OT: $15/hour minimum wage coming to Seattle

You are both proving my point. Thank you.

It takes somebody as out-of-touch-with-reality as krw to make that claim.

The Great Depression started in 1929 and got progressively worse until FDR became president of the US March 4, 1933, after which the economy began to recover.

There are right-wing lunatics around who claim that Hoover's policies worke d - albeit slowly - and that FDR got the credit. James Arthur has claimed s omething like that. Even James Arthur would hestitate to claim FDR made the Great Depression deeper than it needed to be, and sane economists don't se e the necessity for a depression in the first place - the after-effects of the GFC have been pretty dire, but they didn't include 25% unemployment, an d or 25% drop in the gross national product.

That's true only if there's a shortage of senators.

Just because I disagree with you doesn't make me a fool, Rick. That's a typical leftist rhetorical ploy when they don't have anything left but repeating what they said earlier. (Google for "Bulverism".)

If I had some reason to believe that the market for my services would never recover, e.g. if I suffered serious brain damage, that would have to be re-evaluated. Your guy wanting more money for electrical work is being perfectly rational, even if he can't get electrical work full time.

Cheers

Phil

You can apply any labels you wish, but you still aren't acknowledging the logic. If you need money and the only work you can find is your high end work at a low end wage, you would take it.

Just as the price of milk is very flexible as the demand is not, when you need to eat you do what work you can. You seem to be incapable of picturing yourself in that situation and keep talking about markets and quality. You don't have to be brain damaged to become desperate.

BTW, the guy never turned down my $15 an hour.

I keep telling you that isn't true, and you don't believe me. This is _me_ we're talking about, after all.

Expert work comes and goes, just like your friend's electrical work. If I did anything so stupid as you suggest, it would never come back, so that I would have a large net loss.

But desperate people have compassionate leftists to look after them, right?

Of course you didn't take in to account what he needed to live on, did you?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That is right, If I need money, I would work for whatever wage and whatever job I could get. That is why I stayed on for about the last 5 years I worked. When I retired, I did not need the money so did not work for what I was offered.

The plant I worked at was paying in the top 5 in the county when I went to work for unskilled labor. They had to pay that because the plant required working rotating shifts and weekends. At that time jobs could be found many places. They would hire about 20 people at a time ( there were about 2500 hourly workers in the plant) and in 2 months there might be 3 or 4 of them left. It was a very good place to work except for the hours. Times got tough in the last 20 years and the plant even gave a 10% pay cut about that time. The only reason most of the people that were left (only about 400 people on site instead of over 2500 ) are still there is they only have a few years to retirement or they can not find a job anywhere else.

Lets say that doctors or lawyers could be found every where, their pay would drop. Do you remember when you could get the doctors to come to the house for a few dollars (which is probably near an office visit is now) ? The medical schools for doctors and nurses only let so many in now. That keeps the supply down so the demand is up.

So you'd like to completely blank out the second recession in 1937? For those who acknowledge it actually happened, the only explanation for a cause is the New Deal. Now, that's just the "match on the pile of oily rags" but the arrow of causation ...

Nobody knew what they were doing then.

It's entirely possible that a newish theory - that the whole thing really was caused by the gold standard - holds more water. Not

So people don't really know what they are doing now, either.

Meh. Hoover simply had bad luck and what he'd done was not perceived to work. FDR basically continued the same thing only modestly different.

The argument about "left v right" is mostly specious. Hoover and FDR were too much of the same mind. It's interesting to see the differences, but it's simply true that nobody could have actually been relied on the address the issues, and even now, hard work is being done on the subject.

If there is a general poli-sci principle to be derived, it is that deflation destabilizes nation states. It's interesting, because many people *like* deflation and those people also seem to not like nation states all that much.

Multiple ... relatively objective historians would disagree. Scott Sumner has some interesting things to say about it, and doesn't claim any superior knowledge.

That's why some people think the gold standard broke down. But you'd have to acknowledge that Milton Friedman actually existed to discuss that.

You pose a situation that will never exist. If high end work can be found, then there would also be low end work that could be found. And Phil is ri ght. Taking the high end work for low pay is not very bright as it kills t he prospect of ever getting high end work for high pay.

But you are right in that I have just done my Federal income taxes and I am incapable of picturing my self as needing money or a job.

Dan

I guess I know a little bit more than you do what it is like to feel financially desperate. There are situations when I would take any work I could. I am far from that situation now, but when I was a kid, trying to get through school it was different. Even that was nothing like what some people face.

You just can't imagine that if you didn't take the low paying expert work you might lose your home or your car or not be able to pay for a surgery that would extend your life. Money in the future is worth a whole lot less than money right now. Sometimes there is no comparison.

Interesting how you keep saying you would nurture your high end work no matter what. But when I make my point to veer off topic. I still say you just can't imagine needing work so badly that you would take low pay. If your mortgage needed to be paid, or worse, your rent, and that was the only way to do it...

What does that mean? I offered him $15 an hour more than anyone else was doing and more than $5 an hour more for yard work than he could get anywhere else (probably $10 an hour more). The point is that his desire for higher pay for different work was not valid in the context of not being able to get work at any wage.

It's an artificially constrained market - a government created monopoly.

No, you're simply proving what a stupid lefty you are.

Again, you assume that because I disagree with you, I must be a fool. Nice.

You obviously don't understand my point about destroying a market.

And you assume a lot of knowledge of my history that you don't possess.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Den torsdag den 19. marts 2015 kl. 00.51.52 UTC+1 skrev Phil Hobbs:

That is kind the point of unions (when they do their job) Establish a reasonable price that works for both "buyer" and "seller" and make both parties stick to it so it doesn't become a race to the bottom

-Lasse

Unions, at least in the USA, seldom work in the best interest of society, or even of their own members. They tend to be corrupt and tend to destroy businesses, which is why they mostly parasitize government and immobile things like hospitals.

It's in the interest of workers to be more productive, but union management almost always fights to reduce productivity, which requires more workers and increases union dues in the near term. And, long term, kills jobs.

The Wisconsin thing is interesting. Public union membership plummeted when membership stopped being mandatory.

I figure, if you can find a better job, do it. If you can't, you're at the right price point.

Certainly not. FDR didn't create that either - or at least not on his own. The conservatives in government didn't like the New Deal because the govern ment was spending borrowed money, and put enough pressure on FDR to persuad e him to scale back the spending. Far enough to create a perceptible recess ion in 1937. It was never a depression - which was what krw was talking abo ut - and got reversed very quickly, after making the point that the speding was useful.

Actually the only explanation of it's cause is a scaling back of the New De al, which puts the arrow of causation right where most people think it ough t to go.

Right-wing nitwits beg to differ.

Sure they did. Keynes had spelled it out for them by then. Right-wing nitwi ts refused to believe Keynes back then, and still don't, which doesn't stop them from thinking that they know what they are doing, but right-wing nitw its have never been deterred from making the same mistake twice, just becau se what they tried first time around didn't produce the effect they expecte d. It's one of the reasons why they are called nitwits.

Rightwing nitwits subsidise theories that they like the sound of, so nonsen se theories are always emerging. The fossil carbon extraction industry has the same kind of interest in theories that explain global warming without i nvoking CO2. The peer-reviewed economics journals know which side their bre ad is buttered on, and publish the rubbish. The climate science journals do n't have the same history of corruption and almost always reject the equiva lent kinds of papers.

"Merchants of Doubt" will peddle that story.

The difference wasn't modest. Hoover didn't spend anything like enough on c reating jobs, so what he did didn't make any difference, and FDR spent enou gh to be effective, which was a whole lot more.

Size matters.

The hard work is being done by people who want to pay less taxes, and could n't care less if leaves their country stranded in permanent recession. They lack the wit to realise that a rising economic tide floats all boats.

If you've got money, you like deflation. If you've got money you can buy th e services that the nation states provides for everybody (at a much lower c ost per head).

to

Right-wing nitwits have money, and people who write what they like to hear get generous advances and well-publicised book launches. Historians are rar ely objective, and often adopt an objective tone while propagating fatuous propaganda."The Bell Curve" isn't about economics but it makes a fatuous cl aim to objectivty that's in the same class.

He's a Chicago School monetarist economist, precisely the sort that tells t he rich what they want to hear

I have no problem with the existence of Milton Friedman, nor the fact that he remained influential while persisting with the delusion that the free ma rket always delivers perfect outcomes. I do have a problem with a disciplin e that took him seriously.

Unions in the USA do seem to be corrupted by management more frequently tha n they do elsewhere. It may be that US newspapers are more enthusiastic abo ut reporting union corruption than newspapers in other countries, or manage ment is more willing to plant evidence that suggests the unions have been c orrupted - the US has had a strong anti-union component since trade union f irst got serious - in the UK that was 1871 when they first became legal.

The trade unions do contain the usual proportion of short-sighted people wh o will go for immediate advantage. "Almost always" over-states the proporti on of half-wits.

Union membership costs money, and doesn't provide any immediate value for m oney until you need the union behind you. It's like insurance, and the f*ck less don't buy insurance either.

Or the local employers are conspiring to shoot themselves in the foot, by c ollectively under-valuing the people they need to hire. The Texan fast-food minimum wage legend is the standard example.

As long as the fast-food store owners thought that selling fast food was a totally unskilled job, only worth a bare living wage, the service and the f ood in the fast food stores was dire, and they weren't popular. Minimum wag e legislation brought the wages up to level where the jobs were worth keepi ng, employees stayed longer, learnt some skills on the job, and made the fa st food stores more attractive, improving business.

In the US the horrible example of a misplaced price point is at the other e nd of the spectrum, where CEO's conspire to claim that they should be paid very high salaries, and set up "compensation committees" stuffed with other CEO's to rubber-stamp their claims.

Nothing either of us just said speaks to whether or not we have ideas about how government should work. You just don't listen. You're so kind to yourselves, you take the label "liberal" which means free-thinking when you don't have any interest in opposing ideas. You are the Democratic Senators who expressed surprise at their hearing where they learned the banning of DDT led to the deaths of tens of millions in Africa, when Conservatives had been talking about it for 15 years. You are the people who keep saying Conservatives don't have any ideas about heath care because you don't want to read anything they write. You are the Bill Moyers World of Ideas interview show in which he presents a "world" that never has an idea he disagrees with. You're a bunch of closed-minded dogmatists who make tedious claims of intellectual superiority, without ever learning about the philosophical roots of your own beliefs and how they match Stalin's.

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Say something unpredictable, and it might be worth our while.

It might have done at some point, somewhere.

As if you had any.

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Banning DDT in the USA lead to the deaths of ten of millions in Africa? Do trace the cause and effect.

out > heath care because you don't want to read anything they write.

Nobody says that Conservative don't have any ideas about health care - it's just that having the poor die quickly and cheaply without using up expensi ve resources isn't an idea worthy of much attention, no matter how much lip stick is applied.

ts a > "world" that never has an idea he disagrees with.

Interview shows are like that.

As opposed to your bunch of closed-minded dogmatists who make extravagant d isplays of intellectual inferiority by claiming that Stalin's belief had an ything philosophical about them. He used any handy accusation as a excuse f or getting rid of anybody whom he found to be potentially threatening or in convenient.