15 bucks an hour

[dogman_1234]

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2013/08/seattle_begins_push_for_15_min.html

Let us see how this will turn out.

 

[Beachnative]

There is no easy answer to this..... raising wages with no increase in demand for products and services is NOT the answer

 

[dogman_1234]

There is no easy answer to this..... raising wages with no increase in demand for products and services is NOT the answer

Maybe they should take up card counting?

 

[MU_Engineer]

It was such a good plan that Marx and Engels thought it up years ago but look where it got the Soviet Union and its satellites. Human nature wouldn't let it lie there, as they proved in failed Communist States, some people (usually the State employees) would demand bigger houses and higher picket fences with much more powerful cars.

Communism failed everywhere because of two things. Number one, there is no reward for more effort so everybody does as little as possible. The second is that it takes a very powerful centralized government to implement communism and as you stated, it becomes corrupt because human nature is that people WILL abuse power for their own benefit. Communism is excellent on paper but awful in practice when human nature comes into play. This is also why Obamacare will fail- it ignores human nature and incentive/disincentive.

 

[riser]

The disparity between the haves and have not is growing at an expotential rate. Why is it that CEO's averaged whopping 27% increase pay while the person actually doing the production work received 2.7%?

That's where the arguement leads to from a liberal perspective and conservaties hate it. Small business argues that minimum wage should be left where it is and I tend to agree but there is one thing left out.

Large corporations do lousy things, have huge advantages over small business in many ways including tax discounts, low cost credit, subsidies, etc.

My question is what aren't small business owners complaining about the unlevel playing field they experience everday by large corporations?

Did you know of the fortune 100 companies, 20 are currently without a CEO because no one will take the job? The stress is too much, the risk too high.. and only way to entice someone to take the helm is to pay them.

What corporations cannot find a CEO? No one will take the job because the pay will be based on performance and limiting the golden parachute of yesteryear. I say F%^& 'em. Greed is the enemy, not the money but what you are willing to do to get it.

One of the money magazines had a article about 20 of the top Fortune 100 or 500 companies had interim CEOs while they seek a new one. Recycling CEOs is a big thing now because not enough people have the skillset to do the job.

In fact, I'd argue most people don't even know what a CEO really does, yet they're pissed off at how much they make. Everyone company is 1 bad move away from bankruptcy.

 

[riser]

It was such a good plan that Marx and Engels thought it up years ago but look where it got the Soviet Union and its satellites. Human nature wouldn't let it lie there, as they proved in failed Communist States, some people (usually the State employees) would demand bigger houses and higher picket fences with much more powerful cars.

Communism failed everywhere because of two things. Number one, there is no reward for more effort so everybody does as little as possible. The second is that it takes a very powerful centralized government to implement communism and as you stated, it becomes corrupt because human nature is that people WILL abuse power for their own benefit. Communism is excellent on paper but awful in practice when human nature comes into play. This is also why Obamacare will fail- it ignores human nature and incentive/disincentive.

Back in the 1400-1600s or so, there was a Religion that was started. It was short lived. The premise of the religion was Christianity, except the difference is that when you were born, it was already determined if you were going to heaven or hell, no matter what you did in your life.

It didn't last long.

 

[gropouce]

. Number one, there is no reward for more effort so everybody does as little as possible.

And you support on what kind of facts to say that?
This may be true in your country. Maybe in your country, people are only interested in the reward ... and maybe in your country, a donkey move forward only to grab a carrot
But do not generalize.

You're miles away from understanding what communism in your individualistic society. Your country is the one that has the most hated this current of thought and that the most denigrated it. And even today, it is in your own country that talks the most about communism.

 

[dogman_1234]

. Number one, there is no reward for more effort so everybody does as little as possible.

And you support on what kind of facts to say that?
This may be true in your country. Maybe in your country, people are only interested in the reward ... and maybe in your country, a donkey move forward only to grab a carrot
But do not generalize.

You're miles away from understanding what communism in your individualistic society. Your country is the one that has the most hated this current of thought and that the most denigrated it. And even today, it is in your own country that talks the most about communism.

I think we have moved on from communism. Nort so much of a threat.

Now, socialism...that $h!t's scary!

/sarcasm

 

[riser]

You don't even truly own land. You're always paying taxes on it.. you're more or less renting from the gov't in some form. Besides, at the drop of a hat they can declare some nonsense and strip it away.

 

[dogman_1234]

You don't even truly own land. You're always paying taxes on it.. you're more or less renting from the gov't in some form. Besides, at the drop of a hat they can declare some nonsense and strip it away.

Which is illegal. They must compensate you with either free-open land or cash value equal to the worth of the property.

 

[amdfangirl]

You don't even truly own land. You're always paying taxes on it.. you're more or less renting from the gov't in some form. Besides, at the drop of a hat they can declare some nonsense and strip it away.

Which is illegal. They must compensate you with either free-open land or cash value equal to the worth of the property.

They in theory compensate you.

In theory.

 

[riser]

Exactly what I was going to say OMG, or the people who have had land in their family for generation.

Heck, you don't even own mineral rights to anything on the ground you own. Let's say you bought 10 acres of land out west and you find out that a couple hundred feet down you strike gold/oil/silver/something. Guess what? That is the government's, not yours. You have to pay a lot of money for mineral rights.

 

[Saga Lout]

Heck, you don't even own mineral rights to anything on the ground you own. Let's say you bought 10 acres of land out west and you find out that a couple hundred feet down you strike gold/oil/silver/something. Guess what? That is the government's, not yours. You have to pay a lot of money for mineral rights.

I'm surprised at that, Riser. Here in the UK as part of the gas Fracking debate, we're told that the US is the only place where you do own the rights to anything below your land at any depth.

 

[wanamingo]

Unless you were a native American Circa 1700.

 

[riser]

It depends on the sale. You can sell your land but keep the mineral rights. Sometimes you can include them if you owned them when you purchased it. Do something to break the rules and the previous owner automagically owns the mineral rights again.

You can own land and sell the mineral rights. Or you can own mineral rights to someone else's land. It's tricky because when it came out, a lot of people sold the mineral rights to the land. That means you would have to purchase the land from the current owner and find the current mineral rights owner. Areas like Appalachia, mineral rights (coal) have been sold a lot.

I should say that in areas where they haven't been sold, a generic sale should include both the land and mineral rights. If you go out west where the government may have sold land, it is possible that the gov't sold the land, not the mineral rights. Manifest Destiny or something to that effect.

 

[MU_Engineer]

And you support on what kind of facts to say that?
This may be true in your country. Maybe in your country, people are only interested in the reward ... and maybe in your country, a donkey move forward only to grab a carrot
But do not generalize.

I am basing this off of how every communist country that exists or has existed has functioned. Economic production per capita in communist countries is much poorer than it is in capitalist countries, often much, much worse. North Korea can't even close to feed itself and is beyond dirt poor while capitalist South Korea is very prosperous. Ditto with the former DDR (East Germany) vs. the BRD (former West Germany, now the only Germany.) It's the same people, the same areas, the same resources, but vastly different outcomes. The economic system is the difference.

Your comment about Americans wanting "the carrot" is pretty funny as you are going to make my next point for me. There are two ways to motivate people- give them a reward for doing well and/or a penalty for not doing well. This is the carrot and stick analogy. A capitalist society more focuses on the reward for doing well while a communist society has no reward. All they have is the stick, which is often a 7.62x39 bullet or rotting in a gulag. I don't know about you, but I like the carrot as a reward rather than the stick as a punishment as my method of motivation.

You're miles away from understanding what communism in your individualistic society. Your country is the one that has the most hated this current of thought and that the most denigrated it.

We most certainly do know what communism is because we spent decades as the main force trying to keep it from infesting the rest of the world. Why would we have spent so many lives and so much money doing so unless it was something we knew was absolutely horrible? We have an enormous number of people who fled the ComBlock countries to the U.S. to remind us of that all of the time. I posit that so-called "intellectuals" who rarely venture out of their ivory towers of theory don't know what communism really is. They have been so absorbed in their theories that they have not even done as much to wander over to the history section of their university's library and pick up any book about economics or world history from the 1930s to the 1990s.

And even today, it is in your own country that talks the most about communism.

Yes, because others in my country elected an ivory tower pseudo-intellectual as president who has absolutely no clue about history or economics and thus thinks that communism is a good idea. Of course he thinks the others "just did it wrong" and his special brand of "communism lite" socialism is just the ticket. It is ironic that one of your former leaders summed up communism and socialism very well. Your former PM Margaret Thatcher astutely noted that "the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people's money." I couldn't agree more!

 

[Saga Lout]

Your former PM Margaret Thatcher astutely noted that "the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people's money." I couldn't agree more!

I may be mistaken but although she was my Prime Minister, and she was proved right again on that as recently as 2010. However, she was not Gropouce's PM - I believe Gropouce to be a French national. Matter of interest - who would you have supported in the way of being a Democrat and President?

 

[MU_Engineer]

I may be mistaken but although she was my Prime Minister, and she was proved right again on that as recently as 2010. However, she was not Gropouce's PM - I believe Gropouce to be a French national.

I must have thought that Grouponce was British too. If he is French, then that explains more as the French are stereotypically the most socialist group of folks in western Europe.

Matter of interest - who would you have supported in the way of being a Democrat and President?

In general I don't support the Democrats as I usually do not agree with them. My personal philosophy is to have the government be as uninvolved in the lives of the citizens as possible. I do happen to agree with *some* Democrats on a few social issues, mainly in getting rid of "blue laws" if I lived in a place that had them and in backing off punishment of victimless crimes like gambling, prostitution, and recreational drug use. However I disagree with pretty much every Democrat on most fiscal issues as they tend to be for much more governmental control of the economy and I am in favor of less government intrusion. If I got to pick who would be President of the United States, it would be Rand Paul from Kentucky. He is a civil libertarian and a fiscal conservative, which most closely represents what I am and also what a large portion of the country is as well. However those folks rarely do well as while they are popular, they have a lot of trouble in fundraising when they don't pander to various large special interest lobbies. Their opponents buy up gobs of airtime and slander them out of the campaign before the primaries. That's why Mitt Romney, whose platform would be left of the Democrats' in many states, was the Republican nominee. Ditto with McCain before him in 2008. They were willing to sell out to enough people to get enough ad dollars to rival Obama or willing to temper stances that would have cut into profitable donor rent-seeking legislative agendas and policies. The voters responded by largely sitting out the elections and thus Obama got elected and re-elected by the welfare crowd. And that is the last decade of U.S. politics in a nutshell.

 

[Saga Lout]

Thanks for that insight. We get hours of coverage of a US election campaign, staring in the Summer, but precious little detail on policy.

 

[MU_Engineer]

It's worse over here. Most of the media is in the tank for whoever is the Democrat candidate and that pretty well prevents any actual debate on policy from occurring. Election coverage is pretty much all just the tabloid fake scandals such as "did Mitt Romney really tie a dog to the roof of his car?" and a bunch of extremely inflammatory conjecture to keep the actual issues from being discussed in a reasonable manner. Then we get the same thing in the political ads: "Vote for Mitt Romney because Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist sympathizer." It's nothing but a bunch of distraction to keep enough people from actually paying attention to the real issues and electing the "wrong" people such as Paul or a whole host of others who would upset the cushy political arrangements currently in place.

 

[gropouce]

I am basing this off of how every communist country that exists or has existed has functioned. Economic production per capita in communist countries is much poorer than it is in capitalist countries, often much, much worse. North Korea can't even close to feed itself and is beyond dirt poor while capitalist South Korea is very prosperous. Ditto with the former DDR (East Germany) vs. the BRD (former West Germany, now the only Germany.) It's the same people, the same areas, the same resources, but vastly different outcomes. The economic system is the difference.

Are they starving in North Korea because of communism or because of international embargo? (notice: i'm not saying we should take the same way as North Korea; just trying to "un-demonize" (sorry, i can't find a good word for this...) a current of thought, albeit utopian, but too much exploited during the Cold War and the witch hunt, to the point that propaganda still works today.)

Your comment about Americans wanting "the carrot" is pretty funny as you are going to make my next point for me. There are two ways to motivate people- give them a reward for doing well and/or a penalty for not doing well. This is the carrot and stick analogy. A capitalist society more focuses on the reward for doing well while a communist society has no reward. All they have is the stick, which is often a 7.62x39 bullet or rotting in a gulag. I don't know about you, but I like the carrot as a reward rather than the stick as a punishment as my method of motivation.

This is partly true, but not to generalize.
If people were motivated only by the dough, there would be major malfunctions in our societies.
For example, I could very well leave the hospital where I work to start working for myself and earn 10x more money thant today.
It may be difficult to understand, but there are people for whom money is secondary.

We most certainly do know what communism is because we spent decades as the main force trying to keep it from infesting the rest of the world. Why would we have spent so many lives and so much money doing so unless it was something we knew was absolutely horrible? We have an enormous number of people who fled the ComBlock countries to the U.S. to remind us of that all of the time. I posit that so-called "intellectuals" who rarely venture out of their ivory towers of theory don't know what communism really is. They have been so absorbed in their theories that they have not even done as much to wander over to the history section of their university's library and pick up any book about economics or world history from the 1930s to the 1990s.

It is precisely this kind of connection I blame.
You talk of communism as a disease or a pest problem. This is the most insulting terminology from someone who has never approached in any way something just because he was afraid.
The problem is that I speak to you a way of thinking. Thou tell me about countries and history (history written by the winners, I want to remind).

It is because of this meritocracy that you try to build around that part of the world hates you. I think a little openness would be beneficial.
Let the rest of the world fend for themselves if they did'nt call for help. Nobody asked you to choose what is good for others.
But yes, maybe the future will show me your country knew what to do. (I say "in the future" because today it is not shining)

Yes, because others in my country elected an ivory tower pseudo-intellectual as president who has absolutely no clue about history or economics and thus thinks that communism is a good idea. Of course he thinks the others "just did it wrong" and his special brand of "communism lite" socialism is just the ticket. It is ironic that one of your former leaders summed up communism and socialism very well. Your former PM Margaret Thatcher astutely noted that "the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people's money." I couldn't agree more!

Choosing Margaret Thatcher as an example??? seriously???
Maybe your president has a best knowledge of history than you!
Take a look: All fascist leaders spoke of parasites that have infested the world and pseudo-intellectuals who led the country to ruin.

 

[riser]

They're starving because of communism. They can receive international humanitarian aid but the gov't takes control of it and gives it out as they see fit. You see and hear about how horrible it is to live there, unless you're a high ranking military member or known to the leader.

Hell, they built an entire modern city for show but no one lives there. It's all a giant stage.

Did you know that in the DMZ, for every guard looking to South Korea, two guards are watching him to make sure he doesn't signal them? If the two guards look at each other or speak to each other, they are to kill the other. This prevents any attempt for the guards to flee. Failure results in their own death.

Embargos or not, communism is the issue there. It even comes with embargos to boot.

 

[dogman_1234]

And just to clarify, "Capitalism" is a word invented by Communists.

Really?

 

[wanamingo]

North Korea is about communist as the pope is black.

Im really fascinated by North Korea Vice has some really good documentaries about the craziness that goes on up there.

 

[gropouce]

And just to clarify, "Capitalism" is a word invented by Communists.

Really?

Yes, really.

Look how much the word is demonized, especially by leftists/socialists/communists in the US and around the world. You think this is an accident, or by design?

If we follow your reasoning, capitalist invented the words "socialism" and "communism", then?
C'mon... we talk about "capitalist" or "capitalism" since 1650.

 

[chunkymonster]

And just to clarify, "Capitalism" is a word invented by Communists.

Really?

Uh, yes, really!

Prior to 1850, the terms "capital" and "capitalist" simply referred to the owners of capital (i.e.; a land owner) but was used interchangeably with money, funds, goods, assets, etc.

After 1850, the modern term "capitalism" as it is used today is attributed to Louis Blanc, a French Socialist.

It was Marx who popularized (demonized?) the therm "capitalism" to mean a political economic system in Das Kapital Vol 1 & 2 in 1867.

If we follow your reasoning, capitalist invented the words "socialism" and "communism", then?
C'mon... we talk about "capitalist" or "capitalism" since 1650.

In a sense, yes, the term "capitalism" inspired ( I wouldn't say created) the words "socialism" and "communism" as a means for Socialists/Marxists/Communists to be able to give a label and definition to a political economic system that is the anti-thesis of capitalism. Which, if anything, just shows that capitalism and a market economy based on the private ownership of the means of production was (and is) the natural way of the world prior to the theories of Marx and Engels.