The Glade 4.0

That's fine until it labels millions of people as literally not worth living, because the market rate for any service they can offer does not allow them to feed and shelter themselves. That's when it's the government's job to deal with the problem. It's never the company's responsibility.

Well isn't the flipside of that the idea that if goverment didn't tax American busniess's so much and require so many stupid regulations and the unions didn't demand everything under the sun, they wouldn't have to go overseas and do all of these oh so horrible things just to make a buck? The leason as always, less goverment is always better.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Umm... without unions you and your kids would be working 90 hour work weeks (including Sundays) in a coal-mine to pay off your weekly debt-load from the company store. You can make the argument that the pendulum has swung too far to the labor side but when only ~7% of the private sector is unionized and white-collar jobs are leaving you can't really pawn off-shoring on unions.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

This how socities know they have too much population. It creates disincentive to have more children which results in smaller labor pools which results in higher demands for labor which increases wages. You get rid of the balancing mechanism and everyone suffers more.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Well isn't the flipside of that the idea that if goverment didn't tax American busniess's so much and require so many stupid regulations and the unions didn't demand everything under the sun, they wouldn't have to go overseas and do all of these oh so horrible things just to make a buck? The leason as always, less goverment is always better.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

It wasn't government regulation or unions ... Yay for the patently false historical myths of the 20th Century.

I'll give you a choice: A 50% pay cut, or an ass-beating. Which would you rather have?

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

1. Slave labor was on the way out anyway. Whatever pretenses the majority of you hold about the Civil War, the powers-that-be in the American South during the first half of the 19th Century knew Slave Labor was bankrupting them. In terms of "employment" costs, slaves costs more than Northern production workers per unit of production. In fact, some of the most productive cotton plantations used paid labor because it was cheaper.

2. The whole factory store and community store thing starts showing up during the 20s and 30s; it continued into the 50s and 60s some places. The fact that this behavior wasn't regulated out of existence as at all demonstrates an erroneous understanding on your fault.

In some cases, like Hershey, Pennsylvania, and a few other "model" production towns, the model is still in place.

3. And economics brought about these changes ...

Most businesses know and knew that the practices you mention are dysfunctional and dangerous over the long term. A few notorious examples doesn't validate the hasty generalization you're perpetuating, especially since the Labor explosion in the United States didn't take place until the early 70s.

4. Finally, it was 20th Century American Democrats that showed the world how to enslave their populations without threat of force.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Citations and references please.

Umm... without unions you and your kids would be working 90 hour work weeks (including Sundays) in a coal-mine to pay off your weekly debt-load from the company store.

Why is it always Khross who has to provide citations and references?

But that does not work when your economy is a gigantic ponzi scheme based on consumption. Going back to what Xeq said, our problem is over-consumption. How long did your parents TV last? How often do you upgrade yours? How old is the phone in your parent's home? How old is your cell phone? Goods have become the yard-stick for American's to measure where they are in life. Keeping up with the Jones has become a cold-waresque spending binge.

1. Slave labor was on the way out anyway. Whatever pretenses the majority of you hold about the Civil War, the powers-that-be in the American South during the first half of the 19th Century knew Slave Labor was bankrupting them. In terms of "employment" costs, slaves costs more than Northern production workers per unit of production. In fact, some of the most productive cotton plantations used paid labor because it was cheaper.

3. And economics brought about these changes ...

Most businesses know and knew that the practices you mention are dysfunctional and dangerous over the long term. A few notorious examples doesn't validate the hasty generalization you're perpetuating, especially since the Labor explosion in the United States didn't take place until the early 70s.

RD - if those actions were not already unpopular with the majority of individuals in the nation how did those laws get passed?

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Did Government End Child Labor?
By Nick Ottens, January 20, 2011

Child labor laws are frequently cited by proponents of government intervention as proof that businesses cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, American President Barack Obama is no exception. He refers to child labor laws as an example of “common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.” Really?

Capitalism has been blamed for child labor almost since its very inception. Students on both sides of the Atlantic are taught up to this very day that children suffered horribly under the unfettered industrialization of nineteenth century England. Their teachers tend to forget what life was like for the average working man before the Industrial Revolution occurred.

The notion that some “golden age” of simple life and harmony existed in England before it industrialized was first conjured by socialist philosophers Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. They crusaded against the “dehumanizing” factory system which “alienated” workers from their labor. The rationale of the free market was “cold” in their view; laws of supply and demand, “cruel”.

What the average, uneducated worker had “lost” in reality was a terribly short life, plagued by scarcity and disease. “There was nothing romantic or enviable,” notes Robert Hessen in “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), “about a family living and working together in a badly lighted, improperly ventilated and poorly constructed cottage.”

As early as 1697, John Locke had suggested in a report to the Board of Trade that all children over three years of age should be taught to earn their living at working schools for spinning and knitting where they could be fed. “What they can have at home, from their parents,” wrote Locke, “is seldom more than bread and water, and that very scantily too.”

How did children and workers fare under industrialism by contrast? In Human Action (1949) economist Ludwig von Mises reminds readers that, low as factory wages initially were, “they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play,” he writes. “These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them,” according to Von Mises, “in the strictest sense of the term, from death by starvation.” Yet this future offered to them, nineteenth century socialists denounced as “inhuman” and “cruel”?

The truth is that industry provided men not born into nobility, for the first time in history, with the opportunity to better their own lives. Up to this very day, that chance is denied to billions of people around the globe. In light of this, historian Thomas Southcliffe Ashton (1899-1968), writing in The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948), gave perhaps the most cunning answer to critics of the Industrial Revolution:

There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep at night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.

Today, of course, life in India and China is much better than is was half a century ago, precisely because after decades of experimenting with socialism, these states have embraced free market capitalism instead, if only in part. They have opened their markets to foreign products and investment and allowed the best among them, the innovators and the entrepreneurs, to work and trade in relative freedom. Consequently, all of society prospers.

There exists child labor in India and China and working conditions are generally poor, as they were in nineteenth century Britain. But regulation won’t improve those conditions; the market will, eventually. Similarly, government didn’t end child labor.

Hessen points out in his article that the earliest child labor laws in England regulated the hours and wages of those who worked as chimney sweeps—”a dirty, dangerous job which long antedated the Industrial Revolution.” The first act that applied to factory children was passed to protect those who had been subjugated to virtual slavery by the parish authorities, a government body.

As successive Factory Acts were enacted during the first half of the nineteenth century, he notes that the owners of large, modern and safer factories increasingly chose to fire children rather than be subjected to elaborate, arbitrary and ever changing regulations on how they might run a business that employed them.

The result of legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, who needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older and more out of the way factories, where the conditions of employment, sanitation and safety were markedly inferior.

Those who couldn’t find new jobs were reduced to the state of their counterparts a century before, that is, to irregular agricultural labor, or worse—in the words of Von Mises, to “infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers and prostitutes.”

Government didn’t end child labor in Britain. Child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to work; when their parents earned enough money to provide for a family. Only the rise of capitalism could make the huge increase in income necessary for that to happen.

Laissez-faire capitalism didn’t create child labor. It ended it.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Economic Myths: The 5 Day Work Week And The 8 Hour Day
Published by HispanicPundit in Economics, General, Myths and Unions.
How many times have you been in an economic discussion with someone, discussing the benefits of competition, the power of markets, and the overall benefits of capitalism when someone blurts out that in any competitive system, unions and regulations are necessary, for without them, without their interference, we wouldn’t have a middle class, we wouldn’t have a five day work week or eight hour work days? I hear this all the time, I see it on bumper stickers, and it is so often repeated that I thought I’d blog on it and give the readers of my blog an edge on what really happened, and how to respond if they encounter the same topic.

So, who gave us the 5 day, 8 hours per day, work week? Was it really the unions, was it really higher regulations? No, the historical answer is that it was Heny Ford who gave us the 5 day, 8 hours per day, work week. Ford was tired of continuously losing good employees, he was trying to increase employee retention and at the same time increase profits, so he basically doubled wages and implemented a 5-day work week, and in the process effectively invented the modern weekend. It is Henry Ford who is widely credited with contributing to the creation of a middle class in the United States.

In addition, if you look at why Henry Ford did this, you will see that his reasons had nothing to do with charity, and everything to do with increasing profits and dealing with the forces of competition.

What makes those who believe it was unions look even more ridiculous is the fact that Henry Ford despised unions. The tensions were so strong, that Ford hired a former Navy boxer to help him stop the unions from unionizing Ford Motor Company.

Many of those who hold the view that it was unions - or regulations - who gave us the middle class, often hold outdated fears against ‘unfettered markets’, still repeating the now fully debunked Karl Marx view that capitalism, through competition, will bring exploitation of workers, will be a ‘race to the bottom’, and will eventually, atleast according to Marx, result in class warfare blah blah blah blah. However, if you come back to the real world, you will see that competition does the exact opposite, it increases the standard of living, it increases working standards, it increases pay, and it is overall the working person’s best weapon, not its enemy. This is why unions and the minimum wage have the opposite result, since by reducing competition they don’t make the working person’s standard of living better; on net balance, they make it worse.

So in conclusion, it wasn’t because of unions or regulations that we have a middle class, it was in spite of them that we do, and the next time you hear otherwise, correct them immediately, the working class will thank you.

Public popularity and legal enactment aren't always connected, and when they are, the direction of causation doesn't always run the way you're suggesting. More to the point, though, just because a majority of people oppose certain actions doesn't mean those actions will cease. I'm sure the vast majority of workers today are opposed to mass layoffs and Wall Street bonuses, but whoopteedoo, we still have 9% unemployment and record bonuses at Goldman Sachs.

Because he's demonstrated that he can produce them. It was an honest mistake on his part, but it continues to **** him over.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.