Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "Bernie Sanders: "Open borders? That's a Koch brothers proposal"" video.

  1. +James Line >"You cannot support mass immigration and a welfare state and increasing wages at the same time" Thanks for admitting that socialism has to be inherently xenophobic, though.
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  2. Ayanle Farah Well, they follow minimum wage laws to follow the law. People with citizenship tend to complain about it, that's the whole point of using undocumented foreigners as they won't report the situation. So yeah, they increase wages when the min wage increases, otherwise they'd be in trouble. All things being equal, I could not in good conscience advocate for the end of minimum wage laws. But in principle, I am against the concept. In a world without minimum wage I'd be all in favour for a workers' union to be able to negotiate corporate policy that set their own minimum wage without government intervention, just like I would support someone who really needs the money and decides to do the same job for less. Right now, the real minimum wage for those people is zero. No job at all.
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  3. James Line You should tell the media then, stop this myth that we all want walled up borders.
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  4. Ayanle Farah So it's for their own good, huh? Look, there is such a thing as a better life. Would you take a marginally higher wage to live in a country where journalists are executed and left hanging on street signs?
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  5. Ayanle Farah Yeah, protect them from corporations... Look, we live in a world where unions will push for higher minimum wages and then make their workers exempt from minimum wage laws so that the have guaranteed jobs. The "protection" you're talking about breaks the first steps in the economical ladder. That's why people's first jobs are at age 21 and they're serving coffee at Starbucks with a college degree in their hand.
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  6. Ayanle Farah >"I don't think it's fair that somebody works 40 hours a week and still can't afford rent or food for their children" The percentage of people working 40 hours on min wage is extremely low. You also have to take into account that almost half of min wage workers are teens and young adults who live in their parents' house and thus aren't the sole earner. >"I would be glad to skip the first steps in the "economical ladder"" That's a really ignorant thing to say. I assume that you're either a college student or have found labour easily because otherwise you wouldn't say such a thing. You realize that to get to, say, the third step of the economic ladder you need either training or experience. Preferably both. So, when you try to land your first job and they ask you for experience, where do you earn that experience? Working? But there are no lower paying jobs. The bottom two steps of the ladder are missing. This situation plagues Western nations and is the reason why people with college degrees are stuck in dead end jobs.
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  7. Ayanle Farah >"Training to do what? Flipping hamburgers" The guy who's flipping burgers at your local join has a college degree. What now? Are you going to top what he has to offer? >"This conversation was never about requiring experience." Because you make the rules to suit your reality. You can't argue minimum wage if you're going to cherry pick factors to leave out. That's not a debate, that's one-sided propaganda. >"I'm not talking about young individual trying to climb a ladder at his dad's company." Guess what slick, nobody mentioned any of that. If all you can do is cherry pick what you don't want to talk about and Strawman the fuck out of this debate then I know you lost, and you know you lost even though I'm probably not going to hear you admit it. Climbing the economic ladder is now yuppies working for their dads. Fuck this shit.
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  8. Ayanle Farah >"I don't think any restaurant would care for college degrees. Why not try to work with something related to your degree?" All things being equal, if you're paying the same you're going to chose the person most qualified. More than half of people with degrees in the US do not work in the field they studied. Personally college has become a scam but having a degree still pulls some weight and employees take that in consideration. There's people bartending and working as bouncers with degrees. >"I don't think there's much of a economical ladder for a single mother who works at Target" 48.2% of the 3 million people earning min wage are between 16 and 24. That number is only 2.3% of all the wage and salary workers in the US. You're talking about a demographic so small it becomes obvious you're blowing the problem out of proportion. >"I also think that said mother, who's working the hours, should be earning a living wage." Define livable wage. Every place in the world has it's own cost of living. Does this livable wage have to accompany every single fluctuation in cost of living or inflation? Do you realize that by making labour more expensive, prices of goods will increase accordingly therefore undermining the concept of livable wage?
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  9. Ayanle Farah >"Yes, it should be more dynamic." It's a wild goose chase, but I guess "dynamic" makes for better politics. You still missed my point. There is no "standard" for livable wage. Location alone undermines the possibility of drawing up a number and apply it at a federal level. It wouldn't work even at state level. If we're calculating people's wages loosely based on their personal lives (such as adjusting for local cost of living) then it's just another form of welfare that we're forcing employers to pay. You're detaching the wage from the value of one's labour and turning it into charity.
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  10. Ayanle Farah I know what you meant, my point was that there are too many factors to keep track of. It's not a wage at that point, it has so much oversight and control by the government it's welfare. Hence "wild goose chase" - a perpetual game of catching up. >"The minimum wage of $1.60 an hour in 1968 would be $10.90 today when adjusted for inflation according to the Bureau of Labor" And mid-60's to mid-70's was a period of great economic expansion (above 4% GDP growth, with 67 or 68 achieving 5% growth) while the last few years were kind of shitty. You're literally comparing a golden age to a post-crisis period. >"But not trying to do anything and staying with the status quo doesn't seem like an appealing alternative to me at all." So it's the "we gotta do something" fallacy all over again, fuck what's being actually done, or the rationale behind it, or the results. It's just doing that matters. My point is that the idea has to make sense, when we can't even define what the living wage even is! Challenging the status quo? Please, your hypothetical single mother working at Target is going to climb the corporate ladder (not the economic one) as a result of getting a few extra bucks/hour? How the hell will it challenge status quo? Millionaires who employ small numbers of workers are for minimum wage hikes - they pay their experienced and qualified workers more already so they don't get affected, while their competition that relied on minimum wage workers is forced to either cut personnel or raise prices which makes them lose market share. I'm not sure sure of what the store is because I'm not American, but they're like wholesalers and most of their workers are highly qualified because they need to operate forklifts, etc and they'd love to see the Walmarts and Targets dying. If anything it reinforces the status quo, it puts experience and qualifications on a pedestal, the older people keep their jobs by pricing the younger workers out of the line of work. >"You use a lot of loaded words such as charity and welfare. People are still putting in work since it's hourly pay." What for? It would actually be easier to just pay everyone a livable wage. Minimum wage jobs would be unpaid and every other job would get a pay cut - ie if a doctor is making 50 bucks an hour and the livable wage is 15, he now gets paid 35 because he's getting 15 from the government. That's what I'm getting at when calling it welfare. It's a system, and a government controlled one at that, rather than spontaneous trade relations between employer and employee. Your worldview is kind of simplistic, isn't it? If they're working 7 bucks worth of labour per hour and getting 10, those three extra bucks are charity. Just putting in the work doesn't automatically make every cent worth it. Example: I never got any money for doing chores but there's families that do that. Those kids get more money than their labour was worth - it's their allowance and whatnot. Making a bed, washing some dishes and putting the clothes on the drier can be considered "putting in the work" but the reward for it is greater than the value of the labour. Just because there was work involved doesn't mean every cent was deserved.
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  11. ***** Sanders will drive America into further trillions and trillions of debt, even the progressive/liberal side is saying his economic plan comes from Neverland.
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  12. +Jay West I don't see how capitalism "requires" open borders. If the borders are controlled to verify who is getting in and limiting visas, people are prevented from entering willy nilly but the businesses can 1) use visas to coerce foreigners into working for less than nationals (corporations like Intel bring Indian engineers to work for them for half the price of an American one, and they can't complain or their visa expires and they're legally required to go back); 2) outsource labour. In theory a perfectly capitalist aka completely free market would happen in a place freedom of travel is least infringed on. But it's not strickly necessary. The problem with your argument is that it exposes socialism to the "socialism always runs out of other people's money" meme. Socialism can't work because everyone will try to get it and benefit from it without giving back? Why is that concept true to people coming in externally, but not true to the natives to that country? A lot of people will exploit the system and not give anything back internally. But somehow immigration will be the problem? I mean the whole point of socialism is dismantling profits and private property. If socialism works so great, it should be able to deal with an influx of people from all over the world. Socialists claim that their planning allocates resources better than capitalism. No matter how many come in everyone will have jobs, houses, etc. What gives? It is xenophobia. Because the "common sense" argument essentially defeats socialism at the theoretical level.
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