Yeah, and that's why atheists are never kind or generous...
Get rid of welfare and just give every adult $870/mo
- Thread starter strawman
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Westboro is a church. I doubt many would agree that they're a "force for good."
...anyone who's not a member, at least.Westboro is a church. I doubt many would agree that they're a "force for good."
--Patrick
versus government. You want the government to be the arbiter of what's considered morally "good"? That's what I was refuting, not any other argument.
No, but it's acceptable for the public to decide what is morally acceptable/good/desireable and for them to hand it to the government to work towards that goal. In theory (and oh I know this is purely theoretical) the government doesn't have an agenda beyond "doing what the people want", no need to make a profit, not beholdne to any special interest group, and so on.
Of course this theory fails on multiple levels, from lobbyists controlling what happens more than the people, over misinterpreting the signals sent by the people, over the people being a bunch of dickheads sending a million different signals and all the wrong way, to the forming of a governmental oligarchy by a small group of people who stay in power, and so on and so forth.
The idea of democracy is that We the People can sort of work out what most people want done, and the government can then go and do it. In one country, maybe people want more (religious) freedom, in another, more (social) security, whatever.
I would argue that the government is working at it's best when it does the exact opposite of this. If the general public was allowed to have it's way consistently, numerous individual rights would be violated in the name of the religion of the majority and the racial views of the majority. We have already seen what such bigotry has done to the minorities of the country in the past.
This is why the government does not and should not be acting as a moral agent, instead acting as the arbiter of rights. This way it can act against public opinion in order to protect the rights of the most vulnerable, even if it is against the will of the public because how the public views you should not have an impact on your rights.
Funny, because governments at least have some history of not fucking it up in some of their incarnations, while i can't think of a church that hasn't done something horrible once it reached more then a few thousand people. I mean if even Buddhists ended up killing people...
Related to employment (and underemployment) and such, so seemed the best thread we had for this kind of thing: Unemployment in the UK is now so low it's in danger of exposing the lie used to create the numbers
Sounds like an unfounded rumor, at least at a very cursory glance: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/12314
As far I know, unemployment since the Great Depression has been measured as people actively seeking employment. So you don't count pensioners, the sick, and the wealthy as unemployed.
GasBandit
Staff member
It didn't change, it was just the economic collapse caused a large number of people to be unemployed so long they stopped being counted as workforce, thus making the "unemployment" rate return to 6% (falsely being touted as a "recovery") when it really was twice that (if you compared it to the labor participation rate pre-crash), and of course underemployment was ignored entirely.
GasBandit
Staff member
As it ever was, and ever shall be. Before Obama, 5.5% unemployment was decried as evidence of a flagging economy under bush... when it was lauded as "full employment" under clinton.
The whole practice is a sham, and every politician attempts to abuse it to their own ends, because the numbers are all meaningless and easy to misrepresent.
And now Trump just makes shit up
I liked how that video honestly tried to present both sides of it. There was a bias towards "don't panic" but it was honest both ways IMO.
Now for the heavy political side: The guy said it right at the end, remind me again if Globalization is Good or Bad, given Trump's anti-globalization stance?
Really what I think it's going to come down to is whether or not the people who make the machines will claim that everything the machines make/do therefore belongs to them, because the unhappiest guy on Earth will be that guy (or gal!) who spends their entire personal fortune ensuring that nobody else has to work ever again.
--Patrick
--Patrick
The only way that happens is Doomsday. Because the only way to guarantee that happens is to remove humanity from the equation. Don't underestimate the ability of people to behave in stupid ways. Mind bogglingly stupid ways. Ways which no machine would ever be prepared to deal with. Which is why you have humans working the overnight shift, just in case a new branch of stupid appears. And it always will.
I'd say that's worth watching, but I think they downplay FAR too much the 67% (according to the video) of people displeased with their jobs. MOST of them IMO will not work if they can. And if their lives aren't good enough, they'll vote in people who will give them more "free" money yet again.
Probably the best thread for this: Minimum Wage Hikes. The reason I raise the issue is that Ontario (not where I live) raised its minimum wage to $14/hr, and there's been a few doom-and-gloom headlines like this: Shops cutting hours, upping prices after minimum wage hike. In contrast, this Globe article is actually fairly decent: Minimum wages can make for maximum consternation
The question I have to those opposed to something modest like this: If your business isn't viable without paying your workers below a living wage, aren't you horrifically unethical? We don't allow indentured servitude (well, debatable given consumer debt levels, but that's another topic), so why is employing people at levels where they'd have to work 60-80 hours a week to BARELY afford living considered OK?
So I'm actually in favor of a living wage being the minimum. If you work 40 hours a week at a job, you should be able to afford a home (definitions vary, but not a flophouse) and buy groceries, etc, and not be dependent on other anti-poverty programs at all. Basically the statement "The best social program is a job" only holds up IMO if the job itself REPLACES said programs. If it doesn't, it's just working somebody to death for no increase in their living conditions.
And just so you don't think I've gone left-wing here, most of this is caused IMO by the labour market being screwed up. If there wasn't a surplus of unskilled labour, the price of said labour would be higher, and you wouldn't need government to step in. The businesses themselves would be competing for the labour by raising pay. But infinite surplus? Go-go cheap labour! So the government has caused at least part of the problem, in that we have uncontrolled immigration of unskilled people. This caused the other problems that they're now "solving" through a minimum wage hike. It's the right solution IMO, but it shouldn't be necessary, since they put the country in this situation to begin with.
The question I have to those opposed to something modest like this: If your business isn't viable without paying your workers below a living wage, aren't you horrifically unethical? We don't allow indentured servitude (well, debatable given consumer debt levels, but that's another topic), so why is employing people at levels where they'd have to work 60-80 hours a week to BARELY afford living considered OK?
So I'm actually in favor of a living wage being the minimum. If you work 40 hours a week at a job, you should be able to afford a home (definitions vary, but not a flophouse) and buy groceries, etc, and not be dependent on other anti-poverty programs at all. Basically the statement "The best social program is a job" only holds up IMO if the job itself REPLACES said programs. If it doesn't, it's just working somebody to death for no increase in their living conditions.
And just so you don't think I've gone left-wing here, most of this is caused IMO by the labour market being screwed up. If there wasn't a surplus of unskilled labour, the price of said labour would be higher, and you wouldn't need government to step in. The businesses themselves would be competing for the labour by raising pay. But infinite surplus? Go-go cheap labour! So the government has caused at least part of the problem, in that we have uncontrolled immigration of unskilled people. This caused the other problems that they're now "solving" through a minimum wage hike. It's the right solution IMO, but it shouldn't be necessary, since they put the country in this situation to begin with.
So my thoughts as a business owner who would like to hire an employee one day. I don't need a full time employee, I certainly don't need someone who needs the job as their primary income. Prices of comics are printed on the books so unlike some other business I couldn't just increase prices or rates to make up for it. That would have to be done at the publisher level (and in some ways the $3.99 price is reflective of the higher cost of living in the major cities). An employee would have to help me to bring in at least double their wage to begin to make fiscal sense. That doesn't mean just direct sales, but in time freed up to pursue other avenues of revenue.
Region also has more to do with it, another reason why its best not handled at the federal level. There are stores in bigger cities that would be out of business if they didn't do our annual revenue in a month. At that scale employment needs are completely different. I can't imagine other retail markets are much different in that regard.
There you go, didn't solve anything, but all I can say is that for my business if the minimum wage was to double it would at best double the time it would take to feel comfortable bringing in an employee. We would also need to adjust the current payout to the owner managing the place to avoid any effective pay cut. The same would happen if we hired an employee and were already paying them above the minimum wage. To not do so would feel unethical.
Region also has more to do with it, another reason why its best not handled at the federal level. There are stores in bigger cities that would be out of business if they didn't do our annual revenue in a month. At that scale employment needs are completely different. I can't imagine other retail markets are much different in that regard.
There you go, didn't solve anything, but all I can say is that for my business if the minimum wage was to double it would at best double the time it would take to feel comfortable bringing in an employee. We would also need to adjust the current payout to the owner managing the place to avoid any effective pay cut. The same would happen if we hired an employee and were already paying them above the minimum wage. To not do so would feel unethical.
My church’s version of this was called “the United order”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Order
So I’d be all for that, but in this version no one would be forced to contribute, so I’m not sure it fits your definition.
"forced to contribute" is a misunderstanding of communism - in a theoretical communist Utopia, nobody contributes anything, voluntary or not, because nobody has anything. You work/produce/create/contribute for the Greater Good, and in turn you get anything you need and can profit from anything available.
I mean, you don't have to explain to me why it doesn't work with actual real life humans, but the concept of "communism Utopia is like today, except you're taxed at 100% and everyone gets some sort of equal wage" is false.
I’d be very interested in tying minimum wage increases to inflation and possibly cost of living, but not by going back many years.
Beyond that, I’d like unskilled labor to remain low cost. If you want to make a living wage and raise a family you should specialize in a skill or receive training and education for a career.
Beyond that, I’d like unskilled labor to remain low cost. If you want to make a living wage and raise a family you should specialize in a skill or receive training and education for a career.
I mean, you can say that, but if we had no unskilled labor, a lot of businesses would cease to exist. They are still providing a necessary role.
steinman we agree on a lot, but I disagree with you on this. The underlying problem is (essentially) infinite supply of unskilled labour. That leads to the abuses we see of such people, and the rock-bottom wages. When they need people, they pay them. If they can get 10 more off of the street, they will pay the minimum necessary by law.
And your suggestion doesn't work, because if minimum wage means you need to work 16 hour days, every day, JUST TO GET BY, it's impossible to become more skilled. There's literally not any more hours left in the day. So it's more of a false blame thing, than an actual path out of unskilled work, because it's held out as a "if you just worked harder via getting education as well, you wouldn't be in this situation." Because of no hours available (and NO MONEY to fund such an education) you're still just as trapped.
So the root problem is too much unskilled labour, and IMO you're not going to train enough people out of it to make a difference as long as you have infinite immigration (legal and otherwise). Given the unwillingness to pursue solutions to the root cause (supporting cutting immigration is the fastest way to get accused of being a racist/nazi/trump sub-human scum), the "next-best" is a decent living wage IMO. Part-time work is fine, but anything more than 40 hours should be unnecessary (except in very exceptional (those words have the same root for a reason) circumstances) and is harmful towards your other suggestions (education) for reducing the supply.
This is an easier problem in Canada given universal healthcare (it sucks, but it's universal). Your "employer insurance" problem throws a wrench into this, but the living wage itself still holds up as "a good idea" IMO for both of our countries (and others besides as well), and given that I started this current conversation talking about increases in Ontario, in Canada, your USA complications is your problem, not mine. My theory still holds up in this country.
One of the main issues here in Canada that may also be a factor in the States, is that there are sometimes too many barriers in place for everyone to have access to the education and/or training required to make the transition from being considered unskilled labour. The cost of post secondary education continues to climb and student loans are not written to benefit students. They are there to earn money for the banks. That's not the only barrier, but it's the one that I find the most offensive.
(Sorry if this was already mentioned - first visit here)
(Sorry if this was already mentioned - first visit here)
People are starting to ask the right kinds of questions:
If we gave everyone a decent standard of living, could we sustain it?
(tl;dr: Not if we all continue to live the way we do now)
--Patrick
If we gave everyone a decent standard of living, could we sustain it?
(tl;dr: Not if we all continue to live the way we do now)
--Patrick