How can we protect people's social class?

[Trishie]

Ask Trishie what the food costs and gas prices are like for those who live in her country. And ask about healthcare.
I have a gut feeling that you really don’t realize how much better they are doing it then we are.

We have medicare, and there is private health insurance, but no one is turned away from hospital for lack of health insurance.
We also have public hospitals giving high quality health-care.
Many hospitals provide both facilities.

For the unemployed and pensioners we have free dental hospitals, govt funded, for that one requires a healthcare card or that is provided for unemployed and those with disability pensions, or an aged pension card.

If I had a heart attack, an accident, a dangerous allergic reaction, I’d call an ambulance and be admitted to Emergency at any of three hospitals not too distant in my city where my condition would be assessed and I’d receive care according to the seriousness of my condition.
If I wish to go through the public hospital system for treatment for cancer etc as I would get a referral from my doctor and go from there. Some people opt for private health insurance if they prefer their own doctor or a single room. For elective surgery there is a longer wait for public hospital care, but emergency care is always available.

Presumably because my brother-in-law’s accident was a road-condition accident, the Victorian government covered his 6 months in a specialist spinal hospital, and no suing or fight required, but he did have a partial pension. Both medications I must take each day should cost me $27 and around $50. As they are subsidized they each cost no more than $7 each, as I’m a pensioner.

Whether or not Australia will be able to continue to take such good care of its 22 million (approaching 23 million due to the continuing influx of refugees rather than our own birthrate) is another matter. With the Baby Boomer generation aging and world economic conditions worsening,…there may be some hard decisions ahead

health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/EBA6536E92A7D2D2CA256F9D007D8066/$File/ozhealth.pdf

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Australia

 

[Swiss_Guy]

Who determines “proper station in life?”

Besides, purely free markets do not exist now, have not existed in over a century, and may never exist again. ** The days of factories using child labor or putting road kill in sausage are over, and no one misses them.**

ICXC NIKA

No they aren’t. Asia still has child labor and people are calling for the deregulation of labor market. Fortunately Pope Benedict XVI and the Church denounces those ideas:

Caritas in Veritate:

1. From the social point of view, systems of protection and welfare, already present in many countries in Paul VI’s day, are finding it hard and could find it even harder in the future to pursue their goals of true social justice in today’s profoundly changed environment. The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations. Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum[60], for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

The mobility of labour, associated with a climate of deregulation, is an important phenomenon with certain positive aspects, because it can stimulate wealth production and cultural exchange. Nevertheless, uncertainty over working conditions caused by mobility and deregulation, when it becomes endemic, tends to create new forms of psychological instability, giving rise to difficulty in forging coherent life-plans, including that of marriage. This leads to situations of human decline, to say nothing of the waste of social resources. In comparison with the casualties of industrial society in the past, unemployment today provokes new forms of economic marginalization, and the current crisis can only make this situation worse. Being out of work or dependent on public or private assistance for a prolonged period undermines the freedom and creativity of the person and his family and social relationships, causing great psychological and spiritual suffering. I would like to remind everyone, especially governments engaged in boosting the world’s economic and social assets, that the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity: “Man is the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life”[61].

 

[Bradski]

Whether or not Australia will be able to continue to take such good care of its 22 million (approaching 23 million due to the continuing influx of refugees rather than our own birthrate) is another matter.

I think that you mean immigration as opposed to refugees.

NOM has fallen and the latest ABS estimates indicate that it was about 172 500 at 30 September 2011.

Currently Net Overseas Migratiion contributes about 54 per cent of Australia’s population growth. NOM has outstripped the natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) in the population since 2005. immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/15population.htm

The Australian government has boosted its refugee intake to 20,000 a year. Australia boosts refugee intake - ABC News

 

[JIB]

Who determines “proper station in life?”

Besides, purely free markets do not exist now, have not existed in over a century, and may never exist again. The days of factories using child labor or putting road kill in sausage are over, and no one misses them.

ICXC NIKA

We’ve never had a free market.

 

[Julia_Mae]

So you are saying that you could just start paying workers double what they are making now and it wouldn’t have any effect on businesses? They would just eat the profit loss or something?

Tell me, do you know how the money supply is controlled in the US and by whom? Do you know what it means to raise the debt ceiling? Did you know without looking it up?

To answer your own question, Google the last time they raised the minimum wage and then look at the prosperity index for the next 12 months. The scare talk is just scare talk.

 

[JIB]

The economic ignorance in this thread is astounding. It’s actually scary to be honest.

 

[fakename]

Who determines “proper station in life?”

Besides, purely free markets do not exist now, have not existed in over a century, and may never exist again. The days of factories using child labor or putting road kill in sausage are over, and no one misses them.

ICXC NIKA

Social class is proper station in life. More precisely, from what I’ve read, “proper station” is both objective and subjective-relative. The relative part is defined as how people see you and how you feel you are seen by others. It may be summed up in what I think most people call “pride” or “dignity” (for when someone apparently acts beneath their station others will say “have some dignity” or when someone says that their pay is “beneath them” what they refer to as their standard is their “pride” or “dignity”). So dignity is something that is a relation between others and yourself. From whence it follows that it damages someone’s pride if they alone are reduced but it damages it less when themselves and everyone else is reduced in dignity.

The second part of dignity and pride is the objective part, for when someone is a hero he is necessarily honored with greater dignity and if someone is a monk, it doesn’t matter that he lacks worldly goods, he still has greater dignity than a non-monk and this is because of his virtue. Also, whatever is nobler is given more dignity for the wise men are more admired then the manual workmen because of their respective objects; philosophy is more human and leisurely than plumbing.

So a proper balance b/t these two parts creates an effect which is called “becoming”.

But the market, let us assume, by allowing people to be fired and hired at any price essentially destroys the whole concept of dignity because the market assumes that there is no price at which a person would not accept work because it is beneath him. Hence dignity is sacrificed for trifling amounts of money. From this POV we must ask how we can theoretically square the market with the concept of social honor.

 

[fakename]

People have a “proper station in life?” And we need to protect them? I’m very confused.

We need to protect the “proper station in life” as taught here: newadvent.org/cathen/04185a.htm

For we must protect rightful compensation, but compensation includes enough for the proper station in life, so we must protect the proper station in life.

 

[Edward_H]

Tell me, do you know how the money supply is controlled in the US and by whom? Do you know what it means to raise the debt ceiling? Did you know without looking it up?

To answer your own question, Google the last time they raised the minimum wage and then look at the prosperity index for the next 12 months. The scare talk is just scare talk.

Establishing and raising the minimum wage always results in lost jobs at the margin of the wage. Employers decide based on raw numbers they can do without the services provided by the now below margin wage. Movie theatres used to have ushers in each theatre years ago…in the early 70s when minimum wage was hiked they disappeared. Same was true in gas stations…the increase in minimum wages drove a change in roles…consumers pumped their own gas. Gas stations now employ comparably few people.

Such compensatory effects are unavoidable in an economy.

 

[Edward_H]

We need to protect the “proper station in life” as taught here: newadvent.org/cathen/04185a.htm

For we must protect rightful compensation, but compensation includes enough for the proper station in life, so we must protect the proper station in life.

Except it doesn’t say that. Paying people above their returned value to a business isn’t “just”.

Putting people in homes they can’t pay for isn’t just. It’s especially not just to charge everyone else for someone’s imaginary sense of justice.

 

[Julia_Mae]

We need to protect the “proper station in life” as taught here: newadvent.org/cathen/04185a.htm

For we must protect rightful compensation, but compensation includes enough for the proper station in life, so we must protect the proper station in life.

Today Catholic teaching on compensation is quite precise as regards the just minimum. It may be summarized in these words of Pope Leo XIII in the famous Encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (15 May, 1891), on the condition of the working classes: “there is a dictate of nature more ancient and more imperious than any bargain between man and man, that the remuneration must be sufficient to support the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accepts harder conditions, because an employer or contractor will give him no better, he is the victim of fraud and injustice.” Shortly after the Encyclical appeared, Cardinal Goossens, the Archbishop of Mechlin, asked the Holy See whether an employer would do wrong who should pay a wage sufficient for the sustenance of the labourer himself but not for that of his family. An unofficial response came through Cardinal Zigliara, saying that such conduct would not be contrary to justice, but that it might sometimes violate charity, or natural righteousness — i.e. reasonable gratitude. As a consequence of the teaching of Leo XIII, there has been widespread discussion, and there exists an immense literature among the Catholics of Europe and America concerning the minimum just wage. The present Catholic position may be summarized somewhat as follows: First, all writers of authority agree that the employer who can reasonably afford it is morally obliged to give all his employees compensation sufficient for decent individual maintenance, and his adult male employees the equivalent of a decent living not only for themselves but for their families; but not all place the latter part of the obligation under the head of strict justice. Second, some writers base this doctrine of a minimum just wage upon the principle of just price, according to which compensation should be equivalent to labour, while others declare that it is implicitly contained in the natural right of the labourer to obtain a decent livelihood in the only way that is open to him, namely, through his labour-contract and in the form of wages. The latter is undoubtedly the view of Leo XIII, as is evident from these words of the Encyclical: “It follows that each one has a right to procure what is required in order to live; and the poor can procure it in no other way than by work and wages.”

I see.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Establishing and raising the minimum wage always results in lost jobs at the margin of the wage.

No, it doesn’t. And as you made the assertion, you can provide the substantiating evidence for your claim.

Employers decide based on raw numbers they can do without the services provided by the now below margin wage. Movie theatres used to have ushers in each theatre years ago…in the early 70s when minimum wage was hiked they disappeared. Same was true in gas stations…the increase in minimum wages drove a change in roles…consumers pumped their own gas. Gas stations now employ comparably few people.

Yeah, associating the changes specifically with a raise in minimum wage is an enormous stretch. You’ll have to explain fewer employees per vehicle produced once the assembly line and robotics appeared, the loss of jobs to self-check out and the disappearance of farm laborers when tractors were invented. Pretty sure all the technological advances that resulted in fewer employees in certain industries cannot by any stretch be related to raising the minimum wage.

And BTW, theaters cut back because of color TV keeping families at home, not to mention all our Saturday night movie dates were in Da Nang. People stopped going to the movies. Had nothing to do with the minimum wage.

 

[Edward_H]

No, it doesn’t. And as you made the assertion, you can provide the substantiating evidence for your claim.

Yeah, associating the changes specifically with a raise in minimum wage is an enormous stretch. You’ll have to explain fewer employees per vehicle produced once the assembly line and robotics appeared, the loss of jobs to self-check out and the disappearance of farm laborers when tractors were invented. Pretty sure all the technological advances that resulted in fewer employees in certain industries cannot by any stretch be related to raising the minimum wage.

And BTW, theaters cut back because of color TV keeping families at home, not to mention all our Saturday night movie dates were in Da Nang. People stopped going to the movies. Had nothing to do with the minimum wage.

Read Hazlitt’s classic Economics in one lesson for a wonderfully coherent explanation on “down stream effects” of minimum wage laws, price supports, trade tariffs, etc. Most analyses never look at second or third order effects.

More recently:

thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2010/08/04/Minimum-Wage-Jump-Teaches-Teens-Harsh-Lessons.aspx#page1

 

[Edward_H]

No, it doesn’t. And as you made the assertion, you can provide the substantiating evidence for your claim.

Yeah, associating the changes specifically with a raise in minimum wage is an enormous stretch. You’ll have to explain fewer employees per vehicle produced once the assembly line and robotics appeared, the loss of jobs to self-check out and the disappearance of farm laborers when tractors were invented. Pretty sure all the technological advances that resulted in fewer employees in certain industries cannot by any stretch be related to raising the minimum wage.

And BTW, theaters cut back because of color TV keeping families at home, not to mention all our Saturday night movie dates were in Da Nang. People stopped going to the movies. Had nothing to do with the minimum wage.

Sorry, as a percent of the Movie going population the men in Vietnam were a small fraction. I

 

[JIB]

Read Hayek’s classic Economics in one lesson for a wonderfully coherent explanation on “down stream effects” of minimum wage laws, price supports, trade tariffs, etc. Most analyses never look at second or third order effects.

More recently:

thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2010/08/04/Minimum-Wage-Jump-Teaches-Teens-Harsh-Lessons.aspx#page1

“Economics in One Lesson” was written by Henry Hazlitt. F. A. Hayek is best known for “The Road to Serfdom”.

You can’t just use stats to prove a minimum wage increase leads to unemployment. You have to have theory. Correlation is not causation.

That said, no reasonable person denies that an increase in the minimum wage can cause unemployment.

 

[Edward_H]

“Economics in One Lesson” was written by Henry Hazlitt. F. A. Hayek is best known for “The Road to Serfdom”.

You can’t just use stats to prove a minimum wage increase leads to unemployment. You have to have theory. Correlation is not causation.

That said, no reasonable person denies that an increase in the minimum wage can cause unemployment.

Yes…Hazlitt. Sorry.

 

[Edward_H]

youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xVojIYA-o&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

[Edward_H]

“Economics in One Lesson” was written by Henry Hazlitt. F. A. Hayek is best known for “The Road to Serfdom”.

You can’t just use stats to prove a minimum wage increase leads to unemployment. You have to have theory. Correlation is not causation.

That said, no reasonable person denies that an increase in the minimum wage can cause unemployment.

Correct, on correlation vs causation.

The theory is based on human choice and behavior at the margins.

If you create steep marginal tax rates behavior around the margins change. A sales person will take off 3 weeks at the endof the year rather than pressing hard for those extra sales which would push them over the next margin.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Read Hazlitt’s classic Economics in one lesson for a wonderfully coherent explanation on “down stream effects” of minimum wage laws, …

No, Edward, this is theory, not data. You said something happened, it didn’t.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Sorry, as a percent of the Movie going population the men in Vietnam were a small fraction. I

Really? Well, you take out the guys and the girls they would have taken with them and the rest of us so busy trying to get the war stopped and bring them home the last thing we cared about was going to the movies. That’s a rather large percentage of the largest movie-going demographic.

And the number of people staying home to watch color TV was a very large majority of the movie-going public. Had nothing whatsoever to do with the minimum wage.