Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

I agree that it’s gotten worse; I just think people underestimate how much it has always sucked to be among the lowest earning households.

You can look at these retired 70-something boomers driving nice cars, owning a house, and taking a couple trips a year and assume they lived on Easy Street their whole lives when in fact they were probably struggling to pay bills 40 and 50 years ago as well.

Lol... no it's quite the opposite and far less distracting to actually navigate by map. You read the map, interpret the relevant bits, hold (in broad strokes) the entire strategy in your mind, and then just drive. Most of the small decisions don't matter. In fact, this greatly improves situational awareness. I don't need to pay attention to navigating every interesection when I just read the map and realize that every road as long as I'm heading roughly east will dump into the big collector road that I need to get to. I remember whether I'm on one side of the freeway, or the other, and I can find my way onto it without any additional assistance.

Interestingly, it's often MORE efficient than using Waze or some navigation app with ADHD that can't see the forest for the trees. I pity those that never learned to see the forest.

> The individual right to keep and bear arms is a natural right of all free people.

Gun advocates are always going too far. It's not enough that the Founders specifically and narrowly intended the 2nd Amendment to be a check on tyranny and intentionally exclusive of self-defense, it has to also include self-defense due to popular and intellectually dishonest misinterpretation. No, a right to keep and bear arms is not a fundamental and inalienable right, so it is not a natural right, it is instead by definition a legal right subject to the laws of the State. It can be repealed. Self-defense is a natural right which can not be repealed nor is it subject to the laws of the State, which is why including it in the 2nd Amendment is superfluous and in fact dilutes the power of the 2nd, bastardizes it, transforming it from a self-less right to an intensely selfish, egotistical and psychological entitlement, making everyone less safe.

It is ironic that Right of center dress themselves in such a way, as an advocate of rights, while at the same time dismantling the US Constitution's Bill of Rights. This is an assault on the Constitution, not advocation of it. First we lost the 4th Amendment protections, because police are entitled to search you and your car. Then we lost habeas corpus. Then we lost the 5th Amendment. Then we lost the 2nd Amendment. The words have not changed, they are just misinterpreted or ignored.

There is patriotism, but it is quite distinct from the insistence by many if not most gun advocates for anarchy. Gun advocacy is not patriotism, it is more often psychological entitlement than not. We can only hope there still exist advocates of the 2nd in it's original unadulterated intention, who would selflessly sacrifice their lives to protect others from tyranny, should the need arise, as opposed to the idiots who will shoot and kill others while claiming heroism for haphazardly protecting property.

Best example in modern history of a proper exercise of the 2nd Amendment is armed Black Panthers surrounding a courthouse. If you can't align yourself with the principle, you are no advocate of the 2nd Amendment.

This is nothing but a platitude that attempts to shame businesses for not meeting some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be.

There's no hard rules about what wages should or should not be, as with any other market price. A business will pay however much they need to attract and keep the labor they need. If no one wants to work for them they need to increase the wages they offer, which may in turn result in higher prices for customers which is also an undesirable outcome. If what they provide is of enough value that customers will continue to pay for it then the higher costs can be absorbed, if they don't, they will fail. If they can't attract workers they will likely also fail. Delivering value at prices people are willing to pay while still covering costs is ultimately what keeps a business in business.

I sometimes wonder if minimum wages are a net benefit at all as it creates several distortions. Some laborers aren't worth paying a minimum wage, they wind up earning nothing from not having work instead of what their true worth is and being able to build up skills. I think it could also remove some negotiating power from laborers. Businesses can peg their wages at the minimum and balk at those asking for raises, they pay the legally mandated price for that tier of work after all. Try to find a new job and you would also find other businesses doing the same, not paying an iota more than legally necessary instead of a more fluid labor market with people switching jobs for marginal gains, driving wages up. What may more naturally be a range of prices, both higher and lower, gets compressed to the minimum, unless that minimum is so low as to not have any effect on wages at all because no one would willingly work at that price.

I remember reading an article on how relatively cheap it is to "buy" politicians, on the order of just a hundred thousand dollars of donations in some cases, for favorable votes on relevant bills and whatnot.

I would assume if normal,everyday citizens started banding together to buy votes the corporations would up the ante and price us out pretty quickly, but as things stand right now there's no point without competition. Power of the free market baby!