Minimum wages and why there should not be one....

right those people are served by the used car market I would rather go on to say only idiots by new cars.

you've moved the goal posts. We went from low income to people under the poverty level.

If you want to have an intelligent discussion you have to get your perimeters correct.

 

1. WHAT? Murder rates in a thread about min wage?
2. That's not the mantra, I gave you a link to the history of min wage.

 

I wrote Economic Wargames in 1999 and posted it on various sites and granted permission for anyone to copy and spread it. I have found it with searches in places I never heard of. Some people have come up with idiotic criticisms but the economics profession has been handing us all BS since WWII.

How has the depreciation of durable consumer goods been ignored for 70 years by people with PhDs? How does planned obsolescence relate to that depreciation?

Physics does not care about economics or humans.

 

The issue is minimum wage, which is set by the poverty level.

When wages go below the poverty level, our government steps in to help these people with food, housing, etc.

 

Ok, I'm not sure what you mean here.

Are you thinking that I should be deducting the cost of my washing machine in each of the three years since purchase?

 

Then why did you mention low income?

You can say you meant poverty level and I'll understand.

 

When you bought the washing machine it was added to GDP. Machines wear out with use but how fast depends on design, quality of materials and construction, etc. Don't engineers know how to test and measure that?

It is absurd that Bathtub Curves are not known in a society where everyone buys and uses technology. Economists talk about consumers being rational but don't advocate for good consumer information.

But the faster consumer junk falls apart and gets replaced the greater the GDP. Economists hardly mention NDP but their equation is wrong by ignoring consumer depreciation and promoting increasing GDP as the ultimate good.

 

Yes you have. You claimed that high property tax rates were the same as Georgism.

Right: he would pay for what he is taking from the community, not what he is contributing to it.

Just as those who talked correctly about rights talked about how slave owners should yield their property. In both cases, what is claimed to be property -- others' rights to liberty -- are not and never can be rightly property.

Because you think landowners rightly own others' rights to liberty, just as slave owners claimed to do, and for the exact same reasons.

Geoism is.

False. Like capitalism and socialism, they are systems of ownership. The taxation system merely implements that system of ownership.

Capitalism, like socialism and geoism, is an ownership system by definition.

Ad hominem.

No, that's just silly garbage with no basis in fact.

I only notice that you are flat wrong about that too, as you are about everything else on this subject. It very explicitly states that the market sets value.

As I told you before: by the market. But the free market, not the capitalist slave market.

 

Labor is like any other commodity. Wages are based on the value of the labor provided. If a high school dropout is upset that he isn't paid enough, he should go to school and get skills/education to increase the value of the labor he can provide. It as simple as that.

 

Why are you disingenuously pretending not to know the fact that I stated clearly and explicitly, in the very post -- #36 in this thread -- to which you purport to be responding, that the market sets value?

 

Maybe the high school dropout could figure out that having to read Catcher in the Rye was stupid.

Why don't we have a K-12 Unschooling Recommend Reading List?

The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood

 

Yes, but it's a side point & my guess is that we'd best focus on the topic of the thread.

--and when u mentioned that history "states it was to reduce those working below the poverty level" my response was that the min.wage failed to do so and that the commonly repeated phrase "reduce those working below the poverty level" was meaningless except for advocating the position (definition of "mantra" here).

Question: Are we both clear together on the fact that min. wage laws do not raise people out of poverty, but rather they make marginal workers unemployed?

 

There is a lot of information available on line concerning the reliability of home appliances. Plus, there are companies like Consumer Reports that include that information for specific models.

You can't really be a good capitalist and argue for companies to produce higher quality. Quality costs money, and there are reasons for some buyers to choose cheaper models. Capitalism says that quality is one of the features, not some absolute objective. For example, someone who owns an apartment complex may find that outfitting the apartments with expensive appliances doesn't pay off.

So, you ARE proposing a depreciation schedule for home appliances, personal vehicles, etc.?

 

OK, the point there is that if you remove tax on labor (income tax) and move it to property tax your property tax absolutely will go up.

I don't accept that. We oppose slavery regardless of what the taxation system is.

Our issues with employment today don't have to do with the right of someone to go somewhere else to work.

It's not an ownership of humans, though. And, you still have failed to address how land would be priced - what method is used for that.

I would contend that the price of land would still be set by capitalism. It's not likely that we would have an agency that would evaluate how much each parcel of land is "worth". Today, we do have agencies that evaluate property for taxation purposes, but their primary input is the price set by capitalism.

It's an insult to YOU that I don't respect Communism???

Seriously?

"The market" - capitalism, right?? Land is a product that has various features of location and possibility, with the price set by capitalism, not by some other system.

 

I agree that it does not raise people out of poverty, Although it probably could.
And no, I don't agree that it makes marginal workers unemployed. If there's still demand from product/services, the worker will remain employed.

 

Please explain what you are objecting to.

Your post is long. Are you questioning tax incidence? Are you questioning how property value is set? Or what?

 

What's your alternative?

Are you promoting the idea that corporations set the lowest wage they can (the capitalist solution) and then the tax payers pay for the difference between that and cost of living? This would be the old Walmart model.

Would it meet your objectives to have significant numbers of working individuals who can't buy food and housing? If so, what objectives are those?

 

Rubbish, l already mentioned consumer reports in my essay.

Depreciation and Depreciation Allowance are two different things. I am not talking about consumers filing depreciation with the IRS. Requiring manufacturers to supply reliability data on products does make sense. The government specifying how they must be tested also applies.

I worked for IBM. I never saw the word benchmark. I had to write my own benchmarks to test performance of the 5100 against the Datamaster 23.

 

Great - I'm in favor of requirements for reporting reliability data. Perhaps what we have now isn't good enough.

I guess I'm not so sure what other changes you are asking for.

 

I am saying that our entire economics profession is composed of lying morons.

Raymond Goldsmith a PhD economist was writing about the depreciation of consumer durables in the 1950s. He died in 1988. I didn't find out about him until 2005.

We are told about GDP constantly while NDP is rarely mentioned. But by not taking consumer depreciation into account economists are not describing what is really happening and making the replacement of consumer products look like economic growth by ascribing it to GDP. In actuality it is just running on a treadmill going nowhere .

 

OK, I'll say the following and maybe you can point to what I'm not understanding.

If I buy another washing machine what's the process? Do I need to report that I wanted a second washer vs. a replacement? When we count housing starts, do we count how many buildings are being replaced vs. how many are on raw land?

With many of our economic measures, the important aspect is in the change, not the absolute value.

A similar case is that we have various measures of employment. None of them is great for purposes other than noting change.

Today, GDP is pretty well accepted internationally. I'm really not sold on the idea that we would somehow be better served if we tried to switch to some new measure.

Economics is always statistical - not a one for one accounting of each individual's purchases or of each individual's actions.

 

Your repeated false claim that I or geoism have not specified how value is determined.

Right: it is the minimum length required to refute all your false claims.

I am stating the fact that you are objectively wrong about it.

I am stating the fact that you have falsely claimed that I or geoism have not specified how it is set.

 

Well, I continue with the belief that you have not specified how land value is set.

My view so far is that the geoism/georgism method for that is capitalism.

If you have another method, please state it.

 

OK, so you now admit that your claim that Georgism could be simulated by removing income tax and recouping the revenue by shifting to high property taxation rates was a fabrication. Good. Maybe we are getting somewhere.

It is nevertheless a fact. Slave deeds and land deeds both confer ownership of others' rights to liberty. The only difference is that slave deeds forcibly steal people's rights to liberty one person at a time, land deeds do it one right at a time.

You don't oppose slavery if you think someone can rightly own others' rights to liberty, whether they do so with slave deeds or land deeds.

But they do have to do with the fact they they have to pay a landowner full market value just for permission to work anywhere.

It's ownership of their rights to liberty, which amounts to the same thing -- as proved, repeat, PROVED by the fact that everywhere in the history of the world that land has been privately owned and the government has not intervened massively to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners, the material condition of the landless has been indistinguishable from that of slaves.

That is mere repetition of the same bald falsehood you have already repeated a number of times even after having seen it proved false multiple times.

That is meaningless gibberish, like claiming it would be set by Cape Cod, carnosaurs, or conic sections. Capitalism is a system of ownership, not an entity capable of appraising real estate. It is most certainly not the market, which can exist under socialism.

Why not? What prevents such an agency from using the same techniques private appraisers use?

As I have told you multiple times, prices are set by the market, not capitalism. You are just spouting gibberish.

It's an insult to your readers' intelligence to claim that Marx's objection that Georgism was a last-ditch defense of capitalism is a reason to doubt it.

Wrong. Capitalism is not the market and the market is not capitalism. They are not even the same kind of entity.

No it isn't. Maybe that is the source of your difficulties: you think landowners somehow produce the land they charge others rent for permission to use.

Capitalism is not the market, nor is it an entity capable of setting a price for anything. It is a system of ownership, by definition. Your claims are gibberish, where they are not baldly false.

 

No. That is not your belief, because you are fully aware that I have stated several times, explicitly, in clear, simple, grammatical English, that the market sets value.

But you are objectively wrong about that, as capitalism is a system of ownership, and not an entity that is capable of setting value.

I have, multiple times, including above in this post.