431–440 of 451 posts
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> the relevant know-how and opportunities I've seen many guides to doing this in the form of blogs. This is not hard information to come by.
What separates the haves from the have-nots? It's not blogs.
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> The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power i…
> The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor. Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. If…
It should be paired with a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare then.
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How would you "amend the Federal Arbitration Act to deny the use of arbitration as a tool to suppress legitimate use of the courts to address remedies"? Do you just want to get rid of mandatory arbitration? That sounds like repealing the FAA and replacing it with its mirror image.
Forbid mandatory arbitration for b2c and b2smb Or forbid it entirely. What exactly is the problem with writing a law to stop an abusive practice?
I see mandatory arbitration as a trade-off, and would simply prefer that people take that kind of clause into account when they transact with others.
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If everyone has to raise the minimum wage all, everyone has to raise prices accordingly and ROI remains the same.
You disregard the option of simply not doing business. If products and services become more expensive, demand tends to go down, so you end up at square one in terms of income. There is some wiggle room here and not all prices are elastic like that, but it's true in principle.
Society needs to find a way to have people gainfully employed keeping the minimum wage at poverty levels is not a good choice.
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If everyone has to raise the minimum wage all, everyone has to raise prices accordingly and ROI remains the same.
If that were true there would be no resistance to raising the minimum wage. The truth is that it redistributes wealth.
The last forty years has been redistributing profits from labour to capital.
There is nothing at all wrong with reversing that.
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If everyone has to raise the minimum wage all, everyone has to raise prices accordingly and ROI remains the same.
This is not how it works, but it is one of many lies spread to help prevent raising minimum wage.
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There are a lot of reasons small businesses are dead, and regulation is not one of them. The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses. Small businesses are rare because the government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities, ignoring companies that use anticompetitive practices like labor violations and price fixing that lock competitors out of the market. Small businesses are also rare…
> and regulation is not one of them. > Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars Zoning codes and infrastructure policies are a form of regulation. > government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities I agree with this part. A minimal regulatory regime along with a strong antitrust regime is pretty much ideal IMO. > The US regulatory structure…
In the food service industry, the most common type of small business, there are only 2400 federal regulations, and most of them concern common sense things, like "wipe tables after customers use them" and "cook chicken to 180°" and "don't let rats live under the oven". Take every type of food served in the US, every appliance, tool, utensil, or technique used by any commercial kitchen, and 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.
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> and regulation is not one of them. > Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars Zoning codes and infrastructure policies are a form of regulation. > government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities I agree with this part. A minimal regulatory regime along with a strong antitrust regime is pretty much ideal IMO. > The US regulatory structure…
Quantity of regulations is not the same as regulatory burden, and it's not like every single businness in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one. In the food service industry, the most common type of small business, there are only 2400 federal regulations, and most of them concern common sense things, like "wipe tables after customers use them" and "cook chicken to 180°" and "don't let rats live un…
That's an incorrect understanding of how laws and regulations work. Ignorantia juris non excusat.
> 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.
I'd love to hear a food service operator's perspective. It may differ from yours.
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> The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power i…
> The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor. Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. If…
My reading of the argument (maybe different from OP) is the choice to work a low wage job isn't a choice made completely by one's own volition due to a huge stack of societal factors.
Let's break your counterargument down a bit, preventing people from being able to work denies them sustenance yes, but also embedded (IMO) in your argument is the intrinsic value of a job as a part of someone's life. Here we agree and this is why I don't support cradle-to-grave welfare and think it would be a disaster if implemented. It is something welfare advocates tend to ignore, to the detriment of their credibility on other economic matters.
A retraining program coupled with a large hike in minimum wages and temporary retraining assistance could sustainably raise the minimum standard of living with no government takeover of the economy. The program itself can be a private one if designed the right way. Prior retraining programs didn't work due to 1) lack of accountability and 2) lack of demand for upskilled labor. A very high minimum wage fixes that on the cost side and also on the aggregate demand side. (Something approaching the median US wage today or possibly 1.5x-2x higher, phased in over several decades to give business a measure of predictability and planning capacity.)
Most low paying jobs can be automated, when they aren't it is because human labor is so cheap that the expense of capex to automate isn't worth it. By raising the floor cost of labor, government provides business an incentive to retool the economy around higher-wage paying activities. Any business that can't automate and relies on cheap human work to do drudgery isn't worth saving in my opinion. A bonus is that the resulting capex will generate second and third order effects that will catalyze economic growth and spare many otherwise impacted small businesses from failing.
We want to idealize the person who starts out in a fast food restaurant, learns discipline and organizational skills, and moves on to higher paying work. Several decades of data have shown us this is a nice theory that fails in practice in most cases. Those people remain stuck and that is bad for economic growth in addition to causing needless suffering. Keeping the minimum wage low hasn't solved this problem and won't solve it in the future.
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> The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor. Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. If…
> what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. It should be paired with a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare then.
It shouldn't be normalized to be a "lifelong" thing, in the same way we think it's unusual for someone to be a lifelong college student. At least one without milestones such as degrees, etc.