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This Month's Scripture Verse:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Timothy 3:1-5

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Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For December 5, 2018

Dec 3

To Joseph Sunde and his blogpost that argues against the $15 per hour minimum wage. This appeared in the Acton blog.

There are two problems with the $15 per hour minimum wage. The first problem is that not all areas of the country, or any state, has the same cost of living. In rural parts of the country where the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, is significantly lower than in the cost of living in cities. And the cost of living can be different from city to city depending on the size and/or region of the nation a city is located in.

The second problem is partially expressed in the above article: it takes away the need for workers and owners to talk with each other, listen to each other, and work together for each other's interest. And what the conservative side seems to miss about the $15 per hour minimum wage is that the loss of jobs isn't just a possibility for small businesses, it also occurs in corporations. And what many of these corporations have said to workers is that to have any job at all, one must settle for what the owners offer regardless of whether they are offering poverty wages.
An illustration of the problem can be seen franchises. When large food corporations, like Mac Donald's opens a restaurant, it will either open a corporate owned store or a franchise one. With the former, the corporation assumes all costs. Starbucks, if memory serves, has opened quite a few corporate-owned coffee shops. With the latter, the franchise owner assumes all of the costs and that includes returning some of the income from the franchise to the corporation so that the corporation joins a franchise's list of creditors. Meanwhile, the franchise restaurant becomes only a source of income for the corporation. The franchise owner is responsible for all of the non start-up costs.

Unless at least part of the cost for the $15 per hour minimum wage is billed to the corporations that have opened franchise stores via taxes,  the $15 per hour minimum wage only hits the franchise owners who are then put in between a rock and a hard place. In the meantime, the shareholders of the corporations involved would object to their corporations being taxed in order to defray some of the some cost for the new minimum wage because they live by the maximize personal profits ethic: the very ethic that is destroying not just our economy, but our society as well. For the wealthiest shareholders believe that only they deserve to be able to live by that ethic even though that ethic is the cause of class war and the exploitation of people and the environment. We should note that when there are attempts to reverse the exploitation by allowing other parties to live by the same ethic, the business or or economic sectors or the whole system is subject to collapse.


When only one group is allowed to live by the maximize personal profits ethic, we see wide scale exploitation and either self-destruction or revolution. When we allow other groups to practice the maximize personal profits ethic, we also see failures in businesses, economic sectors, and the whole system. So the real problem here is not setting a proper minimum wage, as important as that is, the real problem is how to actually exorcise  the maximization of personal profits from our economy and culture

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Dec 4

To Joe Carter and his blogpost that cites a Koch Industries’ study that predicts significant negative results that will result from Trump’s tariffs. This appeared in the Acton blog.


Here is the problem with Joe Carter's article, it takes predictions from a highly invested source as facts without reviewing America's past use of tariffs, without it mentioning available literature on the current effects of Trump's tariffs, and without questioning the possible lack of objectivity that could occur in source he is citing.


I write the above from neutral point of view on Trump's tariffs. America's history has shown that tariffs can have positive long-term effects. In fact, from the beginning of our nation up through FDR's Presidency, America employed tariffs to allow fledgling American industries to grow to the point of being competitive with, if not superior to, their counterparts from all over the world. That doesn't mean that tariffs always work. But it shows that tariffs can contribute positively to a nation's economy especially when the long-term results are examined. Such a point is not considered in Carter's article.


Other literature is not considered by Carter's article as well. The Houston Chronicle reports that Trump's tariffs are producing mixed results on manufacturers (see https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/economy/article/Trump-tariffs-having-mixed-impact-on-13432850.php ). CNN also gives a mixed report on the results that Trump's tariffs will have on American Manufacturers (see https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/08/news/economy/tariff-explainer/index.html   ) as well as a picture containing some uncertainty.
Furthermore, we should note the source of Carter's report: Koch Industries. How much trust can we put into a report that comes from a for-profit source that might not be all objective? A scientific approach to the subject would not put so much weight on one source especially when the objectivity of that source is questionable.
With all of the above mentioned flaws, why does Carter present his material as factual?






 

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