Comments by "Jeremy Barlow" (@jeremybarlow2291) on "Joe Rogan - The Minimum Wage Destroys Jobs" video.

  1. When an ultra-high-net-worth individual says, “you can’t pay someone less than the market value of their labor” he is telling the truth, but he is leaving out an important fact about that market value. The anti-abolitionist’s most successful argument against freeing the slaves, the argument that meant Lincoln only earned 38% of the popular vote while winning a 4 way electoral college victory in 1860 was that freeing slaves to compete would drive wages down for industrial workers in the North! The reality is that paying no actual pay, but providing a roof over a slaves’ head, clothes on their back, and food in their bellies, even in the bondage slave system kept wage slaves wages high enough that they could earn a living that provided them with enough money for the basics of survival. The part of the equation that is being left out is that in a capitalist market economy as opposed to a slavocracy which valued slaves as property and kept them fed and housed and clothed as an investment. In the wage slave economy, the wage slave is disposable and replaceable. The value can be less than the cost of living. As employees are not balance sheet assets in the wage slave economy, actual bonded slavery was intrinsically better for more workers. I can make that argument about markets and the logic is not flawed. You know it, I know it, and that rich asshole knows it. Now a minimum wage law that is a living wage as Teddy Roosevelt a Republican first argued for in 1912 will provide a livelihood that is better than subsistence slavery and allows a worker to enjoy leisure time and have a life outside of work. What actual socialism -the workers owning and democratically controlling business enterprises and in certain situations of natural monopolies the consumers owning and democratically controlling the enterprise, when tried with the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain teaches us is that the poorest people can build real wealth and grow their economy through cooperatives which are true libertarian and democratic socialism those systems have only exclusively been used in an economy briefly in Catalonia in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and they were a success. Cuba is moving from state capitalism to this libertarian socialism as we speak and it seems to be working there too. The cooperative model has a 6x higher ten year survival rate than capitalist enterprise as well, so maybe we should actually try socialism which is not outside of a market, but is actually the only form of ownership in the free markets that will produce the best results. What this rich prick doesn’t know or understand or which he routinely lies about is refuted with hard data. Mondragon started with 6 worker owners in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain which was amongst the poorest parts of Europe. Today there are 120,000 worker owners at Mondragon with open membership to the workers after a probationary period that makes them owners of the business with one share that collects a patronage dividend based on their proportion of the total man hours of the profits and pays them a market salary and benefits. As worker owners they are outside the unemployment system and the disability system so they take care of themselves. They each get one vote in the management equal to all other workers. They on average have a net worth of $750k and the Basque region today is one of the wealthiest in Europe because of Mondragon which is I believe like the 6th largest employer in all of Europe or something like that.
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