Vote for obama

[Orruar]

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

Would vote Gary Johnson if he was on the ballot in my state, since he isn't will be voting for Obama. The devil I know is better than the devil I don't, especially if the devil is a creepy Mormon.

But how will we solve our problems without magic underwear?

[runlvlzero]

Also down with wallstreet.

[stonez138]

This view of the world would be so laughable if it wasn't driving many of our policy decisions today. In general, businesses don't operate for long on the goal of screwing over their customers. Only through serving the customers' needs does a business thrive.

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.

Do not confuse circumstance due to technology with circumstance due to regulatory regime. We didn't have child labor and long working days due to greedy owners who wanted to rape and pillage the people.

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.

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...

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?

What you continually seem to miss is the fact that in the free market, a customer must consent to the purchase of the product. If they don't like the rules, they can forego the purchase altogether or seek out another provider.

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

It wasn't until the 18th century when we really started to see a transition to free markets, and the following 2 centuries led to the greatest advances in living standards the world has ever seen.

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.

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)

You assume that such a law is black and white in terms of being applied. Hell, even if a company does not break the law, a lawsuit still costs them a large sum of money in defense costs. So even if the employer does not break the law, it still costs more money to employ a woman thanks to Obama.

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?

[stonez138]

We were only able to eradicate it due to increases in productivity of the adults to the point where child labor was not necessary for survival.

Surely you jest...Please research The National Child Labor Committee, The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, and maybe Lewis Hine...

[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.

[Ele]

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[Hitchens]

Neither The Grapes of Wrath nor Atlas Shrugged should be looked at for historical accuracy.

Although the former is a wonderful novel and the latter is complete garbage.

[stonez138]

Wow, you cite The Charles Koch foundation, er, I mean the Cato Institute and Wikipedia. Talk about an epic fail. I can't imagine that the billionaire Koch brothers could possibly have an agenda to justify child labor...

But you discussing businesses screwing over customers, not employees.

Sorry, you don't get to define the topic I'm discussing. How is a woman getting paid less by an employer a discussion about workers screwing over there customers? That's the main discussion here, although we have gone on a few tangents.

The simpleton view that employers exploit laborers to make a profit was debunked a century ago.

Ok now I know you're just trolling. Either that or you have your head WAY FAR up your ass. Who debunked this? Let me guess, The Cato Institute? I guess someone forgot to let Cesar Chavez know this. Let's just take the example of phospherous matches, which were being made in this country into the 20th century. I guess it wasn't abuse or exploitation when these workers fingernails fell off or worse. Or I can speak from my personal experience. I worked briefly at a chicken farm. This farm advertised room and board with employment. This "room and board" was actually a bunch of broke down school busses parked behind the farm. Or how about something more recent like this story about a PREGNANT WOMAN that died after being denied water and shade.
the ultimate irony is that the link is from, you're going to love this, FOX NEWS!!!! http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C293...3458%2C00.html No exploitation going on there huh?

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.

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?

Theres a HUGE difference between a child working on their family farm or working with your father and learning a trade, as was done for centuries and a child being an industrial worker in a factory which, according to the 1900 census, would have included 1 in 6 American children.

And if child labor in factories and such was exploitation by capitalists, why did the parents of these children allow it to continue?

Because they had no choice you moron. They weren't being paid a living wage. They were also being exploited and untill the formation of unions there was absolutly nothing they could do about it, other then starve.

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?

It wouldn't take Johnnie Cochran to win the case. Compare the womans education and work history to her male counterparts and see if they're being paid the same.

[stonez138]

I should've mentioned that the room and board was advertised on the migrant workers circuit. I was fortunate enough to be able to quit that job and find employment else where but I wonder if that was an option for the migrant workers.

[Orruar]

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

Wow, you cite The Charles Koch foundation, er, I mean the Cato Institute and Wikipedia. Talk about an epic fail. I can't imagine that the billionaire Koch brothers could possibly have an agenda to justify child labor...

Yes, and we all know about the Wikipedia sweat shops. As I said, I took the first link Google gave me. If you had actually done the work of typing about 30 keystrokes, you could have found dozens of articles on sites you approve of. In the modern day, facts are easily verifiable, so I don't care much what website I find them on.

Sorry, you don't get to define the topic I'm discussing. How is a woman getting paid less by an employer a discussion about workers screwing over there customers? That's the main discussion here, although we have gone on a few tangents.

You are the one who changed the subject to businesses screwing over their customers, and I was responding to that charge. Then you changed it back to businesses screwing over their employees. It seems like every time I destroy your pathetic attempts at rational thought with facts and logic, you just change the subject. If you don't want me to define the topic you're discussing, then stay on one topic and stop jumping around, grasping at whatever socialist talking point you can remember. Stay focused on the discussion.

Ok now I know you're just trolling. Either that or you have your head WAY FAR up your ass. Who debunked this? Let me guess, The Cato Institute? I guess someone forgot to let Cesar Chavez know this. Let's just take the example of phospherous matches, which were being made in this country into the 20th century. I guess it wasn't abuse or exploitation when these workers fingernails fell off or worse. Or I can speak from my personal experience. I worked briefly at a chicken farm. This farm advertised room and board with employment. This "room and board" was actually a bunch of broke down school busses parked behind the farm. Or how about something more recent like this story about a PREGNANT WOMAN that died after being denied water and shade.
the ultimate irony is that the link is from, you're going to love this, FOX NEWS!!!! http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C293...3458%2C00.html No exploitation going on there huh?

You list some specific instances where exploitation may have taken place, but I was addressing the general principle laid out by Marx that stated that all profits were the result of exploitation of labor. This has been refuted by pretty much every modern school of economic thought, ranging from the Austrians (most pro-free market) to the Keynesians (very pro managed market). Even the 20th century socialists came to realize that the market wasn't some sort of exploitation mechanism that hurt the average man, but changed their argument to say the market was actually too productive and led to the evil of a materialistic society. Regardless, the general principle of all profits being derived by exploitation of the workers is not an idea taken seriously by any of today's economic schools, as far as I can tell. Apparently you

I said that exploitation may have taken place in the instances you list, only because I'm not familiar with these cases. Were these people being forced to work in these conditions? If there is no coercion going on, I fail to see how it can be considered exploitation. An employer shouldn't be obligated to pay their employees a certain amount or guarantee their safety. We routinely accept certain risks in many professions because eliminating risk completely would prove both impossible and so costly as to plunge large chunks of the population back into real poverty.

As for the story of the woman who died due to being denied water and shade, the owners of that farm could easily be put in jail. It's called depraved indifference. If you take actions which would expected to cause the outcome of harm to another, that is a crime, and we don't need any special new labor laws to prosecute it. This may also apply to some of your other examples.

To indict all businesses, or the free market as a whole, because of the actions of a few bad ones, is just silly. You really need to get a sense of proportion here. It would be like saying we should never have governments ever again because the Nazis killed a few millions jews. We need to make sure we prosecute criminal businessmen, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Theres a HUGE difference between a child working on their family farm or working with your father and learning a trade, as was done for centuries and a child being an industrial worker in a factory which, according to the 1900 census, would have included 1 in 6 American children.

We didn't have children working in factories in the 18th century because we didn't have factories... And believe it or not, the vast majority of factory child laborers were not working in those terrible conditions you hear about in the fiction of the era. Certainly some factory conditions were poor, and the adults suffered in the same environment, but were the conditions really that much worse than on some farms, where a child may have to be exposed to mounds of chicken feces, farm equipment, and other threats? I'm sure you have this picture of a child skipping through meadows carrying buckets of milk from the barn, but farm work was actually fairly hazardous in relation to many other professions of the 19th century.

Because they had no choice you moron. They weren't being paid a living wage. They were also being exploited and untill the formation of unions there was absolutly nothing they could do about it, other then starve.

Trade unions were around long before the period we're talking about... And if people had no choice but to starve before the formation of unions (early 19th century), why isn't the human species extinct? How did we get by before that?

It wouldn't take Johnnie Cochran to win the case. Compare the womans education and work history to her male counterparts and see if they're being paid the same.

You sound very naive right now. So many factors go into how much a person is paid. Unless you hired 2 exact same people at the exact same time in the exact same department and doing the exact same job, it will be very difficult to know whether there was discrimination. As these cases will be heard in civil court instead of criminal, there's a much greater chance of being found guilty when there was no wrongdoing. Certainly you must at least understand that knowledge in this world is imperfect and as such, mistakes will be made. Even if they reform tort law so that loser pays (a very necessary reform), the additional cost to the business for hiring a woman is not zero. The actual cost is unknown at this point, but good entrepreneurs and businessmen will do their best to factor this cost in, which will lead to less employment opportunities for women. This law will encourage exactly the kind of behavior it is looking to prohibit.

Finally, I find it strange that in each post, I respond fully to all of your charges and points, and you choose maybe 15% of my posts to respond to. I understand the other 85% is probably impossible for you to refute, so you just ignore it. But it does make it seem like you've conceded pretty much all of my argument at this point, and are now just hitting on every anti-business talking point you've ever heard in a vain attempt to feel like your ideas still make any sense at all.

Equal pay for equal work will do to women what minimum wage laws have done to blacks: Increase unemployment, which in turn makes it harder to gain the skills necessary to command a higher wage in the future. We are selling them down the river.