- 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?

But you will get all the claims that minimum wage laws, labour laws, inflation (money printing) and basically rising prices somehow increase economic activity rather than putting more pressure on business to automate (use capital where labour was used initially).

Maiming small children actually seems to be the business model that modern governments are in today, with all the wars, drones, bombings, wars on 'terrorism', etc. Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, governments on the other hand force you to participate, if you do not like it, you can always opt out to go to jail for tax evasion.

Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.

You are getting the opposite effect, not a 'feel good' effect when you use government violence to impose your wrong-headed moral ideas.

Whether a job is a 'liability' or not is also a question to the laws, many of which are also designed to destroy competition to the larger players in the field, those who donate money to the politicians. However checking oil and tire pressure and wiping your windshield and pumping your gas is a courtesy that can no longer be provided to you by the gas station, not because of liability, but because of the all the labour laws and inflation and government is the responsible party for all of it.

- you obviously are not running a gas station or any business for that matter, so you should really abstain from making ridiculous statements about what a cost is to hire somebody. The cost to hire somebody today in USA is much more than just the wage itself, an employee cost to business is easily twice their wage if not more given the laws and taxes and liability for all the nonsensical government discrimination laws, etc.

The benefit to the business has to be tangible, it has to cover the cost of having that employee working there and it has to provide something on top, the profit has to be material. If you get more customers than your competition by providing better service that is a material benefit as long as you can measure it. On the other hand given the tiny margins that gas stations live on, it is clearly impossible to hire attendants to check your tire pressure and oil and wipe the windshield and pump your gas, in fact most if not all gas stations are now manned by one person.

One person where it wasn't uncommon to have 4-5 people before all the laws and inflation destroyed all those opportunities and automation was increased and customers were switched to the self-serve model.

Given the higher minimum wage laws (most of which didn't kick in yet, by the way, so the effects are not there yet), there will be more automation done in places where people used to provide the service. You will not have a waiter, you will have fewer clerks, you will not have somebody answering phones.

You'll bring your own food to the table, you'll use a self serve cash register, you'll talk to an answering machine (well, at least off-shore call centres mitigate this problem somewhat, people like talking to people on the phones, not to machines.)

You install self check out machines, that's what you do when prices for labour go up. Labour prices and capital are in competition. The more expensive is labour price the more reasons there are to invest capital to automate.

- which was always the case, people always bought "the cheapest gas they could". Of-course you can thank government created inflation for the cheapest gas of today being many times more expensive than most expensive gas at the time when there still were gas station attendants who checked your tire pressure, oil, wiped your windshield, pumped gas for you. That was quality service, today you can't get that and that was still being paid from revenue derived from selling "cheapest gas they could" buy.

The difference of-course is minimum wage and of-course inflation (expansion of the money supply by the government printing presses, yes, I consider Fed to be government regardless of the mistaken belief that they are an independent bank, which they are not, they are a political beast that is playing for whatever is the current administration) didn't help at all.

Technology is capital being used to compete with the price for labour and as government makes labour more and more expensive by all means, including inflation, labour laws, discrimination laws, price controls, etc.etc., capital becomes a more viable alternative to the labour.

The modern "mainstream economists" are there to confuse the issue for you on behalf of the government, they are quite successful at confusing the shit out of the masses, given the responses on /.

Wrong on all accounts, but typing on the phone is tedious, i will only talk about your last incorrect point. Business model is not broken only due to artificial govt laws that do not operate in the free market but are there f9r political purposes. Case in point, gas stations used to employ yonge ppl in usa to wipe your windshield, check tire pressure, oil level and of course pump gas for you. With the govt created inflation and its political game to make it look like it cares and thus raising minimum wage over time these jobs disappeared. So did many others. Was the business model broken before the laws kicked in? No. It worked j7st fine. Were those jobs paying enough for somebody to live on? No. But people took them because it wasnt a problem. Not everybody that needs a job has enough ability and skill and experience to command higher wages. However many need to start somewhere, those jobs provided the first run of the economi ladder. The govt pulled that run from under the people that needed it . Of course the govt also stole money from those, making more to create a welfare state for those that could no longer get onto that first run.

Minimum wage is minimum ability and it is a barrier to entry into the job market. Plenty jobs would exist just fine without minimum wage and would provide value to the customers and some profit to businesses. If minimum wage was set tomorrow to 100 usd per hour by your logic it would mean that every business is broken, because near nobody can afford those labour prices.

It is true that the entire field of "mainstream economics" is exactly what you joke it is. If you repeat lies and propaganda long enough, people will no longer understand the truth, many will lose the ability to differentiate the reality from fiction. Government needs these "economists" to turn the population into economic illiterates. The waters are muddied enough that even logic is no longer understood or followed. Simple logic: rising prices reduce demand, wages are also prices, price controls do not provide feel good results, if you are in debt spending more does not get you out of it, rising prices are not a result of growing economy, in a growing competitive economy prices fall not rise over time, inflation is expansion of the money supply, inflation causes prices to rise or prevents them from falling, government induced spending is fake economy, it is not self sustaining and it is done at the expense of a real economy because that is where the capital is taken from, etc.

In that world 2+2 is whatever government says it is and logic is against the policy and will be ridiculed and laughed at. In that world people will be confused enough to stop thinking rationally. In that world the real economy will be destroyed without doubt.

Nonsense and propaganda. You cannot state anything until those increases actually kick in and are in effect for some time. About 5% of workers are on minimum wage in the first place, out of those 5%, some will not be rehired, and once the wage is in effect fewer new businesses will be created. The money will come from somewhere, higher consumer prices and fewer minimum wage jobs. Fewer minimum wage jobs does not mean "people will have more money to spend" but it will slow down growth of new positions.

Minimum wage is actually minimum ability. It cannot extract non-existing money from small business, but it can prevent people with abilities that are below minimum wage from finding jobs. Large business will transfer costs to the consumers, higher prices will leave you with less money to spend, not more. Small business will cut employment, will hire fewer people. Government stats are manipulated in every category, this is not an exception, best case scenario this is premature.