7 ms·

Here's why the rich get richer: because the 99% produce too damn much. Consumerism worked for a while to keep things even, but we've reached a plateau. People

Here's why the rich get richer: because the 99% produce too damn much. Consumerism worked for a while to keep things even, but we've reached a plateau. People can only buy so much crap. But we're more productive now than ever [1]. So where does all that extra money go? The people at the top take it. CEOs don't give their employees raises, and pocket the rest. Bankers play games with your excess money you've dumped into the market and "lose" it. etc. No-one's missed that extra money until now, because there's always been enough work to go around. Now there's not. Maybe people aren't buying because their "confidence" is shaken. Maybe the Chinese are "taking our jobs". Maybe people don't need more crap. Guess what, it doesn't matter. Everyone's stuck on debating why there's not enough work to go around. But really, the solution's simple. Everyone should do less work. The only way to simultaneously (a) reduce the income gap, (b) lower unemployment, and (c) not return to wasteful excessive consumerism is to shorten the work week and raise the minimum wage. Those at the top will be forced to pay more per hour worked due to decrease in supply. This will fix the income gap. The unemployed will suddenly find work, now that more workers are required to perform the same amount of work. And no-one needs to find any arcane means of "increasing consumer confidence". I propose a mandatory maximum of 35-hour non-overtime weeks, coupled with a 20% (or greater) increase in minimum wage. Necessarily will likely be a short-term (5-year or less) exemption from these policies for small business owners (defined as those whose executives take home in salary + bonuses less than some threshold, say $200k). There once came a day when humans were productive enough that a two-day weekend was warranted. As we continue our march down the road of automation, it is only natural that we give ourselves more time to enjoy the fruits of our labors, and not devote our time to serve those more fortunate than us. [1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USARGDPH http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USARGDPH

usaar333 15y ago
Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/9/973/papers/estevao_sa.pdf http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/9/973/papers/estevao_sa.pdf As a founder, this seems intuitively obvious. I have problems finding the correct people. There simply aren't enough skilled people who can do work (that is where the overhead of managing them + their cost < my time loss). Consequently, it makes economic sense for everyone to just work longer hours. If we had to limit hours, we'd simply produce less. And because our product provides time-savings for our customers, all of society suffers. I also completely disagree that people can buy so much stuff. Sure, physical items, yes. But 77% of the US economy is services. From a personal perspective, I don't need more trinkets. But if I had the money, I'd never do my own laundry, shopping, driving, etc. -- that is I would spend a lot of money to gain time. Whether that time goes toward pleasure or working harder, it doesn't matter -- society still wins.
- wazoox 15y ago
  > Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. There is much to be said about the legal work week in France. It has been badly misrepresented again and again. In most industries, the reduction of work hours was more than compensated by "annualization". That means that you must do 35 hours a week, not every week but as a mean value along the whole year. What's the result? Where people used to work 39 hours all year long, even when the activity was in a low cycle, an work paid overtime when activity was high, they now work 30 hours a week at times and up to 48 hours a week at other times, always paid the standard wage all year long. Furthermore, even the definition of "work hour" changed. For instance, in some industries people are now allowed to take a piss only 2 times a day instead of 4. In "sales" (actually, supermarket cashiers mostly), people are now "working" only while they're actually on duty (they used to be "working" while present on the premises); so they may be given "free time" for up to two or three hours during the day (there aren't many customers in shops for hours during the week), though they often have no other choice but wait at the workplace or the immediate vicinity because they haven't got time or resource to do anything else. So actually for a large part of the economy, going from 39 to 35 hours was quite a big improvement of productivity. What is usually represented abroad as a scandalous, quasi communist change was actually a boon for the "great capital". Further "adjustments" made to the system in the past 12 years by right wing governments have achieved the picture; though they still love to bad mouth "the 35 hours" (lazy leftists! profiteering socialists!), getting rid of the many "progresses" induced by this system is absolutely out of the question. This is, by the way, perfectly in line with the habit to ditch French (now dead) retirement law: "Lazy French retire at 60! Courageous Germans retire at 67!", while the truth is that French retire at 62.5 years, and German 62.7... > But 77% of the US economy is services. Many of these services don't always make sense economically. Is it for the best that so many Americans eat out almost every day? Sure, that creates demand for a lot of low wage jobs, then what? This sort of short-sighted insistence on GDP growth (more business! more jobs!) is toxic in the long term. Some of the basics tenets seriously need to be revised.
brc 15y ago
Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hours will drop productivity like a stone. You're effectively saying that all workers are equal, and interchangeable. You want to forcibly stop the more productive ones from working, so that their tasks and livelihoods can be given to others. In the case of a software company you're introducing the twin evils of bad hires and oversized teams. For what? An inferior product produced at a higher price. Dropping productivity means a drop in living standards for everyone, not just the rich people. The reason people are out of work is because too many people are paying back too much debt, and that equates to negative savings. Minimum wages increase unemployment because they set a price floor above the clearing price for the going price of a worker. Now, that's not an argument for getting rid of minimum wages, but you can't argue against the reality of what they do. The solution is to continue paying back debt, and learn the lesson not to borrow so much next time around. Yes, that sucks, but hard lessons seldom have pleasant consequences. If you want to stop a lot of wealth accumulating at the top end of the pyramid, by all means break up banking cartels and break the ties between legislators and big business, you won't get many arguments from most people. But fairyland schemes to force people to pay more than wages are worth, and force people to work less hours than they want? Hello, central planning. Hello, centralised control. The only way for this to work is to put the needs of the state above the needs of the individual. Which must, by definition, mean less individual freedom and more state control. What are you going to do with someone who works more than 35 hours? Lock them up at the point of a gun? "Wasteful excessive consumerism" is an entirely relative proposition. One persons waste is another satisfactory standard of living. To impose an arbitary living standard on someone is to completely control their lives. You're asking everyone to do less work. Less work by definition means less production, and less production means a lower living standard. And guess where the bulk of that lower living standard will fall - that's right, you can bet your peasant clothes it won't be on the 1%. To conclude : you're effectively asking for centralised control of peoples wages, centralised control of how much a person can work, and centralised and arbitary division of what is small, medium and large business for the purposes of handing out favors, subsidies and handouts. Eventually businesses will start to fail and so will seek more handouts, bailouts, concessions or are nationalised because they are vital to society (eg mining, energy, farming). You've effectively described a blend of National Socialism and Stalinism. And we know that both eventually lead to mass murder and misery of millions. This experiment has been tried before, it ends badly for all involved. I hope you're young and still learning, because if you're of any reasonable age, you should know better by now.
macov 15y ago
You are so wrong. Less work? There is no cure for cancer, no clean energy, no cheap housing, no good education. There are so many things to do.
- forza 15y ago
  Has nothing to do with the amount of work you do, but what goals or values you have.
  - brc 15y ago
    Right - try telling that to the boss. I'm taking the day off, but you can still pay me. It's OK, though, I've got the right values.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
ppereira 15y ago
Strangely enough, because of the way the EITC is tied with wages and already distorting the economics at the bottom, raising the minimum wage could result in net transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor and therefore reduce inequality. I had more relevant comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120123
- brc 15y ago
  Not all people are the same. Not all people are as equally productive, equally talented or equally motivated. Not all people want the same things. You seem to subscribe to the aim of total income equality as a goal. To do this you would force the productive to hand over most of the product of their work to those who are less productive. Obviously, to do this, you need to force them using the apparatus of the state to do so. In other words, they either spend the majority of their time working for others or they go to jail. They are not asked to share the product of their work, they are threatened to do so or be locked up. Does that sound fair to you? That is a very perverse sense of justice, where you don't have a choice in how the output of your labour is divided. Honestly I cannot understand after a century of misery from forced wealth redistribution and forced work and millions of deaths people still come up with these ideas.
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    This is not a black and white decision. There is a big gap between wanting "total income quality", and wanting to close the huge, and increasing, income equality gap in the US, and to increase the minimum wage (or undertake other means) to reach a point where people can reasonably buy a house and send their children to university without requiring crippling loans.
    - brc 15y ago
      You can't force the minimum wage up any more than you can push on a piece of string. While you can certainly change legislation to make the minimum wage a set value, there will be offsetting measures felt elsewhere, usually an increase in unemployment and a general drop in living standards for all. You can't force someone to employ you anymore than you can force someone to be your friend. Once houses have finished correcting lots of people will be able to afford them. Housing affordability is headed towards the best it's ever been. I agree that things are bad, but going down the road of trying to force a solution by means of restrictions, price controls and regulations will only make the problem worse. As I've posted in the past, places like Detroit should be cordoned off and turned into special economic zones like Hong Kong is to China. There should be a very low tax rate, no trade restrictions with other countries, and many other regulations, taxes and boondoggles dropped. There should be no (or very low, say 3%, for Military use) federal taxes and in turn they should receive no handouts or participate in any programs from the Federal government. Do that I can guarantee that in 10 years the place will be booming, employment will be high and things will be moving in the right direction. With somewhere like Detroit, it's time people started thinking outside the box and experimenting with some rollback of the last 100 years of policy.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
It's not that complicated. The rich get richer because they own. Specifically, they own two things - the means of production of wealth, and the debt of the 99%. Outsourcing wealth production to low-wage countries increased profit margins and enabled the meteoric rise in CEO and executive compensation relative to labor, whose wages were stagnant at best, or who were being outsourced and laid off at worst (eg, labor wasn't benefitting from the increased profit margins, only executives and shareholders/owners). Cheap money and debt bubbles enabled labor to continue consuming on credit beyond their means, sustaining the increased profit margins longer than should have been possible, while simultaneously paying interest on their consumption. Hence, the 99% (or whatever the % is) has been transferring wealth to the 1% from both ends. The solution is, stay out of debt as much as possible, and find ways to incentivize repatriation of production operations to the US (ostensibly by reducing the cost-basis of manufacturing here). Certain legal proposals, like financial transaction taxes and the like, may help as well.
- smithian 15y ago
  Or you could stop all government subsidies to corporations and set up a business tax structure that is heavily favorable to worker-owned cooperatives at the expense of shareholder-owned corporations. Corporations are just machines for extracting productivity from large numbers of people and concentrating the wealth produced by that productivity in the hands of a few. Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource.
  - rick888 15y ago
    "Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource." You can start a worker-owned cooperative now. Why don't you? You could even make it a non-profit and save on some taxes. What you want to do is make it impossible for corporations as we know them to exist, taking away freedoms. Corporations aren't slave-owners and employees aren't slaves. You have the freedom to work for one or start your own company. I suppose a worker-owned cooperative would be fine, as long as the workers also took on losses (IE: if sales are down this month, you might only get a $500 paycheck as opposed to a $3000 one). Then you would have to deal with the day-to-day stuff and you would end up having a president, treasurer, managers, etc, etc, etc, essentially creating what thousands of years of human history have already told you. Bitcoin, which was suppose to get around those pesky banks, essentially gave you the reason why banks are necessary: Most people don't want to or don't have the ability to secure their own money. Most people aren't willing to take a risk. They won't start a company and take no paycheck for months or possible years while barely scraping by hoping their idea actually is successful. Why should someone that takes absolutely no risk get anything close to the owners of a company?
adrianN 15y ago
A while ago there was an interesting article in the Orion magazine [1] that talks about this. It claims that people would become happier, even with less pay, when they work less and have more time to spend on family and friends. Apparently Kellog's tried a reduced work week for a while and the workers didn't want to change things back. [1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/ http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...
shin_lao 15y ago
The only way to simultaneously... Everytime someones says there's "only one way", that person turned out to be: * Dogmatic and * Wrong There's certainly not a single reason behind the current situation, and certainly not one single answer to it.
- colanderman 15y ago
  You are right. The other way is for a new, massive industry to open up. (Think terraforming Mars.) This would correspond to increased per-capita wealth consumption. However the fact that you must choose four of {decrease excess wealth, decrease employment, maintain moderate per-capita consumption, maintain high per-capita work output, maintain high per-hour work output} is a logical truth. Proof: Wealth can be created (work), destroyed (consumed), or accumulated and held (income/wealth inequality). Wealth must be created at the same rate it is accumulated or destroyed (i.e. Wc = Wa + Wd). Since OWS wants to decrease wealth accumulated and it is undesirable to increase wealth destroyed (unless in the example given above), we must therefore decrease wealth created. Right now this is happening due to unemployment. Since OWS also wants to minimize that, we must decrease wealth created in another manner. Obviously, decreasing wealth created per hour worked is out of the question (that would mean reverting to a pre-industrial age). The only remaining option is to decrease hours worked. QED.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
Necessarily will likely be a short-term (5-year or less) exemption from these policies for small business owners (defined as those whose executives take home in salary + bonuses less than some threshold, say $200k). E.g., small businesses like Apple and Google.

usaar333 15y ago

Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/9/973/papers/estevao_sa.pdf http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/9/973/papers/estevao_sa.pdf As a founder, this seems intuitively obvious. I have problems finding the correct people. There simply aren't enough skilled people who can do work (that is where the overhead of managing them + their cost < my time loss). Consequently, it makes economic sense for everyone to just work longer hours. If we had to limit hours, we'd simply produce less. And because our product provides time-savings for our customers, all of society suffers. I also completely disagree that people can buy so much stuff. Sure, physical items, yes. But 77% of the US economy is services. From a personal perspective, I don't need more trinkets. But if I had the money, I'd never do my own laundry, shopping, driving, etc. -- that is I would spend a lot of money to gain time. Whether that time goes toward pleasure or working harder, it doesn't matter -- society still wins.

wazoox 15y ago
> Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. There is much to be said about the legal work week in France. It has been badly misrepresented again and again. In most industries, the reduction of work hours was more than compensated by "annualization". That means that you must do 35 hours a week, not every week but as a mean value along the whole year. What's the result? Where people used to work 39 hours all year long, even when the activity was in a low cycle, an work paid overtime when activity was high, they now work 30 hours a week at times and up to 48 hours a week at other times, always paid the standard wage all year long. Furthermore, even the definition of "work hour" changed. For instance, in some industries people are now allowed to take a piss only 2 times a day instead of 4. In "sales" (actually, supermarket cashiers mostly), people are now "working" only while they're actually on duty (they used to be "working" while present on the premises); so they may be given "free time" for up to two or three hours during the day (there aren't many customers in shops for hours during the week), though they often have no other choice but wait at the workplace or the immediate vicinity because they haven't got time or resource to do anything else. So actually for a large part of the economy, going from 39 to 35 hours was quite a big improvement of productivity. What is usually represented abroad as a scandalous, quasi communist change was actually a boon for the "great capital". Further "adjustments" made to the system in the past 12 years by right wing governments have achieved the picture; though they still love to bad mouth "the 35 hours" (lazy leftists! profiteering socialists!), getting rid of the many "progresses" induced by this system is absolutely out of the question. This is, by the way, perfectly in line with the habit to ditch French (now dead) retirement law: "Lazy French retire at 60! Courageous Germans retire at 67!", while the truth is that French retire at 62.5 years, and German 62.7... > But 77% of the US economy is services. Many of these services don't always make sense economically. Is it for the best that so many Americans eat out almost every day? Sure, that creates demand for a lot of low wage jobs, then what? This sort of short-sighted insistence on GDP growth (more business! more jobs!) is toxic in the long term. Some of the basics tenets seriously need to be revised.

brc 15y ago

Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hours will drop productivity like a stone. You're effectively saying that all workers are equal, and interchangeable. You want to forcibly stop the more productive ones from working, so that their tasks and livelihoods can be given to others. In the case of a software company you're introducing the twin evils of bad hires and oversized teams. For what? An inferior product produced at a higher price. Dropping productivity means a drop in living standards for everyone, not just the rich people. The reason people are out of work is because too many people are paying back too much debt, and that equates to negative savings. Minimum wages increase unemployment because they set a price floor above the clearing price for the going price of a worker. Now, that's not an argument for getting rid of minimum wages, but you can't argue against the reality of what they do. The solution is to continue paying back debt, and learn the lesson not to borrow so much next time around. Yes, that sucks, but hard lessons seldom have pleasant consequences. If you want to stop a lot of wealth accumulating at the top end of the pyramid, by all means break up banking cartels and break the ties between legislators and big business, you won't get many arguments from most people. But fairyland schemes to force people to pay more than wages are worth, and force people to work less hours than they want? Hello, central planning. Hello, centralised control. The only way for this to work is to put the needs of the state above the needs of the individual. Which must, by definition, mean less individual freedom and more state control. What are you going to do with someone who works more than 35 hours? Lock them up at the point of a gun? "Wasteful excessive consumerism" is an entirely relative proposition. One persons waste is another satisfactory standard of living. To impose an arbitary living standard on someone is to completely control their lives. You're asking everyone to do less work. Less work by definition means less production, and less production means a lower living standard. And guess where the bulk of that lower living standard will fall - that's right, you can bet your peasant clothes it won't be on the 1%. To conclude : you're effectively asking for centralised control of peoples wages, centralised control of how much a person can work, and centralised and arbitary division of what is small, medium and large business for the purposes of handing out favors, subsidies and handouts. Eventually businesses will start to fail and so will seek more handouts, bailouts, concessions or are nationalised because they are vital to society (eg mining, energy, farming). You've effectively described a blend of National Socialism and Stalinism. And we know that both eventually lead to mass murder and misery of millions. This experiment has been tried before, it ends badly for all involved. I hope you're young and still learning, because if you're of any reasonable age, you should know better by now.

macov 15y ago

You are so wrong. Less work? There is no cure for cancer, no clean energy, no cheap housing, no good education. There are so many things to do.

forza 15y ago
Has nothing to do with the amount of work you do, but what goals or values you have.
- brc 15y ago
  Right - try telling that to the boss. I'm taking the day off, but you can still pay me. It's OK, though, I've got the right values.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

ppereira 15y ago

Strangely enough, because of the way the EITC is tied with wages and already distorting the economics at the bottom, raising the minimum wage could result in net transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor and therefore reduce inequality. I had more relevant comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120123

brc 15y ago
Not all people are the same. Not all people are as equally productive, equally talented or equally motivated. Not all people want the same things. You seem to subscribe to the aim of total income equality as a goal. To do this you would force the productive to hand over most of the product of their work to those who are less productive. Obviously, to do this, you need to force them using the apparatus of the state to do so. In other words, they either spend the majority of their time working for others or they go to jail. They are not asked to share the product of their work, they are threatened to do so or be locked up. Does that sound fair to you? That is a very perverse sense of justice, where you don't have a choice in how the output of your labour is divided. Honestly I cannot understand after a century of misery from forced wealth redistribution and forced work and millions of deaths people still come up with these ideas.
- CJefferson 15y ago
  This is not a black and white decision. There is a big gap between wanting "total income quality", and wanting to close the huge, and increasing, income equality gap in the US, and to increase the minimum wage (or undertake other means) to reach a point where people can reasonably buy a house and send their children to university without requiring crippling loans.
  - brc 15y ago
    You can't force the minimum wage up any more than you can push on a piece of string. While you can certainly change legislation to make the minimum wage a set value, there will be offsetting measures felt elsewhere, usually an increase in unemployment and a general drop in living standards for all. You can't force someone to employ you anymore than you can force someone to be your friend. Once houses have finished correcting lots of people will be able to afford them. Housing affordability is headed towards the best it's ever been. I agree that things are bad, but going down the road of trying to force a solution by means of restrictions, price controls and regulations will only make the problem worse. As I've posted in the past, places like Detroit should be cordoned off and turned into special economic zones like Hong Kong is to China. There should be a very low tax rate, no trade restrictions with other countries, and many other regulations, taxes and boondoggles dropped. There should be no (or very low, say 3%, for Military use) federal taxes and in turn they should receive no handouts or participate in any programs from the Federal government. Do that I can guarantee that in 10 years the place will be booming, employment will be high and things will be moving in the right direction. With somewhere like Detroit, it's time people started thinking outside the box and experimenting with some rollback of the last 100 years of policy.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

It's not that complicated. The rich get richer because they own. Specifically, they own two things - the means of production of wealth, and the debt of the 99%. Outsourcing wealth production to low-wage countries increased profit margins and enabled the meteoric rise in CEO and executive compensation relative to labor, whose wages were stagnant at best, or who were being outsourced and laid off at worst (eg, labor wasn't benefitting from the increased profit margins, only executives and shareholders/owners). Cheap money and debt bubbles enabled labor to continue consuming on credit beyond their means, sustaining the increased profit margins longer than should have been possible, while simultaneously paying interest on their consumption. Hence, the 99% (or whatever the % is) has been transferring wealth to the 1% from both ends. The solution is, stay out of debt as much as possible, and find ways to incentivize repatriation of production operations to the US (ostensibly by reducing the cost-basis of manufacturing here). Certain legal proposals, like financial transaction taxes and the like, may help as well.

smithian 15y ago
Or you could stop all government subsidies to corporations and set up a business tax structure that is heavily favorable to worker-owned cooperatives at the expense of shareholder-owned corporations. Corporations are just machines for extracting productivity from large numbers of people and concentrating the wealth produced by that productivity in the hands of a few. Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource.
- rick888 15y ago
  "Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource." You can start a worker-owned cooperative now. Why don't you? You could even make it a non-profit and save on some taxes. What you want to do is make it impossible for corporations as we know them to exist, taking away freedoms. Corporations aren't slave-owners and employees aren't slaves. You have the freedom to work for one or start your own company. I suppose a worker-owned cooperative would be fine, as long as the workers also took on losses (IE: if sales are down this month, you might only get a $500 paycheck as opposed to a $3000 one). Then you would have to deal with the day-to-day stuff and you would end up having a president, treasurer, managers, etc, etc, etc, essentially creating what thousands of years of human history have already told you. Bitcoin, which was suppose to get around those pesky banks, essentially gave you the reason why banks are necessary: Most people don't want to or don't have the ability to secure their own money. Most people aren't willing to take a risk. They won't start a company and take no paycheck for months or possible years while barely scraping by hoping their idea actually is successful. Why should someone that takes absolutely no risk get anything close to the owners of a company?

adrianN 15y ago

A while ago there was an interesting article in the Orion magazine [1] that talks about this. It claims that people would become happier, even with less pay, when they work less and have more time to spend on family and friends. Apparently Kellog's tried a reduced work week for a while and the workers didn't want to change things back. [1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/ http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...

shin_lao 15y ago

The only way to simultaneously... Everytime someones says there's "only one way", that person turned out to be: * Dogmatic and * Wrong There's certainly not a single reason behind the current situation, and certainly not one single answer to it.

colanderman 15y ago
You are right. The other way is for a new, massive industry to open up. (Think terraforming Mars.) This would correspond to increased per-capita wealth consumption. However the fact that you must choose four of {decrease excess wealth, decrease employment, maintain moderate per-capita consumption, maintain high per-capita work output, maintain high per-hour work output} is a logical truth. Proof: Wealth can be created (work), destroyed (consumed), or accumulated and held (income/wealth inequality). Wealth must be created at the same rate it is accumulated or destroyed (i.e. Wc = Wa + Wd). Since OWS wants to decrease wealth accumulated and it is undesirable to increase wealth destroyed (unless in the example given above), we must therefore decrease wealth created. Right now this is happening due to unemployment. Since OWS also wants to minimize that, we must decrease wealth created in another manner. Obviously, decreasing wealth created per hour worked is out of the question (that would mean reverting to a pre-industrial age). The only remaining option is to decrease hours worked. QED.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

Necessarily will likely be a short-term (5-year or less) exemption from these policies for small business owners (defined as those whose executives take home in salary + bonuses less than some threshold, say $200k). E.g., small businesses like Apple and Google.