We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13533019.

He neglected to finish his thought: "...and on the rare occasion conservatives do offer a counter-proposal it's so laughably naive, so completely devoid of any understanding of nuance or unintended consequences, as to beggar belief".

You think alternative proposals are a game of whack-a-mole. While liberals are trying to knit a fabric of policy and government conservatives run around yanking on loose threads saying "see! see! we told you this was bullshit!".

Thread-yanking is not alternatives, if anything your suggestion gives a good indication of how little you understand the subject.

That isn't a proposal to replace capitalism, that is a small detail of a proposal. A single sentence that is a kernel of an idea (and probably a good one), but far from a sufficient argument.

Please give an alternative proposal. A link is fine.

> That isn't a proposal to replace capitalism

Put down the Marxism for 5 seconds and follow my original premise all the way to it's logical end.

- Make the slaves as expensive as the natives.

- Why would you need slaves in this scenario?

- You wouldn't.

- If slaves and natives are equal cost, then machines are given incentives to outperform both.

- Western liberalism is completely flipped on its head in a world where humans can never compete against machine labor.

There is your solution. Close the slave/native arbitrage, let machines compete. This is where you opine about protecting your sacred cows.

And here is the challenge of that suggestion; what mechanism do you propose to "make them equally expensive" ? There are many things you can 'say' but not 'do', for example 'write the largest integer on this piece of paper'. That is easy to say, and it sounds easy, just put a number down on a piece of paper, but the number requested is not representable and so the suggestion is actually impossible.

Your statement "Make the slaves as expensive as the natives" has exactly this quality. And so any follow on argument is moot. Tell us how to accomplish that and we can debate what policy would make that real.

You and germinalphrase should check your emails. I've given detailed answers on how to do all of this and addressed your points.

I'm sad to read this, because I was hoping you would be willing to share the ideas in a public forum.

You didn't miss anything.

One of the things I've been working to understand the with regard to the continued support of the President is how can I see a set of things and someone else can see a set of things and we draw two diametrically opposed conclusions from it.

So far a consistent them has been ideas which are like the ones suggested by the GP which are both simple to say, clearly would solve some great ill if they were possible to do, and disconnected from reality in a fundamental way. Our GP suggests a unilateral quintupling of the minimum wage (as an example).

I can see how such a suggestion is highly attractive to someone who hasn't learned or thought about how wages get set and the limits of the ability to arbitrarily control those things. I suspect it would help to get more coverage of Venezuela into the consciousness of these people because it demonstrates some of the effects of not understanding how markets or economies work can affect everyday people.

There are lessons there for both sides of this discussion, both for people who advocate a leadership that promises them quick and simple fixes, and for people who believe that rationality will successfully displace their support for a bad actor. Neither of those things are true.

Your usage of "slaves" seems way too strong to me. From my perspective, most immigrants are seeking economic opportunity voluntarily.

This phenomenon is a sort of "global labor arbitrage" and it is perhaps right to argue that industry is exploiting this. Also, there are indeed also certain pockets of immigrant labor dominated industry where the conditions for workers have been so bad, "slavery" might be somewhat applicable. But calling migrants universally slaves to capitalism? I can't see that.

Furthermore, at least recently in the United States, not all immigrants are of the "cheap" variety. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/01/20/the-to...)

And, even if you want to fix this global labor arbitrage, figuring out how will be hard (at least, to do it without making the problem worse). Historically, government enforced attempts at egalitarian economies have worked out rather poorly.

Maybe if you weren't so brazenly agressive and didn't begin every comment with a derisive remark people would pay more attention to you. I know we all must seem very silly and insignificant in comparison to your massive intellect that you can but roll your eyes, but bear with us, will you?

Sheesh.

How does this solution provide for the welfare of those natives/slaves [sic] once their labor is replaced by machines - as is your stated goal?

The "right" hates the idea of a minimum wage.

Because the "right" don't want to earn minimum wage; they want to earn decent wage, which is problematic in condition of "race to the bottom" caused by influx of people from less developed countries.

cheap labour certainly feeds into the modern capitalist/globalist system and often leads to horrendous exploitation, but your focus on those people being brown is odd. People from LEDC countries of every colour have been exploited.