13 ms·

Workers get "exploited" when they're poor and have limited options. Government "protections" can only make it worse. For example, many illegal aliens in the US

by dpatru 13y ago

Workers get "exploited" when they're poor and have limited options. Government "protections" can only make it worse. For example, many illegal aliens in the US are exploited because they are prohibited by law from getting a job. So they can only get hired by the few employers willing to break the law to hire them. If it were legal for them to work, they would find better jobs. Similarly child labor is only a problem when families are too poor to survive if the children don't work. Minimum wage laws "protect" the least profitable workers from getting legal jobs, forcing them to get illegal jobs or survive on government handouts. To see this, imagine if the minimum wage were set just above your current wage. You would then be out of a job. Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. For example, when the river waters belong to no one, people feel free to dump into it. As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them. See http://mises.org/daily/2120 http://mises.org/daily/2120

pyre 13y ago
| As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has | an incentive to protect them What if the owners don't care? What if it's not possible to police it (it's not like a local stream is monetizable in the way that a section of the Mississippi would be). What if major waterways like the Mississippi were owned? What if a section of the Mississippi were owned by some guy that would only allow people/companies through if they were (e.g.) Christians? What happens when I dump toxic waste on my own property but it seeps into ground water that the entire area (or just my neighbors via pumps) uses for water? What happens when it runs off and onto my neighbor's property? What if my neighbor is a farmer and this wrecks his livelihood?
honestcoyote 13y ago
I think you're correct. If only corporations owned more of this country, there would be less pollution. After all, industry has always taken great care of their own land. Former industrial sites are often prized by their new owners because the land is usually quite pristine.
crag 13y ago
"Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. For example, when the river waters belong to no one, people feel free to dump into it. As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them." It's the other way around. When property is owned by all, we take care of it better. Think of parks. There are already companies who own lakes, rivers, areas of land; and pollute the hell out of them. They used these areas as waste dumps. Which, in the end, end up hurting us all. Go to any pork farm in NC and have a look around. You'll see first hand what ownership of lands by "the" company does to the land. Living space: how many landlords you know that actually take care of their properties now - without getting their arm twisted?
- jorleif 13y ago
  Yes, the solution would be more along the lines that the owner or one of his direct descendants has to live at the site. Then hurting the environment hurts yourself.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    Or make the property(rivers, parks and roads) public and force the government to keep it in shape.
- rfrey 13y ago
  Unfortunately we don't have a great track record of taking care of the commons. Communal ownership almost always leads to neglect of the owned thing - parks have paid employees to take care of them, so (sometimes, if there's enough money thrown at it) they stay clean. Likewise, your criticism of private ownership is too extreme. The vast majority of landlords take excellent care of their properties for example. Others take the right amount of care so that the place isn't great, but can be rented for less. Some landlords let a place decay until it's unsafe, but that's usually when incentives are set up that its in their best interests to do so. Such incentives are the opposite of private property rights and are usually in the form of rent controls, etc, where you can raise rent only when you drive tenants out, or its not profitable to use a property as housing and the only way to change its use is through its destruction. On the flip side, the example of privately owned waterways is a terrible one, because there's no way to avoid the communal, commons nature of the ecosystem. And companies might have a use for the lake or river (disposal of toxic waste) that is counter to the common interest, as you rightly point out. Then they poison everyone. So: communal ownership. Suboptimal but we're stuck with it in many situations, so we need to implement it as effectively as we can.
drewrv 13y ago
Illegal aliens get exploited because government protections don't apply to them (they're less likely to know their rights and they're unlikely to go to authorities to report abuse). If it were legal for them to work, the government would protect them and they would be better off for it.
vidarh 13y ago
> To see this, imagine if the minimum wage were set just above your current wage. You would then be out of a job. It's not nearly that simple. Someone needs to do most of those jobs, and a substantial proportion of them are in companies that can't hide illegal hires easily. E.g. try to explain to tax authorities why you're not paying payroll taxes for servers if you're a restaurant. Instead many companies will have to increase prices. Sure, that sucks for export businesses, so it is not without cost. It is almost comical when people present government protections as making it worse compared to US conditions, which are at a level that most Europeans shudder at the thought of being subjected to US working conditions. The US is a shining beacon of how individual negotiation does not work to get decent working conditions for the vast majority.
- salvadors 13y ago
  > try to explain to tax authorities why you're not paying payroll taxes for servers if you're a restaurant. Instead many companies will have to increase prices. What would most likely happen is that one set of restaurants would increase prices, whilst another would try to avoid doing so, by trying to find ways to reduce service costs (e.g. customers place their order at a machine, rather than with a human). Some of each would be successful, some would not. But over time the trend is towards more and more low paid jobs being pushed back to the customer themselves. In many countries minimum wage has been a key factor in killing off many jobs, (e.g. as pumping gas.) Also, if minimum wage is raised to above your current wage, you're now competing for it with people who were in that higher wage bracket before. If a business now has to pay someone, say, $10 an hour instead of $7, they will be able to get people with more experience / skill for that price, making it harder for people to get entry-level jobs in the first place.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    You can see first hand what happens by looking at large parts of Europe. And the development to push low paid jobs back to the customer themselves does indeed happen, but it happens regardless. Countries like Norway does not have massive unemployment by international standard, despite one of the flattest salary curves in the world. > If a business now has to pay someone, say, $10 an hour instead of $7, they will be able to get people with more experience / skill for that price, making it harder for people to get entry-level jobs in the first place. This assumes the more qualified people want those jobs, even at $10 instead of $7. If I could get a job as a cleaner for what I make as a software developer, I'd still pick the (much less physically demanding, and less soul destroying) job as a software developer. If salary was even the main determinant for why people pick the jobs they do, then we'd practically have no nurses or teachers, for example - both jobs that require disproportionally long education for the often very low salaries they command. Or even law. In the UK, the average salary for solicitors (who require 3 or 4 years for a degree plus the Legal Practice Course of one year plus two years of practice before you become qualified) is lower than the national average salary. You can make far more in many professions that don't require even a degree. In fact, there are people in retail and fast food jobs that make more than many UK solicitors, yet work normal hours where many solicitors work hours that are illegal in most European countries. But most of the positions that are in the territory that would be affected by minimum wage restrictions tends to be positions primarily attracting the totally unqualified that are generally positions that are extremely unattractive for qualified workers and remain so for most even if the salary was better. How many people do you come across that actively want to make a career for themselves working themselves up the ladder in McDonalds? Yet making manager at a McDonalds in the UK can net you 45k GBP/year or more - far above the average UK salary. Economically, a large proportion of UK solicitors, teachers, nurses and many others would be better off working at McDonalds. Yet we don't see a massive flight of highly qualified people to McDonalds or similar.
easytiger 13y ago
Your illegal worker point is moronic. They can't get jobs because they are not in the country legally. The solution isn't to give them jobs but either throw them out or give them a visa. > Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. For example, when the river waters belong to no one, people feel free to dump into it. As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them. See http://mises.org/daily/2120 http://mises.org/daily/2120 Ok, now i think you've gone full retard. If the rivers a protected by a rivers authority then they are not ownerless.
- specialist 13y ago
  Citing mises.org is a conversation full stop for me.
arethuza 13y ago
"Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one." Under that scheme, who would have the property rights for the atmosphere? I rather like living in a place where atmospheric pollution (both domestic and commercial) is tightly controlled by regulations. We tried the alternative years ago and it was a disaster on many fronts.
- dpatru 13y ago
  It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting toxins on your property (your land or your body.) Pollution is usually a problem of trespass and enforcement of property rights could solve it. Regulations are kind of a roundabout way to solve the problem. You want the polluter to be concerned about affecting its neighbors, not just to meet (or help set) some arbitrary government standard.
  - subsection1h 13y ago
    It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting toxins on your property Not possible. For example, diesel exhaust and wood smoke both contain carcinogenic submicron particulate matter pollution. It's not possible to sue every truck driver and person with a campfire who is within several miles of one's home. This is why we need regulations like burn bans and diesel engine emission regulations.
    - dpatru 13y ago
      In practice, you'd focus on factories, powerplants, the road owners, auto-makers, etc. This is similar to how regulations already work. The regulators tend to ignore the rogue backyard barbecuer and instead focus on the big polluters. Also, aggregation techniques could be used for both defendants (polluters) and plaintiffs (landowners and other people being poisoned.)
kalleboo 13y ago
> As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them Or, the owner has an incentive to exploit the heck out of the river/lake until it's saturated with pollution, and then they move on.
- eru 13y ago
  Depends on interest rates.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
  Or you do what Thatcher did in the UK. You require all factories that need water from rivers to have their water input below their waste water output. As all factories need really clean water, this would force them to install top of the line waste water plants. That's how you deal with it efficiently.
  - liotier 13y ago
    No, they will just install large buffer tanks so that they can alternate between input and output in total impunity.
shadowfox 13y ago
> As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them I am curious. How do you go about deciding ownership on a long river? What rights does "owning" a river give you?
- dpatru 13y ago
  Murray Rothbard thought that the first users should be the owners. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard157.html http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard157.html So under his scheme, the downstream owners would have to buy the river from the upstream owners to prevent them from polluting. I think that there's something wrong with an upstream owner polluting the river and causing damage to people downstream. The situation is analogous to burning poisonous chemicals on land and letting the wind currents carry the chemicals onto neighboring property. In this case the burner would be liable. The overall point is that pollution can and should be handled as a property-rights matter and that the state need not and should not "regulate" pollution.
  - liotier 13y ago
    Who owns the air I breath ?
mbetter 13y ago
> Government "protections" can only make it worse. Bullshit. > Similarly child labor is only a problem when families are too poor to survive if the children don't work. Bullshit. > Minimum wage laws "protect" the least profitable workers from getting legal jobs, forcing them to get illegal jobs or survive on government handouts. Bullshit. > Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. Big surprise, bullshit.

by dpatru 13y ago

pyre 13y ago

| As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has | an incentive to protect them What if the owners don't care? What if it's not possible to police it (it's not like a local stream is monetizable in the way that a section of the Mississippi would be). What if major waterways like the Mississippi were owned? What if a section of the Mississippi were owned by some guy that would only allow people/companies through if they were (e.g.) Christians? What happens when I dump toxic waste on my own property but it seeps into ground water that the entire area (or just my neighbors via pumps) uses for water? What happens when it runs off and onto my neighbor's property? What if my neighbor is a farmer and this wrecks his livelihood?

honestcoyote 13y ago

I think you're correct. If only corporations owned more of this country, there would be less pollution. After all, industry has always taken great care of their own land. Former industrial sites are often prized by their new owners because the land is usually quite pristine.

crag 13y ago

"Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. For example, when the river waters belong to no one, people feel free to dump into it. As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them." It's the other way around. When property is owned by all, we take care of it better. Think of parks. There are already companies who own lakes, rivers, areas of land; and pollute the hell out of them. They used these areas as waste dumps. Which, in the end, end up hurting us all. Go to any pork farm in NC and have a look around. You'll see first hand what ownership of lands by "the" company does to the land. Living space: how many landlords you know that actually take care of their properties now - without getting their arm twisted?

jorleif 13y ago
Yes, the solution would be more along the lines that the owner or one of his direct descendants has to live at the site. Then hurting the environment hurts yourself.
- anoncow 13y ago
  Or make the property(rivers, parks and roads) public and force the government to keep it in shape.
rfrey 13y ago
Unfortunately we don't have a great track record of taking care of the commons. Communal ownership almost always leads to neglect of the owned thing - parks have paid employees to take care of them, so (sometimes, if there's enough money thrown at it) they stay clean. Likewise, your criticism of private ownership is too extreme. The vast majority of landlords take excellent care of their properties for example. Others take the right amount of care so that the place isn't great, but can be rented for less. Some landlords let a place decay until it's unsafe, but that's usually when incentives are set up that its in their best interests to do so. Such incentives are the opposite of private property rights and are usually in the form of rent controls, etc, where you can raise rent only when you drive tenants out, or its not profitable to use a property as housing and the only way to change its use is through its destruction. On the flip side, the example of privately owned waterways is a terrible one, because there's no way to avoid the communal, commons nature of the ecosystem. And companies might have a use for the lake or river (disposal of toxic waste) that is counter to the common interest, as you rightly point out. Then they poison everyone. So: communal ownership. Suboptimal but we're stuck with it in many situations, so we need to implement it as effectively as we can.

drewrv 13y ago

Illegal aliens get exploited because government protections don't apply to them (they're less likely to know their rights and they're unlikely to go to authorities to report abuse). If it were legal for them to work, the government would protect them and they would be better off for it.

vidarh 13y ago

> To see this, imagine if the minimum wage were set just above your current wage. You would then be out of a job. It's not nearly that simple. Someone needs to do most of those jobs, and a substantial proportion of them are in companies that can't hide illegal hires easily. E.g. try to explain to tax authorities why you're not paying payroll taxes for servers if you're a restaurant. Instead many companies will have to increase prices. Sure, that sucks for export businesses, so it is not without cost. It is almost comical when people present government protections as making it worse compared to US conditions, which are at a level that most Europeans shudder at the thought of being subjected to US working conditions. The US is a shining beacon of how individual negotiation does not work to get decent working conditions for the vast majority.

salvadors 13y ago
> try to explain to tax authorities why you're not paying payroll taxes for servers if you're a restaurant. Instead many companies will have to increase prices. What would most likely happen is that one set of restaurants would increase prices, whilst another would try to avoid doing so, by trying to find ways to reduce service costs (e.g. customers place their order at a machine, rather than with a human). Some of each would be successful, some would not. But over time the trend is towards more and more low paid jobs being pushed back to the customer themselves. In many countries minimum wage has been a key factor in killing off many jobs, (e.g. as pumping gas.) Also, if minimum wage is raised to above your current wage, you're now competing for it with people who were in that higher wage bracket before. If a business now has to pay someone, say, $10 an hour instead of $7, they will be able to get people with more experience / skill for that price, making it harder for people to get entry-level jobs in the first place.
- vidarh 13y ago
  You can see first hand what happens by looking at large parts of Europe. And the development to push low paid jobs back to the customer themselves does indeed happen, but it happens regardless. Countries like Norway does not have massive unemployment by international standard, despite one of the flattest salary curves in the world. > If a business now has to pay someone, say, $10 an hour instead of $7, they will be able to get people with more experience / skill for that price, making it harder for people to get entry-level jobs in the first place. This assumes the more qualified people want those jobs, even at $10 instead of $7. If I could get a job as a cleaner for what I make as a software developer, I'd still pick the (much less physically demanding, and less soul destroying) job as a software developer. If salary was even the main determinant for why people pick the jobs they do, then we'd practically have no nurses or teachers, for example - both jobs that require disproportionally long education for the often very low salaries they command. Or even law. In the UK, the average salary for solicitors (who require 3 or 4 years for a degree plus the Legal Practice Course of one year plus two years of practice before you become qualified) is lower than the national average salary. You can make far more in many professions that don't require even a degree. In fact, there are people in retail and fast food jobs that make more than many UK solicitors, yet work normal hours where many solicitors work hours that are illegal in most European countries. But most of the positions that are in the territory that would be affected by minimum wage restrictions tends to be positions primarily attracting the totally unqualified that are generally positions that are extremely unattractive for qualified workers and remain so for most even if the salary was better. How many people do you come across that actively want to make a career for themselves working themselves up the ladder in McDonalds? Yet making manager at a McDonalds in the UK can net you 45k GBP/year or more - far above the average UK salary. Economically, a large proportion of UK solicitors, teachers, nurses and many others would be better off working at McDonalds. Yet we don't see a massive flight of highly qualified people to McDonalds or similar.

easytiger 13y ago

Your illegal worker point is moronic. They can't get jobs because they are not in the country legally. The solution isn't to give them jobs but either throw them out or give them a visa. > Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. For example, when the river waters belong to no one, people feel free to dump into it. As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them. See http://mises.org/daily/2120 http://mises.org/daily/2120 Ok, now i think you've gone full retard. If the rivers a protected by a rivers authority then they are not ownerless.

specialist 13y ago
Citing mises.org is a conversation full stop for me.

arethuza 13y ago

"Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one." Under that scheme, who would have the property rights for the atmosphere? I rather like living in a place where atmospheric pollution (both domestic and commercial) is tightly controlled by regulations. We tried the alternative years ago and it was a disaster on many fronts.

dpatru 13y ago
It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting toxins on your property (your land or your body.) Pollution is usually a problem of trespass and enforcement of property rights could solve it. Regulations are kind of a roundabout way to solve the problem. You want the polluter to be concerned about affecting its neighbors, not just to meet (or help set) some arbitrary government standard.
- subsection1h 13y ago
  It should be possible to sue air polluters for putting toxins on your property Not possible. For example, diesel exhaust and wood smoke both contain carcinogenic submicron particulate matter pollution. It's not possible to sue every truck driver and person with a campfire who is within several miles of one's home. This is why we need regulations like burn bans and diesel engine emission regulations.
  - dpatru 13y ago
    In practice, you'd focus on factories, powerplants, the road owners, auto-makers, etc. This is similar to how regulations already work. The regulators tend to ignore the rogue backyard barbecuer and instead focus on the big polluters. Also, aggregation techniques could be used for both defendants (polluters) and plaintiffs (landowners and other people being poisoned.)

kalleboo 13y ago

> As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them Or, the owner has an incentive to exploit the heck out of the river/lake until it's saturated with pollution, and then they move on.

eru 13y ago
Depends on interest rates.
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
Or you do what Thatcher did in the UK. You require all factories that need water from rivers to have their water input below their waste water output. As all factories need really clean water, this would force them to install top of the line waste water plants. That's how you deal with it efficiently.
- liotier 13y ago
  No, they will just install large buffer tanks so that they can alternate between input and output in total impunity.

shadowfox 13y ago

> As soon as the waters have an owner, the owner has an incentive to protect them I am curious. How do you go about deciding ownership on a long river? What rights does "owning" a river give you?

dpatru 13y ago
Murray Rothbard thought that the first users should be the owners. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard157.html http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard157.html So under his scheme, the downstream owners would have to buy the river from the upstream owners to prevent them from polluting. I think that there's something wrong with an upstream owner polluting the river and causing damage to people downstream. The situation is analogous to burning poisonous chemicals on land and letting the wind currents carry the chemicals onto neighboring property. In this case the burner would be liable. The overall point is that pollution can and should be handled as a property-rights matter and that the state need not and should not "regulate" pollution.
- liotier 13y ago
  Who owns the air I breath ?

mbetter 13y ago

> Government "protections" can only make it worse. Bullshit. > Similarly child labor is only a problem when families are too poor to survive if the children don't work. Bullshit. > Minimum wage laws "protect" the least profitable workers from getting legal jobs, forcing them to get illegal jobs or survive on government handouts. Bullshit. > Environmental destruction happens because government restricts property rights and creates commons which belong to no one. Big surprise, bullshit.