At the core of it all money is pretty hard to understand at least for me. It's not even real, yet distribute all world wealth equally and things would go crazy. I just ran into this video and it inspired me to ask here what opinions are on Maximum wage.
This video uses a perfect example of the walmart owners family members each making over a billion per year while their employees have to be subsidized by the tax payers. Also raising a perfectly valid question, what could anyone possibly need after making 100 million per year? Beyond donating to charities, rebuilding schools and neighborhoods, I can't think of much but power that anyone would want over 100 million per year.
edit Actually below is a really good analogy and while not 100% factual it is about real world things so it might be cool to talk about this also.
This economy reminds me of an MMORPG with like 50,000 guilds but 10 of them came up on elite legend status by glitches, exploiting, and maybe 2 of them were handed down by legitimate business men to their kids who did jack sn0w, and all 10 of these guilds pratically pay the developers to write codes in their favor. And then we have the fortune 500 guilds. Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Sony, etc. a lot of them "help" sometimes. SO many different agendas these top 1% guilds have.
yea... lol The main difference is they wouldn't be destroying the world, oppressing an entire species you know, important stuff deciding the existence of the future
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What are you up to
What does wage have to do with all this? The people who get wage are situated much lower in the food chain than those you're talking about and typically even the professions who get the best payments don't produce millionaires via monthly paychecks.
I think a certain ratio should be met for how much a company makes and how much they pay their employees. Already established retail stores tend to dominate the market so competeting is out of the question and if you go to work for a company like Walmart or Kholes, or a JC penny, you'll get paid poorly. i wrote a paper on this like 3 years ago and at the time I think it was JC penny or some similar store whose CEO was making around 1250 times its lowest paid employee. Walmart was also up there with some rediculously high ratio.
Greed is a powerful thing and unfortunately there's so many people that need jobs that companies can get away with this sort of thing. Otherwise any sane person just wouldn't work their till the pay increases. Putting a cap on how much one can make in a year isn't a bad idea imho. I think when someone is making over a million dollars a year they've got enough.
(The following thought experiment is lifted directly from philosopher Robert Nozick.)
Suppose we start out with approximately a million people and an equal distribution of wealth. One of the people is Wilt Chamberlain, a talented basketball player, and everybody else is willing to pay $1 to see him play. If all of them do so, then he ends up with approximately a million dollars, and the distribution of wealth is no longer equal. Presumably, none of the transfers of $1 from any of them to Wilt Chamberlain is objectionable - it's their money to do with as they wish - so where does the injustice come in? Nowhere, it seems to me.
The same goes for Walmart. If many of us are willing to spend a little money there, it adds up and creates the potential for someone to end up with a lot of money. That doesn't seem like a problem.
Of course, one can say that some of "the rich" are doing unjust things, but then the goal should be to stop that, instead of targeting what they got legitimately.
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well that's a good analogy but it wouldn't be quite as accurate without the part about many various factors such as
Wilt pays politicians to sign laws that a vast majority of humans stand against.
Wilt hires off shore aliens to work for 25 cents an hour
Wilt gets tax breaks on top of his tax evasion loopholes
Etc etc
Dare I say the other kind of variations like Wilt has instigated and funded both sides of wars.
Wilt doesn't care about the effects of some of the more hazardous pratices which destroy the land and water etc etc
Ultimately there is a major problem that analogy does point out though I'm not sure where to place the blame. Millions upon millions of people shop at Walmart regardless of the actual information they have I.E. Child slave labor, underpaying employees, and exceedingly overly wealthy CEOs taking advantage. This society seems so done and permanently screwed, maybe many informed shoppers are simply raising the white flag. I know I do sometimes. I know also without 1% the Capitol Walmart has almost all other buisnesses options are shot. (Which can be seen as fair only up until the part where we see the abuse of privilege)
As sifi or fictuous as my MMORPG analogy is it seems to apply except in a video game only the game would be messed up. The top guilds in real life have enough voice to stand against destruction and oppression but clearly they do not. If even half of them did then by God load them up take my money.
Has anyone heard of a single elite multi billionaire family advocating for anything moral or life saving? I'm not saying it hasn't happened. But I haven't seen it, and if any multi billionaire wanted to be heard they could be. Seems ours wanna be silent and run game through the Panama papers and pay minimal wages. Granted, many polititians get their slice and educated people earn their ranks as well. But even here look at our tax funded research on medicines that somehow ended up owned by a private douche selling it to us 600 times its worth. You know how they get that 600 per? I'm not 100"% sure but I think it's from tax payers and insurance etc
I don't think Wilt could do that to us.
But seriously the Wilt analogy is decent, it just leaves out a lot of the reality factors.
I'm not against a family passing down fortune and power as much as I am against the abuse of this power. All of them are straight pathetic losers in my view.
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What are you up to
Also you have to bear in mind that all this money isn't sitting in some offshore bank lying dormant, I daresay over 90% of it is reinvested most likely straight back into the company shares.
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"No laughs were had. There is only shame and sadness." Jenny
Not really according to certain investigations - something which I created a thread about a few years ago. As this article also points out, there is a huge amount of funds leaking out of many states every year, quite sufficient to handle even major economic challenges but nevertheless remaining unused, with the burden being distributed among the low-income part of the population, the 99%. People should remember every time when some pseudo-economist preaches "tightening the belt" that the money necessary to move the economy in the right direction are usually just moved elsewhere, via semi-legal or completely illegal methods. Wages have almost nothing to do with all this.
mvassilev said:everybody else is willing to pay $1 to see him play
Let's think about this for a moment though. I've heard it said that any action (exchage, trade, sale) which is done willingly by both parties is automatically ethical from a capitalist point of view. I disagree. We end up with situations like the tragedy of commons or prisoners dilemna or many other famous situations where by a person freely enters into an agreement and it is bad for him. At the fringe you have situations like the Truck System which people willingly entered into but is a trap and is recognized to be unethical.
The problem is people don't take into account Non-rivalry when they value a good. You just assume everyone is willing to pay a dollar, and they are. But why is it worth a dollar? it's a non-rival good and people don't understand that means it should cost less.
If something cost you $100 and it should cost $25 you would do something about it, perhaps see the manager or go to another store. But if something cost $1 and it should cost $.25 you probably wouldn't care much and still pay your dollar.
So we have this effect where people pay much more than a non-rival good is worth and don't care. It isn't automatically ethical. Actors and sport players are overpaid.
I would love to live in a fairy tale capitalist market, one where trade is fair and competitive, and the average consumer makes good decisions. But since we don't and limiting unethical behavior is very hard lets just have a maximum wage. I'd be fine with $100 million and then Wallstreet wouldn't have such perverse incentives.
Celfious said:Millions upon millions of people shop at Walmart regardless of the actual information they have I.E. Child slave labor, underpaying employees, and exceedingly overly wealthy CEOs taking advantage.
It has hints of the prisoners dilemna and the tragedy of commons in it. WalMart is cheap.
Celfious said:Has anyone heard of a single elite multi billionaire family advocating for anything moral or life saving?
Yes, they call themselves "philanthropists". Most of them are still scum. J.K. Rowling seems good intentioned enough, but the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is just stupid. Give Africa food and instead of a hundred million starving babies there will be a billion starving babies. Africa needs birth control. Billionaires think they can buy themselves an ethical status with their stolen money, but the best they could ever do is break even and that would be by giving it all back to the world.
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I wish I were employed by a stupendous paragraph, with capitalized English words and expressions.
It's common to demonize the extremely rich, but the usual culprits of inefficiencies are moderately wealthy if they're rich at all - for example, homeowners who push for restrictions on development, workers in licensed industries trying to make entry into the industry more difficult, and so on. Maximum wages will do nothing to stop them.
Celfious:
In first-world countries, there is relatively little outright bribery. There are, however, connections between industry and government of the kind of "I used to regulate Corporation X's industry and now I work for them" or "I, a regulator, play golf with people who have friends who work for Corporation X", and so on. While most of the people in this sphere are relatively well-off, few have hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sometimes it's just a matter of some companies making an appealing case for a minor policy that's bad but not obviously so, and it's hard to oppose because the cost is distributed broadly among taxpayers (for example) and the benefits are concentrated within the industry. A few policies like this don't do much, but they add up.
Anyway, it's not the place of consumers qua consumers to worry about this. They're still benefiting from whatever they're buying. If they don't want the kinds of things you're objecting to, that's a matter for the political process. And not by pushing for a maximum wage, because that has nothing to do with any of this.
Miru:
It's true that there are situations of the kind you describe, but they're relatively unusual - the typical transaction we enter into makes both parties better off and doesn't impose significant costs on others. Also, the feature of prisoners' dilemmas isn't that the agreements are bad for those who enter into them - they're still better off than if they decline to make them - but that the setup itself is inefficient.
Some markets could be set up more efficiently, but even if they aren't, it doesn't follow that those who take advantage of those inefficiencies don't deserve the money they earn. I may prefer the store to charge 25 cents instead of a dollar, and maybe they would if they faced different incentives, but I still prefer to give them a dollar, which is mine to do with as I desire.
I don't want to get bogged down with the details of my analogy, but there's no non-rivalry here. For example, stadium seats are limited.
Quote:the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is just stupid. Give Africa food and instead of a hundred million starving babies there will be a billion starving babies.
Their largest donations have been to vaccine delivery, scholarships, and fighting disease. If your children tend to survive to adulthood, you have less of an incentive to have a lot of them - and people who grow up with fewer diseases tend to be more productive in adulthood.
Quote:Billionaires think they can buy themselves an ethical status with their stolen money, but the best they could ever do is break even and that would be by giving it all back to the world.
Taking a look at the world's top billionaires, most of them seem to have earned their money. Several companies have been involved in some controversies, but hardly to the degree that a reasonable person would say that the billionaire's wealth was stolen. This is just slander.
____________ Eccentric Opinion
So? There are very valid reasons why this happens. Being rich is not about the money - money themselves are nothing but a tool - it's about the power you can buy with them, the rules you can bypass or even implement, in short about putting yourself in a more privileged position in the society than the regular commoner. From there you can shape laws which then are used to define what is "legal" and what is not - used among other things by parrots with no touch with reality to proclaim that if something is legal, then it's right, to buy the officials who implement the rules that are not favorable to you, to escape responsibility whenever it suits you, potentially harming many others in the process (I'd say that tax evasion for example ruins much more lives than a moderate-sized armed conflict), etc. And that actually happens all the time, so the extremely rich get "demonized" in the end, rightfully so in many cases.
Celfious said: Ultimately there is a major problem that analogy does point out though I'm not sure where to place the blame. Millions upon millions of people shop at Walmart regardless of the actual information they have I.E. Child slave labor, underpaying employees, and exceedingly overly wealthy CEOs taking advantage. This society seems so done and permanently screwed, maybe many informed shoppers are simply raising the white flag. I know I do sometimes. I know also without 1% the Capitol Walmart has almost all other buisnesses options are shot. (Which can be seen as fair only up until the part where we see the abuse of privilege)
The problem has manifold reasons.
1. Sam Walton's (founder) business practices were much different than his sons.
2. Once W-M had gutted small towns of competition, there is no other place to shop today. That is why I consider it a monopoly.
3. Americans helped cause this because of "Convenience." i.e. Too many hassles to support multiple places of business on one trip.
4. Now with so many American's living from check to check, notions of ethics take a distant back seat.
mvassilev said:It's common to demonize the extremely rich, but the usual culprits of inefficiencies are moderately wealthy if they're rich at all - for example, homeowners who push for restrictions on development, workers in licensed industries trying to make entry into the industry more difficult, and so on. Maximum wages will do nothing to stop them.
Demonize? I'm not making them out to be demons, they are demons. Those inefficiencies are peanuts in the grand scheme.
mvassilev said:
In first-world countries, there is relatively little outright bribery.
Hopefully my latest post here is enough to convince you otherwise. If not, leave a post and I'll gather more evidence.
mvassilev said:Sometimes it's just a matter of some companies making an appealing case for a minor policy that's bad but not obviously so, and it's hard to oppose because the cost is distributed broadly among taxpayers (for example) and the benefits are concentrated within the industry. A few policies like this don't do much, but they add up.
The AIG bailout alone cost taxpayers an average of $570. This is not capitalism.
mvassilev said:Anyway, it's not the place of consumers qua consumers to worry about this. They're still benefiting from whatever they're buying. If they don't want the kinds of things you're objecting to, that's a matter for the political process. And not by pushing for a maximum wage, because that has nothing to do with any of this.
"Things are good so don't worry"? What are you saying?
mvassilev said:It's true that there are situations of the kind you describe, but they're relatively unusual - the typical transaction we enter into makes both parties better off and doesn't impose significant costs on others. Also, the feature of prisoners' dilemmas isn't that the agreements are bad for those who enter into them - they're still better off than if they decline to make them - but that the setup itself is inefficient.
They seem relatively unusual until you see:
Tell me they are earning it.
mvassilev said:Some markets could be set up more efficiently, but even if they aren't, it doesn't follow that those who take advantage of those inefficiencies don't deserve the money they earn. I may prefer the store to charge 25 cents instead of a dollar, and maybe they would if they faced different incentives, but I still prefer to give them a dollar, which is mine to do with as I desire.
If it's worth 25 cents and there was a competitive market, someone would be selling for at most 30. 75 cents one time isn't a huge deal but it really adds up. The richest 1% officially own 34.6% of the assets, but I would bet money it's even higher than that because of trusts and 401ks and other abuses.
mvassilev said:I don't want to get bogged down with the details of my analogy, but there's no non-rivalry here. For example, stadium seats are limited.
Don't be silly you know athletes make all of their money off commercials and sponsorships. The stadium seats aren't what I'm talking about.
mvassilev said:
Quote:the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is just stupid. Give Africa food and instead of a hundred million starving babies there will be a billion starving babies.
Their largest donations have been to vaccine delivery, scholarships, and fighting disease. If your children tend to survive to adulthood, you have less of an incentive to have a lot of them - and people who grow up with fewer diseases tend to be more productive in adulthood.
Same thing, they are enabling unsustainable population growth. "less of an incentive to have a lot of them" isn't as good as a condom.
mvassilev said:
Quote:Billionaires think they can buy themselves an ethical status with their stolen money, but the best they could ever do is break even and that would be by giving it all back to the world.
Taking a look at the world's top billionaires, most of them seem to have earned their money. Several companies have been involved in some controversies, but hardly to the degree that a reasonable person would say that the billionaire's wealth was stolen. This is just slander.
Maybe they seem too to you. I'll make some more posts in my other thread, but for now we'll have to agree to disagree.
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I wish I were employed by a stupendous paragraph, with capitalized English words and expressions.
posted August 29, 2016 08:46 AM
