Arius

Right now, the minimum wage is the lowest it has been since the 40's, relative to the costs of living (in actual purchasing power). If you would like to advance the moral argument that's fine, but minimum wage which is lower. relative to the cost of living, has actually overseen the biggest decrease in employment in the last three generations. Over the last thirty years, millions of people have become unemployed as the minimum wage has dropped in relative purchasing power. It's all just a show...$9 an hour is still too little to live on. That's $982.8 a month. Realistically, that's just enough to make rent and eat. Hell, a studio apartment, in any city, costs at least $500 a month (I know, I've looked). That doesn't include any incidental costs like utilities, maintenance, transportation, work clothes, or a social life.

I haven't made any claims about anything existing. I will make one though. Conceptual objects which contain contradictory properties cannot represent existent phenomena. There are no square circles because an object cannot both have exactly four sides and be the locus of all points a given distance from some point. I know that much.

I'm not the one arguing that square circles might exist.

You must really want to be correct to abandon all reason in favor of the possibility of not being wrong. Why does the idea of god not existing scare you so much?

Japan outsources some of its crappier jobs to nearby, poorer Asian countries. Unlike western nations, Japan is still pretty xenophobic. Perhaps the average citizen is cool, but the government is very anti-foreigner. Especially when that foreigner is poor. Most of the imported labor (citizenship-for-labor) is white collar jobs. Also, Japan has some pretty strong anti-immigration laws. There's also the problem of how job progression works in Japan. In America, there's lots of horizontal movement in the employment market. That is, people may do the same job at several different organizations over the course of a career. In Japan, there is a standardized national test which kids take in high school. It determines which positions they enter as adults. There is almost no lateral movement. Many people (in the mid-income range) in Japan work for the same company for their entire lives. There aren't very many opportunities to transfer foreigners into mid-level positions (blue collar supervisory). The Japanese labor market just isn't structured to accommodate importing workers .

Well...strictly speaking, you've eliminated the possibility that a universe, in-which with some things can't exist, exists. Somewhere, in the deep reaches of space, a contradiction is waiting to be discovered.

Gotcha.... So, you wouldn't say "Unicorns don't exist"? You might say "It's unscientific to make any claims about the existence or non-existence of unicorns"? Let me ask you, is there anything which doesn't exist?

So, you're strictly agnostic with respect to unicorns?

You sure?

Unfortunately, I don't think it has. China implemented the policy through draconian measures. That is, it wasn't that people preferred not to have more children... In fact, as most of China was agricultural at the time the policy was implemented, there was more than enough demand for children. China isn't aging the same rate as Japan or the US. Most people in china are either between 20 and 30 or 40 and 50. All of them are still of working age. What you need for youth-labor to become exceptionally valuable is an excess of post-employment people when compared with the number of employment-age people. Basically, the older the average individual in a population is (and the more of the total population which is past retirement), the more valuable youth-labor should be. China went about slowing population growth in completely the wrong way. My guess (IMHO) the Chinese haven't had access to birth control long enough for people to think of reproduction as a choice. From what I can tell, it takes two generations of highly available birth control (not prophylactics or surgery, but pharmaceuticals) before a society throttles-back on producing children. I'm not sure that the availability of birth control and reproduction rates are causal or just corollary, but my gut tells me that it's causal.

Everyone knows science is fake....pffffff

So, you're strictly agnostic with respect to unicorns?

If you look at a demographic breakdown of the Japanese population, you'll notice that the bulk (60%+) of the people are past or nearing retirement age. Additionally, the birth rate is below the replacement rate. In fact, there is a larger percentage of the Japanese population moving into retirement than there is of the American population. Ordinarily, the older people own businesses which the younger people operate to make a living. Sometimes that ownership is abstracted through investment vehicles (retirement accounts or national pensions). Now, Japan has a problem with that arrangement. Namely, young people are in increasingly short supply. There is no abundant source of youth labor for Japanese industry to consume. As a consequence, Japan is the world leader in the manufacture and development of capital which replaces low-cost youth labor. Also, young Japanese workers tend to start at a higher wage (relative to the national average) because there are very few low-skill positions available. Like I said, when the labor isn't there to use, capital develops to fill the void. Honestly, not having children (or having no more than one child) is the best thing anyone can do to create an economic incentive to improve the overall level of automation in society.

In all fairness, before there was an aggressive intellectual property lobby, public eduction, and a plutocratic justice system, there were no billionaires. Though that could just be a coincidence. Of course, as the legal infrastructure which maintains social inequality has grown, more and more billionaires have emerged. Realistically, most modern wealthy people lean on the state for support. There are far too few Howard Roarks in society.

When the old can't take advantage of the young, capital must replace labor.

Those are two different things. I think you are using it in the second way, discussing etiquette rather than moral imperatives.

Perhaps someone could own a bunch of land. I think "to what purpose" is more important than "how much do you have". That is, if someone own thousands of acres, but uses them to feed the world, that seems like a good thing. Alternatively, if someone owns a single house, but uses it as a vehicle for tyranny, that seems like a bad thing.

I've got a lot of beef with the AMA. I'm sorry if it leaks out as hostility. I don't know. "Rich" is very relative. It's true that most people could make a satisfactory living, but I don't know what the upper limit on property holdings would be. What many people forget is that, in or current society, the carrying costs of property are involuntarily socialized. That is, people enjoy property protection disproportionately... regressive property protection costs, in fact. If individuals were responsible for the costs associated with protecting their own property, there would be an upper limit on how much stuff it made economic sense to own. Simply, the more dollars you have, the more you must spend per-dollar to defend that wealth (if the carrying costs of wealth are paid by the individual). Being obscenely wealthy would be impossible in a society without involuntarily socialized carrying costs of property. In those costs I'd include defense from the elements, protection from theft (employee compensation, capital equipment, etc), dispute resolution, a legal system of titles, infrastructure, national defense, and all sorts of state-provided goodies which are enjoyed on a regressive basis. It makes no sense that I pay taxes so Mitt Romney doesn't need to pay for private security. I am made to pay for his use of cops and courts. See what I mean?

Doctors...who enjoy a state-run license system. Who have the most powerful state-affiliated union. Who have all their competition jailed. Don't believe the hype. Doctors are more involved with the state than welfare moms.

Now that is interesting. I'm guessing that, as you don't include NAP as part of your definition, some of this competition could be through the exercise of force. "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. " -Leviathan Even Hobbes understood that, in such a condition, there could be nothing like trade or commerce. You see, markets and violence are in strict opposition. I'd recommend you read (or listen to) the book Markets Not Capitalism. It's free, and addresses many ideas about separating the state and property. It may be able to help you communicate your argument. Believe it or not, you can be pro-market and anti-capitalist.

Well, let's see if that claim sticks together. I'm going to argue about time as an abstraction of perception, rather than a physical object (I know there's that space/time thing, but I'm not talking about that). That is, time is a model for explaining the natural phenomenon of things changing as part of the sensory experience of existing. Insomuch as that's a valid assertion, time doesn't exist. Just like economy, five, and democracy don't exist, abstractions are not existent objects. From this, both the past and the future are non-existent components of this same model. Truth is also a concept. In the way I'd use the word "time" to indicate changes in reality, I'd use the word "true" to indicate either consistency, validity, or soundness (hopefully all three) as properties of claims. So, I think your claim is: claims which we make to explain the physical changes in reality do not change the functioning of the system we use to evaluate the truth of claims. I'd agree to that with a caveat: One of the two models has primacy over the other. That is, an explanation must be true to be valid (yeah, that's a tautology). Because of this, I would argue that no model of reality which invalidates claim-evaluation (for any reason) can be valid...because it cannot be evaluated. However, for the large part, I agree that the details of physics do not change the validity of philosophy (as a practice). Empiricism and methodological naturalism are both derivatives of consistency, validity, and soundness. It would be extremely puzzling if a scientific discovery led to the invalidation of science.

Do you doubt the sincerity of my question? Perhaps you think I have an ulterior motive? Consider this: I claimed that amoebas don't make choices. You responded by requesting proof of the validity of my claim. The way I use the word "choice" precludes the possibility of Amoebas making choices (I believe comparison of possibilities is an essential component of choice, especially where action is concerned. I do not believe amoebas can idealize behavior, as they apparently lack a mind). As you do not share my understanding of the word (or perhaps the animal kingdom), it is extremely important that we compare definitions (and possibly scientific knowledge). There's an error in the communication protocol. I assume it's definitional, but I could be wrong. I'll make you a promise. I promise I won't ask for definitions as a technique to distract or confuse. I genuinely don't understand how you are using the word, though I am quite interested in understanding your argument.

It's pretty clear we don't use the word in the same way. We'll never get anywhere if we don't use similar definitions.

Agreed.

Define "choice".