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Comment Re:One thing's for sure... (Score 1) 870

So when companies switched over from doing finances by hand with a legion of accountants to a computer-based system with a far smaller legion of accountants, they should have kept paying the same amount of tax as if they had kept the full complement of people? Who decides what that tax is? And why does the government get the money instead of the company?

Comment Re:One thing's for sure... (Score 1) 870

I really dislike using the term "inflation" to mean "higher prices". I know people use it that way but it confuses the issue. I prefer using inflation to mean strictly "increased money supply" and deflation to mean "decreased money supply". Thus your post reads "the minimum wage certainly affects prices in an upward direction", which is pretty straightforward. If the same amount of labor now costs more then either prices go up or less stuff is produced.

Comment Re:One thing's for sure... (Score 1) 870

Nice post. I agree in that I don't know what they would end up doing. Ideally they'd find a job doing something, but what if no one wants to hire them and they have no familial or friend-based support network? You could pay them not to work but then that also encourages other people not to work. OTOH letting them starve and die if they can't help themselves seems less than ideal given the wealth of the entire society. Damned either way. Ideally we'd get to the point where food and shelter are so ridiculously cheap that it's essentially free, but we're not quite there yet.

Comment Re:One thing's for sure... (Score 1) 870

Trying to race automation to the cost bottom is an exercise in futility; it's a race humans will not win. The only ones that benefit from it are the employers that get cheaper labour faster as a result.

Not only the employers. Consumers also benefit from the lower prices resulting from cheaper costs of production. Basically the only ones that are worse off are those people who did the jobs that are now automated. That's only in the short-run since increased production always ends up leading to new jobs, be it in that industry in other capacities or in other industries that wouldn't have existed otherwise (consider whether we'd ever have something like a computer industry if 90% of the population were still farmers as in 1862).

Comment Re:One thing's for sure... (Score 0) 870

What would really fix a bunch of stuff is outlawing fractional-reserve banking. With anything besides currency, it would be considered fraud. It creates currency out of thin air, as you put it. Depositing money in an account should yield zero interest, or even charge a fee, as it's just providing a service: convenience and safety of your money. Loaning your money out should be a totally separate concern, which gives you interest, but your money isn't usable in the meantime since you just gave it to somebody else. Then interest rates would naturally adjust to what the price of money is, there wouldn't be inflation constantly devaluing everybody's money, saving would be encouraged. The more savings, the lower interest rates, which makes borrowing money cheaper. Lower interest rates would encourage businesses to borrow money and expand, and they would do this precisely at that point where consumers have savings, i.e. money to spend, which is precisely the time when new businesses or expanding businesses have a chance to succeed.

As it is now, banks can make profit off of something they never had in the first place, and if they gamble too much they get bailed out by the government. The net result is the screwing over of everybody else.

Comment One thing's for sure... (Score 4, Insightful) 870

The higher the minimum wage, the more incentive there will be to automate those minimum-wage jobs. If it'd average out to $11/hr to have a robot do some cleaning, and the minimum wage is $10/hr, then a janitor willing to work for $10/hr will have a job. If the minimum wage goes to $12/hr, the robot will take the job instead.

I read somewhere an essay written around the time the minimum wage was being increased a few decades ago. This was during a time when there were still elevator operators. The author predicted that after the increase, elevator operators would get phased out in favor of automated elevators. That probably would've happened anyway, but raising the minimum wage probably helped speed up that process.

If it gets really bad there will be pressure to illegalize automation of certain classes of jobs.

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