Interesting assertion. How about some evidence to support it? Obscuring disagreement with the government to avoid punishment is different from cheating for gain.

As far as I know, every communist country had oppressive secret police that engaged in many forms of repression. It is a practical necessity of the system. Not so capitalism, so if you want to attribute the cheating to the Stasi and repression it is related to the communist / capitalist divide.

So, you're saying that when 70% of the cost of a legal employee is state-mandated non-wage expense, that's the business' fault?

The problem isn't the businesses, nor the employees, nor the wages. It's the number of fingers the government has in your pocket if you try to do things right and lawful.

I once looked into what it would take to have one legal part-time minimum-wage employee for one year in Los Angeles County. It came to $28,000 before I paid a cent of wages. Since that exceeds my best net and is several times the value of the employee, obviously it wasn't happening. Someone didn't get a job, and I didn't expand my business.

I never gave my opinion on the matter. Your ignorant political stereotypes led you to make assumptions about what things I never even commented on. This is common amongst political ideologues and other loudmouths and pundits.

If it were mindless tripe you'd swallow it without a second thought. The fact is you've completely failed to grasp the points which were being made. Calling it "mindless tripe" because you don't understand it is ... pretty childish. Reminds of the hick I met down in the bible belt who called evolution "mindless tripe". You two would get along great.

So if i did some convoluted bad thing that made you look like a duck, you would be fine taking the blame?

The entire purpose of a false flag operation is to place obvious blame on someone else. We are dealing with masters of deciet here. Ukraine used to be part of the USSR and people around then are around today too.

No, they value the fact that you just can't stay in business when your out of pocket cost is $28/hour for a $10/hour job that earns the business maybe $15/hour in billable labor (and remember, there's also overhead to pay before you can even think about profit).

The business owners I've talked to would rather NOT hire illegals, because there's also an unreliability factor (90% can't be counted on to show up every day) and a quality control factor (most are less qualified than you'd really want), but when it's hire the illegal or go out of business thanks to the mandated costs of legal labor... well, I don't like it either, but I understand why it happens.

You are 100% correct. However, what I don't understand, is why vendors do not release the drivers to CyanogenMod so that they CAN maintain it properly (or at least better). Probably comes down to the likes of Verizon, AT&T, SPRINT et al.

"But if they bettered themselves, they would not be picking produce for sub-subsistence wages, now would they? So those poor farmers would still have to ship in exploitable people..."

Uh, no. Used to be every generation of our own as-yet-unskilled kids did this work. We'll never run out of a next generation of kids.

And I suspect those "exploited" people would tell you it's a better living than they made in the old country -- otherwise, why come here in the first place?

Actually, we know almost all basic chemistry, and the range of (stable) molecules that silicon can form is orders of magnitude less than for carbon.

Well, yeah, but I didn't want to offend the pedants even further. Unless the laws of physics (and therefore basic chemistry) are very different elsewhere in the galaxy, it's not unreasonable to think that carbon-based, liquid-water-dependent lifeforms are the most probable. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum of money that the overwhelming majority of unique forms of life are not terribly dissimilar from ours as far as the underlying chemistry is concerned. They might be fantastically alien in all sorts of other strange ways, but they'll still be based on simple organic polymers. But this is still irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because even if there were different forms of life, we have no idea how we might detect them at astronomical distances.

That's an interesting insight (I hadn't thought of that, thanks!), and I think you're right about welfare making it just as easy, and about as profitable, to not work at all... but the work still has to be done, so...

I've sometimes thought that if we had "national service", it should involve working these types of seasonal jobs, as a means of getting the work back into American hands.

I think you'll find the correlation is not with a higher minimum wage, but with the total cost per employee as imposed by the state. Frex, in California, wages are only about 30% of the mandated cost of each employee. The other 70% is payroll taxes, workman's comp, insurance, and the like.

That 70% is what an illegal labor force saves you, a cost far more significant than any minimum wage increase.

In fact, in some areas illegal laborers make more than minimum wage, because having ducked out of that 70%, the employer can afford to pay more than they would otherwise, and do so to attract a better grade of illegal worker. The illegal worker thereby earns significantly more take-home pay than he could earn as a "legal" worker. (This is common in the construction trade, for instance.) Not only that, but the illegal worker takes home his entire paycheck, minus no deductions or taxes.

Per the last stats I saw, hardly anyone earning minimum wage is "supporting a family". 80-90% of minimum wage jobs are held by supplemental earners (second job or teenager in the same household as a primary wage-earner who gets more than minimum wage). So the notion that we're starving families via the current minimum wage is bogus. Nor have min.wage increases in the past made any difference, for the same reason.

And before you accuse me of being one of those fat cats who just don't give a shit -- as a small business owner, my income rarely exceeds the minimum wage. Hey, let's legislate =me= a better income while you're at it!

"The presumption in the post is that the causality is that increasing the minimum wage causes employment increases. What if the causality goes the other way?"

I had the exact same question. I'd guess those states where the causality is as per TFA may be driven by regional costs, like basic living in the SF Bay and Puget Sound areas -- where if you're going to have entry-level or service workers at all, they have to make an increased minimum wage or they simply can't afford to live there, not even 3 families to a hut. And those regions are such a majority of the state's population as to completely skew the results. Maybe things get better in S.F. and meanwhile the whole Central Valley starves... observationally, this seems to be the case; small businesses are folding all through the minor population areas of California.

But otherwise, I'd expect prosperity and profit opportunity comes first, followed by competitive and rising wages (for a sterling example, see the North Dakota oil patch).

You might want to look at some house after the police have searched it, if you don't think they are still extremely disruptive. They are generally worse if they don't find what they hoped to find. Wantonly destructive is not always an overstatement.