Ah yes, never mind the VERY real effects which happen when the minimum wage is simply dropped by 20-30%, let alone abolished.

I can blame you for trying to kill people, just as I blame any group of fanatics.

And I’m not an economist, but setting a living wage is something which is, quite frankly, not controversial. And a “mistake”, like letting the 99% not live like Chinese peasants? Quite.

Also…you can blame people for results, true enough, but you can’t blame anyone for results that only happened in your imagination. If you tried things my way and people really did starve, then I’d say blame away. But you can’t blame me for the starvation of people who haven’t starved.

I don’t give a crap about intentions, I care about results. And yes, I can blame you for the results – if you intended them or no.

Is it your position that a man paid $14.50 an hour to work in Australia will “starve”, as in not have enough food to eat? Or did you mean starve is some metaphorical sense?

And is it further your position that I am advocating stravation, as you say “directly”, where directly would have to mean that starvation was the result I intend…rather than just a negative consequence of my policies?

Is that what you’re saying?

On its pages, one could read numerous cops coming to the defense of other PPD’ers when they found themseves in the limelight for stealing from bodegas and taverns and shooting innocent citizens and beating the hell out of kids and women and men.

It was a terrific insight into the brutal club that is the PPD.

Alas, some African American cops complained that many of the website’s posts were racist in nature. Yes, they were. But eliminating such websites (or books or public clubs) only serves to drive the racism and abuse of power underground and behind closed doors. Better it be out in the open for the general public to witness.

McNesby was a fan, btw.

You have just defined yourself as crazy, evil and stupid when I would would have stuck with “blindly ideological”, well, your ball!

Yes, I am EXTREMELY confident that not starving people to death is a BLOODY GOOD IDEA.

Your position is he should receive a wage which he cannot live on. And that there is no support for this, in any way, shape or form. Mine is that he should receive a wage he can live on, or failing that the government should make it possible for him to not-starve, and have a roof over his head.

Of course there is another possibility. Maybe your arguments are not as strong as you think, and maybe they need a few patches of such rhetoric to fill out one or two cracks in their logic.

The worst thing I can say about you is this: I’m confused by your extreme confidence in a position that makes so little sense to me. But that’s a far cry from calling you a blood-thirsty taskmaster of the starving workers.

So let me ask my fundamental question in a new way:

Even in your preferred example of Australia, with its 5% unemployment rate, there are still hundreds of thousands of people who want jobs but can’t find them.

If one of those people finds an employer willing to pay him $14.50 per hour, instead of the mandated minimum wage of $15.51 per hour…my position is that he should be allowed to work, both because that is his choice, and because $14.50 per hour is clearly more than $0.00 per hour.

Your position is that he should not. In fact, you believe that if this man accepts work for $14.50 per hour, a crime has been committed.

Please, tell me why…

“In my corner there are whole schools of thought in economics, philosophy, political science, etc.”

I use the common definitions, you’re the one who is trying to revise political and economic science *out of existence*!

And I mean starve and slaver in their literal sense. You can squawk all you like, but that view WILL starve people to death and *very* few workfare programs do not meet the internationally accepted definition of slavery.

Your “programs”, or rather complete LACK of them, would *immediately* cause mass starvation among the poor, and a massive crime wave. That’s what you’re pushing for.

“Any large country with a modern, mixed first-world economy is going to have basically the same constraints.”

In context, you seem to be saying that it’s possible to make nation-to-nation comparisons of economic policy and performance, as long as the nations being compared fall into a category known as “modern, first-world economies”.

Okay, fine…so let’s say I want to compare export policy in Canada against Italy. You claim it shouldn’t matter that one country has oil, while the other does not. You claim it should be a mere trifle that one country controls its own currency, while the other does not. They are both “modern, first-world economies”, so comparisons should be fair game.

I reject that assumption, and I am not alone in rejecting it. In my corner there are whole schools of thought in economics, philosophy, political science, etc.

The danger, you see, is this: let’s say one of your comparisons turns up a “neo-liberal modern, first-world economy” in Nation X that is doing better in every respect than a “modern, first-world economy” that rejects neo-liberalism in Nation Y.

You’d say, “Oh shit. That’s not what I wanted to find at all. I thought neo-liberalism was bad news for sure.”

But never fear. Since Nation X and Nation Y are different in a thousand ways, which you were happy to ignore when your comparison began, all you need to do now is take a second look at those differences.

And guess what you’ll find? A closer inspection of the facts will no doubt reveal that Nation X wasn’t really “neo-liberal” after all. You just had the definition of that term slightly off, but now you’ve fixed it good and true. And it will also turn out Nation Y wasn’t really a “modern, first-world economy”, it was just posing as one. You’ll modify the definition of that term as well, and now that both inconvenient nations have been defined clear out of the sample, you’re back in business.

Don’t you see the hazard in that?
_____________________________________________________________________________

Here’s another methods issue, while I’m at it. You said I view “killing the poor” as a moral policy. Now, since obviously you know I don’t intend to literally kill any poor people (not even one, if fact!) you must have some special meaning in mind when you use those words.

Probably you meant that my policies might ultimately LEAD to death among the poor, which would have been easy enough to say. But you didn’t say that.

Hence, even if it seems a bit silly, I have no choice but to pause and ask that we take a moment to discuss what “killing” means. The same goes for some other words you’ve used, like “slaver” and “starve”, neither of which could possibly stand up to the scrutiny of literal interpretation in the occasions of your use.

“It’s only a difference of degree”

Except it’s not. Any large country with a modern, mixed first-world economy is going to have basically the same constraints. The ones who have chosen any particular foil for neo-liberalism are doing well, it’s the ones who have most closely followed neo-liberalism who are in deep trouble!

You’ve gone off on a complete tangent to the important point, and I can only see that as deliberate.

And if you are not advocating corporate welfare when you pay less than a living wage, effectively, you ARE arguing to starve people even when they work, increasingly (since automation isn’t slowing down) and without recourse.

Ah yes, killing the poor – you view this as moral, I don’t. Chinese wages come with Chinese poverty, and I view it as sad you’re pushing for that situation. (And no, I don’t care for evasions, you ARE advocating these in what you said)

“when other more direct methods of wealth transfer exist”

What are those? Because the minimum wage is one of the simplest, cheapest and easiest.

“I was just asking why YOU didn’t prefer them to a mandatory minimum wage”

Because I’m not a slaver, for one thing? Workfare consistently, even when structured not to displace jobs (VERY hard), and does anything worthwhile (harder, if you’re not displacing jobs) creates dependency by significantly lengthening the time period people spend on government assistance. And it’s expensive.

You wonder why I don’t favour those versus higher employment, people able to live without direct government support and with a degree of dignity? Sigh.

At any rate, it’s not in the nature of my argument to predict that unemployment should be higher or lower in this unique country or that unique country. That’s why the case of Australia doesn’t falsify my non-falsifiable theory, and that’s why it doesn’t confirm your equally non-falsifiable theory.

I just googled to see which countries had the lowest listed unemployment rate on planet earth. The answer was…it’s a tie for first place between Monaco and North Korea. Now, if you were really an empiricist you’d have to say: “The data has spoken. The nations of the world should line up and begin emulating the labor policies of North Korea and Monaco.”

But of course you’re not saying that, and you never would say that. You know axiomatically that North Korea is lying and that Monaco must be some kind of anomaly. You don’t need to travel to either place, you don’t need to interview anybody, you don’t need to start collecting reams of econometric data, you just know on general principle that those numbers do not mean what they seem to mean.

Can’t you see that the same is going to be true of any other country either of us can name? It’s only a difference of degree, and North Korea and Monaco are just extreme examples. Every country is totally unique, and no comparison between unique countries can be empirically fair.

My argument has always been: “the minimum wage will tend to make lower skilled workers unemployable, if their productivity level is lower than the mandated wage.”

I have never once said: “countries with high minimum wages will always have high unemployment, without exception”.

I’m sure you’re not doing it on purpose, but you’ve consistently failed to see the difference between those two claims.

(Also, I’m not advocating any welfare corporate or otherwise. My intent back in #61 Para 4 was merely to express surprise that the minimum wage enjoys so much support, when other more direct methods of wealth transfer exist. As you can probably tell from talking to me for so long, I consistently oppose all such transfers for both practical and principled reasons. I.E., I wasn’t actually suggesting make-work programs, I was just asking why YOU didn’t prefer them to a mandatory minimum wage.)

You’re “arbitrarily” shifting money from taxpayers to the poor, propping up company profits – it’s pure corporate welfare and very much part of the big-state “conservative” agenda.

Your widgets factory is utterly reliant on a subsidy, delivered via the workers! Moreover, it’s reliant on that being delivered via a higher tax rate and requires an expensive, intrusive extension of the state into the lives of the people receiving it.

Your entire argument is that Australia doesn’t exist, since such a high minimum wage in your system would have massive unemployment. Unfortunately for you, it does not; In fact, it has ~3% lower unemployment than the USA.

Employing people who need expensive, intrusive government support is not “helping” people when there are *perfectly viable* existing, tested, alternatives which cut out several steps of the process – in this case, the minimum wage.

“Let people work and still starve” isn’t an alternative I consider viable, and I’m yet to see another proposal which is both viable, cheaper and less intrusive than the minimum wage.

Wages have been increasingly squeezed out by capital in the last 30 years, and you’re arguing that this trend needs to be accelerated, on the back of corporate welfare. I don’t see any grounds you can argue that’s remotely Libertarian.

That gets at an important point. You assume that the minimum wage actually does what it’s supposed to do…that it produces increased wages on net balance, and that any gains produced come at the expense of profit, not at the expense of other workers. Those assumptions are precisely what I am calling into dispute. To stay with my previous examples…

If I employ 100 widget makers who each earn $4.00 an hour, my payroll would be 3,200 a day. Again, let’s say they each make one widget per hour, and that each widget sells for $4.25. That’s roughly a 6% profit for me, which would be considered quite healthy by many businesses today.

Each of my workers gets $32.00 per day, and I get $200.00. From their point of view I am a rich one percenter indeed.

But now you pass a law saying I must pay these workers $5.00 per hour. Your goal is that the pay of each one of my 100 workers should go up to $40.00 day. But that’s not what happens. Because my cost went up by $800.00 per day, and because you didn’t pass a law requiring my customers to spend more money for the same quantity of widgets, I am now losing $0.75 on every sale.

Obviously, this can’t continue. If I am very lucky, I will have some inelastic customers who have nowhere else to go, and who are willing to spend $5.25 per widget. If I am even luckier, I might be able to apply some new capital to help my best and most efficient widget makers raise their productivity to 9 widgets per worker per day, so I can stay in business.

But as for my least skilled widget makers, they can’t keep pace with these developments. They must be let go immediately. Their new rate of pay: $0.00 per hour, $0.00 per day.

This should trouble you deeply, because the intent of your policy was to make life better for precisely those people.

You believe you can do that by arbitrarily shifting money away from profit and towards wages, but what if you’re wrong? What if the system gives way in the other direction, and the increase you mandate comes not from the shallow reservoir of profit, but from the deep pool of wages – raising pay for some workers slightly, while catastrophically lowering it for others?

I’d want to be very sure – much surer than you have cause to be – before I risked any policy that had such an outcome as its downside.

This isn’t just me, it’s a lot of studies showing the same sort of results. Moreover, the economic performance of the countries in question are the final arbitrators, and they’re quite clear. That kind of inflation-focus doesn’t work in the longer run.

That you erupt at the very concept of workers possibly organising, when employers most certainly do without the same kind of response, is also telling.

That you mention “government make-work” programs as a way to HELP the poor, too, is something I find disgusting. I’d of thought slavery would have been even more of a no-go for Americans…

Look, we’ve traded a couple thousand words back and forth – hardly enough for either of us to prove or disprove much of anything. These subjects are way too big for anyone to be signing off QED.

Earlier in this conversation you said “I’m a trained researcher and I know how hard it is to break outside that box.” But have you considered the possibility that you might be the one still trapped in that box? Isn’t it just possible that your “observed data” is really just a bunch of selective facts, mortared together with the same confirmation bias that is natural to us all?

If one’s only goal was to help the poor, there are lots of ways to do that: you might try a minimum wage, but you might also try an earned income credit, a matching program for employers who hire low skilled workers, tax breaks for employees and employers at the lower margins of the economy, government make-work programs, etc.

So tell me which makes more sense:

1.) Let my $4.00 per hour widget maker get a job that pays $4.00 an hour, and then try to raise his income up, by public assistance, to whatever level you regard as a living wage. Or

2.) Make it illegal for him to work at that rate, and try to raise him to a living wage from the considerably more difficult starting point of $0.00 an hour.

It seems to me that option 2 only makes sense if you consider that the minimum wage might be just a way for middle class and higher skilled workers to outlaw their competition from lower class, lower skilled workers. And the fact that labor unions everywhere support the minimum wage is certainly consistent with that explanation.

What do you think?

That’s also measured, and while German productivity is high, Australian productivity isn’t especially – but you’re missing something. Germany doesn’t have a minimum wage per-se, for most workers. Certain /sectors/ have it from collective bargaining, but not the economy as a whole.

“the tally will not be in your favor”

TALLY? You’ve proposed a theory. It’s incorrect, because of a solid counter-example. Stop, go away and come back with a new theory which fits the observed data.

“when I say that a given worker is only “worth” $4.00 an hour, I’m not making a moral or political statement”

Yes, you most certainly are. By not paying a living wage, you’re relying on corporate welfare to fill in the gap. Your business is *not viable in the economy*, without subsidies.

And we have a situation NOW where the bankers and 1% are essentially a separate class. How can taking their tools of domination away from them, as I want to do (and paying people a living wage, freeing them from government dependency, is a TINY part of that) “working” for them? I’m a mutualist, for frick sake – technically an anarchist (although I don’t consider myself one).

On the other hand, you’re just fine with corporate welfare for low-paid workers and American Libertarian policy is very strongly corporatist, in practice.

The reason why your examples do no mischief for me, is because other things have not been held equal. It could be that German and Australian workers are highly productive, it could be that they are especially well capitalized, it could be that they are riding high on export subsidies that will backfire in the long run, it could be that their other economic policies are not as self-destructive as those of competing nations…in other words, in could very well be that they are doing something that wouldn’t work, if everyone else suddenly tried it too.

In the meantime, there are a bunch of Spains, Portugals, Irelands, Kenyas, and South Africas out there, foundering in economic misery with double digit unemployment. If we list out all the countries that attempt to control the minimum price of labor, and then look at their unemployment rates, the tally will not be in your favor. Of course you could counter that other things have not been held equal, and of course you would be right. Every country will turn out to be special in 10,000 ways.

And that’s precisely why I suggested we should try to avoid an exchange of pseudo-empirical evidence.

More importantly: when I say that a given worker is only “worth” $4.00 an hour, I’m not making a moral or political statement. I simply mean that if I can’t sell a widget for more than $4.25, and a worker can only make one widget per hour, then I can’t pay that worker $5.00 per hour. That says absolutely nothing about his value as a person. It is purely a comment on his marginal productivity as a widget-smith.

Of course I’m not playing dumb to your concerns. I realize that you hear those words as the siren song of a resurgent class system, where latter day Toffs run around lording it over the little people. You find that prospect revolting, and actually so do I.

We differ in this sense only: I think your policies keep Toff where he is, and leave the Chav unemployed. And I can’t understand why you’re okay with that.