How long do you think it would take to research whether the whole supply chain for a given item was paid a living wage?
Would you base it entirely on what country is on the label? Because that often only tells you where the final assembly happened and in any case, there are plenty of factories in, say, China, where people earn a good wage, especially given the local cost of living.
Heck, even if they are not being paid a living wage, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a boycott is the answer. Those people are of course choosing to work there, implying there are no better options for them.
I would say, if there are “Free Trade widgets” available, then someone who supports a living wage and doesn’t want to be a hypocrite should buy those (or buy from a country with a good minimum wage). But most products do not have a free trade initiative at this time.
No, but it’s also not hypocritical to push for a legal and universal implementation of a particular policy (with every intention of complying with it when it’s enacted) while not undertaking to follow that policy on an individual and personal level before it’s enacted.
And I notice you avoid replying to my other example about a supporter of tax increases not being morally obligated in the meantime to voluntarily pay more taxes than they legally owe. That wouldn’t be breaking the law, yet it’s not hypocritical for people not to do it. So no, the analogy doesn’t fail.
Bullshit (and I say that as a bike-riding environmentalist who’s never owned a car, so a fig for your wasteful-ass Tesla). An environmentalist who is pushing for stronger environmental regulation is not thereby morally obligated to espouse any particular (legal) personal lifestyle choices.
There are plenty of situations in which we can reasonably and sincerely advocate for collective action while not bothering with individual actions that would have statistically negligible effects. Refusing to recognize that, as I said, is just a way to evade honestly confronting serious policy issues by trying to pre-emptively disqualify opposing opinions.
U.S. workers cost more because they won’t work for pennies.
They are WORTH more because they are more productive. Workers in the US produce far more value per hour worked than workers in places where they’re paid peanuts.
I disagree. It’s entirely legitimate to expect people to make an effort to live according to their stated principles. Especially if those people are vocal and active in trying to coerce others. Mere inconvenience is not an excuse.
If I know a particular product is supplied in a way I find appalling I won’t get it unless absolutely necessary for survival. The devout who abide by dietary restrictions, even if I find other tenets of their faith silly or dangerous, earn my respect with their willingness to work to live according to their stated principles.
I’ve addressed the policy goals. No evasion here. I want a free market on labor. Screw the minimum wage. Get rid of non earmarked welfare. Implement a universal basic income based upon the citizenship. Watch factories come back. Watch blighted areas become revitalized.
They won’t work for pennies because we have a social safety net that discourages working, above the table, for less than a certain amount. We also have a minimum wage where they can’t work most jobs legitimately at their market value anyways. But there is a gray and black market for labor that I am sure we are all aware of.
:dubious: Then you agree with DigitalC that employers shouldn’t be allowed to exploit people by depriving them of basic sustenance with sub-living wages. It’s just that you prefer a setup which closes off the possibility of such exploitation by giving everybody basic sustenance right up front, whether they earn wages or not.
So if that’s the policy you favor, but you still patronize companies that pay their workers exploitatively low wages when they don’t have universal basic income, then by your own professed standards, you’re the hypocrite here.
You’re just using “oh well but I wish there was a universal basic income” as a smokescreen to cloak your willingness to profit by the exploitation of workers who don’t have universal basic income, in a so-called “free labor market”.
If you are genuinely committed in principle to the idea of workers not being dependent on sub-basic wages for bare miserable survival, then you ought not to be supporting companies whose workers are dependent on sub-basic wages for bare miserable survival.
No. I’m perfectly willing to pay people what the market determines. I’m also perfectly willing for a nation that can afford it to subsidize to some extent the welfare of its citizens. Two separate concepts being enacted by two separate sets of entities.
No hypocrisy since while preferences these are not prohibitions or mandates. Similar to me preferring vanilla over pistachio ice cream.
And I absolutely disagree with the idea that an employer is in any way responsible for the living standards of its employees. One’s income and outcome are solely the responsiblity of the individual. Since its my responsibility to have savings for the future, hopefully not confiscated by a future Dem president to buy votes, I do look to buy as cheap as possible. Not my problem that that means enriching Chinese workers instead of American.
All the millions of duck calls they make are labeled “hand crafted”. And if you watch the show you see its true.
Now just how do 6 rednecks sitting in a Louisiana workroom put out tens of thousands of duck calls?
Simple. The duck call parts are made somewhere else. The men in the workroom basically just put together the pieces. Some parts vary like the shell can be made of expensive wood but others are just plastic. However the insides, the reeds and all, are all the same.
So this is how I see American manufacturing being done. Have the basic parts made somewhere else where they be cheaply made and then boxed and shipped in. Then the parts are put together in the US.
I see, you are avoiding the hypocrisy charge on the grounds that you do not actually have principles in this matter, just preferences.
Very well then, DigitalC has a strong preference for employers not exploiting their workers with extremely low wages. No hypocrisy there either.
But that’s just your preference, evidently. There’s no reason anybody else should care what your personal preferences are concerning the responsibilities of employers.
DigitalC did not say a strong preference. DigitalC said it’s out of the question. Aka should be forbidden and completely unacceptable.
You spend a lot of time being confused by simple language and basic economic theory?
You do understand supply and demand? You do realize that one’s electric bill, number of children, coke habit, and car payment are the responsibility of the individual and not Taco Bell?
How would you force other countries to comply with our sense of what someone should or shouldn’t be paid, their benefits and safety standards, etc etc? I mean, it would be forcing those countries to compete with us (the US, Europe, Japan, etc) on OUR terms and to our strengths and to ignore their own and their own best long term interests, so how would you do it?
And, of course, long term you still wouldn’t solve the issue. Let’s pretend for a moment that you could force China, India, Vietnam and all the rest of the countries with large amounts of very cheap labor (and ignore how in some of those countries there is already a shift upwards in the cost of that labor…in some cases despite the countries governments fighting to keep those costs down). What would actually happen? Would all those juicy low wage jobs come flooding back to the US/Europe/Japan/Etc? Nope. Assuming they didn’t go to other, even cheaper places and you got into some sort of whack-a-mole game with sanctions or tariffs or whatever mechanism you plan to use to ‘fix’ this, what would actually happen is it would simply speed up automation even more.
This is, to me, all Trump/Sanders think. It’s not ever going to happen (and I doubt we’d want those jobs regardless). We aren’t going to stop other countries having cheap labor, and if we did we STILL wouldn’t get those jobs back, not in any sort of long term way. We’ve moved on from manufacturing. It’s not dead in the US or Europe or Japan…it simply takes far fewer people to do it than it used to. Like with agriculture, something that used to take a large percentage of the populace to do, today takes a fraction of those people. That doesn’t mean that US agriculture is dead…far from it, we produce more agriculture (as well as manufactured goods) than ever.
Most factories anywhere are like this. Telephone switches were built in Assembly, Wire and Test factories, where the components, frames, and boards were received and the switch put together and tested. Wafers are make in a fab and then sent to another factory to be cut apart and packaged. Factories have been specialized for a long time now.
So made in USA may mean assembled in USA, and it is possible for a car made in Mexico to have more American content than a car made in Detroit.
Where is the money going to come from for this again?
If you have a universal income that is good enough to live on, why should the people making a buck an hour in your non-MW world work? Except in the underground economy, that is. You’d create a lovely black market economy. Offer less than what it takes to live on and how to you assure that wages will be enough to make up the difference without a minimum wage at a lower level. Which is still not a free market in your book.
So, one two things could happen. Employers could get workers for a song, so there would be no reason to improve productivity, which hurts the economy as a whole. Or, employers can’t get workers for a song. In that case they automate even more to make up for the labor shortage, or they pay high wages (and the taxes to pay for the guaranteed income) and wind up with higher labor costs. Why higher? Because their taxes are going to subsidize the non-workers.
Not to mention that people whose skills are in demand to get a good salary will get a bit of a bonus from the government - except that their taxes will skyrocket to pay for this nonsense. But if they are lucky their burgers will be ten cents cheaper.
The sweatshop owners do get inspected, and coerce their employees to say all is fine, so even the companies sometimes get fooled. There are also complex supply chains. If Apple can’t figure it out, how can Joe Blow? And on a continuing basis - the clean bill in July may not be so clean in September.
A universal basic income is not designed for people to live on without work. The idea is that the universal basic income supplements one’s income based upon the idea that a society that generates a vast surplus of wealth can afford to redistribute some of that wealth equally to it’s citizens. Consider it a positive externality. You still don’t implement a minimum wage in the case that some percentage of the populace is so dysfunctional they have literally 0 market value. For those people, in a society that can afford it, you provide some means based assistance on top of that basic income so folks don’t starve.
Anyways, you miss the positives. If a person is free to sell their labor for market value and employers are free to pay market value than that person will have a job and over time will learn new skills and habits that increase his value from a low amount to higher amounts over time. Furthermore this time spent being productive is time not spent being destructive.
Today, the worker who’s economic value is substantially less than minimum wage can’t get a legal job. They are displaced by foreign labor, automated labor, and illegal labor. How can one integrate into productive society, especially after making stupid decisions as a youth or a product of a bad family, if they are never giving a chance to learn the skills necessary?
Minimum wage and welfare programs without the obligation to perform and improve trap people and create dysfunction. The only somewhat positive those programs achieve is empowering the left who are able to use opposition to those programs as a tool to demonize their political competitors. If leftwing politicians truly cared about the core economic principles they support then why do they behave so differently in private life after public service?
Employers are not the government. Employers actually have a profit motive and they compete! Unlike the government which has perverse incentives to behave if a company isn’t continuously striving to improve a competitor will come and take their market share. Obviously market power can become too concentrated and we do have anti-trust law to deal with that. But if Burger King makes an inferior product, according to the consumer, than McDonalds the customer can go across the street and vote with their wallet and get and more importantly give immediate feedback.
Agents of the government can shoot a boy with a toy gun or beat a mentally ill man to death and lose what? So, I trust that private enterprise will work much harder to achieve success than government flunkies. The multitude of corporations and individuals with net worths of 10s if not 100s of billions of dollar vs the government with a debt of damn near $20 trillion ought to be evidence enough that business fights to succeed.
Furthermore for most of human history we had literally 0 minimum wage and look at the innovations and inventions that took place. Even with slave labor people still worked to improve production methodology via technology. History contradicts your premise.
Why people support a counterproductive policy which still results in consumers exploiting workers is beyond me. Perhaps the life of a child laborer in China counts less than an American’s?
Well, thanks. I thought you were going to say it fell from the sky. :rolleyes: Where are these taxes coming from?
I’d love to soak the 1% also, but I don’t see that is going to happen soon, or that they have enough to pay for this. By universal I assume you mean everyone gets it not based on need. If not, it is not universal. Thus the bonus I mention below.
Now, we already have subsidies for cheapskate employers, such as food stamps and Medicaid. And relatively short term welfare and unemployment insurance. But doesn’t it make sense for employers to pay enough so that workers don’t starve, and that the taxpayers not add to employers profits by subsidizing workers wages?
What percent is this, outside those disabled who are not going to be getting great jobs any time soon? The pocket of people too dumb to be employed magically shrinks as the economy improves, doesn’t it? People with 0 market value are never going to get jobs, even if you eliminate the MW, since some people can create negative value to the employer. There are also training programs for those whose value can increase. But we already have mechanisms to deal with this kind of person, so we don’t have to send money to Bill Gates, or even me, to do it.
The Mack Reynolds guaranteed basic was for a society automated enough so that there weren’t enough jobs for everyone. We aren’t even nearly to that point yet.
Why would someone being paid $2 an hour learn faster than someone being paid $10 an hour? Do you think an employer paying $2 an hour is going to spend a lot on education and training? (Even companies paying tons more than that have cut back since I started to work.) What skills are someone pushing a broom going to learn, anyway? And, as I said, someone paying crap is going to get crap work out of people. As I said, negative value. Could be a corollary to Brooks’ law.
Apprenticeships. Training programs. Make these things have an end point, and not act like they are permanent jobs. And accept that some will never make it.
Not that I think there are that many people who aren’t worth $10 and are worth $2.
How do minimum wage programs not force people to perform? It’s not like the employer can’t fire an underachieving MW worker, after all. In fact, the employer has more incentive to coach the worker to add value than if the worker were being paid peanuts.
I have no idea what you think left wing politicians do after leaving government?
Umm - the bonus from the government I mentioned is exactly your guaranteed income plan provides. We can leave your anti-government rantings for another thread.
We’ve done pretty well with the minimum wage in terms of innovation. But today we don’t have sweatshops along with it. Is the life of a Chinese child laborer going to get better by allowing there to be American child laborers? It probably would if they enforced child labor laws and raised wages, though we would have to pay more for our WalMart shmottes.
Where else does government revenue come from if not taxes, fees, and I suppose in some cases rents?
This has nothing to do with soaking the rich. Increasing the size of the economy even with no change in the tax rate causes increase in revenue. More people working due to the removal of a price floor on wages increases productivity. Furthermore, the fact that we have higher than minimum wage labor currently means that supply and demand does in fact work for labor. Which is no surprise.
And the idea that government is subsidizing employers is a disingenuous farce. It’s not a company’s responsibility to pay my bills. That’s MY responsibility. Burger King is not responsible for my choice of car, my cell phone, my entertainment, my rent, my kids college or whatever. Those are my choices and my expenses. And if I can’t afford my expenses I can either increase and seek my market value or I can cut expenses. Or if I am Congress I can ignore debt.
There is a large amount of numbers between 0 and the current minimum wage that is currently being supplied by either black market or offshore labor. For example, if I want to pay someone to clean my house am I obligated to pay minimum wage? Nope. Not at all. I can just pay a company that happens to be a single person DBA So and So’s Maid and I can pay whatever we agree to.
Thing is if I want to get someone to clean my house that won’t eat my cat because they can’t afford food or won’t rob me blind as soon as I turn my back I’ll probably end up paying around $15+ an hr. That’s the funny thing. Everyone thinks that with no MW everyone would be slaves even though prior to having a MW and even with slaves in the economy people still earned good amounts of money!
With regards to education, not all education pertinent to value in the market place is book learning. You discount the type of social learning that occurs with regards to punctuality, participating in a productive enterprise, dressing for a role, seeing how successful people deal with customers, etc. These social skills internalized and reinforced by actually working for a portion of one’s living actually increase one’s market value! Even hygiene and the way you speak signals to the market place economic value. Sitting on your ass, smoking dope, and getting a check or a food card for a vote does not.
We live in a global world. The people outside the borders of the United States and other rich Western nations are just as human as you and me. Why is it ok to try to feel virtuous about advocating a counterproductive minimum wage in the USA while purchasing goods and services that are made overseas or via illegal labor? It’s complete hypocrisy and from a national point of view it’s counterproductive.
It’s also bad national policy in an age of competing nations to empower one’s strategic allies to strengthen their own industry at the expense of ours just to satisfy one party’s goal of purchasing votes.
Granted a Universal Basic Income could be called purchasing votes. At least UBI is a productivity enhancing means of purchasing votes.
People fixate too much on money instead of focusing on wealth. Generating more wealth by increasing productivity and providing people with money by increasing money velocity from the top 30% (which comes right back) by providing cash and increasing the pool of labor is a win win. The only group that loses are some of the poor that would have to actually work for their benefits which even the communists agree with and certain political types who are seen as benefactors.
You spend a lot of time being confused by simple language and basic economic theory?
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There’s nothing confusing about what you’re saying. You’re trying to pretend that your expressed preferences are some kind of immutable economic laws while other people’s preferences are “hypocritical”. Since your reasoning is faulty, nobody’s buying it.
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You do realize that one’s electric bill, number of children, coke habit, and car payment are the responsibility of the individual and not Taco Bell?
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That’s your preference, but you don’t get to unilaterally decide what in a society counts as solely “the responsibility of the individual” and what doesn’t.
Except this is nonsense, because the societies with documented highest worker productivity do have significant wage floors. Your supply-side fantasies don’t correspond to the real world.
:rolleyes: And how are you expecting to determine the amount of this optimal wage, except via the process of initially offering a wage that is too low and results in your underpaid and desperate employee eating your cat or robbing you blind? How many cats and/or other valued items are you willing to burn through on your quest to determine the optimal market cost of your maid service, one-on-one? And why on earth do you imagine that that would be an efficient or desirable way to set wage levels?