The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I am just going to pop this into the thread because it's had me chuckling quietly to myself every time I remember it over the past couple of days.

Courtesy of Sassy Socialist Memes on Facebook.

The problem is I was suspecting that he was calling for less law in order to pull of this kind of ideal reality. This however turned the discussion into a weird conflict between the world that we do have, and the world elodea would like to have. Why? Because the position of "i want less laws" was never directly stated, and any attempt at inferring something got a response of "you're strawmanning me".

It's hard to assume anything when that gets thrown at your face, you see.

And the world that elodea would like to have comes with (ironically) what he would call unintended consequences. In a lot of cases laws exist for a reason. Sometimes multiple reasons. Are laws perfect? No. Are laws enforced perfectly? No. Is this a reason to do away with said laws entirely? No.

Freedom of contract directly relates to exploiting human labour. No wonder it contradicts with socialist principles (and no, not talking about Communism or communism here). The problem is nobody wants to meet halfway. Well, I'd settle for that, but it seems like elodea is fine with everything because he personally would be okay with more freedom of contract.

Which is great for him, but probably not great for a whole lot of other people. Idealistic principles also don't work out in practise because you can affect a theoretical contract by leveraging any financial power you have in-context to force the other party to agree. The entire libertarian principle only works if a) absolutely everyone commits to it (much like my comparisons with communism earlier in the thread) and b) if people are happy with the consequences that decreasing protections afforded by law currently provide. Which, I'd imagine, is the entire crux of the issue around viewpoints, here.

To take your shipping example that you converted into a company, it's a good thing that the company never existed. Not having the opportunity to have a job that would not give you enough to live on is better than being forced into that job, because that job would not give you what you need to survive, while benefitting the people in charge of it. A very capitalistic principle, really, as that's how a lot of low-wage jobs work currently.

Not everyone has the flexibility in choosing a job. A minimum wage is meant to provide for such people so they don't die. Which, incidentally, is another argument against the daft idea that a minimum wage needs to be $1 billion. People can survive on much, much less than $1 billion annually, obviously. People can arguably not survive on $10,000, depending on their personal situation.

I personally have no issue with those who earn more, pay more tax (flat rate or otherwise).
But i said for the car example not only are you forced to pay for the car that you may not have wanted but you have to pay more for it if you earn more, that someone else getting the same car.

That said this example is bad, since when you are part of country you get many benefits from being part of it, some things that the state provide for people you may never use or intend to use by there are there if or when you need them, also you may earn more but you are only able to do so from being part of the society and most likely depend upon goods and services provided by others which in turn are currently only possible under the rule of law and support of others provided by the state.

What on earth? Hello, Earth to gorbles come in. The entire western system of law stemming from the English is based on contract law and private property. Suggest you read a book or take a class in contract law some time.

My god the strawmanning continues to no end. I'm not even shocked anymore.

People should be free to agree to whatever terms of contract they want to. Not agree to what I want them to do, which is exactly what something like a minimum wage is. Someone else telling another person what they want them to do.

Jesus christ.

@elodea A like for your patience.

The question here is: there are lots of stupids/people with bad luck, is there an effective way to prevent them from spending their last years coughing under a bridge? And is it better the solution than the problem?

That's the only reason we could want any of those social policies that cost money and so enslave working people for a good chunk of their work day.

If you live in a good house but you're angry because your neighbour has a plane and a boat full of "horses", you're just a envious piece of and that's not a state problem.

*edit*wrongcat explained much better minimum wage as a standalone concept so i'll just respond with why I brought up the racial component. At this point I'm happy to drop it. You would be right to say I've definitely hammered this point much harder than warranted.

Going back to the example I gave you of Europe. It's clear that the immigrants who are entering the market have hardly any marketable skills. Most aren't even literate in their own language. When a minimum wage of $10 ph is instituted, one is actually saying that they must be able to produce atleast $10 ph of value in order to get a job. This is institutional racism because it denies racial groups (taken as a population and not as individuals) who cannot meet this requirement the ability to get their foot in the door, assimilate, get on the job training and so on. Which is where the talk of 'special wages' exempt from minimum wage comes from. So that instead of getting $0, these people are able to get atleast something.

Same applies if you switch out 'immigrant' for any other socio-economically disadvantaged group of peoples. The poorer parts of society sometimes happen to be occupied predominantly by specific race groups (which a free market aims to solve by punishing and discouraging decision making on irrational factors). I think to chinese immigrants to Australia and other parts of the world who arrived with nothing, experienced real racism, yet worked within the market from the bottom up, eventually producing really high socio-economic outcomes for their children.

It is not by intention, but the negative effects of the welfare state on the black community within the US in particular were pointed out as far back as 30 years ago by prominent black economists such as Thomas Sowell. There are a lot of factors all working together in concert, one of them the drug war, but they all contribute towards the issue with minimum wage being one of them. For example someone has a criminal record for possession, they are viewed as higher risk (irregardless of whether they are or not) and their employable value is decreased, which is where the effect of minimum wage kicks in as another barrier locking them out of the market.

You just have a different definition of survivable than they do. The first rule of the free market is that value is subjective and different from person to person. You may think all those chinese workers choosing to work in factories making apple phones is horrible and capitalism is evil, but one must realise they are doing it because their alternatives are even worse. Yea steve jobs was a silly pineapple and could have done them better, but capitalism itself as a system of voluntary transactions isn't the problem.

It's understandable everytime child labour and the 'horrors' of the industrial revolution get brought as a painting of that whole era as robber barons and evil capitalism. Most of it based on a book by CS lewis and popular culture spread by the left. I too believed that propaganda for quite some time until i looked past the emotional lens and at the actual facts.

1. It's important to compare like with like. Children were working with or without the industrial revolution. They were actually better off than they were before working on the family farm 24/7. This is why they voluntarily chose to work in the city as their best option out of their own self interest. Those that found it worse would choose to go back to the farm.
   
2. Childhood mortality actually went down drastically and has been decreasing ever since in industrialising or industrialised nations. Most of those orphaned children would have otherwise been dead. You can't be a child worker if you're dead.
3. The only reason we don't have child work today is because we can afford it thanks to the industrial revolution and capitalism. Look at every single place in the world where these two things are absent and you will see extensive child labour and child abuse. Another point is that especially with Asians, putting your kid through education is not done because government requires it by law, but because of economic interest. The market is communicating demand for high skill labour.
   
4. As the cost of goods decreased, so did the cost of living. People were voluntarily buying these things. Handing over their treasure for goods and services they valued more. This is how wealth grows. It didn't grow from putting a minimum price on goods and services.
   
5. The industrial revolution saw the greatest outpouring of voluntary philanthropy humanity has ever seen.
6. No-one starts with perfect knowledge or perfect capital. It isn't right to compare the standard of living today with that of 200 years ago and then conclude that capitalism is barbaric. Gotta compare like with like. Capitalism is a system that learns and incorporates new information, whether it be worker safety etc. more effectively than any other currently known.

Absolutely agree 100%. While force should never be used to compel someone to help another person, people do fall on hard luck. Libertarianism as I understand it doesn't say anything against voluntarily helping the guy coughing under a bridge. For example the church has a very long historical record of doing that, so it isn't a 'libertarian fantasy' (separating out the religious connections).

Realistically speaking, the way i see it is we already have a large percentage of the public who believe in helping the needy so much that they would go as far as to use a gun to do it. My question in return is always if so many people support mandatory charitable causes in the first place e.g. democratic socialism, then why do they need the gun?

The problem I have against institutionalising charity into government is two fold

1. There isn't any virtue without choice. Being forced to give to a poor person isn't the same as voluntarily doing it. I remember I used to hate being told to do the dishes when I was just about to do them voluntarily . The destruction of that good feeling you get from helping another soul out of your own volition is the destruction of a very strong incentive. For instance, I am way more likely to want to help that busker if i know that he isn't also benefiting from an assortment of tax funded programs.
   
2. Good organisations that help the poor fundamentally are premised around destroying their own long term viability. The most effective charity is the one that doesn't last very long, because there are no more poor or needy. When you institutionalise something and have the ability to force people to pay into it, there no longer is an incentive to eradicate the underlying problem. Because when you do, you no longer have an excuse to force people to give you money.

You do realise the position you are imposing on me and everyone else in the thread is the same as making us agree with what you think the law should be?

This isn't a strawman, for someone who's trying to hard to defend the principle of freedom of contract that I already linked to (because we're not talking about contract law in general) you really need to work on how you define things.

You are unhappy with the current law around minimum wage. You would much rather this kind of law be removed, because to you it causes an unnecessary restriction on your decision-making.

You don't apparently understand that a lack of law around minimum wage would cause unnecessary restrictions on the decision-making of other people. Namely, the people that currently get paid the minimum wage. They would be paid less. This would affect their livelihoods and the decisions that they are able to make in life.

This is not freedom. This is freedom that favours you.

And @gmase - I recommend you actually respond to counterpoints instead of handing out likes for "patience" that are actually "likes for people that align with your worldview"

(it wouldn't be an issue had you not explicitly defined it as such)

LOL. "take off these shackles, so that I may become a slave!".

Your argument is so blind it pains me. You might be surprised to learn that capital has a demand for labour, just as labour has a demand for capital. Supply and demand - when labour is cheap, investment in capital increases, demand for labour increases, and wages increase vice versa. Welcome to the history of capital formation and wealth accumulation

If capital can exploit labour, so can labour exploit capital. Whoever uses violent force is the exploiter. Really that simple. This retarded marxist line of thinking where "the oppressor cannot be oppressed" would be laughable if not so many gullible people fell for it hook line and sinker.

What minimum wage actually does has been explained very clearly to you several times (horizontal wealth transfers) but you continually refuse to address the subject matter. Instead you seem to like making strawman assumptions about 'evil hidden agendas'. That always happens when people lose the economic argument. They try to make it into a moral argument which involves mud slinging the messenger because arguing the objective immorality of libertarian freedom is too difficult.

Lack of minimum wage favours me? I'm not an employer you silly pineapple. But if i ran a business, i would differentiate my product, plan an efficient value chain, provide good training, and thus be able to pay my employees more than the minimum wage. It's a funny thing what happens when you empower your people. They tend to appreciate their job more, appreciate that they can contribute real value and are likewise valued for it, and thus work better. It's obvious you haven't really bothered to look at the real world in forming your opinions because you might otherwise have spotted this common trend among successful companies.

I'm not a silly pineapple. I'm a common sense human with decency and respect for others, so I don't take out my baseball bat and try to force people to buy my things for more than they are willing to pay. If i charge you $50 for a big mac, would you buy it? No, because the cost is higher than the value. I'd rather sell it for $5 than get $0.

just gonna say i´m done with this thread .. it just isn´t worth it and i rather keep myself sane than be upset about someone elses imo illogical views ... believe whatever you want as there seems to be no way to convince you otherwise anyway .. so why wasting my time with this ... and neiher was the discussion any fun ..
for all i care this thread may as well be closed .. i personaly just don´t see anything positive or realy productive coming out of this ..

Ok, so let me get this straight:
We are having a logical debate, and now because you are losing, you have decided to declare the other side illogical and the debate a waste of time? Are you serious?

Behavior like that is EXACTLY why we got Hitler. And Clinton. And Stalin. Stop being a complete wimp! Get out of your circlejerk. If your beliefs don't hold up outside of your circle of people who believe what you do, then something is wrong with your beliefs. Wallowing in blissful ignorance will not change that.

whatever @mered4 , whatever ... if you feel like you are ohhhh so winning then i rather let you wallow in your glory than further wasting my time ...

Once in a blue moon I like to look at this thread to see what shenanigans you guys got up to. Because it's not like you're going to convince each other of anything.

Seriously? Flucking seriously? You're going to put Clinton in with Stalin and Hitler?

Ok.

Ok then.

Take I easy. We can get 2 things from this thread:
1. Better understand how people we disagree with think, and maybe even change what we think about a thing or two (because there aren't just 2 armies, if you're not 100% with me you're my enemy... )
2. Be happy that we are not mad seeing that people from other countries agree with us on some things. Here in Spain there is only 1 way of thinking that is everywhere. You can only talk differently privately with close friends. Social stuff is our new religion...

Who is being illogical though?

Gorbles is arguing that it is morally justified to impose terms on other people against their will with the backing of violence (textbook definition of theft) in order to expand one person's freedom at the expense of another. Please think about what he is actually saying in an objective and rational sense.

According to him, I would be morally justified to steal someone's TV because it expands the TV watching freedoms in my life. I should be able to steal the space shuttle from NASA because it expands the freedom in my life to fly into space. Socialism as far as I have been able to see is a childish philosophy.

@Geers
Clinton is running on a platform of identity politics and lies, very much like Hitler. She's been able to do this because the free market place of ideas has been turned into a social justice swamp filled with the tears of cry bullying. The modern left is consistently shutting down intellectual discourse and freedom of speech all over the place. This can't be escaped by pointing to whatever Trump is doing. Bad behaviour isn't excused by bad behaviour.

Adolf Hitler

That's about where the comparisons end. Clinton is in bed with corporate and I don't think she actually holds a conviction in her platform like Hitler. She'll utter platitudes to string along the progressives and throw them a bone here and there if it's politically convenient, which should be concerning because they'll be instituted based on political back scratching rather than on intellectual discourse.

HRC is dying and will do anything to get into power. Someone with nothing to lose and everything to gain is a very dangerous type of person. Stroke, seizure, mouth cancer, fainting, memory loss etc. Might be so sick that she fits the profile of an excellent puppet to outside interests like vultures to a carcass. Who knows whether she is still driving the car or someone else is at this point. Information is power. What we do know is that the Clinton campaign hasn't been afraid to hide this by spinning stories, and that in itself is concerning.

Those email scandals are also pretty compromising. Imagine if Julian hadn't released those DNC leaks and power players like China had used them to blackmail and stronghand international diplomacy adverse to US interests. Anyone's guess what else is in her spooky skeleton closet. Classic case of probable conflict between personal and public interest.

Everytime I think of Hillary this image comes to mind,

The opposing side retreating from the logical debate and attempting to sling mud from a moral sinkhole? That's the definition of winning, and you are the flag bearer of this victory in the case for responsible living.

Wake up! Decrying the opposing side because you feel they are illogical without proof or logic is self-imposed ignorance.

I am. And I'd like to include Angela Merkel in that list as well.

Nationalism isn't evil - people hungry for power and willing to do anything to get it, are.

Being proud of your country is of course fine but extreme nationalism is all about being power hungry- mostly just in believing your country is better and is deserving of this power.

This is an interesting argument. Thinking about it (as a small business owner) I have two issues with your assertion here:

1 - Your argument seems to revolve around the assumption that all businesses have some kind of 'right' to exist. If a business is that unprofitable it should fail- which will reduce the amount of that material available in the market place, which will in turn increase it's value so other players in the same field can actually make a profit.

2 - You forget *why* industry has ended up in this position, and despite what others in this thread trying to argue otherwise the answer is simply a 'race to the bottom'. That was driven by industry itself- many products have had their values eroded to the point that they are no longer profitable to produce or distribute. That will correct itself naturally over time. You have to remember, a minimum wage in a market applies to *all players*- like in maths if a factor is common to both sides of an equation it cancels out. The logical argument *against* a minimum wage in this context is that if, by introducing it, you force all players to increase their costs to compensate- then you drive the value of the currency down by the same amount that the work in question is 'overvalued' and thus you end up back where you started (ergo the employee is no better off for the minimum wage).

That however is *only true* IF you assume that all industry runs at tiny profit margins- and I can tell you with absolute certainty that that *is not* true for all industries. Frankly any industries that are working at those low profit margins are in need of a 'reset'- a good example being the global automotive collapse a few years ago which resulted in the loss / consolidation of quite a few large car manufacturers.

The situation where a minimum wage can (and does imo) work is where you have companies who are making large profit margins, and are *not* passing any of that back to anyone. There are many examples of large organisations sitting on huge cash pots- not investing, not increasing their own staffs wages. A minimum wage imo gets paid for by these large groups who would not contribute without being forced to. My personal philosophy is if someone working for me helps me make more profit- I am happy to share some of that increase with them. There are plenty of examples of good employers who do similar- JD Weatherspoons is a good one- they don't pay high wages for the sector, however they reward service with shares in the company, which is a great way of giving their own staff an invested interest in the success of the organisation. I know a few people who work for the group and thanks to the large expansion of the company their shares are now quite valuable. The Virgin group is another example of a company who invest back into their own workforce (with some impressive results- Virgin Atlantic was started by one of their admin staff, who Richard Branson made CEO of the new group and has subsequently been hugely success). Sadly these companies are very much in the minority- which is where regulation comes into play.

I think my post would have been better served if I had said patriotism rather than nationalism