In my country, Sweden, we have a very generous child welfare and parental leave. I have no children though. By your logic I should be envious and bitter? But I'm proud. It's called solidarity and having a healthy society benefits a childless me as well.
It's not tricky, and has been going on for the last fifty years or so just fine.
I like how the premise of this argument is that it's somehow horrible to pay someone too much. How horrible that an 18 year old be able to afford more than the rent on a crappy apartment. The more you empower young people with a livable wage the less of an influence their parent's money or lack of is on their life.
Just pick a floor that's good enough for everyone, accept that will be people with low expenses who will be "overpaid", and stop trying to figure out what every individual deserves.
I don’t think we produce enough for every minimum wage worker to earn enough to have 2-3 kids and raise them in a dignified manner (or the equivalent in Ferraris and hedonism). Kids are really, really expensive.
Pay a wage which is high enough to attract the talent that you need and which still leaves the company with a profit at the end. If there's a wide range that satisfies both of these conditions (and in markets with minimum wages, is legal to pay), then choose to offer a pay rate that best balances getting/keeping the talent you want vs the profitability.
If someone else can do my same job as effectively as me for half the rate, I'd expect my company to switch, just the same way as I'd happily take a 1/2 off coupon on the purchase of my next car, house, computer, or even groceries.
What if the other person costs less because they're being paid under the table? Unfortunately, that's been the case in a lot of lower income and manual labor jobs.
Construction and landscaping are notable examples. If the buyer only cares about cost, and the government adds 20-50% to the cost of wages, then the employer who bypasses the government thrives.
The double standard that enables many of our labor challenges is that people want a higher minimum wage, tend to oppose enforcement, and buy the cheapest option regardless of legality.
Laws that are helpful when fully enforced are destructive when partially enforced.
By the same token, if that next computer you buy is cheaper because it was built in a country with cheaper to implement labor laws than the ones you voted for in your country, how is that ethical?
> What if the other person costs less because they're being paid under the table? Unfortunately, that's been the case in a lot of lower income and manual labor jobs.
> Construction and landscaping are notable examples. If the buyer only cares about cost, and the government adds 20-50% to the cost of wages, then the employer who bypasses the government thrives.
This complicates the landscape, but this is a problem which should be addressed separately. If the system of taxing and enforcement effectively incentivises evading them and disincentivises law obedience, then taxing and enforcement system is messed up.
I agree that government is not automatically = good, it is corruptible. and I do think it sucks that computers are built in places with unethical labor laws.
To make matters far worse, the government subsidizes low-wage employers with the income based social programs in place, and tampers with supply to keep wages in check.
We have nothing close to a free market for labor. Unfortunately, it's called a free market, and so people think the market is ineffective.
Construction was a high paying job until unrestricted labor drove down wages. (Unenforced labor laws meant contractors hiring illegal workers could undercut bids. No payroll taxes, no workman's comp insurance, no chance of legal companies competing.)
Fair wages depend on fair markets, and the labor market at the lower income end of the spectrum is anything but fair.
I sort of agree with this on the condition that "tampering with supply to keep wages in check" includes union-busting. If unions and other forms of labor power were not suppressed by a government owned by Capital, then we would have a chance to see the "free market" potentially arrive at some of the same outcomes that socialists seek, such as worker co-ownership of firms and fair profit distribution. However, it's a bit paradoxical because one of the mechanisms by which these changes would occur is by labor power overturning a lot of the rules of capitalism. A system which did not allow this to happen would still be unjust, supporting the status quo through its so-called laissez-faire neutrality.
I don't think that is an ideological aim of capitalism. It is just an emergent behaviour.
In any case, it is a genuine question from someone living in a decent welfare state and happy to continue to do so. I don't really care to engage in debates of who has the moral high ground, just the practical question, if you have an answer.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your tone as challenging, like "who is anyone to say what is fair or not?"
technically in the U.S. there is a federal (nation-wide) minimum wage, then there are minimum wages for each state. I am not sure how they are defined, e.g. the federal one is certainly not automatically pegged to inflation. there is a movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour but even that is hard or impossible to live on in many areas.
The effects of raising minimum wages are twofold: long-term businesses will invest more in automation as it will be more profitable; short-term they might fire one or two people who might make sense at 12 but say now at 15 it does not. Actually think about how it affects different size business, large corporations can easily afford the automation, fire many people as they have many others. A small business having to fire someone is more drastic. In the end, you might have big corporation owners doing better, and impoverished small business owners, while not really improving the situation of the employees.
arguably, a business that pays someone less than a living wage doesn't deserve to operate, just as a business that can't exist without using slaves doesn't deserve to operate
> one of the functions of the ideological arm of capitalism is to argue that determining fair wage for a low-ranked laborer is so inscrutable that only "the market" can do it fairly, ...
You have not interpreted the comment correctly. This is deterministic. A capitalistic system or game has naturally emergent behaviors, but the propaganda excusing and defending the reluctance to add egalitarian rules is very much deterministic.
In most actual cases, some combination of a sort of free market, monopolies over labor (unions) and capital (large corporations), and government regulation does.
It would be better to say the market sets wages to maximize efficiency. With wages being price signals people are supposed to respond to in choosing and changing jobs.
The "fairness" view assumes everyone is born into their jobs somehow and stuck there. If people could choose any job they wanted, fairness is irrelevant because everyone has an equal choice. This is obviously an ideal, but then the opposite extreme is unrealistic too.
the models of market fairness work perfectly in a world where people could simply choose not to work, and where everyone has the ability to work to qualify for any job.
however in the real world people are forced to work by a need to survive, which puts disempowered people in a position to be exploited. and there is unequal access to education, to the leisure time to participate in education, and to the material security required to have a brain that is able to focus on education, so not everyone will be able to even make an attempt to qualify for every job. not to mention the fact that there is unequal access to the networking and connections, and to the non-merit-based "qualifications" that bring certain people to power (e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. all the isms).
so exploitation and injustice abounds in an unregulated system which tends to entrench and concentrate power within the hands of those who already have it
I've never heard of "models of market fairness", it sounds silly. I called the extreme where fairness was irrelevant an ideal. I take it you agree with that point. Though I don't see that much of what you are saying is particularly crushing to the ideal. In "the real world" one also doesn't need to switch jobs every day like a day trader changing stocks.
I also take it you concede that pursuing fairness leads to reduced efficiency? You can't very well serve two optimals.
> I also take it you concede that pursuing fairness leads to reduced efficiency?
Efficiency of what? Yes, it reduces the efficiency by which overall wealth is created (whatever that means). And yes, it enhances the effiency by which a society provides for the needs of all.
maybe the conditions vary from one warehouse to another, but the fact remains that Amazon smeared and retaliated against whistleblowers at warehouses with terrible conditions
Best Buy is actually pretty amazing. Their protection plan is a great deal too because it basically lets you pay a premium to return your item for a full refund in store credit for 2 years.
weird that you're getting downvoted. probably for the use of the word "parasitical" which I assume some of the HN crowd deems combative or divisive. but it's just true. there's a whole pointless middleman industry whose entire purpose is to derive profit from healthcare by denying coverage and increasing premiums, which of course have real world consequences of people dying or going bankrupt.
In the absence of taxpayer funded healthcare, insurance companies are the only ones negotiating pricing and protecting their customers from being fleeced.
But ... doesn't medicare do a more effective job negotiating than the private insurance companies? Like, my understanding is that typically for a given procedure medicare pays the least, private insurance pays somewhat higher, the uninsured pay way more.
Medicare does a better job of "negotiating" because they aren't really negotiating. The gov't simply passes a bill that says "Medicare will pay $X" and providers are left to either accept it or not take Medicare patients.
voters of the US overwhelmingly support universal healthcare and a majority supports medicare for all. it's not the voters. it's the politicians who are bought and who deceive voters into thinking they are on their side, who tell lies about what things are possible because it hurts their donors.
Clyburn, the congressman from South Carolina whose endorsement arguably delivered Joe Biden a landslide victory, has received millions of dollars from big pharma [0]
that seems plausible. but I consider that a reason why we need taxpayer-funded healthcare, just like so many other countries have had for years. not a reason why insurance is a necessary/lesser evil. I don't see how it's better for insurance to be fleecing people rather than medical providers
I was more referring to the "conspiracy theory" that such a tactic is currently in use by the powers that be. Not a topic I am familiar with so I certainly won't dispute that it occurred historically.
I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.
I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.
Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.
The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.
That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.
That's not how the government measures it. They either assume some percentile of income is poverty, or they put together a bundle of things (home, food, etc) to see if income covers it. However, that bundle always gets updated to include more and more.
do you understand the difference between a government definition and a human experience? I'm talking about making it so everyone has the basic needs of their life met - food, shelter, water, medicine, clean environment, leisure time, sleep time.
your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"
non-factual: Amazon treats their employees poorly, they just don't care about us.
factual: Amazon does this factual thing X and this factual thing Y, and it shouldn't be happening this way.
First one is just an opinion piece, regardless of its truthfulness, because it cannot be evaluated objectively (how to objectively determine whether amazon cares or not? who counts as "amazon" in this scenario? what factual event led to this statement? and on and on).
Second one is a factual statement that can be evaluated on a true/false basis. Events X and Y either happened or they didn't. If they did, the responsibility for those can be traced and evaluated. It leads to actual results, while the former is just an emotional opinion sort of statement, but that's exactly what sells the headlines.
