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"Oversupply" is the key word there. How much do I value having clean water? A lot. I'd pay $100 a gallon if I had to do so to survive. But I'm happily paying

"Oversupply" is the key word there. How much do I value having clean water? A lot. I'd pay $100 a gallon if I had to do so to survive. But I'm happily paying a tiny fraction of that and "pocketing the difference". That's because my demand is easily met by the supply. Am I wronging the water company? Of course not. If they want to make more, they have to offer me something I can't get from someone else for cheaper. Not to mention the fact that "pocketing the difference" in both cases actually means "spending the difference on something else." EDIT: I'm not allowed to reply to the next reply to me, but there is a difference between treating humans as a commodity and treating their labor as a commodity. I have a right not to be enslaved. I do not have a right to be paid for my labor AT ALL, much less to be paid a certain amount. I have to compete to sell my labor to the highest bidder, just as though I were selling widgets.

Nursie 14y ago
Absolutely, oversupply is the word. However society is built by and for human beings, not machines or economic ideals. Where water is a commodity, treating humans as one must have limits, surely?
Nursie 14y ago
"I'm not allowed to reply to the next reply to me" You can usually hit 'link' and it'll let you reply in there, not sure if that's always the case. "I do not have a right to be paid for my labor AT ALL, much less to be paid a certain amount. I have to compete to sell my labor to the highest bidder, just as though I were selling widgets." You talk about these things as if they were written in stone somewhere. When you start to look at this in terms of absolute rights you lose sight of the point to some extent - what outcome do we want here? How can this best be achieved? What are the downsides? The people who are stuck on minimum wage are the least able to compete. They have no skills and likely some difficulty acquiring them, they probably lack the ability to negotiate, they don't have the choice of not taking work because the alternative is starvation. The logical conclusion for them, were a truly free and unregulated market for labour ever to appear, would be contracting their lives away for a roof and some food, working insane hours in hazardous conditions for little to nothing. Make no mistake here, a proportion of the population cannot better themselves. Over the last hundred or so years we've added a huge framework of workers rights to our society to stop this very situation. A minimum wage is part of this, and raising it may well help large numbers of people.

Nursie 14y ago

Absolutely, oversupply is the word. However society is built by and for human beings, not machines or economic ideals. Where water is a commodity, treating humans as one must have limits, surely?

Nursie 14y ago

"I'm not allowed to reply to the next reply to me" You can usually hit 'link' and it'll let you reply in there, not sure if that's always the case. "I do not have a right to be paid for my labor AT ALL, much less to be paid a certain amount. I have to compete to sell my labor to the highest bidder, just as though I were selling widgets." You talk about these things as if they were written in stone somewhere. When you start to look at this in terms of absolute rights you lose sight of the point to some extent - what outcome do we want here? How can this best be achieved? What are the downsides? The people who are stuck on minimum wage are the least able to compete. They have no skills and likely some difficulty acquiring them, they probably lack the ability to negotiate, they don't have the choice of not taking work because the alternative is starvation. The logical conclusion for them, were a truly free and unregulated market for labour ever to appear, would be contracting their lives away for a roof and some food, working insane hours in hazardous conditions for little to nothing. Make no mistake here, a proportion of the population cannot better themselves. Over the last hundred or so years we've added a huge framework of workers rights to our society to stop this very situation. A minimum wage is part of this, and raising it may well help large numbers of people.