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The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy"

I'm the only libertarian I know who is provisionally in favor of a universal income. But once you have that, you don't need a minimum wage and in fact you don't want one, because you want to maximize the number of people who can find work. The minimum wage exists to prevent exploitation, but if everybody automatically receives enough to live on, that's no longer a factor.

That's okay, I'm the only person I know who's talked in support of the idea too. To me a guaranteed minimum income just... Makes sense to me. That's the closest we'll get to each person getting the opportunity to pursue happiness.

I'm way crazy liberal, but if everyone had the ability to take care of themselves, and live as they want, well, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. You're right. (But then, I'd want health treatment to be like police/fire. Something everyone needs, and we're better all paying for.)

So, yeah. The military, police, fire, health, roads, public school to about 10th grade, I guess the post office as we need a way to ensure public notices, and provide a baseline life through these means? I'd good with that. That's the only government I need.

Just about any other social institutions can be done by people living on their GMI and aided by donations.

The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy"...

Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically?

At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption

At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?

I hope more people realize this. What the rich have more of beyond a threshold is power not objects. If you take the "stuff they own" and give it to the poor, each person on this planet will get very little. They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all. We need to have more energy and resources to actually improve the conditions of the masses. Just moving the money around will not get us there. Things like dematerialization: "Turning Gramaphones into iPods into a feature on a tablet" is an example. Elimination of books and paper is another. Education is slowly moving in that direction. To learn something, the student needs to spend time and effort.... not gobs of money to buy a piece of paper. Medicines cost pennies to produce. We spend an inordiante amount of human effort to discover them. If we get better at this, we can spend a lot lesser on health-care. Such changes bring huge improvements. If you need to work only 3 days a week. You save 40% on travel. Earn less and spend less. You will have lesser traffic woes too. Parents could participate more in the education of their kids and take better care of the elderly. Asking people to mine with spoons instead of shovels so that they can all be busy is silly. Jobs are a milder version of slavery for most people. Let us liberate the planet from this as much as possible. But if people had to switch to a 3 day work week, we need to ensure that the quality of life should not drop but improve by doing so.

>They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all.

That's enough of an improvement for our standard of living for me.

We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...

>We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...

Many would say the two go hand in hand, or are ultimately synonymous.

On the whole 21 hour work week thing, I think one way to deal with the compensation issue would be to enforce maximum gaps. By which I mean, write a law that says the top compensated individual in any company can only be compensated so many times the bottom. So if an executive wants to be paid more, after a certain point he has to raise everyone else's salary too. This would also help deal with the issue of executive salaries being roughly 400x average wage. Limit that to 50x or 10x. Money would be much more evenly distributed.

That sounds like a fine idea, but realize that just before the law comes into force affected companies will move their operations overseas [1].

Do you support punitive tariffs on foreign imports?

[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00....

Charging a fine? No. Disallowing the entry of their goods into the US market entirely unless they obey US labor laws? Yes.

It'd cause all manner of hell on implementation, because it would completely turn the world economy on its head. Right now we're really dependent on abusing the hell out of cheap labor and countries that don't have a solid regulatory structure. So while we sit here and claim to decent labor and environmental standards we're consuming a ton of goods produced with out them at a cheap cost. But the world is a single, closed system. At some point, this is going to catch up to us.

We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market. Period. Suddenly, outsourced labor looks a lot less attractive. If you can't abuse the cheap labor and lax environmental laws in other countries, then there's no reason not to put your production in the US.

Of course, this all depends on the fact that the US is one of the top consumer markets in the world, and that companies will do anything to avoid being cut out of it. The window of opportunity in which that's true is closing fast with the rise of China. And may, actually, already be closed. Of course, if you could get multiple high consumption countries together and agree on mutual labor standards to enforce and that any company not fulfilling them would be kept out of any of those countries then it'd have a lot more power.

And of course, there's always the fact that any companies that refused could always be replaced by start-ups.

The change over would be a little rough and chaotic, and it's hard (impossible?) to predict what would actually happen during it. But if we manage to make it through it, the resulting world would have a level playing field for labor and environmental practices. It's difficult to predict the effect it would have on living standards for those of us currently abusing everyone else. Our living standard might drop a bit as the price of goods goes up. But then, if this were linked with the previously mentioned law, a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs for everyone. So it could mean everyone's living standards go up -- despite a rise in the cost of labor and therefor goods.

I'd be really interested to see someone model it.

Consider that an obvious response by the targeted country to tariffs on their exports is to erect restrictions on imports from the initiating country - a situation which can easily result in mutual escalation of trade barriers and one which the WTO was formed to prevent.

Rather than unilaterally barring goods from entering the US which do not comply with our labor and environmental laws, a better approach could be to work within the WTO framework to establish common labor and environmental standards.

Of course, this is strongly resisted by developing nations who justifiably see the strict pollution controls as a way to prevent their transition from vassal states to competitive members of the global economy (see: Carbon Taxes).

Ah, but we're not placing a tariff on any particular country nor banning goods from a particular country. Rather we're targeting multi-national corporations. And part of that targeting includes an increased wages requirement. A minimum wage gap. So countries are really going to protest us insisting that companies that want to sell goods in the US pay their citizens more? I would they'd be willing to take the environmental standards if they came linked with a significant increase in pay.

When the US outlawed US-based financial institutions from honoring transactions originating from the worldwide online gambling industry, Antigua sued the US at the WTO and won the right to violate ~$21M worth of copyrights (annually, IIRC).

This case illustrates two points, first, targeting companies or industries rather than their host nations is irrelevant from the perspective of the WTO. Second, the WTO has some very powerful tools for forcing member nations into compliance with its rulings.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21i...

...a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend,...

This doesn't follow. Most of the wealth that's "caught up in the top of the economy" is simply the means of production. I.e., Zuckerberg's wealth is mainly 30% of Facebook.

Suppose we redistributed 30% of FB to the lower classes. How will this raise living standards?

> "We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market."

Except that the current dynamics of our economy show that this isn't how actual consumers want to use their "consumer power". Rather, U.S. consumers can't seem to get enough of cheap goods from countries with lax labor laws imported by corporations like WalMart that exert market leverage due to their huge purchasing volume. Even manufacturers of high-end goods like iPads outsource their labor to places where labor is cheap, because they understand that very few people would want to spend $1000 on an iPad, even if the extra cost went toward promoting social justice.

So who is the "we" that's going to "force" this? We live in a democracy, and consumers are also voters. These voters may not be thrilled to re-elect politicians who enact laws that increase the prices of consumer goods (or energy, or other commodities that affect the average person's standard of living). And this isn't something abstract that people will think only affects somebody else -- it's something they'll feel every week when they have to spend a much larger percentage of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. (Yes, the price of food will go up under your proposal since it's largely dependent on oil, which comes from many countries that don't have U.S.-style labor and environmental standards.)

> By which I mean, write a law that says the top compensated individual in any company can only be compensated so many times the bottom.

That wouldn't work that well. Companies would just split along payment levels, then. I.e. either outsource the peons, or take the CEO on loan from McKinsey.

Good point, you'd have to link it with some sort of law with respect to ownership stakes and control.

Seems more like a boon to lawyers to me than anything else.

Given the typically disproportionate cost of housing in most areas, I'm in favour of utterly massive protectionism/nationalization of housing infrastructure and other non-tradable goods fundamental to human need; disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home.

What isn't usually mentioned in discussions like this are the resulting lack of returns on investment on behalf of future retirees, but to be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would rationally expect an economy to be stable enough that they could plan not to work for 40+ years of their life - looking around the world, this delusion is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon; there are other valid models.

disallow all speculative investment in property (foreign or otherwise), voila, instant price drops and quality of life increase for anyone who doesn't already own a home.

Well, that or massive shortages and black market sublets. I agree that housing is way too expensive, but before coming up with new ways to solve it with central planning, how about fixing the central planning that's a primary cause of the problem (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046).

> The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there.

Don't let the status quo put you off of a good thing.

Rich people are not the biggest source of employment in the USA. Most people work for smallish businesses. Forcing those companies to pay very high minimum wage would put them out of business. Unemployment would spike, and how would that help anyone?

You're forgetting a key point. If productivity doubles, living on half your current salary would be no problem, because all that productivity will be driving down the cost of most things.

It rarely actually works like that anymore. Companies have gotten very good at controlling their supply to ensure they can maintain high enough margins that their executives can take home ridiculous paychecks.

Well theoretically that shouldn't be possible. Someone else should be there to expand supply and drive down your margins. Speaking on a macro level ef4 is right.

Any sources? Margins for most industry are quite public. And while corporate profits are at high levels historically, they aren't that high.

The problem is one more practiced 40 hour worker is less overhead, cheaper and usually more productive than two 21 hour workers.