Go ahead and guess: If Amazon and Walmart paid every employee $xx more per hour, their profit would go away

roller coaster wrote:

chidder wrote:

Obviously, genius. The problem is when they can't afford to buy stock because they are paid so little (indirectly causing the stock to go up and be even further out of reach).

Now you can shame them for their theoretical life choices to justify the impossibility they've been placed in. Go ahead.

Economics is the study of choices. So if you don't believe choices matter, then the above posters are correct that you don't understand economics.

So now we're just making sh*t up. You could have just stopped replying.

SocialismIsForIdiots wrote:

roller coaster wrote:

If workers want a share of the profits they can purchase stock in any publicly traded company just like anyone else. It's called a free market.

+1

Why do all of the "the world isn't fair" types all seem to think companies and corporations are evil robot overlords rather than actual people??

Of course! Why didn't I think of that! Why don't I just buy it! Well, genius, see my other point. Someone has to do the work to generate the money.

Your answer doesn't solve anything, it just shifts it onto someone else.

chidder wrote:

roller coaster wrote:

Economics is the study of choices. So if you don't believe choices matter, then the above posters are correct that you don't understand economics.

So now we're just making sh*t up. You could have just stopped replying.

While you can certainly find definitions of economics as "the study of choice" in a sort of econ textbook introduction kind of way, the discussion at hand is not that.

As an example, deciding whether the amount of your enjoyment from a coke is worth the $1.50 sticker price is "the study of choice" version of economics.

Investor vs Labor relations, and everything discussed at large scales like this, is not a study of choices. Or if it is, walmart employees aren't "economic agents" (individuals are not the players in this game) and it is not about their decisions as much as it is about investors', large employers', labor's, and government's . An individual working at walmart is so small and insignificant compared to the factors you are talking about, that their individual decisions (buy a coke or don't) don't really affect this discussion at all.

Tatar... wrote:

SocialismIsForIdiots wrote:

+1

Why do all of the "the world isn't fair" types all seem to think companies and corporations are evil robot overlords rather than actual people??

Of course! Why didn't I think of that! Why don't I just buy it! Well, genius, see my other point. Someone has to do the work to generate the money.

Your answer doesn't solve anything, it just shifts it onto someone else.

There is no solution... The only thing we can do is try to make as many people happy as possible and no system in the history of the world does it better than capitalism.

The "labor is more important than capital" argument has been tested and failed horribly.

SocialismIsForIdiots wrote:

chidder wrote:

Obviously, genius. The problem is when they can't afford to buy stock because they are paid so little (indirectly causing the stock to go up and be even further out of reach).

Now you can shame them for their theoretical life choices to justify the impossibility they've been placed in. Go ahead.

Who placed them there? Maybe the solution is to fix the family rather than trying to tear down everyone else to their level?

There is a large portion of the population that is simply too low iq to hold skilled labor jobs. They can’t go back to school to become engineers or retrained to write software. They will never own a meaningful business. In most cases this is not due to laziness but intellectual capacity.

We are sold that everyone has the same abilities and you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you have been around running long enough, you understand that talent is a prerequisite for success.

Opposite this, we really want to believe our own success is just hard work and everyone can be successful like us if they just tried. We then surround ourselves with others that are successful like us. Soon it is easy to believe the lie that everyone has the same potential.

It is easier to sleep at night if everyone less successful than you is just lazy.

I didn't say they were lazy I said they were morons.

The "average" IQ is under 100 which means at the very least HALF of the world isn't very bright.

Unfortunately, we live in a society run by emotional clowns who think equality is a desirable let alone realistic goal.

I haven’t read any arguments for equality. Mostly just pushing on the idea that some large companies could pay more if they were required. The “market” being the only driver setting wages isn’t necessarily the best solution just because it is the status-quo. Of course, your view will change if you are an owner/shareholder versus a worker. The company almost always has a major advantage in this relationship.

The natural state of unchecked capitalism over time is monopolies. It is a great system, but needs controls in place to keep it working for more than a few people.

They tried mandating higher wages in Seattle. Companies complied and raised wages and then promptly got rid of enough employees to absorb the increase in expenses.

There are VERY few things government doesn't make worse by trying to "help".

"They are simply too stupid to do a job that would allow them to climb out of poverty. Nevermind that their current jobs they are already doing could theoretically pay them enough to dig out. That would possibly slow everyone's 401k growth by .5% and that is intolerable. This is what economics is. You emotional communists simply don't have high IQs like me. Everyone without an IQ as high as mine deserves to suffer and toil. I cannot imagine a world in which large scale investment firms running on supercomputer trading programs are slightly inconvenienced and can't continuously increase their massive chunk of the pie for one day."

"Theoretically" if someone else was willing to give them more for their labor then it is actually worth.

I don't think you're an emotional communist I think you're ignorant and naive.

You are filthy rich compared to half the world even if you are an American on food stamps. If you're really feeling bad for the little guy you would be mailing half of your check to Haiti or Honduras rather than feigning outrage of economic injustice on your smart phone...

The better question is why can't I find a single person who isn't successful because Amazon or Walmart didn't pay them more money.

You have all the talking points of just some idiot conservative.

1. "Poor people have low IQs."

2. "They are rich compared to a Haitian so shut up."

3. "You are ignorant."

Groundbreaking and new. You changed my mind.

chidder wrote:

You have all the talking points of just some idiot conservative.

1. "Poor people have low IQs."

2. "They are rich compared to a Haitian so shut up."

3. "You are ignorant."

Groundbreaking and new. You changed my mind.

1. Do you think innate athletic ability has any influence on how good someone is at a sport? Why would success in other areas be any different?? The truth is the truth even if it hurts your feelings.

2. It's not just Haitians it's MOST of the people on Earth.

3. You are clearly ignorant...

You have all of the talking points of a 16 year old who's literally never heard any opinion other than the one he got from Trevor Noah or Samantha Bee...

There's only 109 countries on this list because most of Africa and some other places are too poor to even keep track of the numbers...

An American making the federal minimum wage of $10.95 an hour makes more money than the average person in all but the 25 richest countries on earth.

We are the richest country, idiot

SocialismIsForIdiots wrote:

chidder wrote:

You have all the talking points of just some idiot conservative.

1. "Poor people have low IQs."

2. "They are rich compared to a Haitian so shut up."

3. "You are ignorant."

Groundbreaking and new. You changed my mind.

1. Do you think innate athletic ability has any influence on how good someone is at a sport? Why would success in other areas be any different?? The truth is the truth even if it hurts your feelings.

2. It's not just Haitians it's MOST of the people on Earth.

3. You are clearly ignorant...

You have all of the talking points of a 16 year old who's literally never heard any opinion other than the one he got from Trevor Noah or Samantha Bee...

1. Stupid people are allowed to be stupid. They don't get paid so little because they're incapable of making their business money. They get paid so little because of the inherent adversarial nature of workers and investors, which they are on the short end of thanks to anti-union efforts and monopolistic practices, greenlit by millions of dollars spent on lobbying.

2. "Better than most" is not a remotely adequate argument as you think it is. It is not remotely relevant to the discussion of American labor vs American capital. Suggesting that 1st world workers should live like 3rd worlders while they produce vastly more value than 3rd worlders is idiotic to the extreme.

3. Ignorant of what? What fact am I unaware of? What stat do I not know?

Incredible how stupid and repetitive you idiots are.

You know we could solve all this by unionizing all of these mega-corporations & let workers figure out how much more profit sharing can happen. The problem with everything in this thread is that there is zero incentive for that kind of oversight without workers demanding as a group. But then they'll spend as much money as they need to to break any kind of an organizing effort. That should tell you how much more they could afford to spend if their calculated decision is to spend a ton of money on union busting because that money is actually change to them.

NERunner0353 wrote:

You know we could solve all this by unionizing all of these mega-corporations & let workers figure out how much more profit sharing can happen. The problem with everything in this thread is that there is zero incentive for that kind of oversight without workers demanding as a group. But then they'll spend as much money as they need to to break any kind of an organizing effort. That should tell you how much more they could afford to spend if their calculated decision is to spend a ton of money on union busting because that money is actually change to them.

Yea the union did a great job on the auto and steel industries...

chidder wrote:

2. "Better than most" is not a remotely adequate argument as you think it is. It is not remotely relevant to the discussion of American labor vs American capital. Suggesting that 1st world workers should live like 3rd worlders while they produce vastly more value than 3rd worlders is idiotic to the extreme.

This is why nationalism is so appealing to the Right. It's so they can more easily pit workers against each other. The example here is American worker against Haitian worker.

They like to pretend everyone in every nation has the same economic interests, but that isn't true. The motivations of American capital is the same as Haitian capital and that's to assume control of profits generated by workers in those respective countries. The fact the American economy is larger just shields this obvious fact.