For my Libertarian friends

I wince when I have to write the check, that's what I think.  Particularly this year, when it went up 11%.

 

I've always thought of an individual's social connections as concentric circles. A traditional model would be individual, couple, nuclear family, extended family, neighborhood, village, state, country, world...etc.

 

Over time with increased mobility, the intermediate groupings have gotten less and less important in the life of the individual. In many cases, it's nuclear family and the world for all practical purposes. (obviously this is an exaggeration).

 

To me, two things would improve the way we work society.

 

A) restoration of roles of intermediate groupings of people. (this has to come bottom up, legislation might grease the wheels but it could never be enforced.)

 

One of the major benefits is an eloboration of the old "it takes a village to raise a child." We bemoan the fact that many children are born to single mothers. But we neglect the fact that those children (much of the time) are often raised not by the mother but by an entire extended family. Even in two adult households, readily available Aunts Uncles and Neighbors (multiple generations) makes child care less of a crisis than it is now. Similarly, care of the old can be naturally distributed rather than done badly by an industry that is under-resourced with low-skill workers.

 

B) whenever possible, decisions (power) should be relegated to the lowest possible level that is functional. Decentralization favors diversity which allows the new growth that makes any organism flourish. As such, the highest levels of organization should have only the power they absolutely must.

 

Money should also remain as close to the simplest structures as possible. If it can be done locally, it should. Pooled money and resources are necessary for some societal functions. But whether you call this taxes or whatever, it needs to be extremely transparent for those involved, but minimally transparent for those outside. Thus, I'm not opposed to taxes, but would prefer if most of it stayed local and I could personally look at the books and that the budget would be small enough I could actually get through it in a reasonable amount of time.

 

 

 

Right now our society is very top heavy. There are some advantages to division of labor and using the work of the many to achieve tasks. But the individual has been completely removed from decision making all too often, both in private business matters and in public representation.

 

That's enough for now. If anyone wants to talk about this great. If not just burp a "meh."

 

Only half-joking? The Articles certainly conformed to some of the principles you hold dear. (No taxation, minimal Federal Power).

Your example isn't realistic enough for me: a 50% increase in minimum wage is not going to happen unless it fails to track inflation and/or median wages again [many US states, (eg Florida), have indirectly linked minimum wage to inflation now so this should never happen]; the company doesn't employ 15 people because it only needs 10 but it does pay minimum wage because it can not because it needs to; it costs more to employ an extra person than just the wage costs, so it a 50% increase isn't the equivalent of employing 5 more people - it's more like 2-3 people; you haven't shown how the 10x$10K payout affects the company's finances or how that affects the selling price of a can of Coke or a pair of Levi's (which is what this was all about) - if 10 people are producing billions of pull-tabs each year worth 10s of millions of dollars, then $100K is easily absorbed, [one operator on a machine stamping out 100 ring-pulls a second can produce 1 billion a year]; the number of people on minimum wage working in manufacturing in the USA is negligible, (possibly  zero), so probably no one is making pull-tabs on minimum wage in the USA since most work in food services - if ring-pull tabs are being made in the USA then the machine operators producing them are earning more than minimum wage; the report you cited claims that increases in minimum wage result in a loss of welfare benefits for the employee, (but isn't that what you want?), however they still "earn" more as a result but not through hand-outs - the "missing" 64¢/hr in the report is paid for by your taxes, not from the employer's payroll - (so welfare benefits the employer as much as it does the employee) - the 90¢  of your example is still 90¢ and they still earn more as a result, but they claim less welfare (sounds like a good scheme to me); as you say, most of those on minimum wage are young people living with parents, so they do not qualify for welfare handouts and their parents don't either because they are no longer dependent children - for them a 90¢ increase would net 81¢ in they pay-packet after tax.

 

Minimum wage is terrible because it shouldn't be necessary at all.

 

The USA taxes people on minimum wage? what is the point of that when you are going to give some of it back as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Food Stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)? (I know you made this point too, I'm agreeing with you). The solution is (again as you say) to decrease income tax (I say to zero), but only for those on minimum wage - but don't apply a fix for 12% of the population across the remaining 88% (or apply a fix for 1.4% of earnings to the remaining 98.6%). Of course it could be applied to everyone by raising the lower threshold and applying a zero percent rate on earnings below that threshold and it would benefit everyone and it would decrease tax revenue, but at least it benefits those who need it by reducing the poverty trap.

 

If you want to eliminate welfare then you have to provide the people who claim it a valid and legitimate means of earning their way out of it - this is one area where I do not believe the free market will do anything to alleviate this problem. Minimum wage isn't a great system or a perfect solution, principally because it is an easy system to attack ideologically (because it is inherently socialist) and with convincing looking numbers (convincing until you analyse them closely), but it is a necessary system when you do not have a viable alternative.