I found this a very interesting article... http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...r-us-plutocrats-108014_full.html#.U7CrBfmSx8F "The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depressionso that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforksthat will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It's not just that we'll escape with our lives; it's that we'll most certainly get even richer."
This is worth a read. For those who aren't familiar with the author, Nick Hanauer, he's a billionaire, one of the first investors in Amazon.com and sold one of his companies (aQuantive) to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. He made a short TED Talk that got banned because TED felt that: "Hanauer's talk was explicitly partisan and included a number of arguments that were unconvincing". This is what Nick Hanauer argued: He is a critic of extreme levels of inequality and favours raising the minimum wage in America. In the linked article he states:
I have been seeing pitchforks in my crystal ball for some years now. As much as I can, I am going to try and feed the kids, mainly muesli bars! OC
Placing an artificial floor on the price of labour retards the employment prospects of the unskilled. http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/politicians-are-job-killers
Where does that demand come from if people aren't earning enough to pay for the stuff? And as the obscenely wealthy guy who wrote the article about increasing the minimum wage points out, he earns a thousand times more than an average person but doesn't buy a thousand times more stuff.
If they don't even the scales indeed it will be pitchforks. In the UK some of the poverty is shocking and the 'no-go' areas are truly frightening. I looked at the 'bogan' and maladjusted migrant population areas around Australia and moved as far as possible from them. Now I'm thinking I need to move further. This will not end well. The rich would rather risk everything than lose anything.
The demand that the author is referring to is demand for workers. If prices are too high, demand for workers remains subdued, likewise if prices were low demand for workers would increase. Who are you referring to?
The article addressed this claim: There's obviously more in the article about this so its worth looking at what he says before immediately rolling out the usual "minimum wages cost jobs" argument.
By "they" you are probably referring to the government. To believe that a government has the capacity to configure a society is to fail to understand how societies develop in the first place. Societies are not planned, they evolve. Government manipulation cannot design a society that best meets the needs of its occupants, it can only make things worse. And the longer we cling to foolish notions such as governments possessing the capacity to deliver us from evil, the worse things will become and the longer we will have to wait for a solution.
I am afraid that Julie is probably referring to a "tax the rich" policy. Even if you taxed the rich at 75% (or 100% - ONCE), and reduced the tax on the poor at 10%, (or 0%) it would not stop the pitchforks. SHTF Day will dawn and bring social chaos with it very soon after. OC
Ok. Well, I did a quick search for any studies on minimum wage and employment prospects. Pretty much the conclusion seems to be "Raising the minimum wage has no discernable effect on employment levels." http://www.americanprogressaction.o...-the-minimum-wage-is-no-threat-to-employment/ So the author is not completely "talking shit".
Let's try some facts and evidence here... Minimum wage was instituted a few decades ago and has been steadily rising. In the same time inequality has been rising. Now, while correlation certainly does not imply causation, what it it does do is imply that it's not working and therefore maybe that there is some other issue going on. Just maybe? What's the definition of insanity?
insanity nsanti/ noun noun: insanity the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness. "he suffered from bouts of insanity" synonyms: mental illness, mental disorder, mental derangement, madness, insaneness, dementia, dementedness, lunacy, instability, unsoundness of mind, loss of reason Not sure what you were trying to get at... unless you were hoping to go with a pop culture reference of some old scientist the internet loves quoting lol.
Minimum wage is just another form of central planning redistribution of income. You might as well advocate communism if you think minimum wage works. Certainly no-one seems to have any clue what the minimum wage should be or it would have been at that rate long ago.
Demand for workers is directly related to demand for the products and services they produce. If nobody is earning enough to be able to pay for the stuff, demand for it will remain low. Poor people don't buy much stuff. Basic shelter, shoddy clothes and just enough cheap junk food to keep them alive. That's about it. If you're not a slumlord, a sweatshop owner or chucking sawdust and arseholes into a meat grinder, you have very little opportunity to sell stuff to those people. The billionaire who wrote the article titled "I see pitchforks" arguing that higher paid workers have more disposable income to buy stuff with and that rich people like him are ultimately better off having a large, well-off middle class of consumers than a mass of serfs.
Does this rich person talk about debt? Does he talk about manipulation of interest rates and the adverse effects that has on the economy and by extension people's jobs and lives? Does he talk about how a system that favours debtors over savers is bound to lead to people getting into increasing amounts of debt (subsidise something and you get more of it) and thus the increase in credit money from this driving ever increasing inflation which puts more and more financial pressure on people? How this all results in inequality. It's what seem like best intentions but has very adverse effects. ie. next time you see a politician talking about keeping interest rates low think about how what they are really saying is that the want to subsidise the uptake of debt. Does he talk about how minimum wage has alleviated all this in the past few decades? Oh wait, it hasn't. I'm sure it will work this time though... It's like when I went into the hospital with appendicitis. My stomach was killing me. They gave me some real good painkillers though and sent me on my way. The pain keeps coming back, even though they keep upping the dosage. But now some new guy has come along and is telling me that one more big increase should get rid of it forever.
