would be spent on business goods, salaries, etc. All of my savings are in stocks, for example. The "paradox of thrift" is also a myth.
For example, Manufacturers' New Orders: Nondefense Capital Goods Excluding Aircraft which was $70 billion dollars last month.
In fact a number of companies rely on those welfare programs in order to supply a very cheap work force.
I belie
The animation studios are all in Bangalore.
There certainly are Indian and South Korean animation studios.
Transformers 4 was mostly done by Industrial Lights & Magic, although now that I take a close look it was actually co-produced by Paramount and China Movie Channel. It was also mostly shot with Canadian IMAX cameras.
Regarding Bollywood, Dhoom 3 did $8 million and Chennai Express did $5 million in US box-office. I think that Bollywood movies are still a bit too cheesy for US audiences, although clearly Indian producers could make US-targetted movies if they wanted to.
Capitalism is a system designed to reward capitalists.
Capitalism is a system designed to assure private property rights. Through assuring protection of private property from appropriation form the state, the risk of investment is lowered, thus encouraging investment. Investment provides the capital that allows new types of jobs to be created and technology to be improved.
Thus capitalism rewards capitalist investors with enhanced returns on capital, rewards laborers with better and more well paying jobs because of improvements in their productivity due to higher levels of capital investment, and rewards consumers with improved products and technologies.
Monopoly is the natural end state of Capitalism. The big fish eat all the smaller fish, until there's only one big fish left.
Where is the evidence for this? Private property protection encourages competition because it incentivizes investment in new companies and technologies. We see this for example in accelerating Fortune 500 turnover and the turnover of the DJIA. For example, today we barely recognize the former DJIA companies Owens-Illinois Glass or Central Leather. The economic term for this is creative destruction.
Many large companies exist today created from scratch that did not exist 50 years ago (Starbucks, Best Buy, FedEx, Dell, Cisco, Sysco, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, ARM, AMD, Intel, Nvidia).
It is particularly difficult for a large organization to remain competitive over a long period of time. They build up too many entrenched internal power centers and often become blind to market change and technological change. See IBM for a company that started as mainly a hardware company, but has totally lost that market and is mainly a software consulting company today.
On the other hand, when the commanding heights of the economy are in the hands of the state, it is easy for the government to enforce monopolies of state-owned enterprises through regulation.
while the poor starve to death
Most actual deaths of people due to starvation occur in countries with low levels of economic freedom, not in countries that embrace private property rights and capitalism. Recent famines in Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, DRC, Ethiopia, and North Korea are occurring in states ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom as being "Mostly Unfree" or "Repressed", with many having a long recent history or even still being ruled by governments that claim allegiance to Marxist socialism (for example, Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or the Workers' Party of Korea).
When farming fell from 90% to 3% of work force in USA, it was an exporting nation.
Not an exporting nation any more???
Transformers: Age of Extinction did $134 million gross in China so far.
Since Amazon is probably well aware of the law in Seattle and they are going forward with it, apparently the numbers work OK.
I think the point is that restaurants that already have delivery drivers (such as pizza parlors) may be more willing to outsource delivery to Amazon in order to not have to pay the higher minimum wage to the delivery people on their payroll.
[BTW, why should I worry about the minimum wage rise? I'm not a young, low-skill worker. If they loose their job, it is not my problem...until they decide to become self-employed entrepreneurs and rob me at gun point]
I wonder how this will work with Seatttle's new $15 minimum wage that is coming...
I went to some "young Mensan" meetings back in the 1980's. I ended up dating a very nice (and smart) girl and had a good time.
In the 2010's, I'm not sure there is much point in joining Mensa to meet people for romantic reasons, especially given the large number of "meetup" style events available, plus online dating sites allow one to signal intelligence pretty easily if not explicitly.
There are many signals that people look for in romantic engagements that people prefer to not receive explicitly, including money, intelligence, and power. For example, women on average may like rich men, but if you show up at a date and give a woman a $100 bill to signal your wealth, it is not likely to be received well.
"Similarly, almost 53% of all C++ build errors were classified as dependency-related. The most common such errors were using an undeclared identifier and missing class variables."
OK, why can't a compiler just Google for the dependency?
Identify everything with a unique ID. When you need to reference it, your system searches all your code (and any other code repositories) for the unique ID.
Why hasn't this been solved?
If power is removed from government, some other entities will gain that power and become the new evil that must be fought.
I believe there are occasional market externalities that need to be dealt with via government. However the problem is that most people feel everything is a market externality that needs to be dealt with via government, thus government has too much power.
What is keeping YOU from competing with your local cable provider on higher-quality Internet connectivity? If you could prove to investors that your offering would be profitable, and they would invest in you because rich people like making money.
But then you would have to go to your local cable franchise board (set up because people feel that cable service is a "natural monopoly" that is not amenable to market forces, which is BS), and then you would have to fight against government power to be able to legally offer a service that people want.
Politicians are patently not answerable at the ballot box, by and large, or so many unpopular bits of legislation would not be passing.
I regularly vote against politicians who pass legislation I don't agree with. Why everyone else is sheep and votes for the incumbents is unclear to me!
starting with removing the corrupting influence of money
I have news for you, the corrupting influence of money will remain AS LONG AS POLITICIANS HAVE POWER. Money will "route around" such "campaign finance reforms". That is why all the campaign finance reforms put in place since the 1970's have consistently achieved nothing (except for allowing incumbents to hold on to power more strongly).
Politicians are always answerable at the ballot box. If you vote for politicians who promise to REMOVE POWER FROM GOVERNMENT, you will REMOVE THE POTENTIAL FOR CORRUPTION.
Most of our "Internet problems" are last mile problems. These are not national problems. You need to show up to your local government meetings and work on last mile access. I suggest local government reduce barriers to entries for new local ISPs (my suggestion). Or perhaps local governments should build open FTTH (which of course would be open to corruption to the contractors who build it, but perhaps that is better). But local is where to deal with this issue.
Neither country has ever carried out a test
You don't need a test for a U-235 gun-type fission weapon. It is too simple to make. "Little Boy" was never tested. But purifying U-235 is a huge industrial undertaking.
And it probably isn't too hard to work out the implosion mechanisms for a plutonium fission weapon either.
Getting fusion-boosted weapons to work might be a tad bit harder to do without practical experience.
So what kind of circuit is it?
I assume it is BJT based?
I can confirm that the Panasonic TC-L65WT600 65" 4K UHDTV can play 60 fps 4K over its HDMI 2.0 connector (yes, I actually have access to 4K/60p content and a 4K/60p video server). I have seen it for as low as $3500 on BestBuy.com.
World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession.
WW2 reduced private spending. The private component of GDP fell after 1941, and while the war lasted, private output never recovered to its pre-Pearl Harbor level. In 1943, real private GDP was 14% lower than it had been in 1941.
It was the end of WW2 (and perhaps co-indicdent with the destruction of Fascism and death of FDR, both large concerns of business leaders before the war) that allowed private spending to return to pre-war levels.
There were actually some economists who thought that the end of WW2 would plunge the world into another Great Depression due to the end of massive government defense spending. US government spending was cut nearly in half from 1945 ($118B) to 1947 ($57B). But the private economy boomed after WW2 despite the dramatic cuts in government spending.
These folks simply do not understand that the underlying goal is to drive U.S. wages to third world levels by introducing large labor surpluses.
It is unlikely that any surplus of labor would lead employers to pay significantly less than the productivity of a worker, especially in sectors such as computer programming where barriers to entry are low and new firms can rapidly form.
It is possible that labor surpluses could actually lower the prices of goods and services in general, which can benefit consumers.
for those who talk about expanding the economy to accommodate millions of new workers; how's that working for you?
Research suggests that "U.S. natives (especially high-skill natives) appear to have benefited from greater availability and reduced prices of nongraded goods and services that are intensive in low-skill labor"
Complimentary labor from low-skilled immigrants makes things better for high-skilled natives, although it may have a small negative effect on the earnings of low-skilled natives (especially those that drop out of high school).
BTW, I know several women in tech fields who only have the opportunity to work because of the low cost of services from immigrant nannies for their young children, immigrant house cleaners, etc.
Your argument is that the United States should be the only country in the world with open immigration?
Okay... lets do that. And then lets see how long your welfare and entitlement programs last with millions crossing the border and suddenly getting full social security benefits, EBT, etc.
I'm sure plenty of people would like to move to the US to work even if they do not get any entitlement benefits. Ethically, that would probably be better than forcing people to stay in places where they live at under $1 per day...
Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year.
Warren Buffet's main business is insurance, so he would like to encourage you to try to put your heritable funds into non-taxable insurance rather than into funds your children will directly inherit.
The "value" of stock is by no means connected to real world revenue of the issuing corporations anymore. It's just dependent on expectations of stock traders and whether or not they have any "faith" in the paper.
Actually equities price to earnings ratio (P/E) is highly correlated with 20-year annualized returns, (see graph here).
Adam Smith pointed out in 1776...
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
You don't pay employer taxes when you hire a contractor.
The IRS says "There is no "magic" or set number of factors that "makes" the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination."
But you can submit Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding (PDF) with the IRS. The IRS will review the facts and circumstances and officially determine the worker's status. Be aware that it can take at least six months to get a determination.
I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Sam Walton's low prices
I would prefer for tax transfers to "top up" low income people rather than distort the market through price floors on labor, that may lead to less employment of the less productive, and may raise prices for all.
I feel that it is better to take a few dollars from a rich person through taxes than to say to a person who only produces $9 per hour that they can't have a job because the wage floor is $10 per hour.
Moreover, wages are a price signal, and perhaps people should know that not finishing high school and getting additional post-secondary training or education does not lead to $10 per hour wages, but more like $5 per hour.
Your examples of Communism had little to do with actual communism
I prefer to look at real-world track records.
Capitalism (economic freedom and secure private property rights) has a great record of dramatically expanding economic growth and delivering tremendous technological innovation. It has also lead to income and/or wealth inequality, but even the poorest of capitalist countries experience improvements in well-being over time.
Attempts to "fix" capitalism through reductions in economic freedom (such as labor rigidities such as high wage floors, costly firing, etc.) and also overly high levels of redistribution generally find a point of diminishing returns and often are retrenched (see Germany's Hartz reforms).
The track records of attempts to have "common ownership" of the means of production has generally lead to violence, poverty, and lack of innovation. I would like to suggest that this is because the ownership is never truly "common", the ownership resides in political power, of politicians (elected or not) who are rent-seekers on the means of production, and they may have political needs to maintain power that is greater than economic profit of the means of production.
This is opposed to capitalism where ownership resides in those who put their actual capital at risk and are seeking actual profit by meeting the needs of customers.
CEO's may not always represent the best interests of shareholders, but shareholders can always sell their shares and invest elsewhere. It is typically difficult to exit a "common ownership" system.
China is informative, where common ownership is being converted into capitalist ownership, with great reductions in poverty along with higher levels of income inequality.
Seattle's unemployment among those who are age 16-24 is *lower* than the national average. How is that possible?!
The greater Seattle area has a lot of economic production (Microsoft, etc.) so I'm not surprised that highly-educated, high-income workers are demanding the service of lower-income workers. It is possible that the market-clearing wage for low-educated workers age 16-24 is around $10/hour or perhaps not that far below that level. Whether it is around $15/hour remains to be seen.
If the artificial wage floor is raised above the market-clearing wage, there will be enhanced unemployment of those who are least productive, typically the least experienced and educated.