The Glade 4.0

Then I win at the internet again. Let's shut down the servers and unplug the fiber optics, we're done here. Everyone please return to your cable televisions, libraries and newspapers.

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Self-respect.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Yeah not so much of that going on these days. Used to be people were embarrassed to get government handouts. Now people expect it. Shame.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

They learn government dependence in school now, Nite.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

10% stated unemployment, and real unemployment more like 17%. That's why. Eventually the unemployment spigot will run out.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

More importantly, why would you assume that job will be minimum wage, or even less than welfare if you got rid of all the surplus people who are forced to take it for less than that? If welfare pays a certain amount, and there are no illegals forced by their status to take whatever is offered, growers will simply have to pay more than what welfare offers or have few, if any, workers - possibly not enough to bring their crops in.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, but the growers could just close up shop and live off welfare, it's a win-win!

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I know! Isn't it more fun to argue economics as if physical reality doesn't get a vote?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We could all work for the government!

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I seem to recall that being tried.



Didn't work out so well.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Damn reality. There go my dreams of a (non-)working man's utopia.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm more curious how the american public would react to the price increases.

e.g.
minimum federal wage in Aust (when you're 18) = $14.31 (ish)
minimum federal wage in USA (when you're 18) = $7.25 (ish)

cost of an average small burger in aust = $1.99ish (maccas)
cost of an average small burger in USA = $0.99 (or so i've been told)

Not saying it's across the board, but you will be paying for the wage increase, rather than the government. So the question is still, are you guys (ie the american people) willing to pay more for basic stuff?

It appears that you're using Government mandated wage levels to ask a question that relies on market based wage levels; the two aren't synonymous. It's plain that the more Gov't gets involved, the higher costs will be to the consumer, whereas allowing the market to work will result in the lowest prices being charged that will still allow sustain the business model. That said, there's a lot more that goes into the pricing of a cheeseburger than Government mandated wages.

I'm in the minority here, as I believe the borders should be open to anyone willing to work. That would require the dismantling of the entitlement programs, though. The Government should be in the business of conferring citizenship, and safeguarding the borders, not denying entry to workers.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Why can't you just have the entitlement programs require proof of citizenship or residency to dispense benefits? That would seem to solve every problem without having to kick legal immigrants in the balls. The people who just want to mooch wouldn't come here, and the people who want to work are people we want here anyway.



To put this in even bigger perspective, the Australian Fair Pay Commission (who sets the minimum wage) is widely considered to be a partisan far-right organization that exploits the workers for the benefit of business.

Easy paths to citizenship, and birth-right naturalization.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I know what you're saying vind, and to a degree this is true but only a very minor degree. Business are accountable to their bottom line, they require a minimum % growth every year or the investor/share holders start to make noises.

Keep in mind that the biggest expense in any business is wages, even a 10% increase in wage, hits the bottom line hard. While efficient use of employees would help with some of that, and big companies could afford a slight hit on their bottom line before their share holders/investers start making noise, the majority of companies can not.

Since small/med companies are still the majority, you can always be certain to expect the average price of living to go up with an overall rise in wages.



this is true of the last prime minister who put in the fair pay act, but this has since been dissambled. (last party in power was more for the business, thus last election they got voted out on the issue, so all is well). So keep in mind that this minimum wage has in effect GONE DOWN and not up since our last review.

Except, Lydiaa, what's being discussed isn't "an overall rise in wages", it's an increase in wages for a subset of a subset of blue collar workers. It would seem that a few cents on a head of lettuce (for example) would offset any increase in wages that a legal worker would command over an illegal alien worker in a market driven economy.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Goddamnit you people are **** retards!!!! Obviously the solution to minimum wage is Government subsidies!

Yes... Wages are too low to work so we roll half of Welfare to businesses to tack onto minimum wage...

I started out really sarcastic but to be honest I would prefer the above solution.

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lets take a small business grocer than for e.g.

and lets say that instead of the $5.00 per hour to an illegal immigrant, a legal worker would do it for the minimum wage of $7.25.

Lets say the small business has a pure profit of $360 a day. (running off a 10k per month profit)

Thats an increase, per legal person hired/per day of 5% of the pure profit thats taking away from the owner.

Now look at it from a consumer point of view. While this simple 5% will not effect emergency items (e.g. milk, bread) they are more inclined to bulk buy from the bigger retailers for bigger items(and if you're asian, pallets at a time).

Like I said, I get what you're saying, however the gereneral public wants cheaper products (as evidenced by the rise of the evil wal-mart). A rise in any wage has 2 out comes. Either the company absorbs the decrease in income, or the consumers by paying higher.

and believe it or not, minimum wage jobs are kinda the majority of any city.

No, people we want to work are not people we necessarily want here in the quantities that want to come. We want some of the people that want to work, at a managable rate, and we want them here legally. That way they aren't artificially driving wages down.

As you pointed out, if you can make more money on welfare than making minimum wage picking crops, people won't take the crop-picking jobs. The growers, however won't just sit around saying "welp, guess we're ****." They'll find a balance between what they can afford per worker and how many workers they really need.

Yes that will possibly drive prices up to some degree, but not as much as you might think since they will also have to cut some workers. Yes, this will result in the elimination of some jobs, but in this case we want those jobs eliminated because they're only being done by people who shouldn't be here. Elimination of jobs by government-mandated wage hikes = bad; elimination of jobs by normal market competition = not bad. I'll give you a guess as to why that is, because the reason that's true is not just that governmental actions are inherently bad.

As for kicking legal immigrants in the balls, nothing about this does that. This whining about having to carry your green card is just that, whining, and in any case, they're legal immigrants, not citizens. If it''s too **** onerous, take a hike.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Heh, the funny part about this post is that it is the border security you demand in order to protect wages that is artificial, certainly not the natural flow of labor into labor markets.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

No they aren't. We've debunked this before. Not only are minimum wage jobs far less common than most people think, most of them are held by people who are not primary household income earners. They go almost completely to people who take them as part-time supplements to someone else's income, or to high school and college students, or retirees who have at least one other source of income.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Only in the sense of the global labor market. That is made up of a bunch of national labor markets. In this case, the unhealthiness of the Mexican labor market and the ready availability of another to go to is both A) artificially draining labor from the Mexican market, allowing Mexico to avoid solving the problem of its labor surplus and driving wages for those remaining artificially up and B) creating an artificial labor surplus here and artificially driving wages down.

So yes, it may be artificial in relation to an idealized perfectly free global labor market, but having an idealized free global labor market for its own sake isn't really a goal, especially since the labor market isn't an entity in a vaccuum. The goal is to have healthy national economies; a global system made up of healthy national economies will itself be healthy, but an overall healthy global system will not necessarily have all of its parts be healthy.

So the goal is to have as much of a free labor market as reasonably possible in this country, not one that has labor artificially shifted here by failure to innovate or make progress in some other market, because that's good for the economy of this country; not because we want a free labor market for its own sake. We want that because markets that are as free as is reasonably feasible generally do the best job of producing economic prosperity, which is, after all, the goal of an economy in the first place.

If Mexico didn't have a massive labor surplus and an inability to find its *** with both hands in regard to what to do with them, I'd have no problem with some labor coming here, which is why I have no problem with legal immigration. Illegal immigration, however, is symptomatic of Mexico simply shoving its problems elsewhere, and it affects a lot more than just the labor market here. Since the goal is not ot have a free global labor market for the sake of a free global labor market, I have no problem restricting that labor flow in order to keep the national labor market more free and deal with the other problems illegal immigration causes.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm not arguing any of that, I simply saying you've chosen your words poorly.

Edit: Well, actually I would argue for the merits of a global free market for the sake of a global free market, but you already know that anyway, and that's not what this thread is about.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."