The question is whether those qualified citizens are willing to accept wages as low as the companies want to offer.

Ad the answer is no, so the companies would much rather bring in immigrants over whom they have far more leverage and who will accept lower wages... consequently lowering the average wage for those positions that local citizens are applying for.

The companies offer positions requiring high qualifications and low pay; those who are qualified won't accept the pay, so they cry there's "no qualified applicants" and demand more visas to bring in immigrants willing to accept a lower price.

The members of congress are also partial to the current electoral method, seeing as they're usually members of the major parties too. I wasn't only talking about presidential elections but congressional ones as well. Nobody currently in congress would support election reform as it would undermine their own political careers; we'd still need to first somehow get enough people into congress who would support it. Though I agree, the first step to that is getting the people to want it.

Agreed but the only people who might ever do that would be 3rd party politicians trying to secure more opportunities for them to get elected in the future. So to secure a world where 3rd parties are viable options, we first need to get enough 3rd parties to win that they can institute electoral reform.

I'm glad to hear someone else pointing this out too. :-)

A secondary benefit to this strategy is that if enough people follow it, if everyone in swing states started voting their true choices instead of buying into the two-party horse-race, because their votes didn't matter anyway, then their votes would start to matter. E.g. if we assume there's a lot of Californians who prefer Democrats over Republicans but would really prefer Greens, and they all start voting that way because their votes don't make a difference since the Democrat is a shoe-in anyway, then the Democrats would be weakened and the Greens would become a viable party and now suddenly it really matters who you vote for. You might (as a left-leaning voter) say that would actually be a bad outcome because then the Republicans might win California, but if the right side of the spectrum was doing the same thing meanwhile (e.g. if a lot of Californians who prefer Republicans over Democrats would really prefer Libertarians over either, and started voting Libertarian cause it's not like the Republican was going to win anyway), you could get an actual contested election with multiple viable options and a third party could possibly win the state.

I really wish the various third parties would get together and run a series of ad campaigns in election season targeting would-be third-party voters in swings states telling them "[Liberals/conservatives] of [state], [shoe-in candidate] is in all probably going to win [state] no matter who you vote for. So why waste your vote on [them/their major-party opponent] if that's not who you'd really prefer? Why not vote for [short list of prominent third-party candidates aligned with target audience] instead? They're even more [liberal/conservative] than [shoe-in candidate / their major-party opponent], and a vote for them will bring attention to the issues you really care about like [issues the major parties are neglecting]. Vote third party this election and make your vote count!"

Wish I had mod points.

Someone with a lot of wealth owning stock doesn't impose a constant expense on anyone with little wealth. Who owns what stock has no effect on how much it costs me to live; what businesses exist and competition between them and so on does, but someone is going to own each of them at the end of the day and opening that ownership up to a broader variety of people doesn't make any difference (other than the overall positive economic benefits of investing money with those best capable to use it and diversified risk and all of those things that stock enables).

Stock is also an investment that's immediately available to anyone who has any kind of savings income to set aside, unlike something like renting income properties which requires you to already have either huge savings or a huge income just to get into that game (to buy the extra housing) and then gets easier from there. So stock exhibits none of the iniquities that I'm concerned about. It's a form of investment that everyone can participate in.

In fact people with lower incomes benefit the most (proportional to their invested amount) from stock investment, if we assume that their lower incomes are indicative of an inability to generate a return on capital through their own activity. By instead trading that capital to someone better capable of generating a return on it, in exchange for a portion of their business, everyone including the lower-income investor benefits more than if they had just hung onto that capital and not invested it. Whereas someone more capable than average of generating a great return on capital through their own actions, who would likely have a higher income already because of that productivity, is better off hanging onto that capital and putting it to good use, rather than investing it into other people's less-productive ventures.

Also, I never said anyone shouldn't be able to borrow money. Interest-free loans are possible, and if useful will still exist in a world without interest. I imagine a roundabout form of such (payment plans) would be extremely common in an interest-free world: expensive items can be bought on different terms (payment due dates) for different prices, where you're charged a higher price for longer terms (more delayed payment). A pair of such transactions is how temporary use of expensive things could still be possible without technically renting them: the "rental" company would technically be a buyer and seller of used [whatever]s, selling on longer terms for higher prices and buying on shorter (immediate) terms for lower prices, and the "renter" would technically be buying something on long terms at a high price and then selling it back on short (immediate) terms at a lower price well before he's finished paying it off, thus canceling the remainder of his debt toward the purchase.

He'd lose some money in such a the deal and the "rental" company would profit from it, but the "renter" could technically avoid that by selling back to someone else for a better deal... if he was willing to accept the inconvenience of finding such a buyer, which most people wanting to use something temporarily wouldn't be, so the profit to be made "renting" things out in such a way would be driven down the the value of the convenience such a "rental" company provides. Meanwhile people who don't want something temporarily, who want something permanently and just can't afford the huge barriers to entry into ownership, can start "renting" and just keep it up until eventually it's theirs and they can stop, and if they do eventually decide they don't want it (they're moving house, for example), take the time to find a buyer who will take it off their hands for a price and terms that doesn't leave them losing on the deal.

The tricks that Muslim (and Middle Ages Catholic) countries use(d) to get around the prohibition on interest usually involve(d) a rental contract as part of the complex financial instrument used, so those would not be technically possible under my proposal. That was one of the problems with such earlier opposition to interest: it didn't recognize it as just one (major) instance of the broader phenomenon of rent which is the source of the trouble. (Another problem is that they actually banned it as in you would be punished if you tried to enter into such an arrangement, whereas I only advocate not legally protecting such contracts, which makes them unsuitable for widespread economic use [as what good is an unenforceable contract], by having the state do less rather than more, maintaining compatibility with libertarian principles [in the broad, not-US-centric sense]).

I haven't said anything against investments. Investments are great. You can buy goods and commodities when and where they're cheap and sell them when and where they're expensive. You can buy equity in promising business ventures (stock), taking part in all their risks and rewards, and profiting if they do. There are all kinds of investments that don't involve rent and interest.

In fact a hopeful side-effect of the effects I intend to achieve by eliminating rent and interest would be that lower-income people would have more money to save and invest, especially in stock, which means that more resources are in the hands of the people who can get the most return from their use, growing the whole economy (to the benefit of higher-income people too, who have more resources invest in them to put to productive use), and further increasing the mobility of the lower classes by better allowing them to participate in that growing economy.

Ok thanks, I understand what you're talking about now, but I still don't see how anything I've suggested impacts it. I'm not at all talking about a command economy, I'm talking about fixing the bug in market economies that makes people think command economies might be necessary. A way to have a free market (which is really the thing you're talking about that allocates resources well) without capitalism (which is not the same thing as a free market, and I'd argue actually makes markets less free and less efficient by allowing some parties in an advantageous position to merely extract value from the market without contributing anything to it).

Also, re "in America, pretty near everyone has more than they need": everyone needs a place to live, and though it's apparently nigh-impossible to find statistics on how many people own houses (vs how many houses are occupied by people who own them), personal income statistics compared to housing cost statistics strongly suggest that most people in America don't have a place to live of their own -- and are subsequently forced to borrow a place to live, for a fee, from others who have more living-space than they personally need, many of them for their entire lives, generation after generation.

That's actually the origin of my concern with this problem: if I didn't have to pay housing rent, I could afford to work a whole lot less, and would probably just freelance working for myself to supply for my own meager needs. I work a lot more than I have to to make a lot more money than I actually need to pay for the things I consume in a comfortable lifestyle, because I have to pay a lot of money every month forever in order to not be homeless, and I need to make a whole damn lot more money than that to escape from that effectively infinite debt, because the finite debt I'd need to replace it with is still so oppressive, partly because of factors that effect interest rates but also because the cost of housing itself is so damn high, because it's in high demand because an extra house is a free money machine (when rent is possible) and that's a really desirable thing to have if you can afford it. Get rid of rent and there's no reason to own housing you're not living in, and all the housing currently being rented out would have to be sold to the only people still interested in it, namely everyone who was stuck renting before; and it'd have to be sold on terms they could afford, or else no sale and no profit for anyone.

That's what I think is the insight Marx missed. Yes, people are beholden to their employers, but that's only half the problem. They're beholden to their employers because they need money from them to pay their landlords and creditors and other capitalists on the expense side of their cash flow. Fix that end of the problem and suddenly the employers have much less leverage (because the employees can more easily walk away from the job and not have their entire lives fall apart as soon as next month's rent is due), and most of the workplace problems Marx laments go away.

I specifically qualified "need" as "enough that they can afford to let others use it" so that nobody but the person in question is making any call about where the line between "want" and "need" is. If you have something, and you're not making any use of it, you clearly don't think you need it, and why would you even want it? As it is now people may need/want things they're not personally using because they can get the "use" of charging-other-people-to-use-them out of them, which is what we're aiming to eliminate here. Eliminate that "use" and nobody would have any reason to acquire more stuff than they're going to personally use themselves. And any such excess stuff they've already got, they will trade away for something more useful to them, like money, which can be used to buy services and spare you from having to work as much. Which is how extra wealth (more than you personally can make use of) would afford you leisure in a sane world: by trading the wealth (capital) for the leisure (labor), and ending up, eventually, in the same boat as everyone else (because they've gained the capital you spent on their labor). Instead of that extra wealth being an infinite-(albeit-rate-limited)-free-money machine, which is what rent (incl. interest) enables now.

And I'm unclear what you mean by "that allocation of capital (resources) is something that has value". Are you just talking about the fact that if I have more X than I want but not enough Y, and you have more Y than you want but not enough X, trading some X for Y will profit us both? If that is what you mean then I don't see how anything I've said goes against that. If that's not what you mean then I'm not sure what you mean. Care to elaborate?

There's nobody advocating complete "communism" (by which I assume you mean Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, not the end-state that was supposed to follow that that's never existed in a modern country) anymore, but there is still substantial debate about to what degree something like it should be patched over an otherwise capitalist society to ameliorate the problems of material inequality. It's broadly accepted in most of the western world that it's a good thing for the state to take rich people's money and give it (or goods and services it pays for) to the poor. What's still debated is how much and how exactly that should be done. (With some people, in America at least, ostensibly of the opinion that it shouldn't be done at all).

And I thought I already explained clearly enough, but the reason interest (and more broadly, rent of any sort; interest is just rent on money) causes problems, and thus eliminating it would make things better, is because it means that those who have excess wealth, enough that they can afford to let others use it, can make a continual unearned income from that excess without ever losing the excess; and conversely those who need more than they have and have to borrow it from those who have such excess have continual expenses for the use of it, without ever actually acquiring any real wealth for those expenses. Without rent and interest, the only way to profit from excess wealth would be to sell it, and thus those who wanted to profit from their wealth would gradually lose that wealth, and conversely those who would otherwise have only borrowed that wealth for a price would instead gradually acquire that wealth for that price. So there would be a natural and voluntary redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, as the rich paid the poor for their labor with their capital, and there would be no further process (like rent and interest) subsequently returning the capital back to the rich again to spend over and over again.

I have, and Marx has some good insights into the root of the problem, but his proposed solution is problematic, and nowadays nobody seems capable of discussing the problem without assuming that Marx's solution is the only solution, such that those who reject that solution "must" deny the problem, and those who acknowledge the problem "must" support Marx's solution. The debate has become one about whether or not (or to what degree) Marx's proposed solution is necessary or acceptable, and closer examination of the problem and other possible solutions has subsequently been ignored.

I don't know why I'm bothering to reply when you're pretty obviously trolling/baiting me here, but whatever...

Yeah right, so every high school graduate and welder in the country is easily set for retirement? And consequently the majority of Americans (struggling to make ends meet day to day much less save for retirement) are only in that boat because they're unskilled high school dropouts? Even the ones with four-year degrees doing technical jobs and making twice the median income and nevertheless struggling because the median income is a pittance compared to the cost of basic necessities like housing -- they're all unskilled high school dropouts too, somehow? Most Americans are high school dropouts, and all their struggles are all their own lazy faults for not just... welding? Really? Obvious troll is obvious.

Yeah, you can work hard and possibly beat the odds. You can increase you chances of success. But the odds are against you. That's why I said "just try ... and probably lose anyway". Try, of course, to not try is to guarantee failure. But it's not like it's a matter of just choosing not to be poor, and most attempts to change that fate fail, or else almost nobody would be poor.

You apparently don't understand even naive set theory. There are a lot of other things much less severe than overthrowing the government that could be achieved if enough people demanded it. Like just changing a few laws here or there. Change doesn't have to mean a complete replacement.

Something like that (or a negative income tax, etc) would be a useful band-aid, but in the long run I agree that those are boring solutions. Forced redistribution of wealth is palliative at best, treating the symptoms of a problem, making it hurt less, but not addressing the cause of those symptoms at all, leaving the actual problem untreated.

The problem is that wealth concentrates; that having more wealth makes it easier to acquire more wealth, and having less wealth makes it difficult to even stem the further loss of wealth, to the point that a class of idle rich can live off the labors of a class of working poor, creating the class divide and class immobility which are the symptoms that forced redistribution is aimed at alleviating, but which aren't the root problem. As far as I can see almost nobody is even asking the question of what the root problem is. How does having wealth enable some people to simultaneously work less and gain more? How does lacking wealth force other people to work their asses off and yet gain nothing? Why doesn't wealth naturally flow from the idle rich to the working poor, as the rich pay the poor to work to support them, gradually drawing the rich and poor together into a single moderately-working moderately-wealthy middle class? What breaks that natural process?

The short version of my answer (because I gather you don't really care enough to read a full explanation) is that the problem is any transaction where someone with more wealth than they need for their personal use lends that wealth (be it money, land, whatever) out for temporary use by someone who needs more than they have, in exchange for a permanent transfer of wealth (i.e. money) in the other direction -- rather than a simple sale where both sides give up something permanently in exchange for some permanent gain. Such transactions (the ones we call rent and interest, or in older technical terms, "usury") are the root cause of the problems of capitalism, and if we got rid of them we wouldn't need palliative treatments like forced redistribution at all. A usury-free free market would be one without any of the troubles that free-market opponents deride. It would be one where any high school graduate or welder who showed up and did their job every day could expect to own their own home and eventually retire, unlike the world today.

I have much more I could say about how such a usury-free market could function without disrupting all the things which currently rely on rent and interest, but you probably don't care to hear it.

Oh, you meant solutions the suffering individuals could implement all by themselves? Nah, they're probably fucked. Just try to fight it as best as you can and probably lose anyway.

I was offering ideas for solutions we collectively might implement if enough of us had the political will to do it, but it doesn't sound like you're actually interested in hearing those so never mind.

From your own link, "The overall median personal income for all individuals over the age of 18 was $24,062".

You're probably right about the taxes though, that was a back-of-the-envelope estimate based on my own take-home pay. Still even when I was making about $25k my take-home was still barely above 80% of my earnings, so it's not super far off my estimate. That would give you an extra $200 a month or so, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially at lower incomes, but still not enough to retire on. If you can manage to save all of that for 45 years of work, it might pay your rent and maybe some utilities on a small apartment in a cheap location for 15 years of retirement. But food, medicine, never mind something to make life worth living? Good luck with that.