Lucille posted:So they should be purged, to free the internet of their traffic.
purged and replaced with what? all workers' Hour Price is equal. Minimum Wage is a fixed price for a fixed commodity
maybe once Science develops a way to accurately predict individual lifespans, then we can apportion different values to individual's Time (an hour of Time for a person who will live 80s years is of less worth than an hour of Time for a person who will only live 60 years), but until then, Minimum Wage is teh best system we have
Lucille posted:Sometimes, when I walk into a store or museum, the first thing I notice is a human being whose job could be replaced by a sign.
Fuck you, there's no need for personal attacks
Lucille posted:Sometimes, when I walk into a store or museum, the first thing I notice is a human being whose job could be replaced by a sign.
exactly. That person is obviously contracting their Time and Geographic Location out to an employer who desires their body in a certain location at a certain time of day for a certain number of hours. They are not being paid for labor or productivity
Leftists say Bill Gates is a capitalist. But his wealth is in stock certificates. Stock certificates are paper, not means of production.
If you extend the definition of "means of production" to cover voting rights in a public company, then welfare queens are capitalists because they exercise their political capital and votes to secure surplus value.
ilmdge posted:For example a Mc Donalds cant operate without a cook and a cashier and a person answering drive through.
when i worked at Bailey's Chicken Fingers and Dangerously Slippery Floors before i was fired by 9/11, i held all three of those Jobs simultaneously. Obviously my employer did not understand the specifics of Labor/Time Theory, which is probably why they went out of business
Lucille posted:To answer your question superabound, it depends if you're talking about aggregate hours worked or aggregate hours spent existing.
Existence IS work. And if we cant monetize and value-establish neither Time nor Location, when twhat the hell kind of slipshod 21st century Capitalist economy are we running in the first place?
Lucille posted:If you extend the definition of "means of production" to cover voting rights in a public company, then welfare queens are capitalists because they exercise their political capital and votes to secure surplus value.
who ever said that welfare queens werent capitalists? theyre very capitalist
it's probably a good principle that any full-time job should be able to give a relatively comfortable existence. a lot of the jobs affected by minimum wages are not full-time jobs, though. i think most minimum wage jobs are part-time and held by young people who live with their parents or are in school. obviously the value of that person is not easily explained in their current productivity, which is part of why students should get a wage for being at school, and their school should be free.
but that mostly ignores class power and its influence on "markets", which are entirely political constructed systems of power. the accumulation of capital over long periods of time, usually in conjunction with government favour (certainly in terms of taxation), means that productivity is measured insofar as it benefits capital, with human needs only an indirect measure of worth. so, for example, it might be very profitable for an advertising agency to think of a way to convince young people to smoke, but that isn't necessarily what's good for society, and relates almost nothing to actual productivity connected to human needs. the fact is that human society is very "messy", and these economic models never really account fully for "distortions" such as, say, the government shooting strikers or something and its effect on wage negotiations or something.
most social-democracies in europe do not focus heavily on minimum wages as a poverty-fighting measure, in some countries they only really exist through union agreements. the main focus was offering a job or training to everyone and then ensuring the rest had a strong social wage (housing, health care, etc.).
Minimum wages are still the most effective way to compress wages. They bump people out of work, but people don't care about that, high youth unemployment is accepted as normal in Europe.
Leftwing parties generally support wage and union regulations, rightwing parties are more likely to support social security transfers that maintain existing hierarchies insofar as benefits are proportional to contributions.
the accumulation of capital over long periods of time, usually in conjunction with government favour (certainly in terms of taxation), means that productivity is measured insofar as it benefits capital, with human needs only an indirect measure of worth.
That's true whether capital is strong or weak. If anything when capital is strong you get hippies like Bill Gates trying to fix things.
the fact is that human society is very "messy", and these economic models never really account fully for "distortions" such as, say, the government shooting strikers or something and its effect on wage negotiations or something.
The distortions are mainly the other way around, welfare dependence, the iron law of hierarchy, Murphy's Law and all making social policies less successful than they were meant to be. This is why leftist policies should really be subject to a higher burden of proof than noninterventionist policies. If you want to be logically rigorous of course but that isn't necessarily the goal of marxism.
The actual goals of wealth redistribution have little to do with poverty reduction. One, the poverty line is an inaccurate measure of poverty, there are people making $50,000 a year who are poor and people making $-50,000 a year who are rich. Two, the cost of most welfare programs is huge relative to the reduction in poverty they accomplish.
The actual reason why people support these policies has much more to do with relative income than absolute income. In other words, destroying wealth to make everyone else feel better.
I don't think the destructive tendencies I mentioned manifest themselves consciously. I think they manifest themselves as the vacant attitude leftists take toward the economic costs of their policies. They know their relative income will improve so they don't care if their absolute income falls.
if you want greater absolute income, move to Zimbabwe
This is actually true, you could probably buy the country on a McDonald's salary.