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A comment on A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage. Parent comment

Re:A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage by lujim on Monday April 04, 2016 @03:56PM (#11424970)
And borders are just imaginary lines. They are however a based around the underlying reality of geographical, cultural, and political factors. We could make a law that all airplanes must slow down to 50 miles per hour over crowed areas but that doesn't matter if most planes can't fly any slower than 120mph without falling out of the sky.

Laws do have to take into account things like physics and economics. The latter is the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses and specifically addresses things like the cost of labor and the affect of artificially manipulating it.

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Re:A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage by dv_dt on Monday April 04, 2016 @04:30PM (#11425319)
Economics has no particular respect for human self-sufficiency. If businesses can operate with employees just above starvation wages then all sorts of technologically feasible efficiencies are skipped while human suffering is prolonged.

From a practical standpoint, it feels like for a time that capitalism seeking local-optima was perfectly ok in that the efficiencies gained were lifting society all around - and it still seems that way in the world at large.

However, in more mature economies it seems like a different discussion needs to be made because the business actions seem to be divergent from the interests of society - optimizing on the same financial metrics seems merely a shell game of keeping a larger share of the production -- to the point that there is little to no growth in value to most of society.

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Re:A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage by denim_chicken on Monday April 04, 2016 @05:37PM (#11425894)
> Laws do have to take into account things like physics and economics

Economics is not even remotely similar to physics in any respect.

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Re:A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage by lujim on Monday April 04, 2016 @06:00PM (#11426075)
Where did I say they were? I called them both "things" I guess.
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