One thing I seem to have noticed with minimum wage raises .. is that employers tend to become pickier and more demanding of their staff. They want their staff to have more experience, more qualifications. Here in my country they want the average barista to have minimum 2 years experience as well as training. (e.g. that means you have to go to the polytech and take out a $700 or so student loan just so they can teach you how to make a fucking coffee!) All in all, the higher the minimum wage, the more they consider inexperienced and new workers to be a risk in their business. In an ideal world, we'd all be able to easily get the jobs that we want by simply negotiating a starting wage at $5 or so an hour, and then working our way up as we prove to our employers what we can accomplish. You'd be able to just walk up to a small restaurant that has recently opened up in town and work something out. Hell - I'd be willing to do IT work and laptop repairs for $2 an hour! That's better than having no damn income.. Better yet - if you could offer to work for free for the first couple of weeks, that greatly increases your chances of getting your foot through the door. Then again, the truth remains that people need to pay their rent and bring food to the table. This is why I would consider a Basic Income to be a superior choice to constant, pointless minimum wage raises that merely make employers pickier and less willing to hire. Basic Income would also benefit entrepreneurs in particular, because it would allow them to have a means to support themselves financially as they build up their business at the beginning stages; where profit is either minimal or non-existent.
Basic income is paid with the same money that is being put into failed anti-poverty programs e.g. welfare, food stamps, social housing, etc. Here in country we have many different forms of weekly welfare (benefit) payments; Disability support, Jobseeker allowance, student allowance, single parents, etc. Those would be removed and replaced with a single payment paid to everybody. The amount of money saved from reducing bureaucracy and reduction in government jobs also means more money to fund said basic income.
But it's still just another name for wealth re-distrobution. Taking money (through the use of force) from group A and giving to to group B. How long before the elite and top earners in group A figure out how to shelter their money leaving the lower end of group A to pay for all of group B?
(continued) A basic income would be survivable, but not 'comfortable'. In other words, it keeps your stomach full and a roof over your head, but it won't be enough to go on vacation to the Maldives every year, or buy the latest iPhone. And since most people have dreams and ambitions .. I'd say I'm pretty sure most people would have more than enough motivation to work for that extra money that is added on top of said basic income. This is something that isn't well explained by most proponents of this scheme.
Pretty sure we already use wealth redistribution to pay for roads, firefighters, police, the military .. border security, etc. Without a social safety net of some sort you'd have more crime which means more money spent on jails and law enforcement .. so money goes to waste one way or another. I can confidently say the basic income is the least bureaucratic social safety net of its kind. Taxation has existed since the dawn of man and is inevitable like death and aging. I don't think anybody opposed to taxation has the slightest grasp on what a world without taxation would actually mean. I don't think they'd actually want to live in a world like that .. if we magically one day decided to eliminate taxation. I just think it's people who are mad that they have to write some paper work every year - then again, taxes could be much easier to pay in future through the use of a digital, block-chain-based cryptocurrency.
I should add that a lot of anti-taxation people seem to claim that they are following into the footsteps of America's founding fathers .. etc. then again, the founding fathers of the US never said anything about having No taxes. The first thing George Washington did after the American revolution was over .. was introduce a tax on Whiskey in order to pay for the war, which was violently opposed by farmers and countrymen. The only one talking about 'no taxes' was that Russian chick Ayn Rand who spent too long living in the Soviet Union that she decided that anything Opposite to the soviet union must be a utopia. It's clearly a lot more complex than that..
I fully support the notions of a free market, such as it has existed in its best forms throughout history (rarely), and I think that historically, optimally speaking it was the way to raise society up economically. Meaning, businesses will be incentivized to open up shop, provide jobs, and as a result everyone would lift themselves up by working hard and being compensated fairly. I agree with this and it has worked historically. I don't think this can exist in the future. I feel some type of basic income is inevitable in an increasingly modernized and automated society. If (when) automation continues to replace human labor in major industries, the sheer numbers of people displaced will demand a complete overhaul of how society functions in terms of labor and compensation. Not because we'll be socialist, but because the numbers will be impossible to ignore. Self driving cars, for example, already exist and they are being implemented more and more. Consider how many people are employed as drivers of some sort or another. What happens when humans are no longer needed or preferred for all driving? Paris cab drivers rioted, flipping over cars, because of Uber. How will all drivers react when they are completely and permanently replaced? Another one would be the restaurant industry where major chains are beginning to automate more and more of their processes? What happens to all the people who work in food service? The conventional retort is that people will readjust or retrain, perhaps even reeducate. I feel this only works up to a certain level of population movement. If one or two minor or mid-sized industries are being displaced by automation then sure, those people can readjust and be reabsorbed into the ongoing labor force. The markets and industries can take them in. However, If several major industries are being simultaneously automated to a higher and higher degree, then how can billions "readjust"? What giant people-needing industry will they all flock to? I see a dozen ways where masses of us are needed less but none where masses are needed more. Perhaps "Basic Income" is just the first thing we're calling this, but I feel within the next 10-20 years, should technology continue to advance, society will HAVE to completely rehaul the labor/compensation model. There simply won't be a need for mass human labor, unless we are somehow integrated into the machinery that is replacing the traditional worker.
It's also important to note that 'Free Markets' aren't a binary function. Just because you have taxation and a social safety net, doesn't mean you can't have a free market. In reality, some markets are freer than others, and those that are freer tend to offer a better quality of life .. but there will never be a 'pure', 100% free market, and I don't think anybody would want that anyway. A basic income isn't a deterrent to free trade. If anything, it is an enabler of free trade .. by allowing more people to vote with their wallets, people who previously weren't able to do so because they didn't have wallets to begin with, I suppose. As the human work force moves away from being manual and labor-based .. and more into the intellectual areas and specialization .. people will be required to spend more time in education and training. In a 100% free market, that would require people to rely on massive debt and loans in order to survive. Then again, we already know from obvious historical examples just how toxic and damaging a debt-based economy can be. . . We're only human, after all. We aren't psychics, we can't predict the future. Every time you borrow money, you're essentially gambling. But the future is shaky. Maybe you chose the wrong career, maybe they're not hiring in that field anymore .. .. ... there's so many reasons. And when people can't pay their debt back, they spend less money on stuff .. and businesses go bankrupt, because they need their customers to have money to spend, in the first place. We can either live on borrowed, non-existent money for the rest of our lives .. or just accept taxation as a fact of life, give people the basic means to survive .. and move on from there.
People have been expressing fears similar to yours for centuries. When the Industrial Revolution led to the mechanization of agriculture, people were afraid that farmers would lose their livelihoods. Well, some did, but this led to people flocking to cities, which led to the development of new industries and expansion of existing ones. And the price of food for EVERYONE, urban or rural, was cheaper, leading to population growth and a better standard of living for all. Technology pretty much always has a net positive effect on standard of living. Another example is to look at the history of computing. Before electronic computing, many educated people were employed doing trivial calculations to help keep businesses running and such. Yeah, the invention of the computer put these people out of work, but it also made it much easier to do pretty much everything, and thus spawned a countless number of new jobs and opportunities. The cab driver thing is a classic example of stagnant thinking. They are basically pissed that someone came up with a superior business model and is out competing them. Well, they do have a legitimate complaint when they point out that Uber drivers aren't subject to some of the same regulations they are, but fundamentally Uber is so popular because it's a better service that people would rather use. I think the free market actually becomes MORE viable as technology improves. Just compare being poor today to being poor at any other time in history. Poverty used to mean starvation and exposure, it still does in places that are less developed. In developed countries, fat people use their smartphones to post about how poor they are on the World Wide Web. That's the thing about income inequality and poverty, innovation not only reduces the incidence of these problems, but it makes the problem itself less of an ordeal. People talk about self driving cars putting truckers out of work, but a reduction in shipping costs would make pretty much everything more affordable across the board. So I just don't agree with the viewpoint that there's a major crisis ahead for, as you put it, "the masses".
I'd agree with most of those points. As I pointed out in my longer post, I think the changes we are looking at being made are going to involve a completely different number of people than ever in the past. The fears that I'm expressing specifically were not expressed for centuries because we have never been looking at mass-automation of potentially every single major industry there is. Today's capacity for and rate of technological change is unprecedented in human history, by far. The free market, with which I agree historically, worked for humanity because it made use of people and rewarded them in turn. I believe as tech increases, the need for mass-employment drastically decreases once automation is in full swing. This is something that should be addressed politically better sooner rather than later. You may disagree with the French cabbies, I may actually as well, but the fact is they rioted over Uber. Agree or disagree, that's what happened. What will happen world wide when zero human driving is required? No cabbies, no Uber drivers, no truckers, delivery drivers, etc. We'll riot over Uber but when all driving is taken out of human hands completely we'll take it in stride? Hard to imagine. I happen to be all for automated driving because it will be infinitely safer once ironed out, but that does not assuage my concerns about the human labor dependent on it. Companies are in a race for profit, not for highest employee count and satisfaction. If they can cut the "lazy" human who can only work 40-70 hours a week, requires rest, benefits, and respect and decency, then cut him they will. The machine never complains, never demands. Like said before, it's important to bear in mind that driving is just one example. Other, major industries are undergoing the same issue simultaneously. Several food service chains are looking to automate and are automating more and more. Once again, whether one agrees or disagrees with this, this is happening. What happens to all those people? I'm not completely doom and gloom about this, because I actually do believe we can go into a bright future, but it won't be based on the labor models that exists today. Even if we could successfully re-educate/train everyone for higher positions, we simply don't need that many people in higher positions. Sillicon Valley is not looking to hire millions and never will. This is why I believe that something like Basic Income will become an inevitability. The fact that Finland is already doing it today is a hint as well. Everyone may still end up contributing to society, perhaps Star Trek style where it's more just a life of self bettering and doing what you want, but I don't see 8 or 9 billion people mass employed they way they have been historically, unless we actually set out to conquer space and create a new and infinite frontier where everyone can spread out as they see fit. TLDR: Yes, Tech can change the future for the better as well, but not unless we rein it in politically and philosophically, otherwise it'll just be a race for the highest profit. This race would result in continued mass automation and there are no provisions in place, no markets or industries, that can absorb all of that human labor should it be completely displaced.
The bolded is easily proven false. I can provide reading material if necessary, but I'm trusting you're capable of using a search engine to find a time since "the dawn of man" when taxation did not occur. I don't think anyone in favor of taxation has any idea of how the monetary & financial systems work. A block-chain crypto-currency makes no sense for a fiat currency. A lot of the power of a fiat currency is that some entity can create more of it at any time with very little oversight. A blockchain is functionally a ledger where all transactions are public. The "crypto" part of the currency adds a lot of overhead and is primarily useful by subversives. On topic: The Case Against the Minimum Wage
Jane, if I thought this was remotely possible like 1/1000000th of a chance I would support it. But universal basic income won't happen in america til like there is dramatic external factors like 50 percent unemployment and even then somehow rich people would probably convince poor people they were better off without UBI. We can even agree in this country to stop spending less on military and more on healthcare and education. I highly doubt we'll ever be having a debate about UBI cause we're still debating shit that isn't even remotely that far to the left. I would support UBI in countries that can maintain it but US will never pull it off with the current govenrment structure and populous. Just my .02
OP, I want my baristas to have years' experience and a master's degree. Making me a mocha frappucino is tough business. /s
Hah don't even get me started on the dilution of the importance and weight of most degrees due to their being so many college educated people out there now compared to 50 years ago. When everyone and their mother has a masters it becomes less of a big deal.
I am not surprised you have noticed that. When the cost of labor is arbitrarily increased, the response is to increase prices, cut hours, and hire less people. So I guess they have to do more with less As a general principle I think private unions are more effective at protecting job security and better wages than minimum wage laws. As an example, Switzerland does not have a mandated minimum wage, and in fact voters rejected, by ~75%, a minimum wage law that would have been the highest in the world. Instead, about one in four workers belong to some sort of trade union which negotiates the price for labor. Switzerland has a very low unemployment rate as well as high GDP per capita. Of course there are other factors such as better fiscal&monetary policies. In contrast, a state-mandated price floor creates structural unemployment. It's actually a pretty straightforward economic principle. The Congressional Budget Office even studied this and estimated that a minimum wage increase to $10.10 would cost 500,000 jobs, possibly up to one million, with low skilled workers the most vulnerable. Couple this with predatory fiscal and monetary policies, an arbitrary increase to the minimum wage is not going to benefit most people or solve any problems. Minimum wage laws were first introduced specifically to price people out of jobs. In America, it was implemented specifically to price black people out of the labor market. As black people, on average, were willing to work for less, employers were incentivized to hire blacks over whites. And that's what was happening, especially in construction jobs. Before that, in Canada, it was implemented to keep Japanese immigrants out of the job market. In South Africa, whites wanted to enforce a minimum wage to keep blacks from competing for the same jobs... And the bernie people seriously want to force $15 on young, low skilled minority workers already suffering from chronically high unemployment. God help us all...
Eh, I disagree. Attaining a degree is still an accomplishment. You can't bullshit your way to a college degree (at a good or great college). The percentage of people with a Master's in this nation is actually minute, at an estimated 8.9 percent. It's higher than it was 60 years ago, sure, but that's expected. It only grew like 5 percent in 60 years.
It really depends on what the degree is in. The reason many college graduates struggle to find work in their field is they don't pick fields that are in demand. If you take a hard major like engineering you'll find work in your field. If you get a Master's in History you might not.
1. That's why businesses like hiring illegals, because they'll work for exactly that little. Not everyone, is willing to work for that much and would probably rather suck on the government teet. It's much easier and less demeaning. 2. What you describe in the second bit is called an "internship". Those already exist, so are you saying all jobs should be internship level? What problem, exactly, would this solve. It's just free labor for businesses. Sent from my SM-N920T using Grasscity Forum mobile app