You listen too much to Hush Bimbo, would you say that if the temperature in you home is better to be 70F rather than 45F it means that 100F and more is even better? Or that if 100F plus is not good the termostats/heating system is bad?
The minimum wage should be set above the subsistence level - the difference being large enough to allow workers to better their lives and society to prosper. Workers should have their fair share in the profits in addition the subsistence.
But the minimum wage should not be so high as to undermine the economy.
The labor laws like minimum wages, 40 hours work week and prohibition of child labor are not socialism! These are the measures which created more just society and made socialism less attractive.
I agree. I never had much use for that line of Rush's on the minimum wage either. In our daily lives we're forced to draw the line every day and the fact that the minimum is arbitrary is not a good reason why the minimum wage is bad. IMHO what makes the minimum wage bad is that it involves government control of the economy. Lots of economic control is socialism and very little control is free capitalism. Naturally, there must be some control with say, child labor laws.
Why child labor laws and not minimum wage laws? Well, we have to draw the line somewhere don't we?
You miss the point completely. You buy the myth that Government dictat creates wealth. It doesnt.
You buy the myth that if Govt wasnt there, all hell would break loose. Wrong.
Setting a 'minimum wage' doesnt give anybody a job.
It doesnt give anybody a job increase.
It merely says that in certain cases, people who would otherwise be willing to work for a wage X are doing something illegal.
Creating conditions for prosperity requires creating opportunities for jobs, not taking them away.
Minimum wage laws have done little to help people,
as real wages are set by supply and demand.
A minimum wage simply means that anyone whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage will be unemployed, and in a welfare society like ours, this means that we will be poorer both of the small value of his labor and the larger value of the relief given to him.
A minimum wage is as useless as a price control. It does more damage than welfare alone does by itself.
There are a helluvalotta Dutchmen who USED to be wealthy, until the tulips crashed.
Tulips really aren't worth that much - unless half your countrymen have temporarily gone insane and are buying all of them in sight. I personally cannot wait for the housing bubble to break. You know what the first thing I'm going to do in the event that housing prices radically go down? Well, buy a house. Me and everyone else. So I'm kind of skeptical that real estate and homes in particular are going to be selling for pennies an acre anywhere in my lifetime. Maybe speculators will get burnt for part of their investment if prices readjust to meet actual demand, but I suspect for most people a house is a good investment. 'Cause, you know, they plan to live in it?
We should include health care reform, tax reform, tort reform, etc in with these FT agreements. Otherwise the deck will be stacked against American's because of our onerous government burden.
This is insightful. As stated above, the three things hurting American manufacturing, production, and consumers are: 1.) Litigation, 2.) Regulation, 3.) and Taxation. They're all government derived. The last thing anyone needs (except the protected companies that stand to directly benefit at the cost of everyone else in America) is more government subsidies in the form of tariffs.