[Orruar]

Originally Posted by stonez138 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I agree that a business must, at least to some degree, serve the customers needs. That in no way stops the business from screwing over their wage slaves, I mean employees.

But you discussing businesses screwing over customers, not employees. Try and stay on topic, will you? Also, employees are not required to work for any business, unless slavery has returned. I am well aware that the work I do for my company makes them a truckload of money. They whore my services out at $200/hr and pay me $30 of that. Just today I saved a $50k deal from walking away. Do I feel exploited? Hell no. The company provides me with the conditions by which I can be this productive, and I do not believe I can be this productive on my own, or I'd certainly go into business for myself. The simpleton view that employers exploit laborers to make a profit was debunked a century ago. Again, nobody is forced to work for any particular company, and companies must compete for labor. This is what drives the increases in wages, not some government dictate or labor union.

That's your opinion, not fact and not only do I strongly disagree but I find it laughable. I'm going to assume you are just trolling when you actually defended child labor. I'd really like to know where or when it's been documented that child labor is a good thing and prevents things like sexual slavery, since the very same countries that work children in sweat shops consistantly have a thriving sex slave market.

Do you disagree that we had a vast amount of child labor ever since we were living in small tribes of hunters/gatherers up until the 19th century? Do you think everyone from the beginning of time until the 19th century were just terrible parents who hated their kids? Or is it that they needed the kids to help do work in order to keep the family alive? It's not a matter of whether child labor is good or bad. It was a necessary evil until the 19th century, when free markets and the capital accumulation that comes with them brought us to such a productive capacity that we no longer needed children to work. Not all countries have the productive development required to allow this. Your desire to end child labor would lead to mass starvation on a scale that would make Mao blush. And I'm sure you can find all the documentation on how US attempts to end child labor has led to things like child prostitution. Google is a wonderful thing, and this isn't even a controversial topic among most historians. In fact, here's what I got from the I Feel Lucky button on Google: http://www.cato.org/publications/com...d-prostitution

Child labor is just one example capitalists grossly exploiting people.Was it "circumstance due to technology" that led to the Ludlow massacre or the countless other bloody confrontations between the worker and greedy capitalists? Or maybe you just attribute that to rable rousing communists...

If child labor is a case of capitalists grossly exploiting people, how do you explain that the majority of child labor in the 19th century was farm work? Even throughout much of the 20th century, there was significant child labor on farms. Are the parents of these children (the farmers) just greedy capitalists that care not for the well being of their children? And if child labor in factories and such was exploitation by capitalists, why did the parents of these children allow it to continue? Were they all just terrible parents?

And I don't believe you understand what I meant by "circumstance of technology". Because the rest of that sentence has nothing to do with the point I was making. The point I was making was that workers were poor in the 19th century due to technological poverty, not because some greedy person was keeping all the loot for themselves. To put it another way, the rise of government controls coincided with the rise in technological standards, but the two are not causally related. Correlation/causation confusion is perhaps the most pervasive mistake made today.

Although we disagree, you seem reasonably intelligent so I'm going to assume you are familiar with or have read The Grapes of Wrath. We're the tribulations faced by these people caused by "circumstance due to technology" or greedy capitalists realising that with the abundance of desperate starving people they could pay a fraction of what they used to pay or what was promised. I am also sure you're familiar with the term company store. Was this exploitive practice also caused by "circumstance due to technology" or greed and exploitation?

It's not good practice to refer to fiction books when discussing history. I'm sure you wouldn't want me to make references to Atlas Shrugged as if that was an accurate account of what happened in the mid 20th century. With that said, I don't see any particular problem with company stores. If someone doesn't like being paid in store credit, they don't have to work for that particular employer. Again, we don't have slavery, so people are free to select the employer that suits them. People in the 19th century had much less mobility (harder to pack up and go work for a firm across the country), which made it easier to keep wages low and still maintain your work force. And company stores made sense in certain circumstances as a more efficient means of obtaining the goods you wanted. We didn't have things like mass distribution of goods, and so this was an artifact of the technology of the day. I doubt anyone today would work for an employer that offered such an arrangement.

You alluded to this earlier but is this really an option when so many of us rely on employer provided health insurance?

I've already stated my opinion that health insurance should be de-linked from employment, and this is one of the big reasons, mobility. Trust me, big business loves the fact that employees are beholden to them for continuing insurance. It reduces their costs, since it's less likely an employee will threaten to quit unless they get a big raise. The question we must ask is why health insurance is provided by our employers in the first place. To give you the short version, it was tax incentives given to this activity by the Roosevelt administration during WW2 price controls (which included wage controls). Removing these government incentives will quickly lead to insurance being purchased on the private market, outside of your employer. This will benefit everyone in so many ways, but to address your point, it will allow people much more mobility in job selection. This will have the extra benefit of raising wages, since businesses will now have more competition in the area of employment.

This simply is not true. You must mean the greatest advances in WHITE PEOPLES living standards the world has ever seen. From 1350-1950 China and India's gdp per capita remained roughly constant, hovering around $600. In that time Western Europe's gdp per capita increased from $662 to $4,594, a 594% increase! (See The World Economy, A Millenial Perspective, Angus Maddison) Was this great increase in living standards due to technology or exploitation of cheap labor and resources stollen from impovershed people? In 1981 40% of the world lived on 1 dollar a day or less. Today (21st century) today it's 18% and is estimated to fall to 12% by 2015. China's growth alone has lifted more then 400 million people out of poverty the largest reduction that has taken place anywhere, at any time and it's economy has been growing 9% annually for 30 years, the fastest rate for a major economy IN RECORDED HISTORY! (which is a ringing endorsement for communism if you ask me) Pretty amazing how socialized medicine hasn't hamstrung their economy.

Free markets didn't really exist in most of the world in the 19th century. I was certainly only speaking of America and western Europe, which adopted these ideas after the American and French revolutions. And we've actually reversed course in the past half century or so. We'll probably begin to see the damage from this reversal in our lifetimes, if you're as young as me. China and much of Asia only began to adopt free market principles in the last half of the 20th century, and so it's not a surprise that they had no real growth during the 19th century. As for the endorsement of Chinese communism, you may want to look at a history book. It's funny that you use a time frame of 30 years, since 1978 was the very start of the reformation of the Chinese economy to a free market.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform)

On a side note for those that worry China is going to take over America don't ignore the fact that we have 12 nuclear subs each capable of launching 85 attack jets while China is working on their first. The pentagon estimates china has a paltry 20 nuclear missles that can reach the U.S. compared to Americas 9000 intact nuclear warheads and around 5000 strategic warheads. (see "Out of Thier Silos; China and America" The Economist, June 10, 2006)

America is way too paranoid about attacks from all countries. No country would ever invade the US, it would be foolish. As the most powerful nation on earth, we can barely tame a nation 1/500th our size (Afghanistan). Imagine any other country trying to tame us. The other option is nuclear destruction. Of course, America is large enough that any nuclear destruction of the US would lead to irradiating the entire planet and likely a nuclear winter that would kill all humans on Earth. And on the topic of China, they are not exactly an expansionist nation...

Yopu are implying that theres an absolute certaintity that women everywhere are going to begin suing their employers which is simply unfounded. This speaks more to your opinion of women then to anything to do with the law. Do sexual harrasment laws also hurt women and prevent them from being hired, since by and large most harrassment suites are filed by women? Would the work place be better for women if those laws were abolished? Besides that, an employer falsely accused has only to fax his payroll records proving he is paying both genders the same, how is this going to lead to costly litigation?

Why pass a law if it is never to be used? Certainly there will be some litigation based upon this law. Do you refute that? Do you honestly believe that nobody will ever be taken to court based upon this law? It doesn't require every women to file a lawsuit to force a businessman to consider that the risk and understand that employing a woman is now more expensive than employing a man. Even if the risk is very small, it is not zero. A 1 in 10,000 chance of a lawsuit that will cost $2M still means it costs $200 more to employ a woman than it did before.

And are you seriously stupid enough to believe that when the government comes knocking saying they received a complaint, a businessman will just spend 2 minutes faxing over some numbers and will be done with it? Let's ignore the fact that government loves to waste your time and is inefficient as hell at everything it does. He's not going to have a pool of people exactly as qualified as the woman to compare to. It is a subjective assessment, and such things have to be considered in court, which is going to cost him money whether he wins or loses.

One last point: Let's say you're right and there are all these asshole men running things that want to pay women less because they are sexist pigs who think women can't do the same work as men. What effect will this law have? Will they hire women at the same rate as men to comply with the law? More likely, they will hire fewer women since they are sexist and figure that if they have to pay the same amount, they might as well hire men, whom they believe are more productive. This hurts women by reducing their employment opportunities.

Look, I want women to have equal opportunities as men. I'm on your side here. But you aren't.