Balancing FreedomFollow

the only thing keeping me from hitting it is the overwhelming fear that I will force more **** out of his mouth in the process.

Huh? They are the same thing. Well... If you don't toss in a qualifier like "When they really need them" of course. Employers determine whether to hire more workers based solely on whether hiring more workers will increase their bottom line. Period. If I could hire 5 more workers, but I'd make less money as a result, I'm not going to hire them.


Payroll taxes directly increase the cost of hiring someone. Which means that the amount of real dollar gains which have to be realized as a result of that hire must be greater in order for an employer to see a profit than they would need to be otherwise.

And just to toss in a relevant point: Mandatory benefits add to that cost as well. It's hard to calculate exactly how many people would have a job if the employer was not required to provide health benefits but are never hired because of them, but it's safe to say that the number is higher than zero and almost certainly much much higher (probably in the hundreds of thousands).

Given the choice most people would rather have a job without benefits than no job at all...





No, it's really no. The mistake you make is that you forget that the objective of business is to "pad their pocketbooks". They're going to do this whether you add additional costs or not. The point being that if you make it more expensive to hire people, don't complain if fewer people get hired. Seems kinda obvious, but there you have it...


Edited, Sep 21st 2009 5:02pm by gbaji

But how many people would not have a job if safety regulations did not exist or were not enfroced?

There are hundreds of companies that all they do is specialize in industrial safety equipment? Either manufacturing the actual equipment or designing the equipment for usage in larger factories. Hundreds of employees, from factory workers to engineers and sales persons.

So what would the net effect be if these companies went under but other companies could hire without worrying about machine safety...

Edited, Sep 21st 2009 6:52pm by TirithRR

No, idiot, because there are no intrinsic values in the universe. Values are imagined and arbitrary. That doesn't mean that you were the one that imagined them for yourself.

Where I'm heading, is to tell you to use your goddamn brain to determine how much things should be valued, actually taking some time out of your day to think about the value of objects, in whatever capacity you want to value them, but to do it for yourself, instead of depending on some value calculus that someone else has developed for the express purpose of decreasing your freedom, and you being so oblivious to what is happening that you happily sign away every freedom that you have while thinking that you are protecting them.



Keep buying those platitudes child, and I mean that in every possible meaning of the imperative.

Here is an excellent example where you try to pass off a ******** opinion as a fact because you can't state things properly. Your homework assignment is to figure out how to get your point across more directly and concisely. I know you can do it!!

This is one of the most dismissive, dense, irrelevant, and absolutely evil things that I have ever seen you write or imply. I can't honestly believe that you live in the 21st century and can even muster the moral inclination to write something like this as if it was the slightest bit relevant to any point other than making yourself look like an elitist and petty jackass who has no regard for the quality of human life. I am trying really, really hard right now to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your point is not something like, "things like mandatory benefits that benefit the worker should be less mandatory, or perhaps even stricken" but if that is in fact something even remotely close to your point, then it is physically disgusting and you should be ashamed.

Really? Stating that people would rather have half a loaf than no loaf is "evil"?

I thought I was stating a pretty reasonable assumption. Should we test this? Take a survey or something? I'm pretty sure if you presented the choices of "no job", and "job with no benefits" just about everyone would select option 2.






Sigh. It's like your head is clue-by-four proof or something...


Let's do a little thought experiment. Right now, you can go to a store and buy a cheap TV for maybe a couple hundred bucks, right? Of course, it'll be a small CRT, with no whistles and bells, but you can buy one. If tomorrow, we passed a law which required that every TV sold in the US must be a flat panel screen, measuring no less than 40 inches, with picture in picture, high definition, with energy saving modes, multiple inputs including component, hdi, vga, etc, what do you think would happen to the minimum price of a TV? It would increase. By a lot. And a whole bunch of people who could today afford a cheap TV could no longer afford any TV at all.

Wrapped your head around that? It's kinda obvious, but I want to make sure. Now. We could argue that we are ensuring that everyone has a better TV, but the largest actual effect would be to decrease the number of people who can afford any TV at all. Do you think that law is better for the consumer, or worse?


Now. Apply that to employment. It's the same exact thing. Today, you can get a low paying job pretty easily. It might not pay a ton, and you might not get benefits with it, but just like that little cheap TV, it's better than nothing. As the government mandates more minimum pay, benefits, and taxes be involved in employment, it increases the cost of employment, pricing it out of reach for many people. Employers are not endless buckets of money. As I stated earlier, they're going to hire exactly as many people will produce an amount of labor in relation to their pay which maximizes the profit of the employer. If hiring an additional worker would increase that employers bottom line, he would do it. He does not need a government law to tell him to do this. He'll just do it because it benefits him to do it.

Anything which increases the cost of labor changes that equation. The employer has to see a higher return on that labor in order to justify the cost of the labor in the first place. This is going to result in fewer jobs and/or increased costs of goods (which nullifies in part the higher pay/benefits of the job in the first place).

You can't get something for nothing. You can't magically make labor more productive. You can make it more expensive though. Which just seems moronic.

I very clearly outlined the conditions underwhich this statement is relevant.


If you wish to disagree with my assertion that by increasing the cost of labor you will decrease the total amount of labor purchased by employers, please do so. Of course, you're arguing against a pretty basic rule of economics (cost effects on the supply/demand function), but feel free to knock yourself out against a few centuries of established economic fact...

Edited, Sep 21st 2009 4:40pm by gbaji

No. But I suspect that our definitions of "benefit society" are radically different. For me, artificially creating circumstances in which anyone who does not reach a certain level of success is automatically cut out of something is *not* a benefit to society. Especially in a case like this where we aren't actually increasing the number of people who can afford said TVs, but simply preventing anyone who can't from being able to buy cheaper ones.


Just like what happens when we increase the minimum cost of labor, but don't do anything to make it so employers can better afford to pay that increased cost. Those who could afford to pay high wages and benefits for their employees will continue to do so unchanged. But those who cannot, now cannot afford to hire them at all. It's funny how many of the Left's proposals end out actually hurting the working class and poor the most and this is one of them.


Of course, once you understand that the actual agenda here is to increase the number of poor people who need government assistance to survive, it all makes perfect sense...


So what's your excuse?

No, it was a joke, see. I was suggesting that cutting the number of people with TVs would benefit society.

Here you go CBD:




Sigh...


I really hate when I hit "edit", when I mean to hit "quote"

So, funny story. When you replied with "I very clearly outlined the situation under which this statement is relevant." I thought "...no he didn't. What is he talking about?" So what I did, strangely enough, was scroll up and reread your post. Lo and behold, the only condition you set in the entire thing was at the beginning, which I assumed was referring to BrownDuck's post in the manner you've described. I figured "oh, since he says he set a condition, and clearly wouldn't try to lie when I can scroll up and read the post, he must have meant for that to pertain to the medical benefits as well."

Basically we have a few choices left here:

1. You lied about clearly outlining the situation, and you in fact did not clearly outline anything pertaining to my original quote of your post
2. You meant the beginning conditional to pertain to the statement about medical benefits, in which case my interpretation is still accurate.
3. You don't really know what you said and now you're just running around making claims hoping that a couple will be right.
4. You completely ignored what I said in the first place, or drastically misinterpreted my quotation of a single statement (with a specific declaration of it as a single example!) to be an attack on the post as a whole.

Do let me know which it is.



Grammar isn't reading comprehension. To someone of your esteemed intelligence that should be apparently obvious.

This coming from a guy who in one paragraph insists that we should all derive our own values for things around us, and then follows it with an insistence that people who actually do this are evil and we should impose value decisions on them based on what you think it most important...


It's funny really. In a "Gee this guy's had his head filled with a bunch of ideas, but hasn't really sorted them out yet" kind of way.





But how do you eliminate it? You're demanding something, but not saying how you'll pay for it. You can't get something for nothing. The resources the employer uses to make a product costs something. It's based on that exact valuation process you claimed was important to use. Labor also costs something. The cost of the goods produced always has to be equal to or higher than those costs when added together. It's math Pensive, not speculation.


If you increase the cost per unit for labor without changing the relative value of the product of labor, the difference has to be made up in either decreased total units of labor, or an increase in the real cost of the product of labor (note, that "cost" and "value" are not the same here).


What your proposing is the equivalent of insisting that if we have a box which can hold exactly 100 balls, and we take the balls out and replace them with ones that are larger, we can still fit 100 balls inside the box. You can't. You either have to increase the size of the box, or put fewer balls inside it.


That's analogous to increasing the total cost per employee, but thinking that this means that the employer will continue to hire the same number. Of course he wont. He'll either decrease the number so that they fit his profit margin (the size of the box), or he'll find a way to increase profits to make up for it (increase the size of the box).


Now you may argue that he should do those things, but it's not as simple as just saying he must, or placing some kind of moral valuation on it. It would be wonderful if everyone on earth could eat nothing but the best food, while lounging around in luxury all day getting a massage. From a purely ethical standpoint that would be "better" than a world in which people have to work hard and don't always get enough food or shelter and comfort. However, we can't just magically give everyone everything they want. No matter how much it might be nice to do so.



You're ignoring actual physical resources in favor of some kind of moralistic absolute valuation. Clearly, your model will fail at some point as what you believe we should have outstrips what we can actually afford. Whether or not this particular demand for labor hits that point or not is debatable, but it does the discussion no good to simply dismiss the fact that there is ultimately only so much actual productive output to work with.