I think that's what scares people here so much, at least it scares the shit out of me. I have a job that in 19 years I'll be able to retire with a full pension and then go do something else with my life but I don't trust that my 401k or pension or social security will be around when I'm ready to retire.

I think it's the same reason. Both Greeks and Americans are being sedated by their governments, all along with a false dream, that either they don't give a damn as long as their get their share, or they are just being ignorant to what is happening around them. When the ball finally drops, everyone will point fingers at one another and at their leaders.

There's a lot of corruption in the world and I believe that most don't want to see it, since ignorance is bliss.

Swedes were pretty degrading towards the Greeks and their situation but this year we are looking at an unemployment rate of 8-10% as opposed to last years 7-8.

Here in Sweden even if we work our asses of the pension funds will be dry by the time I'm 65 since there were a lot of people being born in the late 40's that will receive most of it leaving us that came after with nothing.

There's not much difference anywhere else in the world, all the industries are sent off to China and India. All the software development goes of to China, Russia and India. Cheap labour at the cost of higher unemployment rates, leaving a state with more problems than needed.

Yeah well unfortunately that doesn't stop politicians from selling us out to secure the wants and needs of their big business friends, or from making sure that they get their raises and their retirements secured.

Part of it is our fault for playing along and only waking up when it's too late. But who are we to bite the hand that feeds?
You can draw a small parallel to the Matrix.

In defense of the masses the government makes it hard for people do see anything but the facade they put up. Just look at one of the main causes for the situation we have here in the states, the housing market. What kind of government lets a regulated market make the kind of choices they did and then sweep it under the rug, and that's just a small piece of the puzzle. I guess in the end when one domino falls they all do.

I feel that the government should just get out of the economy entirely. The only real interest they have preventing monopolies from forming.

Corporations aren't inherently evil. A corporation is simply a group of people who voluntarily agree to start a company in the hopes of maximizing the return on their investments in the form of profit. Like most everything in life, some are run by good people, others are run by less scrupulous people.

But if there was no minimum wage, I'm not entirely sure it would throw us back into the dark ages of industry. Yes, there were people who worked long hours for little pay, but at the same time, there were a lot of monopolies. I'm not entirely sure what would keep that from happening again, except societal expectation. Businesses would all have to conspire to drop wages, and there surely would be businesses springing up to take employees from them by offering higher wages if that would happen. Unions would also be a safeguard.

Not to mention, how does all this explain why Henry Ford paid his employees so well or instituted 8 hour work days?

Cause he was a damn smart man and listened to his workers. Besides 8 hour work days are another double entendre, most people who need to work more than 8 hours a day can't because their employers won't let them and the other half get forced into working all the time because they are salaried and it's cheaper to work them to the bone than hire more people.

Then when you finally get promoted to a position where you're allowed to, hire extra people if you think it will make a difference in sales. It's that simple. Please do keep in mind that this is what business is about.

Your customers always want things faster, cheaper and better service. As a business, you optimize things to have the best business you can have. If your model works, you get satisfied customers.



Yeah, no shit. But who doesn't?

Newsflash: everyone is understaffed, overbook, underpaid, overtaxed... you name it. It's called optimizing. The token minimum wages across North America aren't gonna prevent any store worth a shit from hiring an employee if it results in significantly more business. It's pocket change, for Christ's sake.




What are you talking about? Of course I believe you should be paid because you worked your ass off and are good at what you do. Isn't that exactly what you've been telling us here on this thread? You've been telling us your success story and how your store hired you above minimum wage, and how you've been promoted because of your efforts 5 times. And none of this was prevented by minimum wages. You make it sound like minimum wage is welfare. All it does is fix the bare minimum wage you can work for in a given state. It's a ridiculous number across the board, not fucking opulence! It just says: here we set the absolutely lowest bar for the shittiest wage you can get for an hour of work. And the number is indeed shitty. It's got nothing to do with being "entitled to some paycheck".



Good stores have the number of employees required at all times to optimize their business. If they need an extra guy, they'll hire him. 2-3$ an hour less is not going to change that.



It's got nothing to do with being evil. Business is business. Your business is profit based. It doesn't mean you treat the customers like shit. Quite the contrary. But they're customers. Not friends. We all look out for our own interests, as it should be.



You ominous goof. Yeah, why stop at 3$ an hour? Why not 50 cents an hour while you're at it? It's gonna be even more efficient!
How the fuck do you live on 24 bucks a day? What kind of sadistic fuck would be down with that?



So if it's not of significance, why remove the minimum wage? If it wasn't significant, it wouldn't do what you pretend it might do in that sentence below:



More people working? If the wages drop, people will be hunting for hours everywhere. If they hoard more hours, that doesn't create new jobs. They will struggle financially, be exhausted and their quality of life will decrease. That's all you're gonna achieve by abolishing the minimum wage.



Ah, the evil illegal immigrants! But hey, we know you're clamoring in that other thread to keep your guns. Maybe you should shoot them?

You're so typical.

Your assholish attitude is the only thing that's typical. I have more important things to do than refute or argue with everything you say. I said my points, people can take them for what they are. I stand by my ideas and thoughts. I don't see a real reason for minimum wage to exist. All it does is subsidize legal work in this country to be more expensive than it should be.

His tone was rude but his arguments were solid, and your last post is just a classic example of "lalala I can't hear you, I'm not changing my mind no matter what you say, lalala". Oh well.

PS: pretty much every civilized industrialized country has minimum wage. It's important to quality of life. Removing it is as anathema as not having universal health ca.... oh wait. Nevermind you don't believe in that too. Once again, ideology trumps facts.

Now that's just hitting below the belt , I can't speak for my fellow Americans here but I for one support the idea of universalized health care and I'm sure a lot of others do as well.

Maybe y'all missed it, but I replied to the same points without being a dick at the end of the last page.

viewtopic.php?p=2197438#p2197438

Sorry you felt I was being a dick. If we're talking about music or whatever, I'm not usually like that.

But when someone parades the notion of 3-bucks-an-hour-servility for second class employees, tries to justify it with the company struggling financially while simultaneously reveling in the fact he is gonna get stock options in said company with his next promotion, that's as nice as I can be.

I don't know if other people missed your message but I didn't BTW. Maybe it wasn't dickish enough to get a reaction?

I thought it was a good response. But since the original message was written to me, I felt the need to reply myself.

I'm pretty sure her comment was directed specifically at orionmetalhead and not anyone else.

You're probably right Riffs but it's worth being noted that there are lots of people in this country who would love universal health care much like you guys have up there.

Yes, my comment was aimed at Orion and his libertarian "unregulated free market solves all economic and social woes" pipe-dreamer kind.

Pining for an unlikely scenario just because we'd have it better that way has made the alcohol manufacturers extremely wealthy and many locally owned and operated bars and night lounges able to afford limited table service. Whingeing is good for the economy. As far as pipe dreams, I like how Greg Graffin put it in "I Want to Conquer the World."

Morrigan and Zod both replied civilly to my points. They always do and they know that for me, I live in a fantasy world that makes sense only to me and other libertarians. A large portion of the population in American are actually opposed to universalized health care. http://www.gallup.com/poll/158966/majority-against-gov-healthcare-guarantee.aspx

Great statistics. 4 days of asking people definitely yields absolute results about what the entire country thinks!

I have a feeling you are too young to have studied how statistics work. Yup, it's possible to have a really screwed result with a sample of that size, but if the company that did the legwork knows how to run their business, that could be, surprisingly enough, a rather good sample of the overall opinion.

Yeah and you could not know that I took statistics in college.

Even if they did that correctly to apply something like that to such a large population is kind of ridiculous. Unless they were going for a niche population like upper middle class americans or people who work in certain businesses which then might be correct but it would only be for that group. Statistics are real sketchy and the fact that they can be manipulated very easily to make it seem like the results are something that they aren't always has me questioning them.

Gallup is one of the most cited and reported polling groups in the country.

Umm... They're not always very accurate.

Due to their ignorance about what it actually is. I'm not surprised about this majority, though, considering the rhetoric going on about death panels and other idiocy.

There is a large enough difference to refute the point that the majority are in favor of universal healthcare.

Possibly, I'm just saying that in the United States, to claim that the majority is for Universal Health Care is inaccurate.

Well, I didn't say it.

Orion, why wouldn't you want universal health care? Our taxes already fund health care for the un-insured and less fortunate people so why not just take that next step. I'm curious as to how good it is and what the logistics of it are up in Canada so if you guys could provide a bit of insight that would be stellar.

It has nothing to do with logistics or fairness or anything. I just don't like the idea of a government-run system of healthcare in a country in which our framers and reason for claiming independence was to get away from an overbearing government.

There are definitely positives to Universal Health Care and there are reasons to support it's institution since it's worked in other countries to some effect however I believe that it is against the whole founding principals of our Nation. Call me old fashioned and nuts if you will but that's my opinion.

Additionally, I don't believe our taxes should be spent to fund the healthcare of the uninsured.

I have yet to see facts that will prove that universal healthcare will 100% do everything it's proponents claim it will do without affecting individual rights. Something suffers somewhere.

I'm so Libertarian I'm not loyal to the Libertarian party. Hah if that makes sense.

Less gov't is a good rule of thumb, but to promote near anarchy is dumb.

And cause I consider life a basic right, I do want universal health care.

It works already in America. The military gets free health care. It's not the best but it doesn't suck. And if you want better, you pay to see a specialist.

Malingering is also a crime in the military so you can't abuse the free health care. Oh look, that's a solution to a problem, rather than just saying no health care cause it'll have problems.


The police and fire department are free. But if you get shot or burned you have to pay tons of money. Makes no sense to me. Don't we pool our tax money together so in case of emergency we can get help?

I'd rather it not be people's health that suffers. I'll be the first to admit that I know fuck all about economics, but it seems like common sense to me that a developed country doesn't just let its citizens die in the interest of "free market". That's just out and out fucking evil, no way around it. Living in constant fear and praying that I never get sick or hurt because I can't afford to do see a goddamn doctor should something ever happen to me can fuck right off. I'll gladly pay more in taxes if less people (myself included) can avoid living in such a nightmarish situation day in and day out.

That doesn't happen at all anyway? People can't be denied care at a hospital, even if they can't pay what treatment costs. They leave without a bill in a lot of cases.

No one is saying that there should be total anarchy. I just think that if we stopped expecting the government to provide services that the private sector could provide, and have provided without being co-opted by cheaper government programs on the backs of the tax payers we would see a drop in prices as more and more competition existed.

I do believe that Veterans and Military should get government care, since they are, in a sense employed by the federal government and Veterans should receive care that is second to none anywhere in the world.

You people assume I want to disband the government and make everything unregulated and totally market driven. The market needs to have some regulation but the government shouldn't be your healthcare provider, it shouldn't be your child's teacher, it shouldn't be your internet service provider and cell phone company and it shouldn't be poking it's nose in your private business. When you allow the government to take over services, you essentially hand over your fate into the hands of people that can't balance a budget or agree on anything other than that they should be exempted from having to use the healthcare that they are mandating everyone else has. Why are we going to trust our health with a group of people that absolutely no one trusts to begin with?

The government shouldn't provide an exemption to antitrust laws for healthcare providers and middleman, it shouldn't allow collusion in an industry that uses broadcast frequencies that are restricted to a select few massive companies, and it shouldn't be be supporting anti-competitive telecommunications infrastructure across public land.

Healthcare isn't a matter of regulation like those other things. It is unethical and morally reprehensible to have a private industry that balances profit against human suffering. The existence of an industry that acts as a middleman between the actual providers of healthcare and their recipients is terrible. Regardless of any sort of regulation or deregulation of this industry, there are still private corporations who don't even provide the actual healthcare service that stand to profit (the function of for-profit corporations) by denying healthcare to people.

There is no direct competition with health care though.

My work provides health care. They buy in bulk. So they get it way cheaper than I can on my own. I get health care through my work. I didn't actually shop around.

Most of us are like this. It's not us forcing competition as if we were buying cars.

Once this trend caught on it removed all power from us, the consumer. Health care costs rise and insurance companies keep trying to get away with more. Knowing this, why don't I just also shop around for my own insurance and force competition?

It's in my best financial interest now to not go buy more insurance with me already covered by my employer. Also, no one cares cause my employer is already paying them more than I ever could pay any competition so it flat out wouldn't work. The free market works with everyone working in their own best interests, but in this case all of us doing what's in our best interest isn't helping. Hence, there are times the free market fails and this would be one.

The free market also fails when there are costs that would benefit humanity but have no foreseeable payoff. NASA for example is a gov't program I believe in because there's just no money to be made from space but the benefits are huge for future generations and partially for us now.


There are private schools out there. They're better than public schools. But education is something everyone ought to have access too if they can't afford the private sector. Just like health care.

No one leaves without a bill. They leave will a bill that they can't pay and guess who picks up the tab?



What are you talking about? Everything is on the backs of the tax payers in this country, and if you can't see that well then I'm sorry but you're blind. Should the government control everything? No. Should the government be able to regulated some of the services that its people require? Yes. Health care in particular has already proven time and time again that free market will always be trumped by greed in this country.

I don't currently pay for my health insurance my company picks up the tab for that but you'd better believe I get the fuck taxed out of me because of the bracket I happen to fall into and I personally would gladly pay more in taxes to insure that everyone in this country could go to the doctor if they need to. See if those who don't have insurance did then they could go to the regular doctor instead of the ER when sick or hurt or what not and we all know which is cheaper.

I think that sums up right there why I tend to disagree with your position about, well, almost everything.

It seems that somehow, a lot of people holding this type of positions have forgotten that although big government VS small government is a valid issue, what matters most is good government VS bad government.

So much so that in one single sentence, you can recognize the value in a mechanism yet reject it because it would involve the government.

The independence wasn't fought so you could be freed from the shackles of a British healthcare system. There was no such thing at the time. It's about founding a better country, better for its people. Your Founding Fathers didn't write a new constitution for fun. It's because they saw the value in government that they felt it necessary to write a solid constitution for these times. They wanted better government, good government.

I think it's wise to keep an eye on government involvement but one should examine government initiatives for what they are rather than where they come from.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. We've tried it for a long time in this country in terms of government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and we've seen constantly rising prices in the cost of healthcare. Everyone complains that the prices are too high. I think that's because of government involvement. You think differently. Simple as that. This is why we vote for different people.

No. No there isn't. Gallup doesn't produce less accurate results than other polling firms because they don't do the statistics right. A high school sophomore could do the statistics right. They produce less accurate results because they ask stupid questions.

Not one question in that survey asked if people wanted universal health care. Not one. The polls concludes that people think health care:

1) Sucks.
2) Is expensive.
3) Is not something the federal gov't is responsible for ensuring everyone has.

And why would they? Who would think it's the job of the feds to ensure everyone has access to something that sucks and is expensive?

You can run away from that with the conclusion that people don't want universal health care, but that's just a case study in interpreting data to fit ideology. The poll does not even remotely support that conclusion. The poll doesn't really say anything useful at all.