The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I wouldn't have sleepless nights if highranking members of a company were to have their wages limited ... why exactly do they need a lamborgini or million dollar estate ?

if history shows anything then that humanity is generaly unable to work as a whole and people with power and money are generaly apathetic about the lower classes ... until those are fedup and eventualy rip the higher ups a new one ...

free market at that state is just capitalistic anarchism were the weak are eaten by the strong and the weakest tied to strong or left to die

it's a ffa afterall ...

A few points we need to cover on this topic so bear with me.

Some people are able to command such high salaries because that is truly the value that they bring to a company - the board as representatives of the shareholders are willing to voluntarily pay them that much. People who clamour for wage caps often have no idea whatsoever the sheer amount of skill, work ethic and absolute sacrifice that is required in one of these positions. Let alone the stress that comes along with it. I deal with businesses on a regular basis and let me tell you, being a high powered executive is not high on my list of life goals. The money is good, but the work requirements and heavy responsibilities are just not worth it in my opinion.

There is also a lot of misinformation out in the public about how executive salaries are set - most of it stemming from a lack of understanding about corporate governance. Boards of directors set officer remunerations and have to do so bearing in mind their contractually binding fiduciary responsibility to the companies shareholders. All compensation is reported annually in financial reports and shareholders can hold boards legally responsible if executives have been significantly overpaid or act badly. Boards and shareholders are the check and balance. If a CEO deliberately underpays workers, the board will say "stop, this is not a sustainable strategy. Our employees will be unproductive and leave for our competitors. We don't want to be held responsible by our shareholders for the company being run into the ground so we will remove you as CEO if you do this etc."

Just like with progressive taxes, Socialists and marxists like to lazily force wealth redistribution within companies themselves. You know, instead of actually starting their own competing businesses because they are all talk and no walk. Nothing but empty virtue signalling. What makes it even more pathetic is that none of them ever bother to even do the basic maths to see how much more money workers get as a result of taking from the 'fat cats'. I challenge you to actually look up a companies annual report, take all the money away from the CEO, spread it out among all the employees, and see how much their pay would increase. Hint: It increases by basically nothing.

Nothing could be further from the truth - one only has to open their eyes and observe reality. Everything we do relies on people working together from making pencils to airplanes. Modern life as we know it has resulted from an historically unprecedented level of global co-operation. Just look at how many skyscrapers there are in a major city.

You need to write down an inventory of everything you use and consume just in one day and ask yourself how much of it you directly produced. Even the food you eat results from other people working together to create it and then co-operating with you as a customer to find a price you are willing to pay and they are willing to sell.

I thought i covered this already but it won't hurt to do it again. This popular meme of strong eating the weak isn't accurate as it implies an act of violence or coercion where there is none. Free markets are voluntary and economic power(capitalism) is very different from political power (socialism/communism). For example Mc Donalds economic power is derived from customers and if they don't like them anymore, Mc Donalds dies. It is the little man who is empowered within capitalism. The same cannot be said about a socialist/communist dictatorship. There is a reason why almost every single person who has immigrated/fled from heavily socialist/communist speaks ill of it.

Capitalism is not a gladiatorial arena ffa. I have an orange you want to buy it from me. You offer me 50 cents and I refuse because it is too little. So you offer me $1 and I accept. We aren't fighting each other to the death. We are negotiating and trying to find agreeable terms that allow us to co-operate with each other while still benefiting. I value the money more than the orange and you value the orange more than the money.

And now a question for you. Without a free market of buyers and sellers, how would you determine how much a CEO should be paid? Will you also force CEO's to work as CEO's if they are unwilling to work for the arbitrary price you come up with?

Edit: not worth it.

Because while a small about of sodium chloride is good for you, a large amount of it will kill you.

Everything in moderation. Arguments to absurdity never helped anyone

Can you explain how you derived that metaphor and why it should hold true?. I can replace "minimum wage" with "violence" and your metaphor would make just about the same amount of sense. Just a little bit of violence is good but too much is bad? Tyranny in moderation?

$1 million minimum wage is a thought experiment specifically debunking the claim that minimum wages stimulate the economy. They don't. If they don't do it at $1million they don't do it at 999,999 all the way down to $0.01

When the cost of something increases, demand for it decreases. Labour isn't magically exempt from this rule. If i buy oranges and government forces me to buy them for a higher price than I am willing to pay, I don't buy them. Same with labour.

And don't get me started on how racist it is. Truly disgusting. I used to naively think minimum wage was a necessary evil until i looked at the overwhelming real world effect it had on minority or disadvantaged groups. Racist employers should pay a competitive cost to exercise their prejudice and minimum wage protects them from doing so.

Minimum wage doesn't really help, because the prices of housing etc will go up.

Prices have gone up either way. College as an example.

Elodea, if your 100% free market works so well then why, out of 200 countries in the world, do none of them implement it?

This is a very dangerous way of thinking. "If murder is so bad, why do people still murder? Therefore murder is ok"

Morality is not always convenient. A person with the power to initiate violence against another is unlikely to willingly give that away. Same applies with democratic processes as well - look up the famous prisoner's dilemma in game theory. One of the biggest reasons that corporations get involved in politics is to protect their own rights and interests against others who would use politics to likewise infringe upon them vice versa. Politics has always been a struggle for control over the use of force. The reason more people don't vote libertarian is because it is fundamentally a vote to reduce the power you have over others. It is moral yet difficult. We all want someone else to pay for our lunch.

Infamous quote about the value of violence in pursuing self interested security.
"Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn everybody else." Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor (192-211AD)

Which is easier. Voting to steal stuff from someone else on some trumped up social injustice? Or working hard to make it myself? Violence is easy, cheap, and destructive. There's a reason why the US has a constitution and bill of rights. There's a reason why most other western democracies utilise some form of the Westminster system filled with checks and balances. Why do you think the republic of rome flourished as it did when it rejected kings and tyrants only to fall when they instituted emperor worship?

Yet even then, republic rome wasn't perfect. They kept the practice of slavery because they had the power to use violence in order to serve their own self interest and it cost them potentially an industrial revolution as there was no incentive to create labour saving devices. I wonder what we are missing out on sometimes when we institute significant financial slavery through taxation.
~30 to 50% of gdp is nothing to sneeze at

Opening up a history book tells a tale for the vast majority of human experience, with the sole exception of recent modernity, as one of kings, queens, and warlords constantly waging war for their own self interest. The only thing that has made our recent past any different is the rise of enlightenment values, liberty, and the recognition of individual rights and freedoms. Most of which you can thank greco-christianity as a rudimentary philosophy that recognised all men as 'equal spirits under god', bypassing entirely millennia of identity politic, power driven ape history. If you believe god owns the individual, what

Progressives would like to 'progress' back to the oldest idea in the book by giving back to authoritarians the freedoms that were won for them with the blood of millions. To use violence against others in order to achieve their own self interests. None of my business if you want to progressively enslave yourself, just don't use a gun to drag your neighbour along with you.

Likewise on the right, people would like to use violence to intrude on the social lives of others and tell them what they can or cannot do. Who they can marry and what they can put in their body etc.

That is why we don't currently see 100% free markets. Not because peaceful and voluntary interactions between people are bad ideas, but because people have a socially acceptable avenue(politics and government) to impose their will on others by force.

I'm not sure complaining about my metaphor when you used argument to absurdity is a great basis for your discussion, here.

Neither salt, nor implementing a minimum wage, involve violence. Neither of them cause violence, either. You bringing violence into this (for which any amount of violence is usually undesirable) is yet another example of you attempting to ridicule my position by claiming an absurd example.

Nothing is absolute. By your logic, if salt isn't good for you at 1 tonne of salt per day then it isn't good for you at 5 grams per day. That was what I was illustrating with the salt analogy. A small amount of something can be good for you, a large amount might not necessarily be.

But this does illustrate a fascinating issue with your worldview. Minimum wage is racist, because it allows racist to be racist in their hiring options. Naw, man. That's the racist's fault - not minimum wage's. Using minimum wage as an excuse doesn't render the excuse racist. That's still on the employer.

How do you think a minimum wage is enforced other than with violence? If someone doesn't obey the law, what happens to them? Do they get polite reminder letters in the mail or do they pay a fine or go to jail at the point of a gun?

It really wasn't an argument to absurdity. Without free market price discovery, you have absolutely zero idea what things should cost and how much anyone should be paid. When you reject the free market, any number is as 'valid' as another. Why $10, $11, $12? Why $1million?

What arbitrary value would you institute and why? If we make it $10, any job that only produces $9 of value gets destroyed. If we make it $11, any job that produces only $10 gets destroyed. You disrupt businesses for no good reason, and in the long run all that will happen is the cost of living will inflate whereby the nominal minimum wage now matches the real buying power of the previous wage. $10 is now worth $9. Also, who are you to tell someone else what monetary value they can or cannot work for? What if i am willing to work for $1 because I am being paid in work experience, training, and job opportunities? The lack of intellectual rigour in minimum wage policy is so blatant.

If your public education is churning out people who don't even have the skills to clothe and feed themselves, the problem is hardly an issue of minimum wage law. Controls on top of controls. Power expanding on power.

Minimum wage is racist regardless of intent. Intentionally racist employers are only one part of it. If I come from a lower socioeconomic background and am willing to work for lower than the minimum wage in order to compete for a job that I may be a more risky prospect for, am i benefited by this law or discriminated against?

why should people work for less money then they need?
why should people need to work 2 to 3 jobs to be able to sustain themselves?

" Will you also force CEO's to work as CEO's if they are unwilling to work for the arbitrary price you come up with?"

if they don´t give a sht about their employees wellbeing, yes ...

to me it matters that the small guy is fairly paid .. if the CEO gets to drive around in a fcking ferrari while the smallguy can´t even buy himself a used personal car to get to his work or to get basic healthtreadmeant then there seriously is something wrong with the CEO and the company (among other things) ... and there are examples of companies basicaly abusing their workerbase to live in cheap and poorly constructed flats having barely enough money to sustain themselves ... while the company is making a huge profit and the higher ups getting the larger ammount of cash .... how can this be ok?

are you telling me that a basehuman live is only worth this much?


"If your public education..."

tell me how should one be able to pay for private education when he isn´t able to get the money for that?

basicaly from what i see you expect people to basicaly work there asses of to the last bit of flesh to be able to even gain a decent job ... and whoever doesn´t can die of or what? ... you talk about minimum wages being racistic ... i call not giving people the chance or help to be able to help themselves just flatout inhuman ...

one thing i wonder is what do america and australia offer for unemploeyed people?
in germany afaik unemploeyed can register for unemploeyed money .. they get a minimum amount of cash and a small flat if they can´t afford they own but have to go to work whereever the agancy for work sends them until they eventualy get a full time job ..


of course it´s up to everyone himself to make the best out of his/her life and people who are unwilling to, well that´s that then ... but what about the people who struggle? why should it be sooo much harder for them to get a normal decent job?
not everyone needs to be a CEO or billionaire .. i personaly am not asking to get fcking millions of money .. it´s enough for me to be able to sustain myself and eventualy a standartsize family ... i don´t need cash that would cover 50 generations of my bloodline

Minimum wage is enforced with law, the same as everything else. If you equate enforcing the law to violence then this is a concept that informs your entire worldview, and thus is very hard to argue against. You're entitled to it, but it's like talking to someone who assumes the default value for numeric systems is -5, instead of 0. It's not wrong, it's just different.

We have a minimum wage in the UK - it certainly isn't good enough to survive on, but it does exist. The UK has not, so far, exploded into flames or suffered from a massive Leninist revolution. It prevents workers from being paid exploitative wages that they can't live on. I'm very sure America has a similar concept, because the outcry is generally about raising the minimum wage, not the existence of such itself.

The value wouldn't be arbitrary, because just like a regular minimum wage, a living wage or something equivalent would be related to the economic situation and the relative cost of living (which varies in the UK as it will in the US). This isn't arbitrary. It's relative.

If you're willing to work for less, I'm sure you could negotiate that with your employer and sign a waiver that prevents them from being prosecuted for paying you less than the minimum. Exceptions can always exist, because they always do. There are established patterns and processes for exceptions in any area of law - were you not aware of this?

If you're willing to work for less, assuming the motivation is to get a job you're unqualified for, then the onus is on the employer for accepting an unqualified staffer in exchange for less of a financial burden. This is not racist, this is your employer exploiting your desperation to work.

If you're willing to work for less and the law doesn't allow it, and your employer therefore doesn't hire you, this will need to be evaluated in a court of law and will probably come down to discrimination because your potential employer isn't prepared to grant you the minimum wage - assuming you're qualified.

This is all very straightforward and most (if not all of it) already exists within the confines of the law as it stands. It's kinda confusing to me that you think this doesn't already exist. Your stance on racism is not confusing to me - you appear to be using the label of racism like a cudgel to smash anything you think could be construed as racist. A very ironic appropriation of the phrase "racism" that's common amongst libertarian ideals because in my anecdotal experience this tends to remove racism from the context of exploiting minorities and tries to apply to a racial majority (i.e. poor whites), which is ill-applied.

What you might be looking for is classist, because your examples seem to revolve around economic class, and not race.

Sorry I meant to say raising he minimum wage alone, since it all relative to the cost of living which is very like to go up with any increase in wages.

As far as I see it the dollar has already gone down enough that prices have been risen. I feel like it's actually that minimum wage, due to prices, needs to go up some amount.

Inflation happens without solely minimum wage up. And it always will unless something resets the dollar value. As prices ride due to inflation, so does minimum wage. I know slippery slope, but it must be done.. Otherwise all jobs are shafted on their wages. If the lower class has higher wages they buy more things, meaning higher class get more money to pay middle class to buy even more things. And it repeats. This though does perpetuate the inflation but tbh I don't think that's inherently negative. Japan is fine with its currency worth.

Okay Elodea. Here's a question:

Is the free market equipped to tackle climate change?
If it is, then why has it failed thus far?

Answered this already in the thread, but i'll sum it up again

1. we don't have a free market and private property in all aspects of our lives. The reason people can run factories that dump carbon into the atmosphere and pay zero cost for it is because air quality is largely a public good regulated by a public institution and thus it suffers from tragedy of the commons. Pollute your land all you want, but if it creates an externality that infringes upon the property of a third party without their consent, then you should be held liable. This is the core of libertarianism and voluntary free markets.

2. Value is subjective, not objective. If i derive emotional benefit from knowing that my energy is 'clean' I am willing to pay a higher price. Look at the organic foods industry and the free range egg industry. Arguing that free markets are merely races to the bottom and screw everyone and the environment is naive and laughable. Free markets exist to serve buyers. If you had the choice to buy renewable derived energy or fossil fuel energy, which would you choose?

3. The free market has actually given rise to alternative energy sources. Where do you think the idea of solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear came from? You think this was dreamed up by some government directive? Is elon musk a public employee? Who do you think is creating and investing in the potential of fusion but private investors who see the potential for large profit? Who do you think actually restricts the use of clean energy sources such as nuclear even though they have been incredibly safe in design for the past 30 or so years? Surely couldn't be government.

4. Everything is a tradeoff. Everything has a benefit and a cost. If solving child mortality, extending life spans, wealth and artistic creation beyond levels humanity has ever seen, and an industrial and scientific revolution which pushes us further and further towards an understanding of the universe means we have to live with several meters of increased sea level and adapt to different weather patterns, then personally I stand with the former outcome.

yupp because they found such a good way to deal with the waste that continues to radiate for centuries ...

and if what they said about chernobil is true then that core will continue to radiate for what is the age of our damn planet .... and the sarkophargus they are building around it? just another bandaid ...

@Gorbles
Well, here we get to the heart of the issue. I can pass a law that bans you from eating oranges and you will say this is not an initiation of force infringing upon your freedoms. Likewise, minimum wage is an infringment on the freedom of contract. It's like watching a slave deny his own slavery. Productive discussion isn't possible if the rules of logic and reason are denied.

If you're so worried about exploitation, then start a nonpolitical workers union or create an app that is a market hub listing of low paying jobs in a manner that furthers the propagation of information thus increasing competition and free market action.

I hope we can stop using "we haven't exploded in flames yet" arguement. Just because i punched you a little bit and you didn't die doesn't mean punching is a good thing. I explained how minimum wage merely results in cost inflation in the long run (market correction), and how it is merely a horizontal transfer of wealth from unemployed workers to employed workers. If i only have $10 to buy oranges and they cost $2 instead of $1, I will only buy 5 instead of 10. Worst case I might just switch to buying apples instead.

Minimum wage is arbitrary because cost of living is arbitrary. The cost of living in london is different from the suburbs and again different from a country town. It is different from person to person, from lifestyle to lifestyle. I can have all the expectations in the world, but have no right to demand another person spend some of their life subsidising my expectations. And what incentive does someone have to work if they know the fruits of their labour will be forcibly taken and given to another? Even marxists seem to understand this basic rule when they rail against all the profit of the workers being taken by the owners of capital (incorrect premise, but same motivation).

You don't seem to really understand law. It means nothing for me to waiver away a minimum wage because I simply plead to the court that I did so under duress as evidenced by the fact that I was working for wages that the court deemed "exploitative" to begin with. Just because I am willing to work for less doesn't mean I won't clamour for more when the opportunity presents itself. I may be perfectly happy to work at mcdonalds flippping burgers for $10 an hour, until someone tells me minimum wage is actually $12. What do you think I'm going to do but try and class action my employer for extra money that the law magically entitles me to.

The rest of what you say seems to stem from a misreading of my post.

I never said employers hiring people willing to work for less was racist. I said employers refusing to hire people less qualified because they legally can't is because minimum wage law is institutionally racist.

I never said anything about equally qualified individuals of equal risk. People who are socio-economically disadvantaged for whatever reason are generally less able to compete for the same job on merit. It could be because they are immigrants and can't speak the language or are less educated etc. The only weapon they have to get their foot in the door is to offer to work for less and you are taking this away from them. There is a reason why aborigines in Australia are doing so badly, as is the black community in the US. I would wager immigrants to the UK also experience the same. Most of it stemming from well intentioned welfare policies including minimum wage.

I was debating calling you out on putting words in my mouth and I think I will as politely as I can. Whether or not I think minimum wage already exists has no relevance whatsoever.

As much as you might like to believe, culture matters and socio-economic differences between races exist for any number of reasons. It would be naive to claim otherwise. If I was a smart racist, there could be no better policy than a welfare state that denudes a people who are currently socio-economicaly disadvantaged of their independance and enterprising spirit, followed by a minimum wage that puts an artificial barrier between them and the market. It may even be instituted with all the good intentions in the world but it matters not if the results are still the same.

TL;DR Don't mess with the market. The law of unintended consequences is a very real thing.

Is the public sector doing a good job preventing climate change? They have offered billions in incentives and tax breaks to companies attempting high volume renewable energy plants. Most have failed miserably, because even with the financing from the government, the renewable energy sources cannot currently compete with the incredible efficiency and ease of use that fossil fuels provide. They are literally throwing money down a drain to people exploiting the public's supposed good intentions.

The way forward to truly reducing the carbon footprint of civilization is not through renewable energy sources like wind and solar. It lies at the feet of the robust and safe nuclear industry. And maybe fusion, if the DoE would get their heads out of their asses and stop funding ITER.

Claiming that the free market will stay static in the current energy industry is also hilarious illogical. The free market goes for what is in demand and what is economically viable to bring to market. Instead of regulating nuclear, the public sector should keep their hands off the industry (excepting safety stuff, ofc). Instead of incentivizing a failed product, the government should encourage improvements to current designs, like localised vertical windmills. Or, they should stay out altogether - that would be great.

And, as Elodea was saying earlier: taxation and regulation are just a form of stealing and violence. A group of people tell a much larger group of people to give them money or else. Sometimes they politely ask us to volunteer said goods, and when we refuse, they take it anyway at the point of a gun.