one in which financial returns are the priority, independent of whether they're associated with something innovative or useful in the real world.

Adam Smith pointed out in 1776...

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

You don't pay employer taxes when you hire a contractor.

The IRS says "There is no "magic" or set number of factors that "makes" the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination."

But you can submit Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding (PDF) with the IRS. The IRS will review the facts and circumstances and officially determine the worker's status. Be aware that it can take at least six months to get a determination.

I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Sam Walton's low prices

I would prefer for tax transfers to "top up" low income people rather than distort the market through price floors on labor, that may lead to less employment of the less productive, and may raise prices for all.

I feel that it is better to take a few dollars from a rich person through taxes than to say to a person who only produces $9 per hour that they can't have a job because the wage floor is $10 per hour.

Moreover, wages are a price signal, and perhaps people should know that not finishing high school and getting additional post-secondary training or education does not lead to $10 per hour wages, but more like $5 per hour.

Your examples of Communism had little to do with actual communism

I prefer to look at real-world track records.

Capitalism (economic freedom and secure private property rights) has a great record of dramatically expanding economic growth and delivering tremendous technological innovation. It has also lead to income and/or wealth inequality, but even the poorest of capitalist countries experience improvements in well-being over time.

Attempts to "fix" capitalism through reductions in economic freedom (such as labor rigidities such as high wage floors, costly firing, etc.) and also overly high levels of redistribution generally find a point of diminishing returns and often are retrenched (see Germany's Hartz reforms).

The track records of attempts to have "common ownership" of the means of production has generally lead to violence, poverty, and lack of innovation. I would like to suggest that this is because the ownership is never truly "common", the ownership resides in political power, of politicians (elected or not) who are rent-seekers on the means of production, and they may have political needs to maintain power that is greater than economic profit of the means of production.

This is opposed to capitalism where ownership resides in those who put their actual capital at risk and are seeking actual profit by meeting the needs of customers.

CEO's may not always represent the best interests of shareholders, but shareholders can always sell their shares and invest elsewhere. It is typically difficult to exit a "common ownership" system.

China is informative, where common ownership is being converted into capitalist ownership, with great reductions in poverty along with higher levels of income inequality.

Seattle's unemployment among those who are age 16-24 is *lower* than the national average. How is that possible?!

The greater Seattle area has a lot of economic production (Microsoft, etc.) so I'm not surprised that highly-educated, high-income workers are demanding the service of lower-income workers. It is possible that the market-clearing wage for low-educated workers age 16-24 is around $10/hour or perhaps not that far below that level. Whether it is around $15/hour remains to be seen.

If the artificial wage floor is raised above the market-clearing wage, there will be enhanced unemployment of those who are least productive, typically the least experienced and educated.

Kids have no choice in who their parents are, and typically only get SS if they have something like autism.

SNAP SNAP offers nutrition assistance to millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families and provides economic benefits to communities. SNAP is the largest program in the domestic hunger safety net.

"We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants

And the part of the reason the US is the greatest economy on the planet (and also the world's leading culture, which is also monetizable) is due to immigration.

For example, consider these immigrants: Albert Einstein, I.M. Pei, John Muir, Joseph Pulitzer, Irving Berlin, Ang Lee, Cary Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Van Halen, Rupert Murdoch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pamela Anderson, Dave Matthews, George Soros, Sergey Brin, Alexander Graham Bell, Marcus Goldman (Goldman Sachs), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Theodore and Milton Deutschmann (Radio Shack), Maxwell Kohl (Kohl's), Daniel Aaron (Comcast), Sol Shenk (Big Lots!), Jerry Yang (Yahoo!), John W. Nordstrom (Nordstrom's), William Colgate (Colgate), Nathan Cummings (Sara Lee), E.I. du Pont, James L. Kraft, Charles Pfizer, William Procter, James Gamble, Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun / Arista Networks), Andy Grove (Intel)....

Those are of course the 1st gen immigrants. Think about how many 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants who are participating in expanding the US economy and culture (like me, for instance).

It's only natural that people who know and are related to each other would want first and foremost to support each other over any other randomly selected set of people.

Personally I don't care about people who theoretically share some kind of artificial division of humanity with me. Nationalism is a dangerous feeling that should be relegated to its proper recreational use. Man-made borders of a country are only means to achieving scalable governance.

I only care about the myself and my family and the things and people that are important to me. That is why the US is such a great and open country where people of all kinds can work together to create amazing economic and cultural growth. That is the American way!

All barriers to economic freedom reduce everyone's potential. Everyone is different, and mathematically we know that if everyone can specialize in what they are most productive at (whether that is management, computer programing, being a nanny, being a house cleaner), total productivity of humanity is maximized.

No big surprise that the collapse of the unions in the late 60s and 70s coincided with the rise of minorities in blue collar/skilled labor.

Which minorities are those? African Americans? Since most African Americans have ancestors in this country going back over 200 years

African Americans were actively excluded from unions until the late 1960's, see Unions and Discrimination.

It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.

Currently younger people are not a protected class (at a Federal level) against age discrimination in the US. Only workers over 40 years old are a protected class. (Some states may have other age protections).

You didn't think they were sent home, did you?

I know an H1-B holder who had to leave the country with his family (and kids who grew up in the US) when it came to and end.

So yes, they do send them home. Why don't you go talk to an H1-B visa holder...

Or, you know, have parents who cannot afford to put food on the table.

If you are over 62 you can get Social Security - in 2013 over $670 billion was spent on OASI. Poor people make more in Social Security than they put in, even accounting for inflation.

I know people who came to the US with no education, no money, no command of the english language. no legal status, etc. and they are able to work hard and provide for their families just fine.

You really have to screw up in the US to actually go hungry. Getting addicted to drugs, doing crime, etc. is one way to go down that path.

I shouldn't have called out meth, there are only about 350,000 meth addicts in the US. There are 7 million people opiate addicts (heroine, pain meds), and 1.5 million cocaine addicts.

A poll of the IGM panel of economic experts found them about 50/50 to the question "Raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.".

Would be interesting to ask the question about $15/hour.

I suspect if you asked economists about $100/hour, they would all suspect greater levels of unemployment.

Sure, there is no issue with starvation in the US

Because when you spend your money on Meth, there is no money left for food...

Take a look at Henry Ford, the prototypical example, who paid his factory workers far more than anyone else so that they could actually afford to buy the cars they were making, kickstarting an entire industry by selling cars to people other than the rich.

This is a complete myth. Ford payed people more because he needed workers with more physical stamina to work on the assembly line rather than the more "craft like" production of vehicles. Also he wanted to reduce turnover, as new employees had to be trained up on the new assembly line, so he felt he had to pay workers more than his competitors to hold on to talented workers (before the wage rise, Ford hired almost 3 employees to keep one). And he also ran a secret police to ensure that they did not drink at home and did not cheat on their wives and that the wives did not work to ensure maximum productiveness. If you did not live up to the Ford concept of a good worker, you did not get the bonus that brought you up to $5 a day.

Ford employed 14,000 workers. This was not enough to "kickstart an industry". Car production in the year before the pay rise was 170,000, in the year of it 202,000. Moreover, even if all of his workers bought a car every year, it would be about $7 million of additional sales, but the wage rise cost $9 million.

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