Raise the Minimum Wage!

I got into another real life debate about minimum wage again that left me exasperated.  What people don't seem to understand is that the entire economy benefits if people have more money in their pockets, it's just that no business owner wants to be the only person paying more than everyone else.

For example, let's say you own a convenience store with just a few other employees you pay minimum wage.  If you have one guy on the shift at a time you don't have any incentive to double your labor cost to $15 an hour because none of your competitors are paying that.  However, if everyone starts paying that all your customers have more money in their pocket, so your sales go up which will more than make up for the additional labor cost.  It's pretty simple.

Will their be inflation?  Yes, more money in people's pockets means they can pay more.  But the inflation won't be universal, it will mostly impact companies that employ primarily low wage employees, but has very little effect on things like rent and electricity bills.   Even the inflation that occurs will be offset by the additional money circulating in the economy.

That 99 cent double cheeseburger may get bumped up to $1.10 or ever $1.25, but the people at the low end of the spectrum will still be way better off and that will translate to everyone participating in the economy.  Poor people don't save money.  All of those additional wages will translate into what is effectively bonus economic stimulus that will pay dividends all the way up the chain as the money is immediately reinvested locally.

What's the real reason that republicans oppose minimum wage hikes?  I have no idea.  Layoffs are often cited as a reason to avoid minimum wage hikes, but the reality is that companies that employ primarily minimum wage or low wage employees (companies like McDonald's and Walmart) are the same companies that most directly benefit from the increased liquidity enjoyed by their customers.

The real reason seems to be that it is bad because people think it is bad regardless of the actual reality.  Cutting costs and squeezing labor down to the bare minimum has become so ingrained in american business culture that any suggestion that we should pay more for something we have been paying less for is met with incredulity and outrage.  It's all about short term gain at any cost, so regardless of the truth of the assertion that a minimum wage increase would benefit the economy, those who represent the interests of business refuse to even discuss it as an option - even if it might assist with solving some of the other problems they hate so much.

Too Little, Too Late.

Check it out at Daily KOS

If only the cartoon pictured to the left wasn't a parody.  While I commend Senator Portman's support for basic human rights, I find it sad that it took him being personally impacted by the issue at hand before he chose to undergo this evolution.  It's a problem of so many in our government because they are so thoroughly insulated from their constituents and the real world in general.

So what's the answer?  I don't know, but if I had to start trying to fix the problems I'd start with term limits for congress.  The average length of service for a member of congress is about 13 years.  For a significant number of them it effectively becomes a lifetime position.  Think about what you were doing thirteen years ago.  Who did you hang out with?  Do you still work in the same place?  How different is your life now?  

Pictured: Average Political Lobbyist

We're shaped by our social circles.  No matter how hard you may try to remain true to principle, your beliefs will gradually shift to resemble that held by your friends and acquaintances  even if it is just to be more sympathetic towards them.  Things should evolve, but thanks to the culture of Washington, after a few years spent among the oligarchy those evolutions rarely prove to be in line with the bulk of the country they are supposed to be representing.  And then there's the special interests.

The job of the lobbyist is to insulate congressmen from their constituents and to substitute their own goals and beliefs for those they represent.  They do it inch by inch.  A little extra for their next campaign in return for a little help making introductions , a little rider added to a bill, or a little give on a vote.  Pretty soon an inch becomes a mile and that senator isn't representing the people he elected any more, he's representing the people who are paying for his next campaign.

What does this have to do with Portman?  It's just another part of the problem.  It took the issue having a face, in this case the face of his son, before he realized just what the real world implications of his stance against gay marriage.  The same thing crops up in the relationship triangle between congressman, constituent, and lobbyist.  

If you contact your congressman you are at best a voice on the other end of the phone, or a few lines of text his secretary reads, or one of 300,000 names on a petition.  While he might care   on some level about you as a voter, how does that compare to how he feels about Bob from Monsanto who took him to lunch yesterday.  The same guy who helped him meet people and find his footing as a freshman, never forgets his kid's birthday?  To the hypothetical congressman Bob has a face, you don't, Bob is a person, an individual, while you are at best a 2 dimensional bit player that he knows he should care about on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level he wouldn't shed a tear for you if you got hit by a bus.  

So in short, run the special interests out of Washington and send congress home after their terms are done.  Make sure they know that when the job is finished they have to go back to being a regular citizen again, won't have a cushy lobbyist position to slide into, and will have to live with the changes (or lack of changes) they make as a private citizen when it is over.

Free the Troll!

Andrew "weev" Auernheimer is an unrepentant douchebag of an internet troll.  He also just got sentenced to 41 months in jail, triple the time that the Steubenville rapists, for the internet equivalent of walking into an unlocked garage.  What, precisely, did he do?

In 2010 he discovered that AT&T had failed to protect user account information.  The info was on the web without any form of security and could be accessed with the difficult and highly skilled hacker technique known as "manually typing the address into his web browser".  His primary crime was releasing the information to Gawker before notifying AT&T, thereby embarrassing the company and earning the ire of the FBI.

Fast forward to today and he recieved more than three years in jail for it thanks to the outdated "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" (CFAA), the same law prosecutors used to threaten late activist Aaron Swartz with up to 35 years in prison.  Unfortunatlye for weev, he's not nearly the sympathetic character that Swartz was so there is very little outcry about this.

So why should you care about Auernheimer?  It's another example of how US lawmakers are both ignorant and afraid of the internet.  They have no idea what differentiates a hacker from a hypertext transfer protocol, yet that doesn't stop them from creating legislation and prosecuting "cybercrimes" like they're chasing communists from the cold war.

So speak out, spread this around, and try and help get some publicity going for this to help free the troll, because as they say:  First they came for the trolls, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a troll.  Then they came for the hackers, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a hacker.  Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Henry Rollins on Steubinville

The Steubenville rape case was not terribly remarkable in itself.  What was remarkable is how the facts of the case were laid bare through social media (I could write a whole post just about how the digital native generations interact with social media compared to us old folks) and more importantly how the outcome was received by the media.

Without rehashing CNN's lamentations of future wasted, or Fox's repeated reiteration that the victim was intoxicated (and therefore somehow culpable) I found the whole mess to be depressing.  I also wonder if the outcome would have been the same had it not piqued the interest of Anonymous and gained national attention through their tender ministrations.

Anyway, the point of this post is to draw attention to Henry Rollins' take on the whole mess and to say bravo, because he has the right of it.  Check it out.

What is a Left Libertarian Anyway?

As I have succeeded in alienating and annoying several of my friends, family members, and distant acquaintances with my political facebooking hobby I have decided to spin things off into their own entity, namely this blog and the corresponding facebook page to keep my personal musings and political musings a bit more segregated.

I personally describe myself as a "libertarian socialist".  It's hard for a lot of people to reconcile those two concepts because, especially in America, the libertarian party is inextricably linked with the republican party thanks to the efforts of "main stream libertarians" like Ron and Rand Paul. 

Personally I don't consider Rand to be a very good libertarian.  I have seen the following circulating as a meme for the last couple of days:  "Libertarian, n: A person who believes that oppression is best handled by the private sector."  That sums up my issues with Rand Paul and his ilk quite succinctly.  

Left libertarianism is an attempt to reconcile self ownership and non-aggression with an egalitarian view of the  planet's natural resources.  Indeed, when private ownership of the resources and means of production that keep a society running become directly harmful to the majority of the members of that society then the private claim becomes illegitimate and a form of aggression in itself.

I know that all sounds like scary, pinko, communist rhetoric, but it really isn't.  Looking at America today you see the results of run away capitalism and just what happens when most of the resources end up in the hands of a very few.  When capitalism works it's great, but as a capitalist economy matures into a corporate economy, and the corruption incentivizing nature of capitalism infiltrates a representative government, the system breaks down, at least for the regular person.

During my grandparent's time (during the height of collective bargaining) you could expect your boss to live on the same street as you.  His house might be bigger, his car might be newer, but in the end his kids went to the same school, he dined at the same restaurant, and he worried about the same things you did.  In the intervening 40 years the entire system has been rewritten.  

As more and more of the profits of increased american productivity have bypassed the middle class and been rerouted to the top we don't live in the same world as the owners and CEOs we used to share a neighborhood with.  They're lives don't resemble ours, our children don't mingle, and we don't worry about the same things anymore.  The average American CEO makes $11.4 million a year.  In other words they make in a day what the average worker makes in a year.  Their time is worth 365 times what yours is.  How can we expect them to care about what we care about?

That's why I can't call myself just a libertarian.  That sort of disparity is just fine with the guys like Rand Paul, because in his mind that CEO earned it and if you work hard you could too.  Unfortunately that just isn't true anymore.  Sure, if you invent the next iPhone you could be a billionaire when you retire, but if your plan is to go to college and get a BA then work your way up the ladder the old fashioned way you'll soon find out that they are adding more ladder faster than you can climb.