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Comment by EekSnakePond | Hacker News Reader

Yes we do.

It's just those who have benefited from this arrangement the most happen to also control the relationships that power mass media, which is then used to undermine alternative solutions as "racist", "sexist" and "evil" with no evidence whatsoever and immediately engage in mob swarming and plebeian intimidation.

For example: Western Liberalism absolutely requires cheap brown people. (And that deep reliance ABSOLUTELY makes supporters of Western liberalism completely racist) If you make cheap brown people as expensive as Western natives, why do you need cheap brown people? And if you have "good-enough" AI, why do you need either?

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This is another criticism, not an alternative proposal.

Please give an alternative proposal.

Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour.

Watch as "serious economists" lie about:

* All of the jobs that will actually not disappear.

* All of the prices that will actually not rise (by much).

And try really really hard to pretend that:

* Raising the minimum wage doesn't channel profits into the pockets of workers.

What surprises me isn't that they lie. What surprises me is that people continue to believe them.

> Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour.

I don't know how you came to the conclusion of western liberalism being against raising the minimum wage when it's been a core tenet of their platforms for over a decade now.

But to $20 an hour is something neither liberal nor conservative has EVER advocated for as until there is a public uproar for it, both will always side with corporate interests.

That said, your proposition is an alternative solution that I have never heard anyone of actual influence from either side of the political spectrum (outside of Sanders) ever bring up.

In direct inflation terms the minimum wage was ~10.50 / hour in 1968 or around the current minimum wage in France. Though as a percentage of the economy it was more than 20$/hour. Thus, it's not quite as clear cut as you are suggesting.

PS: Inflation is not really a single number as some but not all things end up costing less to produce over time. In other words, A may get more expensive while B becomes less expensive. Which makes long term inflation calculations more complicated.

Despite the fact that political language in the United States confuses this, 'Western Liberalism' is not the same thing as 'Progressivism'. Western Liberalism is about liberal democracy combined with free-ish markets. This can come with a minimum wage, or it might not. It encompasses the vast majority of the political landscape in most Western countries and everyone from American conservatives and to British labour fall under its domain.

I don't quite believe I'm hearing somebody say "aside from one of the 3 Presidential candidates who were all in the news constantly, nobody said this so nobody has EVER advocated for it".

The fact that the corporatist extremists ("moderates" like Obama and Clinton) squeeze this kind of idea from the public discourse is exactly what led to declining incomes which in turn is what made people furious enough to vote for Trump.

Out of curiosity, what do you suppose are the long-term effects of raising minimum wage?

If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

If a McDonalds needs to pay all of its employees twice as much money, how long before they double their food prices to make up the difference?

I feel like the working poor in this country get a terrible deal in this world - we definitely need to make conditions better. But does raising minimum wage actually do that in the long run? Or does it just increase inflation and destroy any savings the poor might have?

> If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

Remember, your tenants are now able to move to gentrified areas, their wages allow that. Some might want to get a mortgage for a house they could not dream of previously. So now your apartments will have to compete with much wider selection of property. You'll raise prices definitely, but not as much as you would think, and you'll spend most of the difference doing renovations and spending on security.

It also assumed increasing minimum wage would increase everyone wage. It's not going to boost a retired persons income or a CEO's pay for example.

Coincidentally, housing prices (buy/rent) are income-elastic and one of the criticisms of a blanket UBI, not just minimum wage.

Did anyone compile a list of ways to handle this problem? I'm all for UBI, but this feels like a show-stopper, and I don't know of any workaround.

Not that I know of. Traditionally it has been handled by attaching spending restrictions to the income assistance - e.g. food stamps, medicare, unemployment, student loans, etc.

The market will solve it if the number of housing units is large enough compared to the number of families, provided no one vendor owns too large a fraction of them.

It seems pretty wasteful, though.

>Out of curiosity, what do you suppose are the long-term effects of raising minimum wage?

* An increase in inflation but nowhere near enough to offset the rise in wages at the lower end.

* An increase in growth as the money multiplier effect kicks in.

* No real change in employment.

* Share prices fall and lowered earnings projections for classes of business that rely on minimum waged labor.

* As a sort of general guide, look at Australia.

>If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

It depends. This does not happen in a vacuum. If there are a lot of apartments coming on the market at the same time rent could stay the same or even go down.

Every business is subject to competition which would moderate the effect of inflation and tons of businesses that manufacture often respond to an increase in demand by raising production rather than prices (e.g. car manufacturing).

If it went up to $20 I'd project something like 4% inflation.

>If a McDonalds needs to pay all of its employees twice as much money, how long before they double their food prices to make up the difference?

If you want to see what happens to McDonalds, look at Australia:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-in-australia-vs-amer...

They A) raised the prices, B) raise the quality, C) actually kept the big mac price more or less the same, C) are facing competition from nicer restaurants (people have more disposable income and use it in restaurants other than el cheapo mcdonalds).

>I feel like the working poor in this country get a terrible deal in this world - we definitely need to make conditions better. But does raising minimum wage actually do that in the long run?

Yes.

>Or does it just increase inflation and destroy any savings the poor might have?

The poor have debts, not savings. Demand pull inflation caused by increased wages is just about the best possible outcome for them, but it is HORRIBLE for the rich and the rich have a very well oiled propaganda machine. Hence the "why don't you propose solutions" crowd and the downvotes on actual solutions ^^.

>Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour. Watch as "serious economists" lie

appears a bit of a strawman argument. Googling "$20 minimum wage" the only thing on page one is an article explaining the obvious that people would lose jobs if you did. http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/20/why-shouldnt-we...

>explaining the obvious that people would lose jobs

That is neither obvious nor is it true. It is the opposite of what is observed experimentally. When the effect of minimum wage hikes is measured across state borders employment remains static.

A significant rise of the minimum wage would rapidly accelerate the ongoing process of automation making people unemployable.

Already there are swaths of jobs that could be done better by machines but currently it's cheaper to hire a "cheap brown person" as the parent post says by outsourcing it. For example, the manufacture of clothing and footwear which currently employs many millions of people worldwide, mostly in SE Asia. As soon as rising wages pass that barrier and companies pony up for the required capital investments these jobs are never coming back.

There will always be more desires for new jobs/tasks that could be done - but the market price for them will be below the minimum wage, so they will happen only as hobbies.

>There will always be more desires for new jobs/tasks that could be done - but the market price for them will be below the minimum wage

That's a brave and entirely unsourced claim.

Given that this never happened in the past (e.g when almost the entire workforce was automated out of farm work), why are you so confident it will happen in the future?

How, exactly, does Western liberalism absolutely require cheap brown people?

Every single thing you touched (And every single thing connected to what you touched) to type that statement was made overseas.

Welcome to the international system of currency and labor arbitrage, a core prerequisite for any democratic experiment. Democracy has ALWAYS and WILL always require slaves.

You are conflating economic neoliberalism (which is neither new nor contemporarily liberal) with social liberalism. They are not the same and nobody is pretending that they are.

I still fail to see your connection:

1: Slaves

2: Democracy

3: ????

4: Profit(?)

Could you explain with links or examples how exactly slavery (or economic peonage, depending on your definition), is required to maintain a democracy?

> You are conflating economic neoliberalism with social liberalism.

I agree it appears I'm making this conflation. But

> nobody is pretending that they are:

Is not an honest statement. Any attempt to make cheap brown labor more expensive through legislation (See the Trump protests) or even by IMPROVING their quality of life (See gentrification) is instantly fought off as racist. The powers that be have deeply merged international currency flow with Western liberal morality after the 1940s and use their sacred cows as hostages to stifle any threats to their power.

Gentrification pushes low income people out of their communities by increasing the costs of living there beyond their capacity to absorb those costs. It is also not inherently racist (as it affects anyone who is low income), but is one mechanism through which racial inequities are exacerbated in our country.

>Is not an honest statement. Any attempt to make cheap brown labor more expensive through legislation (See the Trump protests) or even by IMPROVING their quality of life (See gentrification) is instantly fought off as racist.

For the third time, I ask for a specific example. A link. Something. Otherwise I think you are either trolling or positing biased statements that are not backed up by facts.

To me, I think you are objecting to capitalism more than democracy. That certainly chases labor arbitrage however I do think its a poor mischaracterization to attribute labor arbitrage to slavery. That doesn't mean arbitrarily small amounts of compensation don't effectively become slavery, but instead that pareto optimality is not the only way to prevent slavery.

Trade which is popular these days is not the same as slavery which is thankfully rare. The Chinese who make much of the stuff have done pretty well over the last few decades.

It doesn't. Western liberalism has, at times, relied on cheap white people, too.

But the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously, while demand for skilled labor has spiked. See, for example, the IT industry's need for "cheap brown people" (from India, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Asia). They're only marginally cheaper than white citizen labor, and a lot more expensive than unskilled labor. This has been offset some by outsourcing, so the labor can have a lower cost of living in their native country, but still.

Brown labor is always, always an act of desperation. A racist society would rather not have brown people at all, and only employs them if whites cannot or will not do the job.

"the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously"

here, the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously here

That's only because unskilled labor has become much more expensive here (unions, safety regulations, overtime, etc).

No, the need has gone away. Take, for example, moving a few tons of concrete rubble a couple hundred feet. The way it used to be done was to have a group of men hammering it into movable chunks, and another group of men carrying the chunks by hand. Now, you just use a Bobcat. One man can do the work of twenty.

Any job that requires a lot of muscle and not much brain has been more or less wiped out. That's a lot of jobs.

That's only true where the cost of labor is too high. Go visit a construction site in India and you'll see a lot of tasks done the way you've described above.

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