18 thoughts on “Where Is Superman When We Need Him?”

  1. Well if the salaries rise then tax receipts will rise as well. People will have more money to spend, and poor people with little disposable income when they get a salary increase they usually bump consumption of goods and services up a notch as well.
    Maybe Apple will be able to stash less billions in the US Virgin Islands or something. What a disaster…

    1. Well if the salaries rise then tax receipts will rise as well.

      The salaries won’t rise, they’ll disappear. Restaurants are already going under in Los Angeles.

      1. I thought the US was at historically low rates of unemployment right now. Dunno the situation in LA. Then again I’ve always been against the tipping culture of the US so it is hardly a surprise I prefer the wages to rise.
        The whole US idea of hungry workers doing more work as they need to rely on tips was kind of weird to me. I like Americans and the culture in general but I just cannot understand the way you do compensation. I understand that you need to motivate people by compensating them differently but after a certain point it just leads to morale loss and a bunch of burnt out people.

        1. I thought the US was at historically low rates of unemployment right now.

          Only because so many have given up and dropped out of the work force. Real unemployment is close to 10%. Not that it’s relevant to this discussion.

          Dunno the situation in LA.

          The situation in LA is that they’ve already raised their minimum wage. People are unwilling to pay more to eat out, so restaurants are automating, laying off, or going out of business. That will be the story for the rest of the state in a few years.

          1. I’ve been hearing about restaurant automation for like a decade now. Everything from food robots in Asia to people ordering with their mobile devices at McDonalds so they don’t need to pay someone to say “Will you have fries with that”. I suspect it would happen regardless unless the salaries were like third world country low.
            I know that at a certain point you end up replacing people with machinery or machine tools. I don’t like the situation either. I’ve sometimes contemplated if I did the right going into software in the first place. I’ve always seen it as automating bothersome or tiresome tasks but after a certain point what is left for people to do? I don’t see any Star Trek or Asimov idle future for us here.
            I’ve worked in the telecom sector at one point. If you just think about the amount of jobs displaced when someone invented automatic switchboards and all those operators had to be laid off… and the jobs those people got afterwards weren’t necessarily more interesting to do either. And that is just one episode. Still I’m an engineer at heart so I just can’t see us freezing technology at any one point and going Amish or whatever. I don’t think that would work in the long term. It’s a contradiction we will have to carry with us one way or the other.

      2. A couple of years back I read and heard a lot about people in the US, and even here in Europe, going back into the countryside to have a less heady lifestyle. I guess one of the good things about the US is that you have lot of places you can be in. So people have a chance to start again somewhere else with less expensive living conditions.
        The whole deal with compensation in the entire West needs to be thought over. Both in terms of work time and in terms of pay grades, salaries and compensation. There’s just way too much disparity. Heck I mean I was looking at salaries a couple of months back and someone in my profession (software) earns like twice as much in California as in the center of Europe or even London. As for the so called Chinese low salaries, I foun dthat the salaries in Beijing were even higher than in California, which had some of the highest pay grades in the whole West. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. I know there are living cost disparities, but a lot of this work could be done just basically anywhere as long as you have a network connection. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. If you think at it from a market perspective.
        Then again when you look at what that salary actually gets you (e.g. how many sq ft of property you could buy, or the price of food) you often find that the salary differences in USD aren’t all that matters.

        1. Interaction with a human server has some value, but it is a finite value. People need jobs, and restaurants need servers, but the law is pricing them out of the market.

    2. This is made up Keynsianism. I wonder if it’s okay that a good friend of mine will no longer get raises at the store where he works because Seattle is forcing the company to give his wages to employees who have been there less than a year.

      I guess that doesn’t matter to theorists.

      And as far as Keynsianism goes, Japan is still nowhere after 25 years of priming the pump.

      1. Japan’s economic malaise is overrated. If you look at the GDP/capita growth trends they were increasing until the Kobe quake hit. This time they had a mild recovery until Fukushima hit and they did the moronic great act of closing all the nuclear power plants and importing coal. Which basically cratered their industrial economic competitiveness and tilted the balance of trade negatively.
        This had little to do with Keynesianism. Just plain natural disasters, fear mongering, and also somewhat of a lack of investment in the future. The Japanese just don’t know how to dream big anymore.
        The bigger problem they have is how to enfranchise the next generations and create the next export market segments. To some degree they did this with LED manufacturing and they still seem to manufacture as many automobiles as they ever did. They are making attempts at getting into the military hardware and defense sectors at the same time as they increasingly earn more money from the entertainment sector.

      2. I wonder if it’s okay that a good friend of mine will no longer get raises at the store where he works because Seattle is forcing the company to give his wages to employees who have been there less than a year.

        Was it okay that many Disney employees lost their jobs when the union took over, because Disney couldn’t afford to hire everyone back under the new contract?

        The unions and the Know Nothings never talk about what happened to those people. But when a handful of union workers allegedly lose their jobs to more productive contractors, stories about Disney flood the Know Nothing press. Blaming the company and foreign immigrants, naturally.

    3. Your whole comment hinges on the system being closed. It is not. When you further expand it to the US, which as a whole is not as foolish as California; it is still not a closed system; hence Apple having assembly outside California and the US. I supposed you could demand China raise the minimum wage. But when Vietnam is only $17.80 (a month), manufacturing will just move south.

      1. It has been moving to Vietnam for quite some time now. I guess next stop will be Africa. Supposedly. Once it gets more infrastructure.

  2. It’s a basic tenet of the branch of State-cultism we misleadingly call “liberalism” to deny that statist economics cause economic dislocations.

  3. It just shows how callous the elite California liberals are. They should raise the minimum wage to $30/hr. After all, that’s still less than their psychotherapist and divorce lawyer makes.

    Then one day one will note that it’s not that California’s job were filled by illegals, it’s that the California jobs that still exist are illegal and off-the-books.

    Odd fact for Bernie: The minimum wage in all Scandinavian countries is zero. Their minimum tax rate for people who make more than about $2,000 a year, is 30+%.

    1. Yeah there isn’t a single minimum wage. There’s a bunch of them decided sector by sector between the employers, unions, and the government. I think this is called Corporatism. But they would probably disagree with the label.

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