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I see no deception on the part of the minimum wage increase proponents.
I see a lot of smoke being blown on the phony issues of alleged discrimination against the disabled and alleged permission for unlimited workplace access. I'm frankly amazed that the business community is being this flagrant with its weaseling.
The proponents offered to edit the proposal both when it was at the City Council and also when it was put on the ballot by petition. The offers were rejected. It looks now like the offers were rejected so that these bogus issues could be brought into play against passage.
The proposed issue doesn't discriminate against the handicapped, and it allows entry to public "non-work" areas only. You and the other opponents of this proposal are flat out lying, and no amount of Rush-sputtering is going to change that.
If you are as intelligent as I think you are, you should be ashamed of yourself. Please just tell the truth that you oppose minimum wages altogether, not just this proposed increase. Lying about the issues just makes you look like an opportunistic spinmeister.
Tell the truth, Mario. You would oppose this ballot proposition even if it didn't say anything about access or the handicapped. The proposal could allow employers to disallow all contact with their workers, and you would still oppose it. It could mention nothing about the handicapped, and you would still oppose it. Why are you bringing up these bogus issues?
Tell the plain truth, Mario. It will only hurt for a little bit . . .
Okay, here's the truth: no one out there has the guts to buck the politically correct trend and state exactly why the living wage law is a bad one. And that is because no government – federal, state or local – has the right to meddle in any way in the economic affairs of private citizens and private business. Yes, I’m going to trot out the “antiquated” Constitutional rationale: Government exists for only one purpose, and that is to protect our life, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness. No government, despite its best intentions (and when has our government’s intentions ever been “best” anyway?) can guarantee happiness. Including a high paying job.
If you’re going to survive in today’s hyper
inflated economic environment, you’re going to have to do one of two things: get an education that gives you a better than average shot at a better than average paying job or severely limit your lifestyle.
Throughout history, government meddling has hurt the individual more than it has helped. Bottom line: the government must get out of our private lives at all levels, and that includes the economic. Why the mass sucking in of breath? After all, decades of government regulations and taxes and price supports and handouts haven’t made a dent in poverty rates anyway. Let’s try something new.
One of the necessary things that governments do is to govern.
The state of affairs where government isn't present is anarchy. That means that we would be governed by ad hoc warlords. Now I'm a full-grown man with weapons, so I might make out all right in that environment. The women, children, and old folks might not do as well, but maybe they can just "severely limit their lifestyles."
We have a name for the condition when business runs the government: fascism.
So our alternatives to the form of government we have are anarchy and fascism (and we're heading closer to both of these by the day).
Government at best is all of us deciding how we want to create our society. Should we deny all of us the right to create communities we want to live in? Is all social planning wrong?
We have had conditions like that in the US (e.g., the Robber Baron Era, et al.) that didn't work out well for most of the population, so we changed the rules. You seem to be arguing that our lives should be spent in a knife fight with no rules at all. For a lot of folks, life really is like that: nasty, brutal, and short. The poor get lots and lots of free enterprise; the socialism you apparently despise is mostly for corporations now.
Some government actions have had large effects on the poverty rate, but space is too limited for a full discussion of this point.
No matter how much we educate the populace, someone will have to clean the toilets and chop up the veggies. That person is performing a necessary task and deserves to be paid a decent wage for it, no matter how many people are lined up to take the job. If it's all-against-all with a race to the bottom of the wage heap, we wind up with a few rich people at the top and everyone else grubbing at the bottom.
I think it's nicer to have a middle class. Don't you?
By the way, the Constitution doesn't mention life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's the Declaration of Independence, and the actual quote is about "certain unalienable Rights, that AMONG THESE are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Emphasis added.) That's not "one purpose."
And your choices for survival aren't limited to going to college or scrounging through dumpsters. Many of our richest citizens haven't completed college. Alternatives abound. The military. Crime. Having the good sense to be born to well-to-do parents. Etc.
I am happy to see, however, that nobody wants to even attempt a justification of the indefensible bogus arguments against the current minimum wage proposal. The "let them eat cake" argument at least has the advantage of honesty. I don't think it's a majority opinion, though. And I think that this proposal will pass, at which point the courts (i.e., government) will again seek to overthrow the opinion of the majority. Will you complain about "government" then?
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