Should We Drop Minimum Wage?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product[/quote]

Well, I’m the CEO of my company, so I will pay myself whatever the fuck I want to pay myself. Second, if I hired someone to run my company & investments it would be proportional to how much they make for me. Which most companies do pay their CEO’s a pretty uniform proportion of the companies net income. Same as they pay their employees.

102

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Using your reasoning abilities , I would say this is stupid , if Mac Donald�¢??s can not pay it�¢??s workers a wage they can live on then maybe they should not be allowed to employ people

Wages are proportioned to the lowest point a company can get away with paying.

Maybe we should just allow people to live better on the social net we have built for them, meaning Welfare.

McDonalds can pay the guy who mops the floors and refills the napkin things a livable wage, but they aren’t in business because they like paying people, they are in business to make money. Requiring that they double what they pay their bottom of the barrel, expendable, no-talent-or-intellect required employees means that they will simply keep fewer of those people around and require more of them. So now, 1/3 of the people who worked at McDonalds are now without ANY wage. AND because everything now costs more because everyone is having to pay their lowest producing employees more, those 2/3 of the McDonalds employees who were able to keep their jobs still can’t afford shit.

Very ethical, huh?

And no, we shouldn’t allow them to live better on the welfare safety net. Have you been paying attention at all here?

[/quote]

Yes, it is ethical. In no way is McDonald’s forcing this person to work there. They made the choice, McDonald’s put out the rules regulations and circumstances, and they agreed to it. The question is it fair? But who said the world is fair, I sure know that none of these people requesting more money were not at the negotiations trying to make that last dollar on a deals.

103

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

[/quote]

Public Corporations, still privately owned. So, “we” is still not the right word, unless you own the right type of stock and enough of it you do not control how much is paid to the CEO.

104

[quote]clip11 wrote:
AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.

And by looking at all these companies closing and going bankrupt I would say that was money well spent…
[/quote]

Are you talking about the companies that were kept afloat by government dollars and legislation before they needed extra money to bail them out? Oh okay, because obviously government induced monopolies wasn’t the reason.

105

[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Using your reasoning abilities , I would say this is stupid , if Mac Donald�?�¢??s can not pay it�?�¢??s workers a wage they can live on then maybe they should not be allowed to employ people

Wages are proportioned to the lowest point a company can get away with paying.

Maybe we should just allow people to live better on the social net we have built for them, meaning Welfare.

McDonalds can pay the guy who mops the floors and refills the napkin things a livable wage, but they aren’t in business because they like paying people, they are in business to make money. Requiring that they double what they pay their bottom of the barrel, expendable, no-talent-or-intellect required employees means that they will simply keep fewer of those people around and require more of them. So now, 1/3 of the people who worked at McDonalds are now without ANY wage. AND because everything now costs more because everyone is having to pay their lowest producing employees more, those 2/3 of the McDonalds employees who were able to keep their jobs still can’t afford shit.

Very ethical, huh?

And no, we shouldn’t allow them to live better on the welfare safety net. Have you been paying attention at all here?

Yes, it is ethical. In no way is McDonald’s forcing this person to work there. They made the choice, McDonald’s put out the rules regulations and circumstances, and they agreed to it. The question is it fair? But who said the world is fair, I sure know that none of these people requesting more money were not at the negotiations trying to make that last dollar on a deals.[/quote]

Re read my post brudda, you’re agreeing with me. My point is that artificial price floors create circumstances that are actually worse for workers.

106

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

As far as me breaking some social rule by expressing my opinion, you would be as guilty as I,by your standards. You think life has to oppress people, and any attempt to minimize the hardship on the less advantaged of us is going to make the sky fall. It won�??�?�¢??t period. The people that run this world want you to think if you do it any other way than they prescribe the world as we know it will cease to exist and too many people buy that.

So you think that people who work at minimum wage jobs as unskilled laborers do so because they are oppressed?

We have public schools. We have near universal access to higher education if they are willing to work hard.

While it won’t make the sky fall, it will create more hardship and place a burden upon those who are working harder (“less fortunate” is a crock of shit. Go to your local McDonalds and ask the guy working the fryer what his GPA in high school was if he even graduated). You seem to think that legisliation has zero economic impact, but this is understandable since you have ZERO understanding of how economies and labor markets operate. What far too many people believe is that all people with money got there by somehow taking from others and those without deserve to be supported entirely on the backs of those who are working for their living. I forget who on here said it, but “the problem with the US today is that half of the population has been tricked into thinking that our largest economic emergency is people making money.”

This has nothing to do with expressing opinions. You want me to assign myself to a collective “we”.

You and I disagree about the whole experience here at T Nation. WE disagree on politics,

I do not care what the fryers education level is, if he has the gumption to work and the labor market has a place for him, they should pay him a livable wage

Yes I believe the money I have, I took from some one else, just the same as you. The money you have is money you took from some one else.

And on the subject of disagreeing on opinions, your opinion is different than my opinion. That is all it is, nothing more. No grand scheme on how intelligent or not you are :slight_smile: No rules are broken, Grow up and learn how to communicate like a big boy.

I do not want to make any designations of you. Other than you

No, you are assigning me to the collective “we” and then using that as the basis for your argument that I am responsible for someone else not doing what they need to do to get by. You really are dense.

The money I have is money I received as a result of my economic activities. I worked hard in high school (public school, mind you), worked hard in college, and got a job that rewards my hard work by paying me more. I now work hard at my job to pay off the expenses resulting from my education. No where did I “take” anything from anyone which was not willingly given to me. I am no blue blooded old money aristocrat. My father got one pair of shoes per year and a fruit basket for Christmas. He did what I see so many of these entitled hands-out-for-their-welfare-checks freeloaders claiming they cannot. He got an engineering degree in spite of time and monetary challenges. Through his hard work, I was able to forgo a similar experience, and through my hard work, my children will be able to avoid it also. You need to stop assigning your own guilt to others.

Have you ever worked a minimum wage job? You do realize that these are not exactly complex or incredibly important tasks that these people do, right? So simply for having the gumption to dick around for the first 20 or so years of their life and THEN try to pay their bills, we should pay them a “living wage”? Fuck that. Let’s get rid of the safety nets and then maybe people will have more incentive to do something with themselves instead of sitting around with their thumbs up their asses until they realize that living costs money and they need to get some. When there’s no safety net, people tend to focus a lot harder on not falling in the first place.[/quote]

I am sorry that you think I am lumping you together with any one else, I hope it does not make your pussy hurt too badly :slight_smile:

The money you got from your economic activity either came from an employer or a customer, If I am guessing properly you employer charges a customer and pays you for your impute on the product

Your fatherâ??s accomplishments are commendable; there is honor in all labor.

I worked for minimum wage in 1971 when Nixon froze wages.

Getting rid of the social net will never happen,

I know you will disagree with me but if some one were to get off their asses and get an education they just may take your job. I have had this discussion with other free market idiots, but I will have at it with you. There are a limited number of jobs. I know that new jobs can be created, but mostly if some one gets a job means also some has lost a job. Just as if you paid me a hundred dollars to dig a ditch I have a hundred dollars that you used to own

107

[quote]orion wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
orion wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off :slight_smile: On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

N-O-K-I-A!!!

A-P-P-L-E!!!

M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T!!!

They all have awesome products; Apple and Microsoft were run for a long time by the founders. That is where it is at innovation. The irony that you chose two friends that took the same product in two directions just prove my point even more. I do not know a lot about Nokia; I have had one of their phones and really liked it

If you want to prove your point that a CEO makes a company, tell me one that sells dog shit and makes a handsome profit.

Who do you think makes the decision what to make and sell and how to produce it?

[/quote]

I think Microsoft and Apple had an idea and built their companies around that Idea, research and development is usually not part of the CEOâ??s job description.

I think there are exceptions especially when the founder is CEO and inventor or developer.

I think a good example of my point is Home Depot, when Bernie and Author founded Home Depot they hired people out of the Trades, to insure the had knowledgeable employees . They paid more than other retailers and expected a higher standard of ethics. When Bernie and Author left the experts in retail took over and ran the company into the ground.

I think private companies owned by one or two people would always have the companyâ??s best interest at heart, I could not make the same statement about public corporations.

108

[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off :slight_smile: On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

Quite possibly. My job title is Senior Manager ;-)[/quote]

Good for you.

109

[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well, I’m the CEO of my company, so I will pay myself whatever the fuck I want to pay myself. Second, if I hired someone to run my company & investments it would be proportional to how much they make for me. Which most companies do pay their CEO’s a pretty uniform proportion of the companies net income. Same as they pay their employees. [/quote]

What point of mine are you disagreeing with?

110

[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Using your reasoning abilities , I would say this is stupid , if Mac Donald�?�¢??s can not pay it�?�¢??s workers a wage they can live on then maybe they should not be allowed to employ people

Wages are proportioned to the lowest point a company can get away with paying.

Maybe we should just allow people to live better on the social net we have built for them, meaning Welfare.

McDonalds can pay the guy who mops the floors and refills the napkin things a livable wage, but they aren’t in business because they like paying people, they are in business to make money. Requiring that they double what they pay their bottom of the barrel, expendable, no-talent-or-intellect required employees means that they will simply keep fewer of those people around and require more of them. So now, 1/3 of the people who worked at McDonalds are now without ANY wage. AND because everything now costs more because everyone is having to pay their lowest producing employees more, those 2/3 of the McDonalds employees who were able to keep their jobs still can’t afford shit.

Very ethical, huh?

And no, we shouldn’t allow them to live better on the welfare safety net. Have you been paying attention at all here?

Yes, it is ethical. In no way is McDonald’s forcing this person to work there. They made the choice, McDonald’s put out the rules regulations and circumstances, and they agreed to it. The question is it fair? But who said the world is fair, I sure know that none of these people requesting more money were not at the negotiations trying to make that last dollar on a deals.[/quote]

I would not say it was unethical for McDonalds to pay as little as possible, But I think our Governmentâ??s job is to protect people that can not protect them selves.

But who said the world is fair? I answer who said it has to be unfair?

112

[quote]pushharder wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

I would not say it was unethical for McDonalds to pay as little as possible, But I think our Government�¢??s job is to protect people that can not protect them selves.

But who said the world is fair? I answer who said it has to be unfair?

I believe you really feel this way. Big government folks usually do. The answer to all of life’s problems is…more government, right? It’s ALWAYS more government. Always. Every time. Without fail.

Government is an eternally benevolent albeit pervasive force. Gotta have more of it so…that “we” can protect people that cannot (or will not) protect themselves.

“Hi, I’m with the government and I’m here to help you!”

“Bend over. I’ll make this feel good for you. I promise.”
[/quote]

We agree, I think a livable wage could easily be obtained by an increase in minimum wage and Socialized medicine

113

removing government from business is a great way to ensure that the number of middle class individuals drastically decreases, labor is undervalued, poverty increases, and the rich get exponentially richer.

if you like the image of the robber baron, this is the position for you.

114

removing government from business is a great way to ensure that the number of middle class individuals drastically decreases, labor is undervalued, poverty increases, and the rich get exponentially richer.

if you like the image of the robber baron, this is the position for you.

116

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

Getting rid of the social net will never happen,
[/quote]

Because lazy, entitled people can vote too.

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
I know you will disagree with me but if some one were to get off their asses and get an education they just may take your job. I have had this discussion with other free market idiots, but I will have at it with you. There are a limited number of jobs. I know that new jobs can be created, but mostly if some one gets a job means also some has lost a job. Just as if you paid me a hundred dollars to dig a ditch I have a hundred dollars that you used to own
[/quote]

First of all, if you gave me $100 to dig a ditch, you did so under your own volition and therefore I have taken nothing from you against your will and owe you nothing more than the digging of that ditch in return. The exchange of $100 for the digging of a ditch is the economic activity (work) and I have no responsibilities to you outside of that nor do you have any to me.

Now, to address your other (horribly flawed) argument, you are operating under the assumption that the demand for labor is fixed. Economic growth creates more jobs that pay more. There were far fewer high paying jobs in 1900 than there are today. By the same hand, more people possessing specific skills and the initiative to use them for financial gain. Now, if you get into the realm of a shrinking economy-like the one resulting from widespread dependence on social welfare and the subsequent low productivity-then there are fewer and fewer jobs to go around.

More and more people are receiving higher education over the past 30 years, so by your logic, employment of new college graduates should be shrinking due to an increase in the labor supply. This, however, is the opposite of the trend. The lifelong value of a college degree continues to rise.

Your lack of understanding with regards to these very simple economic concepts is astounding.

117

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Getting rid of the social net will never happen,

Because lazy, entitled people can vote too.

pittbulll wrote:
I know you will disagree with me but if some one were to get off their asses and get an education they just may take your job. I have had this discussion with other free market idiots, but I will have at it with you. There are a limited number of jobs. I know that new jobs can be created, but mostly if some one gets a job means also some has lost a job. Just as if you paid me a hundred dollars to dig a ditch I have a hundred dollars that you used to own

First of all, if you gave me $100 to dig a ditch, you did so under your own volition and therefore I have taken nothing from you against your will and owe you nothing more than the digging of that ditch in return. The exchange of $100 for the digging of a ditch is the economic activity (work) and I have no responsibilities to you outside of that nor do you have any to me.

Now, to address your other (horribly flawed) argument, you are operating under the assumption that the demand for labor is fixed. Economic growth creates more jobs that pay more. There were far fewer high paying jobs in 1900 than there are today. By the same hand, more people possessing specific skills and the initiative to use them for financial gain. Now, if you get into the realm of a shrinking economy-like the one resulting from widespread dependence on social welfare and the subsequent low productivity-then there are fewer and fewer jobs to go around.

More and more people are receiving higher education over the past 30 years, so by your logic, employment of new college graduates should be shrinking due to an increase in the labor supply. This, however, is the opposite of the trend. The lifelong value of a college degree continues to rise.

Your lack of understanding with regards to these very simple economic concepts is astounding.[/quote]

But I thought all economic activity was a zero sum game? There’s no way that BOTH parties in that ditch digging example are benefiting.

118

[quote]TBT4ver wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Getting rid of the social net will never happen,

Because lazy, entitled people can vote too.

pittbulll wrote:
I know you will disagree with me but if some one were to get off their asses and get an education they just may take your job. I have had this discussion with other free market idiots, but I will have at it with you. There are a limited number of jobs. I know that new jobs can be created, but mostly if some one gets a job means also some has lost a job. Just as if you paid me a hundred dollars to dig a ditch I have a hundred dollars that you used to own

First of all, if you gave me $100 to dig a ditch, you did so under your own volition and therefore I have taken nothing from you against your will and owe you nothing more than the digging of that ditch in return. The exchange of $100 for the digging of a ditch is the economic activity (work) and I have no responsibilities to you outside of that nor do you have any to me.

Now, to address your other (horribly flawed) argument, you are operating under the assumption that the demand for labor is fixed. Economic growth creates more jobs that pay more. There were far fewer high paying jobs in 1900 than there are today. By the same hand, more people possessing specific skills and the initiative to use them for financial gain. Now, if you get into the realm of a shrinking economy-like the one resulting from widespread dependence on social welfare and the subsequent low productivity-then there are fewer and fewer jobs to go around.

More and more people are receiving higher education over the past 30 years, so by your logic, employment of new college graduates should be shrinking due to an increase in the labor supply. This, however, is the opposite of the trend. The lifelong value of a college degree continues to rise.

Your lack of understanding with regards to these very simple economic concepts is astounding.

But I thought all economic activity was a zero sum game? There’s no way that BOTH parties in that ditch digging example are benefiting.[/quote]

I get money, he gets a ditch. I receive money in return for my time. He gives money in return for getting the ditch without expending his time. One’s time is a finite resource so that time has a monetary value.

Are there many more of you guys? No wonder our country is in so much trouble.

119

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
I know you will disagree with me but if some one were to get off their asses and get an education they just may take your job. I have had this discussion with other free market idiots, but I will have at it with you. There are a limited number of jobs. I know that new jobs can be created, but mostly if some one gets a job means also some has lost a job. Just as if you paid me a hundred dollars to dig a ditch I have a hundred dollars that you used to own

[/quote]

As does economic theory and observation. Stronghold just explained how a minimum wage ends up raising unemployment and prices. So either agree that these are OK consequences of higher legislated wages wages or get out of the debate.

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[quote]chrillionare wrote:
removing government from business is a great way to ensure that the number of middle class individuals drastically decreases, labor is undervalued, poverty increases, and the rich get exponentially richer.

if you like the image of the robber baron, this is the position for you.[/quote]

O rly? So in the last hundred years, as you capitalist-hating folks like to say, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer (that’s a massive misnomer, but that’s for another thread). Guess what’s also been happening? I’ll give you a hint: It hasn’t been LESS government interaction and it hasn’t been STATIC either. Think about that for a bit.