[brc]

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.

[nhaehnle]

> Hoo boy are you wrong.

> You are so, so wrong.

...

> You've effectively described a blend of National Socialism and Stalinism.

Hyperbole much? It saddens me to see this kind of nonsense on HN.

Also, let me point out that your disagreement is not on the highest level of the disagreement scale. In particular, your parent brings up the very reasonable point that mankind introduced the two-day-weekend at some point during the industrial revolution. It's likely difficult to find anybody who says that that's a bad thing. So what's wrong with drawing an analogy here between the introduction of the two-day-weekend and reducing the maximum length of the regular work week?

I'm not saying that all your points are without merit, but you have not addressed the parent's point, and your comment is so full of rhetorical bullshit, it's disgusting.

By the way: too many people are paying back too much debt, and that equates to negative savings.

This is factually incorrect (or perhaps you misstated). The savings rate is the ratio of disposable income that people do not spend. Since paying back debt means that you use some of your disposable income to pay back the debt instead of spending it, it actually equates positive savings.

You can see that the savings rate had a huge spike upwards in the US after the mortgage bubble burst, for precisely that reason: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PSAVERT

And - as you say - that's largely responsible for the economic mess we're in right now, because larger savings have translated to lower aggregate demand, which has lead to net layoffs. It's the paradox of thrift at work.

[brc]

The OP asks for control of wages and working hours. The plan is to use a simultaneous forced raising of wages and restrictions of working hours so that everyone can have a job. Apart from being unworkable and ridiculous, this is the starting point of a completely planned economy.

Hyperbole? Maybe a little, but too many people sleepwalk into agreeing with this type of idea without thinking through the full consequences.

Sure, they wouldn't start out that way, they never do. But as businesses fail, they need support or nationalisation. Which brings in more planning. National Socialism took over 10 years to get to it's full zenith, this doesn't happen overnight, but there is no reason to even begin down the path that leads to that. You can dance around it all you like, but the only way to make this sort of rubbish work is by overarching state power over the individual. You can't try and whitewash the misery of millions caused by planned economies just because it is a cliche to do so.

It saddens me that people still think this way after a century of misery from trying to command and plan economies. And on HN of all places, which is supposed to be about startups and technology. You mightn't like my way of putting things, well, that's the way I talk and write.

Re savings rate : we are in agreement. People are using disposable income to pay down debt, which means it goes into neither consumption or new investment. Which causes the slump. This has to be worked through before things will improve.

[notahacker]

I think the last half century of European history proves that the sub-Hayekian argument implying any increased government intervention necessarily leads to dictatorship is even more intellectually bankrupt than those in favour of a fully planned economy. 35 hour working weeks and high minimum wages are not a radical or untried idea. Arguably excessive regulation of working conditions has contributed to many of Europe's present economic and social problems, and that's a subject worth discussing, but the imagined threat of mass-murdering autocrats isn't one of them. In HN of all places we shouldn't be invoking Godwin's law at this stage of an argument.

[brc]

If you think that's Hayeks argument, I suggest you go and read his works again.

He went to great pains over his career to point out that he never said that imposing increasing controls over people necessarily leads to dictatorship. His point was that, in order for a centrally planned economy to work, you necessarily had to capture increasing amounts of activity under the control of the government. And that increasing control by government was by no means

It's true that Hayeks original ideas have been characterised by many different people and groups to the point where it is impossible to know what they mean unless you go back and figure them out for yourself. It's also important to know that Hayek wrote his original works while socialism was still a bubbling, living idea in the western world, and not the failed anachronism it is (should) now regarded as.

My point here is that you always have a choice in the way you want to run things. Down one path is increasing amounts of control, and there should be no argument about what lies at the end of that path. Of course it's not inevitable that, once you start down that path, that it's impossible to reverse. Down the other path is not increasing amounts of government control over people.

35 hour weeks are not a radical idea, sure, lots of people have agitated for them for a long time. But the way the thread was written was that everyone was going to be forced to work a 35 hour week. Maybe the OP didn't presume to force people, but if it's not forced, it won't be obeyed and thus will be pointless. Besides that, the entire thread showed a complete lack of understanding of what creates real jobs and wealth, with statements like 'we produce too much'.

If the last half century of European history gives us anything, it's that the welfare state is doomed and that you can't magic up productivity and wages growth by government intervention.

Sure, conjuring up mass murder was probably overdone for this forum, probably a case of being a bit hot headed when I originally posted. But whenever I see outbreaks of this type of thinking among what appear to be young people, I get anxious that they get some history and context into the fact these ideas have all been tried and failed in the past.

[notahacker]

I think the last half century of European history proves that the sub-Hayekian argument implying increased government intervention necessarily leads to dictatorship is even more intellectually bankrupt than those in favour of a fully planned economy. 35 hour working weeks and high minimum wages are not a radical or untried idea. Arguably excessive regulation of working conditions has contributed to many of Europe's present economic and social problems, and that's a subject worth discussing, but the imagined threat of mass-murdering autocrats isn't one of them. In HN of all places we shouldn't be invoking Godwin's law at this stage of an argument.

[colanderman]

> The OP asks for control of wages and working hours.

So you're saying minimum wage and overtime are bad things? I'm not proposing new laws, just new numbers in existing laws.

[alastairpat]

You're exactly right - by killing productivity and massively increasing employment without reason, you're going to have massive increases in exogenous consumption.

Fantastic, except where are all of these consumed goods going to come from? You'll see huge inflationary pressure which means tighter monetary policy; higher interest rates and reduced borrowing and lending. Yes, there will be economic growth and increased GDP on paper, but there won't be any benefit to society. Furthermore, inflation actually helps the '1%' through arbitrary redistribution of wealth.

First year macroeconomics - I seriously think it should be a prerequisite to adulthood.

[brc]

Unfortunately history tells us that the person who promises something for nothing to the people who want more will always get traction. It is very difficult for people to accept the reality of the world and many people spend hours creating fantasies about how, if they were in control, they could 'fix things' which is just code for controlling everyone else and arranging things the way they like it, and phooey to whatever anyone else wants.

You can't herd invididuals, as anyone who has tried to round up a group of cats knows. You either accept that individuals have the right to be individuals or you have to force people submit to your plans and forego their individual choices. Too many people come out of education nowadays thinking they could organise society, if just given a chance. But the truth is that society is a loose collection of individuals, and by nature can only be convinced, not coerced. You either believe in the fundamental human right to choose your own destiny, or you don't - there are no half measures.

[Jach]

I mostly agree with your point, but I want to ask a question: if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted, without any repercussions on you personally, do you think you could use this power to effect a much better world than we currently live in? Major choices that have huge consequences are increasingly being made by individuals, major choices that affect a lot of people for the better or worse. Remember Petrov Day.

[brc]

>if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted

What kind of question is that?

No, I wouldn't want to harm anyone. You definitively can't make things better by killing people. You can make things better by letting people get to work and build their lives and families in peace.

Kill anyone? I'm aghast at the way Gaddafi was treated, even though I thought he was an evil despot.

[Jach]

I ask it in the way those annoying moral dichotomy type of questions are asked. The goal is to see what you would actually do or believe, not to get your opinion why the situation would never happen or why the situation is Forbidden. I agree with you completely on the notion that killing people is wrong, I find it sick how he was killed and how his body was treated, however I recognize that, in the following toy scenario, killing is the optimal choice from the set of available choices {kill, do nothing}: an Oracle reveals to you that if you don't kill Mr. Bob within the next five minutes, 5 billion people are going to die; do you kill him?

Even Gandhi recognized the right outcome here, but I agree with him that in most real cases the set of choices usually contains something else, such as maiming or more generally "disabling" to include relatively harmless things like tackling. (Hence I still criticize soldiers who shoot-to-kill brainwashed and/or insane kids coming at them with a machete for not shooting them in the knees or somewhere easier to hit but less likely to kill.)

My original question is dependent on you believing that there exists some real situation where killing one or more people makes the world better, the classic (sorry to Godwin the topic) being to kill Hitler to save who knows how many lives (regardless of if the war still happened). Since you've said you don't believe that, I guess I got what I really wanted to know. I should have just framed it that way to begin with. I agree with you that too many people falsely believe they could fix things, I don't agree with you that a single person couldn't fix things given the right opportunities such as being able to kill the most damaging 50k people.

[tkahn6]

Sounds like the plot of Death Note.

[cpeterso]

I saw a poster (in San Francisco) today that proposed solving the unemployment problem with "30 hours work for 40 hours pay"...

[alastairpat]

My lecturer would explode if he saw this.

[ctl]

This is a pretty strong reaction to a pretty mild proposal. You know that the US already has a minimum wage and a standard workweek, right? The parent is advocating increasing the minimum wage 20% and decreasing the standard workweek 12.5%. That's not Stalinism.

Now, it's reasonable to point out that skilled laborers are basically fully employed right now, so the proposal would marginally reduce the supply of skilled labor hours -- and could thereby reduce skilled output.

But FWIW I don't think that's a very good point. Skilled labor is not really hour-limited in the same way that unskilled labor is -- that is, the output of a salaried full-time knowledge-worker employee is unlikely to change much (certainly not by 12.5%) if the standard workweek drops from 40 hours to 35. That's not how knowledge jobs work and that's not how salaried positions work. Whereas productivity in unskilled positions really would drop by somewhere close to 12.5% under the proposal. (Which is good; it opens up more of these "job" things that are so crucial to wealth distribution in the modern world.)

At any rate, if shorter work weeks for skilled workers bothers you that much, there's an easy solution: just say that you can only pay the minimum wage for the first 35 hours of the week, after which you have to pay at least 1.5 * minimum wage. Leave everything else the same. (Well, I like the parent's minimum wage hike too.) Now we're only cutting the output of near-minimum-wage workers.

I'm not at all sure that this idea wouldn't be disastrous, but I can't think of any good reasons that it might be. I feel like it's the most obvious way out of the current economic situation.

[brc]

It's not the mechanics of the price - it's the basic premise that you can fix things by forcing people to pay more for labour and to work less hours. A standard workweek of 40 hours is different to a maximum workweek of 35 hours. Put yourself in the position of a startup founder. You've got $x million of runway in your account. Now the government says your employees have to work less and you have to pay them more. Where is the value created? It's not.

As I said - what are you going to do, lock them up if they work 40 hours?

How about we just leave things alone with regard to minimum wages and let people work as much as they want?

Yes, there are already minimum wages, and we know that this already causes unemployment. If you increase the minimum wage by 20%, there will be a resulting hike in prices of things by some value. Now you've just made everything more expensive, and you've increased unemployment.

Yes, it's probably a strong reaction, but I just hate the thought of any of this type of 'solution' ever getting traction. It just seems so naive after these ideas have been tried and failed time and time again.

Anyone who is here and is interested in startups needs to understand how jobs are created. Jobs are created by the process of value being created, whereby the work of a person adds more value than it costs, and other people are willing to exchange something of value for it.

If I were president, I could dictate 100% employment tomorrow by enlisting everyone as air raid wardens or terrorist spotters and paying them a salary. But would we be better off? No. It doesn't work at any level. Sure, you can borrow a billion dollars and employ people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back in again, but then you've just made society a billion dollars poorer, and all that potential labor to do something with has been wasted.

Bottom line : people should stop trying to impose price controls on things, including labor. It has never worked, will never work and it frustrates me to see it being discussed.

[colanderman]

> Bottom line : people should stop trying to impose price controls on things, including labor. It has never worked, will never work and it frustrates me to see it being discussed.

You're right, this whole weekend thing sucks. Let's go back to the industrial revolution era and work 6-day 80-hour workweeks because that's what the market decides is the most productive. People who don't want to lose their free time can opt to work less and... oh wait, they'd be fired and be out of work. /sarcasm

This is why people organize... the labor movement is a natural product of a laissez-faire economy. Government exists to serve the people; i.e. the laborers. Hence, it makes sense for government to enforce labor policies.

[colanderman]

So what do you think of the 40-hour workweek? Should we eliminate the concept of time-and-a-half pay for overtime?

> 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.

Software engineers are not hourly workers last time I checked.

> What are you going to do with someone who works more than 35 hours?

The same thing we do with people who work more than 40 hours now. Pay them overtime.

> I hope you're young and still learning, because if you're of any reasonable age, you should know better by now.

You sir are an asshole.