221–230 of 376 posts
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> I have no idea why you imagined it would involve beating and robbing anyone. How do you think government would enforce that "revoking a business license" thing?
The same way the government goes about most things: asking , then telling, then forcing you to. I mean governments also revoke driving licenses all the time, I don't think it always devolves to beatings
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What if I still want to exercise my business without a license? How would they enforce it? Hint: see what happens to abortion practitioners in countries where abortion is illegal or marijuana resellers where it's illegal etc.
Most businesses don't require a license to operate unless they deal with controlled goods like tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, or the exploitation of natural resources. Beyond that, what the government provides is the articles of incorporation to limit the liability of investors, and allow the owners and operators of the business to act as a single entity within the court system. If we take away the articles of in…
That's simply not true here, where any business which has to collect sales tax (i.e. nearly everyone) needs a "Transaction Privilege Tax" license.
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Business is a social construct and we can un-construct it if it proves no longer to be the socially valuable way to do things. It's there to serve humans. if it doesn't do that, it's a parasite, drag it out behind the shed and shoot it.
The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.
People tend to think communism vs capitalism but for most of human history it's been something else. Like hunter/gather or some form of feudalism. I don't disagree that market societies work for distributing goods. But they do have external costs. Are there more efficient ways? Probably. Will market economies go the way of hunter/gather economies at some point? Almost certainly.
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You are essentially making the luddite case. The counterargument usually goes like this: yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run; however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices, so real wages will go up along with demand and the extra income not spent on, say, buying feed stock for your horse, will go in creating other jobs and economic sectors t…
> however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices Except why would that ever happen? If you were a business owner selling widget X, and it suddenly cost you half as much to make that due to automation, you don't pass those savings on to your customers, you celebrate how much better your margins have gotten and how much more profit you're making.
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Well, I just don't know what to say to this. Sounds like the kind of thing someone who gets paid well above the minimum wage would say. Check out this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count... and sort by Hourly Nominal in descending order. Australia, France, New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, and Canada all have minimum wages above the US. All…
The US really does seem like some strange experiment in how not to do economics and democracy. This is the exact opposite of how most people view America. If it's so bad, why do so many people want to live in the US?
Annually the USCIS gets about 6 million applications (that's in total, including permanent and temporary immigration claims). That's 0.08% of all the people on Earth (not including those already in the U.S.). Is it really fair to say a lot of people want to live there?
I'm all for raising the minimum wage, temporarily it may help people for several years. The truth is the automation wave is coming quickly regardless of what people are paid. And it's not for just minimum wage jobs. Think about jobs like truck driver where there's probably several million people who count this as their profession in the US. In 10-20 years, that number will probably approach 0. There's a nasty new wor…
>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone Want to know the biggest job killer in history? The tractor. Farm employment in the developed world went from 70% to 2%. We have been through this before. We can generate new jobs.
I for one would be very grateful for this new class of service workers. I mean.. I don't change my own oil. I could but I don't. Jiffy Lube does it better and cheaper.
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They would just revoke it because they are the issuers of the license in the first place. You can't take something that you already own from yourself by force.
You're not taking into account that this "Issuer" claims some right to decide (by force, obviously) who can do business in the first place. So if some entrepreneurial lady begins, say, arranging flowers or braiding hair... maybe she gets forced out of business for not having a license. Or maybe she does get a license but it is revoked for some arbitrary reason like the Issuer decides she's a "parasite" because she do…
Do we really need every thread that even tangentially mentions government on HN to devolve into this same childish nonsense?
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The conservative government here in the UK has put the minimum wage on a steep upward trajectory. This is not a conservative vs left-wing (or liberal as you like to call it) thing. The more important distinction is between those who keep holding on to paid work as the main or only moral basis for deserved income and the other camp that tries to move away from that principle. There are conservative, left-leaning and l…
Would slowly increasing minimum wage act as a slow (not exact) transition to basic income?
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You are essentially making the luddite case. The counterargument usually goes like this: yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run; however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices, so real wages will go up along with demand and the extra income not spent on, say, buying feed stock for your horse, will go in creating other jobs and economic sectors t…
Does anyone have any economic information on what happened to grocery stores when the scanner was introduced? Did prices go down? What happened to those workers? I bet consumers didn't notice any benefits. I bet wait times stayed the same because fewer lines were open. I bet prices didn't go down either.
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Minimum wage increases, experience has shown, put upward pressure on wages generally. It is not the case that everyone making between the old minimum wage and the new minimum wage ends up at the new minimum after the change.
Let's continue your thought: If minimum wage increases put upward pressure on wages generally, then what happens? Higher wage levels in general means more money in people's pockets, and this can turn into general price inflation (especially since business costs have risen due to the general level of wages going up). So let's assume you now have inflation. This means everything just got more expensive, so now that new…
You're basically arguing that it's raising the minimum wage that increases inflation, when this is patently not true. Inflation is almost always present, regardless of modifications to minimum wage.