But of-course it matters, what it does it lowers your expected salary across the board. Sure, it's market rate on top of a government mandated minimum but that's a mandated minimum that is not supplanted by a higher wage (like the minimum wage law is irrelevant from point of view of your rate if your rate is higher than the minimum wage, though it is not irrelevant if you realise that minimum wage pushes many prices of products you buy up and thus robs you of your purchasing power all in the name of hiding inflation created by the government in the first place) but in fact the minimum mandated vacation days are actually part of your total compensation.

My point is that in a system where government sets minimum vacation days your hourly wage is lower than it would have been otherwise. If a government comes out with another law that increases the number of paid vacation days your employer will likely not reduce your salary directly right away (though I would) but instead most employers will work this out by reducing your bonuses / raises and by attrition, where the new employees would start with a lower hourly wage and/or other benefits and/or with fewer raises, etc.

Basically again, money doesn't come from nowhere, the law of conservation of energy still applies. Your productivity commands your total compensation and your government mandated vacation days are paid to you in lie of hourly wages.

I am correct in both, theory and practice not because of what you may or may not be able to negotiate with an employer but because your vacation pay is part of your total compensation.

Without laws and regulations it is up to you to negotiate. With the laws and regulations it is already negotiated for you, you have no choice but to accept part of your compensation in vacation/sick days rather than in hourly wage.

Before you make another comment on this, think, where is the money coming from to pay for your vacation? You think it's coming out of your employer or out of your own productivity? Obviously (well, it should be obvious) that it is coming out of your productivity. That means that you are compensated in those vacation days rather than any other form of compensation that you might have negotiated with your employer.

Your vacation days are just your wages that are not given to you as money.

The point is that you are getting fewer dollars / euros and under the guise of giving you 'something for nothing' the government is actually forcing you to accept payment in form of vacation days as opposed to anything else you might have negotiated on your own with the employer.

You are mistaken about money, prices and business in general. Money doesn't come from vacuum, it is generated by the business that produces something. Any business that has employees has to consider the total cost of labour, not only a salary, so when you are hired by a business you are paid a salary and if there are any other 'benefits' that come with that salary that is just part of your salary, this includes your vacation pay.

Business is not there to pay your wages, it is there to make the most money for the investor(s), this means that no business will be overpaying its employees above their market rate, and in cases where there are laws that raise labour prices (wages) with various laws and rules and regulations then all of these costs are counted towards your total compensation.

Your total compensation is just it. You can negotiate to be compensated in dollars, pieces of silver, gallons of milk, condoms or paid vacation days, but all of these are part of total price of your labour and where you get something, you lose something somewhere else.

Why this goes above the heads of average /.ers (and moderators here) I have no idea.

You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live, all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract. Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you. You can get more money or more vacation time, your call. It is the same situation with anything that is mandated by a government that must be part of your employment contract. You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.

On the page 48 of this document
EXAMPLES OF TERRORISM AND/OR TERRORIST ACTIVITIES

3.18.1 destruction of aircraft or aircraft facilities .....
3.18.13 damaging a protected computer used in interstate or foreign commerce or that is used exclusively by a financial institution or the United States Government ...
3.18.18 damage to Government property
3.18.19 destruction of communication lines, stations, or systems ...

Well, AFAIC under these definitions the IRS are terrorists.

...
3.18.29 the use of weapons of mass destruction ...
3.18.34 harboring TERRORISTS
3.18.35 providing material support to TERRORISTS
3.18.36 providing material support to terrorist organizations
3.18.37 financing TERRORISM
3.18.38 receiving military-type training from a FTO
3.18.39 torture
3.18.40 developing, transfering, possessing, or threatening to use atomic weapons ...
3.18.46 manufacturing, distributing, or possessing controlled substances intending to provide anything of pecuniary value to a FTO, member, or group

Under these definition USA government is a terrorist organization.

Socialism or attempted communism is not the wrong variable, it is the correct variable, what do you think socialism and communism lead to? Massive poverty, lack of equality under the law, lack of opportunities to get out of poverty.

Sure, you can say that the problem is poverty, but poverty in the socialist countries came from socialism - lack of private ownership and operation of property, lack of individual freedoms.

Today's USA and most of Europe and Japan and many others are lacking individual freedom where it comes to freedom to make your own choices in life, to run your own business without getting hit in the head by governments. There are fewer and fewer freedoms available and because of that the moral compass is getting more and more off track. People are willing to cheat more in a system that does not allow them to be equal and free under the law. When I say equal, I am not talking about equality of outcomes, I am talking about equality of application of the law.

If the law is applied differently to some people even in such concepts as different tax brackets and different tax breaks you will have less economic freedom, less initiative, fewer opportunities, fewer people trying to get ahead the honest way because the honest way is made so much more expensive (whatever the costs are, they are raised considerably before the newcomers so that vast majority of people just gives up and doesn't even try). In that case you will have more cheating, more lying, people not honouring contracts, people expecting to steal from each other by any means and considering that to be 'justice' (like 'just society' actually meaning a society that steals from some to subsidise others).

You cannot redefine words that mean justice to mean theft and corruption and expect the people to not notice and not to change their behaviour and not to become morally corrupt.

Social or economic justice redefines the meaning of the word justice as much as the government redefines the definition of what inflation is in order to pretend it doesn't exist.

Redefining the word of what unemployment is to pretend it doesn't exist.

Redefining what 'GDP' is to pretend it is growing.

Redefining words is a political game, it is played by the government and it is there to lie to you, to destroy your ability to differentiate between reality and fiction, to destroy your moral compass. Immoral people are easier to use in a mob settings, immoral people do not have a problem stealing and calling it 'being just'. When I say immoral, I am not talking about any religion either, I am talking about willingness to lie and cheat and steal, to give half truths, to not honour contracts, to pretend, to use government system to steal on your behalf, that's what I am talking about.

Of-course there are very few moral people in an immoral system.

- just because you are economically illiterate doesn't make something "a lie".

- if it could and it were economically advantageous for companies to provide it, they would have done it. Nobody had to force the gas stations in the past to provide the service, it was in their best interest to do it because it attracted more customers and there was a competitive pressure to do it.

- precisely why the service can not be "absolutely provided" and what makes you not only economically illiterate but also so confused as to make 2 separate completely contradicting statements in the span of 2 paragraphs.

- that's the propaganda line, sure. The reality is of-course completely different. The wages of the workers have been destroyed by inflation, not by 'corporate profits'. The inflation is created by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad USA debt from the Treasury (and the rest of the market) for decades following Nixon's default on the US dollar in 1971.

The corporate profits are driven up by the inflation as well, unless those corporations are selling worldwide and not only within USA itself. It is quite frustrating to be surrounded so tightly by so many people with so little knowledge and so much desire to talk.

Maybe you can tell me this, oh wise one, just how many people are supposed to be on welfare provided by a few companies in the world exactly? Let's say the companies make it possible for people to buy enough food and energy and shelter and clothing and medical help to sustain 70 billion people, not 7, should the companies be forced to provide these 'human wages', however you define them or maybe the companies should be forced to pay everybody welfare (the way it is done now)?

Ok, so let's have a 1 working person to 10 parasites ratio, how about 1 to 100, 1 to 1000? The parasites that are given free stuff never fail to procreate, so the ratio will never decrease, it will always go up. So in your generous estimation, do you think that at some point if one person runs a bunch of factories that produce everything that everybody needs, should he be forced to subsidise everybody?

1 to (ALL-1) ratio? Interesting, what if he decides to stop and blows up all of his factories and all of these people are only alive and eating because he is so productive to feed them all? 99.99999% of them will die from starvation, right? Good plan. Let's turn one guy into the slave of the all. That's basically your idea, if not that extreme in the beginning.

- unions pushed for this legislature, normal people did not need any of it. The democracy is broken specifically because it allows large organisations to destroy individual rights of people that are not organised that way, which is why those laws were passed though they benefited very few at the expense of many. These laws prevented people with a lower socio-economic status (at the time mostly non-whites) from competing with the union workers for the jobs.

Union organisation is obviously there to represent the union, not anybody else, not employers and not people outside of the unions. Unions destroyed competition in the job market. You can yell 'hogwash' all you like, but the people who lost the jobs that unions were after actually didn't "pull that trigger" and it wasn't their "finger" either. The finger was given to them.

- actually USA was not the leader in this fight of the unions against disorganised minority labour. New Zealand introduced the first minimum wage laws, those were directed against the aboriginals competing for jobs with the whites. Then it was time for Australia.

Once the precedent was established, the UK stepped into the action, realising that this was a powerful way to gain political support from the unions. USA tried this in 1912 first, then it was deemed unconstitutional, which it was! It was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In 1938 it was pushed through, as many other horrific things that were pushed through during the FDR, where the excuse was always 'Great Depression' (started as a bubble that was inflated by the Federal reserve buying bad UK debt from France and which became the depression during Hoover and FDR due to all of the government meddling and attempts to 'save' the economy from the much needed recession, which was realigning the mis-allocated resources).

When you tell me to "try again", I will most certainly do and tell you exactly what is what, so that maybe you can pull your head out of you know where.

- maybe you should read my comments and my journal entries, I do not like democracy, I can appreciate the difference between a democracy and a republic, which USA was supposed to keep, but it didn't. Democracy is mobocracy which I specifically not only 'do not like', I abhor it. I completely disagree with allowing a majority to destroy rights of a minority, which is what democracy does, which is what destroys the economy when the majority (employees) are pitted against a minority (employers). Employees, business owners will never have the same number of votes allocated to them, so in a democracy first the individual rights of people in the minority are destroyed by the mob and the politicians, who are only too happy to oblige to stay in power and second the business owners then have no choice but to use whatever leverage they can to corrupt the system further by throwing money at it.

If the democracy did not provide the politicians with the method of destroying the Constitutional rights of individuals then the business owners would not be able to use their money to buy any favours, because there would be no favours to sell. Government must not be able to pass business related and money related laws and thus destroy individual freedoms. Government must not be able to tax income, it must not be able to create any type of labour or business related regulations. Once it can do it, then favours for some can be bought at the expense of others. No, I do not like democracy specifically for those reasons. I do not believe that all people are entitled to vote for example simply by birth right, they have to earn that privilege by for example being part of the tax base (not income or wealth related taxes, that again goes against individual freedom, but import taxes and duties, sale taxes, things of that nature.)

- I am not part of the majority on anything, when you find yourself to be 'part of the majority' that is the time to reform yourself. Majority rule is 2 wolves and a sheep voting for what is for dinner.

- right, the point is that it is recognised that minimum wage as a law prevents some people from competing against other people for reasons other than their ability, it prevents people on both sides, those who want to offer their labour for sale and those who are willing to pay a price for that service from finding each other and agreeing on their own terms. It prevents people from working. Those who need labour will find somebody, it will be suboptimal, however those who have really nothing to offer at the level of the legal minimum wage stand no chance to move up in your version of economy.

- the facts are in, I am an employer and I have some people working for me above what you consider 'minimum wage' and some people below it. There is nobody that qualifies to work at any exact artificial number anyway. If I am forced to pay everybody a minimum wage, those who are currently employed below it will not have those jobs. I will have to search harder to find those, who are around that level and hire fewer people of-course (money does not grow on trees here, that's a fact).

- unfortunately you being economically illiterate (regardless of whatever you believe your 'education' is, AFAIC most so called economists today are illiterate economically, including the fakes with the PhD behind their names, the likes of Krugman, who only proves that illiterate fools can too get Nobel prizes) is the actual expensive (not cheap) attack against the economy and society.

First of all this wasn't "society", unions supported the very idea of the minimum wage in order to get rid of cheaper (and at the time blacker) competition. Minimum wage is a vestigal expression of racism in the US. Secondly there are plenty of people that "society" ( in quotes, this is a political creation, society loses because of it) says do not have to be limited by this artificial barrier to entry into the job market. The minimum does not apply to various categories of people, for example the mentally retarded (medical term). An employer would not hire somebody with that type of legal disability if he has to pay the same minimum wage to that person as to any normal one.

Interns in the US cannot be paid. It is either 0 for them or at least minimum wage, which is quite interesting. You cannot pay 1-2 bucks to an intern who is doing a good job even to cover their expenses to get to work and back under the system. Society doesnt give a shit about your silly notion of "differentiating" all of this is a political ploy to give you something to vote on, and since majority of the people are employees and not employers and vast majority (95%) make above the minimum wage, it is a safe "feel good about yourself" economically horrid idea that gives you a fake reason to vote one way or another while hurting those on the lowest end of the economic ladder. Unions still make much more than MW but they will always vote to raise it, it prevents competition and the likes of you are so economically illeterate, you actually believe it is good for society and will vote accordingly.

Minimum wage is an arbitrary price control, a wage is just a price on labour. Setting minimum wage to an arbitrary number and then declaring that no business that can make a profit hiring people at a price lower than that number should exist is an interesting statement from point of view of some sort of central planner maybe, but from point of view of a real economy that's quite egregious. If somebody is willing to buy a service at 5 bucks but not at 10 for example, then your statement reads like so: because of politics you should have to pay 10 bucks for the service and if you cannot afford it - tough.

When you put it into those terms, then how can you justify such a position if on the other hand you declare that you are somehow pro-people?

- yeah, professional economists don't hire people and don't run businesses, their job is to feed you the pro-state propaganda, but hey, you are only talking to a guy who actually hires people and writes checks, but don't let the reality stand in the way of your fiction.

- no, but I do build and sell retail management systems, supply chain management, customer relation management, business intelligence, logistics and shipping and handling integration and management systems. My own design, the main systems were my own implementation and now I have people working for me building more on top of what I built in the beginning.

What is wrong is your idea of 2% raise. The current minimum wage hikes that are about to hit are not 2%, they are closer to 40% (for example from 7.25 to 10.10 that's a 39% increase) in just NOMINAL wage. Of-course actually hiring somebody means that your total cost of labour is about 2x that much. To buy labour at 7.25 really means to pay around 13 bucks or so for that labour, so at 10.10 that's closer to 18-20 dollars, depends on how the tax scale goes as well, could be even worse.

Why don't you start a business and hire some people and then talk?