I should have stated above the minimum threshold of a sustainable population in where there is no loss of important technical knowledge from generation to generation, the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole for each person added. More to your liking?
Sure. Now what evidence do you have for that extrapolation as human population continues to increase?
Like I said, humans are resources who can create resources. We are the most valuable resource of all. Comparing population growth to human standard of living in general for the past 100 years demonstrates continued growth.
By your logic, nobody should ever trust any scientific finding without have done the work for herself. By your reasoning, peer review counts for nothing. Those views are not rational. They are, however, extremely common amongst climate change deniers and others who would prefer to believe in a more attractive version of "the truth", despite there being overwhelming evidence of something less agreeable.
Don't be ridiculous. I'm saying that belief and faith is a normal thing, and is necessary for humans to practice science.
So there's only a problem if you love science AND hate belief, because that requires suspending Reason. And how do you practice Science without Reason?
It's really sad how many people who supposedly are for science do not get these important details right.
Apparently you don't even know what you just said.
There is substantial evidence supporting a minimum sustainable population.
So if it's substantial, surely is must be easy to cite and show it, right? Yet, your first reaction is to attack someone as illiterate... because he asked you to show the evidence you said existed.
That's not how someone with a substantial amount of evidence behaves.
And that's before I even point out you contradicted your earlier point:
For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole
Every increase includes the increase going from 1 to 2 to 10 to 1,000.
By the way, learn to read the name of the person you're replying to before saying, "your argument". People might think you can't read.
Belief implies taking something on faith, even in the absence of facts.
There is no way you can believe a claim to be factual without using belief and faith.
There is always a chain of trust - a belief that your senses are accurately showing you reality; that scientific observations were documented properly; or that scientific models built off of those observations reflect reality; or even a belief that there is an objective reality at all!
What a warped view of reality. For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole, because the finite resources of the Earth are then divvied up among more people.
Wrong. Count the population today vs. 100 years ago.
Now measure the standard of living. Do you seriously want to argue that it was better 100 years ago?
No matter how efficiently resources are used, there is a point were the standard of living afforded to everyone isn't enough to live on.
You don't understand that humans are resources - the most valuable one of all. Humans CREATE resources. More humans is more resources.
Don't believe it? Consider what happens if everyone else in the world drops dead right now. Are you better off, with all of the world's resources to yourself?
Are you going to pick up your own trash, cook your own food, build your own car, refine your own oil, create your own art?
Resources may be finite, but that in of itself doesn't mean much. A trillion seconds is a finite number - and it's still an order of magnitude longer than human history.
I brought up China due to a previous argument with somebody over whether China's traditional diet was "very healthy" due to not containing much meat (98% grains and vegetables, bits of meat for flavoring). China had a major revolution, alright: in the late 1970s, they drastically increased their meat consumption. This has been cited in studies on diet because the drastic boost in China's lifespan occurred during a period where the only thing that changed was diet: China's cultural revolution occurred a decade away from their major health gains, which coincided with their dietary changes.
Let's not forget that meat is expensive.
Let's recap: there was the Sino-Japanese War/WWII (1930s-1940s), the Chinese Civil War (1940s-1950s), communist mismanagement of the economy (1950s-1960s) causing famines, Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s)...
40 years of war and famine and millions of deaths, and you find that the most important factor in the change of life expectancy is that they "changed their diet"?
I think you have the cause and effect confused. Meat is expensive, as you say - and the reason that people could afford meat in their diet is because China entered a relative era of peace several years earlier, and the government reforms allowed more people to shift from survival to development. It's not the food, it's the politics. Communism is bad for life.
The fact remains you want to imagine that people who are not eating as much food as they need each day are not starving, are not experiencing negative effects from chronic hunger, and thus are not facing degrading health and eventual early death from not eating. This includes people who are so far from having enough food as to experience physical pain from hunger multiple times each week.
At no point have you actually offered any evidence that this is the case. You are using your imagination to extrapolate "food insecurity" into hunger and then extrapolating hunger to starvation, and then guessing at a potential death rate of "thousands" from that extrapolated "starvation".
I recall instead the more well-grounded example of China, with its single change of diet in the late 1970s suddenly moving the median age of death from 39 years to 80 years-
I'm sure this thing called a Cultural Revolution at that exact same time had absolutely nothing to do with it. Or a communist government that mistakenly eradicated beneficial sparrows as a pest a decade prior (Google Four Pest Campaign).
Imagine that - poorly thought out solutions hurting the very people it was supposed to be helping.
In the traditional publishing model, it's in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books â" the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn
Under the traditional model, how are those readers reading other books? Library? Purchase?
If it's the library - the reader isn't paying for the other book, but probably not the author's book either. These readers don't matter.
If it's purchased... well, that's $5~10 that's not spent on the author's own books.
Even without KU, there's less "potential earnings" when recommending other authors. So KU does not make the book market more or less zero-sum.
Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc.
I have not. You are imagining what I would say about other situations, and using your imagination as evidence against me. Unfortunately, it looks like your imagination is not very good at reading my mind.
I am pointing out that "starving to death" without any deaths is not "starving to death". It is just plain "starving". (Note: Estimated deaths are guesses)
But even claiming "Americans are starving" is wrong, because it takes much more than feeling insecure about food to actually be starving.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
If "more intelligent" means twisting words to lie about reality - I'm afraid I don't see why I should care how intelligent you think your group is. If they don't value honesty, they're useless to me and to society. Society is built on trust - not lies.
Quoted for unintentional hilarity. Death is so hard to quantify that the US collects giant tables of statistics on it. From those numbers, we can claim what the leading cause of death is, say heart disease. Strangely, with 45 million people starving TO DEATH, starvation/malnutrition isn't even in the numbers.
You offer an estimated death rate of 3,000. Out of 45 million "starving" people, that'd be 3,000 starved to death and 44.9 million (99.99%) starving people not starved to death.
99.99% of "starving" people not dying is what you will call "starving to death". Right. Here's what starved to death looks like. Look at the numbers - millions, not thousands.
Depends on your definition of "starving to death".
If people are starving to death, there will be dead bodies that you can point to. You did not, because you cannot. This is like accusing someone of murder when no one is dead.
You're also deliberately obfuscating your ideas by trying to twist the meaning of "starvation". "Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake." You know this definition because you yourself used an example of caloric deficiency earlier.
People who starve to death this way will be skin and bones. You're just not going to find that in America, where the poor can be OBESE, enabled by our welfare system. As far as they're malnourished - that's by their own choice of what they buy with EBT. You'll also note that there's an appropriate word for their condition - "malnourished", not "starving to death".
If you can't start with intellectual honesty, your claims on what's wrong with society or how to fix it are not credible. It's not too late to start.
15% of the United States of America is starving to death.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people starving to death.
Show me. Where are the dead bodies? People dead by obesity related problems don't count, for obvious reasons.
I'm responding to this point first because there is no point to further discussion if you cannot or will not make truthful claims about reality.
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
The abstract concept of the demand curve also already includes the marginal profits. It's already accounted for.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage. The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected. That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can find a single worker who has a job.
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
Which is what I expected - your claims about minimum wage effects on business decisions are ludicrous.
Let's take your own example - if minimum wages removed the 16-yo exception, making minimum wage to affect all workers - all those 16 year olds would be out of their jobs, even if they were willing to work at $6/hour. Maybe a handful would get hired on at $7.25/hour, but there would be some who were not worth $6/hour.
Even if you personally think all your 16-yo coworkers could justify $7.25/hour, there are going to be some who would not be at some other business affected by the law - and they would no longer have their job by law, not because the business is unwilling to hire them, or because they are unwilling to work.
Minimum wage restricts the labor supply by forcing some workers not to work. You may argue against this all you want, but you can't change the math behind it.
It's not, but it's also not going away.
We're mostly agreed on the problems of the current welfare system. I don't have much to say on your proposed fixes, but you do need to understand what minimum wage actually does if you want to make public policy about wages.
The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
There may be a welfare system that is better and more sustainable than what we have now, but that is not particularly relevant to my criticisms of minimum wage.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die."... because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
This is the 3rd time you've contradicted reality. People aren't starving to death. They're not getting worked to death. A solution to prevent those two outcomes misses the mark because those are not the primary problems of our current system.
Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys:
Why should we make that assumption? We're not looking at a specific business, we're looking at the demand as a whole.
Demand inelasticity could make it so that a small enough minimum wage does what you hope it will do - but that also means it's small enough to not be disruptive and thus provides little benefit.
Additionally, even for small changes, businesses will adjust their operations over time to make the most profitable use out of the resources they have available. If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives. In short, the general demand/supply curve still applies - which tells us that minimum wage artificially reduces labor supply by telling some people they're not allowed to work at the wages they can ask for.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
People aren't starving in 1st world countries. Food is cheap. Yet again, your economic model doesn't reflect reality. Thus, it is useless for theorizing improvements to the systems in reality.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Preventing people who would like to work, from working, does not "provide the means to live".
Giving people a "living wage" regardless of the value of the work they actually do drains their work of any meaning and destroys the desire to work - if they get the same results regardless of effort - why bother?
Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
The labor supply isn't restricted. We have a huge labor supply; it's the money or job supply that's restricted.
Minimum wage works by restricting supply, increasing the price paid for the exact same labor.
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
40 guys end up with no work instead of having a $5/hour job. Even though they were willing to work at $5/hour, they are not allowed to do so.
100 guys willing to work, but only 60 are allowed to do so due to minimum wage. That is a restricted supply of labor.
If the labor will KILL you, but food and healthcare will sustain you, the proper payment is the cost of food and healthcare that will sustain you, PLUS compensation for your time; however, without an income, starvation will kill you faster, so you will work a job where you pay $10 worth of your health and receive $5 in compensation, thus dying more slowly. This is, conceptually, what happens in our current system.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers. Your concept doesn't match reality - and thus should not be used to govern reality.
This is why I prefer to ensure survival outright, to disconnect life from work.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
It's very easy to vote for bread and circuses - but bread is created by work - destroy the work and there will be no bread.
Removing minimum wage right now would leave the poorest under the threat of a worse situation than a horribly low salary. The salaries they would be offered would be below tolerable, but better than nothing.
All jobs exist because the worker provides more value than what he is paid.
The only way for removing minimum wage to reduce what a worker is paid is if the labor supply is being restricted by minimum wage, thus increasing the price given the supply/demand.
The only way for minimum wage to have an effect is if people are DENIED paying work that they are able and willing to do, in order to make someone else earn a little more money. You think denying people a paying job ($0/hour) is better than them having a paying job?
Bear in mind that in the real world, no one is working AT minimum wage, forever. McDs pays far more than $2/hour for its fryers - and a fryer probably has no desire to make that his life-career - nor should he. Some new inexperienced high schooler will be here in 2 years who can take over the job, while he moves on to something better. (Say management!)
Actually, if you can get everyone a barely survivable standard of living by default, you can repeal minimum wage.
You can repeal it right now, for a net improvement to society. Minimum wage destroys training jobs - which is a way for people to get job experience and qualify for better jobs, without schooling (which costs money!).
Getting paid to get experience is a good thing. Unpaid internships exist for a reason; a "below minimum wage" job is an upgrade from that.
You're playing with words. "Discrimination" can mean either the simple act of differentiating between two things, or in a phrase like "racial discrimination" acting in a negative manner towards a group.
Do I need to point out that "racial discrimination" is a subset of "discrimination"? "White truck" vs "truck".
Discrimination is the judgement, it doesn't have to be linked to action. People get called racist for racist opinions/statements, not necessarily for racist actions.
"whites are smarter"/"blacks are smarter" is the SAME FORM as the previous innocuous statements. Still not racist?
How about "Whites are dumber"/"blacks are dumber"? Simple inversion of the smarter claim - still not racist?
You may consider this playing with words, but either words communicate a concrete idea, or we're just babbling at each other.
You cannot debunk what he said by just calling it racist. Is it true what he said? If it is, its not racist - a fact is not racist.
I agree you cannot disprove the truth of a claim by calling it racist, but for that same reason, being factual does not preclude racism.
Because if all factual claims are not racist, a racist statement must not be true - but if racism does not change the truth content of a claim, a racist claim could still be factual.
Going to the definition of the word, racist means discrimination on the basis of race. A simple true statement like, "whites are pale-skinned and blacks are dark-skinned" is discriminating on the basis of skin color (race).
Stealing is the unlawful taking of someone else's property. There, I even highlighted the important word for you. There are many good reasons for lawfully taking someone's property or rather: Small parts of it. Unless you're a hard-core anarchist, you have to solve the problem of how to keep the government (small or big) working at all, and sooner or later your solution will be taxes, even if you call it by a different name.
Oh, so it's not stealing as long as you pass a law to do so.
The legal does not override the moral. Even if a government made it legal to kill people of the wrong skin color for any reason, it would still be morally wrong to do so, and I am well within reason to call it murder, legal or not.
The major disagreement between political factions is how much to tax, who to tax and what to spend the money on, but never about taxation itself.
I was addressing a point that thought it'd be fine for the Federal government to print money, as long as it gave it to the "right" people.
Printing money is a way to secretly steal from the savers of society. It is indiscriminate and ultimately will most benefit the people in power and the people with connections, no matter who else nominally benefits. (ex: The People)
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I should have stated above the minimum threshold of a sustainable population in where there is no loss of important technical knowledge from generation to generation, the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole for each person added. More to your liking?
Sure. Now what evidence do you have for that extrapolation as human population continues to increase?
Like I said, humans are resources who can create resources. We are the most valuable resource of all. Comparing population growth to human standard of living in general for the past 100 years demonstrates continued growth.
By your logic, nobody should ever trust any scientific finding without have done the work for herself. By your reasoning, peer review counts for nothing. Those views are not rational. They are, however, extremely common amongst climate change deniers and others who would prefer to believe in a more attractive version of "the truth", despite there being overwhelming evidence of something less agreeable.
Don't be ridiculous. I'm saying that belief and faith is a normal thing, and is necessary for humans to practice science.
So there's only a problem if you love science AND hate belief, because that requires suspending Reason. And how do you practice Science without Reason?
It's really sad how many people who supposedly are for science do not get these important details right.
Can you read?
Apparently you don't even know what you just said.
There is substantial evidence supporting a minimum sustainable population.
So if it's substantial, surely is must be easy to cite and show it, right? Yet, your first reaction is to attack someone as illiterate ... because he asked you to show the evidence you said existed.
That's not how someone with a substantial amount of evidence behaves.
And that's before I even point out you contradicted your earlier point:
For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole
Every increase includes the increase going from 1 to 2 to 10 to 1,000.
By the way, learn to read the name of the person you're replying to before saying, "your argument". People might think you can't read.
There is no way you can believe a claim to be factual without using belief and faith.
There is always a chain of trust - a belief that your senses are accurately showing you reality; that scientific observations were documented properly; or that scientific models built off of those observations reflect reality; or even a belief that there is an objective reality at all!
What a warped view of reality. For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole, because the finite resources of the Earth are then divvied up among more people.
Wrong. Count the population today vs. 100 years ago.
Now measure the standard of living. Do you seriously want to argue that it was better 100 years ago?
No matter how efficiently resources are used, there is a point were the standard of living afforded to everyone isn't enough to live on.
You don't understand that humans are resources - the most valuable one of all. Humans CREATE resources. More humans is more resources.
Don't believe it? Consider what happens if everyone else in the world drops dead right now. Are you better off, with all of the world's resources to yourself?
Are you going to pick up your own trash, cook your own food, build your own car, refine your own oil, create your own art?
Resources may be finite, but that in of itself doesn't mean much. A trillion seconds is a finite number - and it's still an order of magnitude longer than human history.
I brought up China due to a previous argument with somebody over whether China's traditional diet was "very healthy" due to not containing much meat (98% grains and vegetables, bits of meat for flavoring). China had a major revolution, alright: in the late 1970s, they drastically increased their meat consumption. This has been cited in studies on diet because the drastic boost in China's lifespan occurred during a period where the only thing that changed was diet: China's cultural revolution occurred a decade away from their major health gains, which coincided with their dietary changes.
Let's not forget that meat is expensive.
Let's recap: there was the Sino-Japanese War/WWII (1930s-1940s), the Chinese Civil War (1940s-1950s), communist mismanagement of the economy (1950s-1960s) causing famines, Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s)...
40 years of war and famine and millions of deaths, and you find that the most important factor in the change of life expectancy is that they "changed their diet"?
I think you have the cause and effect confused. Meat is expensive, as you say - and the reason that people could afford meat in their diet is because China entered a relative era of peace several years earlier, and the government reforms allowed more people to shift from survival to development. It's not the food, it's the politics. Communism is bad for life.
The fact remains you want to imagine that people who are not eating as much food as they need each day are not starving, are not experiencing negative effects from chronic hunger, and thus are not facing degrading health and eventual early death from not eating. This includes people who are so far from having enough food as to experience physical pain from hunger multiple times each week.
At no point have you actually offered any evidence that this is the case. You are using your imagination to extrapolate "food insecurity" into hunger and then extrapolating hunger to starvation, and then guessing at a potential death rate of "thousands" from that extrapolated "starvation".
I recall instead the more well-grounded example of China, with its single change of diet in the late 1970s suddenly moving the median age of death from 39 years to 80 years-
I'm sure this thing called a Cultural Revolution at that exact same time had absolutely nothing to do with it. Or a communist government that mistakenly eradicated beneficial sparrows as a pest a decade prior (Google Four Pest Campaign).
Imagine that - poorly thought out solutions hurting the very people it was supposed to be helping.
In the traditional publishing model, it's in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books â" the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn
Under the traditional model, how are those readers reading other books? Library? Purchase?
If it's the library - the reader isn't paying for the other book, but probably not the author's book either. These readers don't matter.
If it's purchased ... well, that's $5~10 that's not spent on the author's own books.
Even without KU, there's less "potential earnings" when recommending other authors. So KU does not make the book market more or less zero-sum.
Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc.
I have not. You are imagining what I would say about other situations, and using your imagination as evidence against me. Unfortunately, it looks like your imagination is not very good at reading my mind.
I am pointing out that "starving to death" without any deaths is not "starving to death". It is just plain "starving". (Note: Estimated deaths are guesses)
But even claiming "Americans are starving" is wrong, because it takes much more than feeling insecure about food to actually be starving.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
If "more intelligent" means twisting words to lie about reality - I'm afraid I don't see why I should care how intelligent you think your group is. If they don't value honesty, they're useless to me and to society. Society is built on trust - not lies.
If religious people had any proof, it would no longer be religion. Of course they don't, because the supernatural is imaginary.
I assume you have proof of this? Care to share?
It's hard to quantify death.
Quoted for unintentional hilarity. Death is so hard to quantify that the US collects giant tables of statistics on it. From those numbers, we can claim what the leading cause of death is, say heart disease. Strangely, with 45 million people starving TO DEATH, starvation/malnutrition isn't even in the numbers.
You offer an estimated death rate of 3,000. Out of 45 million "starving" people, that'd be 3,000 starved to death and 44.9 million (99.99%) starving people not starved to death.
99.99% of "starving" people not dying is what you will call "starving to death". Right. Here's what starved to death looks like. Look at the numbers - millions, not thousands.
I suggest you stop digging.
Depends on your definition of "starving to death".
If people are starving to death, there will be dead bodies that you can point to. You did not, because you cannot. This is like accusing someone of murder when no one is dead.
You're also deliberately obfuscating your ideas by trying to twist the meaning of "starvation". "Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake." You know this definition because you yourself used an example of caloric deficiency earlier.
People who starve to death this way will be skin and bones. You're just not going to find that in America, where the poor can be OBESE, enabled by our welfare system. As far as they're malnourished - that's by their own choice of what they buy with EBT. You'll also note that there's an appropriate word for their condition - "malnourished", not "starving to death".
If you can't start with intellectual honesty, your claims on what's wrong with society or how to fix it are not credible. It's not too late to start.
15% of the United States of America is starving to death.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people starving to death.
Show me. Where are the dead bodies? People dead by obesity related problems don't count, for obvious reasons.
I'm responding to this point first because there is no point to further discussion if you cannot or will not make truthful claims about reality.
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
The abstract concept of the demand curve also already includes the marginal profits. It's already accounted for.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage. The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected. That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can find a single worker who has a job.
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
Which is what I expected - your claims about minimum wage effects on business decisions are ludicrous.
Let's take your own example - if minimum wages removed the 16-yo exception, making minimum wage to affect all workers - all those 16 year olds would be out of their jobs, even if they were willing to work at $6/hour. Maybe a handful would get hired on at $7.25/hour, but there would be some who were not worth $6/hour.
Even if you personally think all your 16-yo coworkers could justify $7.25/hour, there are going to be some who would not be at some other business affected by the law - and they would no longer have their job by law, not because the business is unwilling to hire them, or because they are unwilling to work.
Minimum wage restricts the labor supply by forcing some workers not to work. You may argue against this all you want, but you can't change the math behind it.
It's not, but it's also not going away.
We're mostly agreed on the problems of the current welfare system. I don't have much to say on your proposed fixes, but you do need to understand what minimum wage actually does if you want to make public policy about wages.
The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
There may be a welfare system that is better and more sustainable than what we have now, but that is not particularly relevant to my criticisms of minimum wage.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." ... because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
This is the 3rd time you've contradicted reality. People aren't starving to death. They're not getting worked to death. A solution to prevent those two outcomes misses the mark because those are not the primary problems of our current system.
Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys:
Why should we make that assumption? We're not looking at a specific business, we're looking at the demand as a whole.
Demand inelasticity could make it so that a small enough minimum wage does what you hope it will do - but that also means it's small enough to not be disruptive and thus provides little benefit.
Additionally, even for small changes, businesses will adjust their operations over time to make the most profitable use out of the resources they have available. If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives. In short, the general demand/supply curve still applies - which tells us that minimum wage artificially reduces labor supply by telling some people they're not allowed to work at the wages they can ask for.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
People aren't starving in 1st world countries. Food is cheap. Yet again, your economic model doesn't reflect reality. Thus, it is useless for theorizing improvements to the systems in reality.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Preventing people who would like to work, from working, does not "provide the means to live".
Giving people a "living wage" regardless of the value of the work they actually do drains their work of any meaning and destroys the desire to work - if they get the same results regardless of effort - why bother?
Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
The labor supply isn't restricted. We have a huge labor supply; it's the money or job supply that's restricted.
Minimum wage works by restricting supply, increasing the price paid for the exact same labor.
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
40 guys end up with no work instead of having a $5/hour job. Even though they were willing to work at $5/hour, they are not allowed to do so.
100 guys willing to work, but only 60 are allowed to do so due to minimum wage. That is a restricted supply of labor.
If the labor will KILL you, but food and healthcare will sustain you, the proper payment is the cost of food and healthcare that will sustain you, PLUS compensation for your time; however, without an income, starvation will kill you faster, so you will work a job where you pay $10 worth of your health and receive $5 in compensation, thus dying more slowly. This is, conceptually, what happens in our current system.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers. Your concept doesn't match reality - and thus should not be used to govern reality.
This is why I prefer to ensure survival outright, to disconnect life from work.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
It's very easy to vote for bread and circuses - but bread is created by work - destroy the work and there will be no bread.
Removing minimum wage right now would leave the poorest under the threat of a worse situation than a horribly low salary. The salaries they would be offered would be below tolerable, but better than nothing.
All jobs exist because the worker provides more value than what he is paid.
The only way for removing minimum wage to reduce what a worker is paid is if the labor supply is being restricted by minimum wage, thus increasing the price given the supply/demand.
The only way for minimum wage to have an effect is if people are DENIED paying work that they are able and willing to do, in order to make someone else earn a little more money. You think denying people a paying job ($0/hour) is better than them having a paying job?
Bear in mind that in the real world, no one is working AT minimum wage, forever. McDs pays far more than $2/hour for its fryers - and a fryer probably has no desire to make that his life-career - nor should he. Some new inexperienced high schooler will be here in 2 years who can take over the job, while he moves on to something better. (Say management!)
Actually, if you can get everyone a barely survivable standard of living by default, you can repeal minimum wage.
You can repeal it right now, for a net improvement to society. Minimum wage destroys training jobs - which is a way for people to get job experience and qualify for better jobs, without schooling (which costs money!).
Getting paid to get experience is a good thing. Unpaid internships exist for a reason; a "below minimum wage" job is an upgrade from that.
They can be wealthy without having to spend a dime on other people, just on technology.
There are so many things wrong in this single sentence.
You don't become wealthy by spending money. You get rich by people giving you money - either by adding value, or by stealing it.
Technology comes from people - buying technology involves giving money to other people for goods and services rendered.
If you can't get the basic details right, why should anyone care about your economic analysis and predictions?
If the robotic dystopia happens, then you can claim Marx was onto something.
Until it does, he's still the failed economic theorist he's always been.
Are you putting this forth as evidence you're an expert on racism? Really?
Reading is hard. You couldn't even finish the sentence and address the POINT of the sentence.
But you do OUTRAGE really well, so maybe you're a racism expert.
You're playing with words. "Discrimination" can mean either the simple act of differentiating between two things, or in a phrase like "racial discrimination" acting in a negative manner towards a group.
Do I need to point out that "racial discrimination" is a subset of "discrimination"? "White truck" vs "truck".
Discrimination is the judgement, it doesn't have to be linked to action. People get called racist for racist opinions/statements, not necessarily for racist actions.
"whites are smarter"/"blacks are smarter" is the SAME FORM as the previous innocuous statements. Still not racist?
How about "Whites are dumber"/"blacks are dumber"? Simple inversion of the smarter claim - still not racist?
You may consider this playing with words, but either words communicate a concrete idea, or we're just babbling at each other.
You cannot debunk what he said by just calling it racist. Is it true what he said? If it is, its not racist - a fact is not racist.
I agree you cannot disprove the truth of a claim by calling it racist, but for that same reason, being factual does not preclude racism.
Because if all factual claims are not racist, a racist statement must not be true - but if racism does not change the truth content of a claim, a racist claim could still be factual.
Going to the definition of the word, racist means discrimination on the basis of race. A simple true statement like, "whites are pale-skinned and blacks are dark-skinned" is discriminating on the basis of skin color (race).
Is it your argument that it's immoral to do what's necessary to secure peaceful societies with opportunities for economic development?
I'm saying printing money is stealing. What point of mine do you think you're responding to?
printing money != taxation
Stealing is the unlawful taking of someone else's property. There, I even highlighted the important word for you. There are many good reasons for lawfully taking someone's property or rather: Small parts of it. Unless you're a hard-core anarchist, you have to solve the problem of how to keep the government (small or big) working at all, and sooner or later your solution will be taxes, even if you call it by a different name.
Oh, so it's not stealing as long as you pass a law to do so.
The legal does not override the moral. Even if a government made it legal to kill people of the wrong skin color for any reason, it would still be morally wrong to do so, and I am well within reason to call it murder, legal or not.
The major disagreement between political factions is how much to tax, who to tax and what to spend the money on, but never about taxation itself.
I was addressing a point that thought it'd be fine for the Federal government to print money, as long as it gave it to the "right" people.
Printing money is a way to secretly steal from the savers of society. It is indiscriminate and ultimately will most benefit the people in power and the people with connections, no matter who else nominally benefits. (ex: The People)