I’ve got two devices (An auto-darkening welding hood, and a LED desk lamp) with USB-C ports that will simply not charge if you plug them into a USB-C charger. You cannot use a USB-C charger to charge these USB-C devices.
You must use a USB-A charger with a USB-A-to-USB-C cable to charge these devices.
Nobody is asking what you do not believe.
If the total amount of loans you’ve taken out using investment vehicles as collateral
The banks would simply re-write their lending policies to not require such collateral from ultra-high-net-worth individuals. No collateral, no tax on said collateral.
What we need is a securities tax, payable not in dollars, but in shares of the taxed security. No need for the ultra-wealthy to liquidate their holdings; we’ll have the IRS offer shares comprising no more than 1% of total traded volume of each security, so as to minimize market influence. If it takes 10 years or 200 years to liquidate the taxed shares at this rate, so be it.
Natural persons can exempt the first $10 million of their portfolios; no exemptions for artificial “persons” (corporate shareholders). With a sufficiently high tax rate, shares of the “means of production” (and their associated voting rights) become a valuable asset to the working class, but a significant liability to the ultra-rich.
If you need a hammer or a torque wrench or a truck to do an ongoing job, compensation for that job must be sufficient to pay for the continuing maintenance and eventual replacement of that hammer, torque wrench, or truck.
If you hire a human to do a job, compensation for that job must be sufficient to fully meet that human’s basic needs. They need to be earning enough to be a fully functional member of society, not an impoverished charity case. They need at least a living wage, where they don’t have to choose between excessive employment or going without. A living wage (or better) is not exploitative.
Generally speaking, cashiers aren’t earning a living wage, let alone a gainful wage. Cashiers are generally exploited.
As minimum wages go up, so will prices,
There’s a glaring flaw in your analysis. Increasing minimum wage increases effective purchasing power much faster than it increases prices.
If your cashier’s are not making a living wage, then maybe the minimum wage should be increased?
Minimum wage is certainly too low. It should be more than double its current hourly rate, but that’s not the main problem here.
Where I am, if a minimum wage worker worked 40 hours a week consistently,
Cashiers are rarely allowed to work full-time hours. Management keeps the position open only for part-time workers. Cynically, the reason for this is so they don’t have to provide benefits to those workers. Giving retailers the full benefit of the doubt, this keeps a surplus of workers on the payroll, allowing the retailer to schedule everybody during major shopping events like Black Friday. Regardless, these workers are typically denied sufficient hours to be able to earn a living wage.
The job isn’t always for the impoverished,
You’ve got it backwards. The job isn’t for workers who happen to be impoverished. The impoverishment is because the job does not compensate workers adequately.
Also, I worked at grocery stores a lot when I was a younger person and I was never a cashier, but I knew most of them and I was able to go back there years and years after I left and see the same faces at the tills. A lot of wives with empty nests helping to save up for retirement, or simply to do something during the day while their kids are off at school or whatever…
So, you’re saying that these workers are holding these jobs for something other than gainful employment? They are using them as some sort of hobby or recreation? They are willing and able to accept exploitative conditions because they aren’t actually trying to live off the fruits of their labor?
The people you are talking about are, ultimately, enabling this exploitative behavior from employers. They are competing for work with people who do need actual gainful employment. Their recreational participation in the workforce devalues the labor of everyone else. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to work recreationally, or that employers shouldn’t be able to hire them. I’m saying that this practice should be strictly regulated, so that the employer can’t use their willingness to be exploited to justify exploiting everyone.
I think we need to establish both a “minimum wage” and a “standard wage”. The minimum wage would be the fixed, hourly minimum rate that we already have . The “standard wage” would multiply the minimum wage by 40 hours a week. Employees who aren’t paid at least that weekly amount are on “substandard employment”. A 40-hour/wk worker earning minimum wage makes a standard wage. A 20-hour/wk worker earning 2x minimum wage makes a standard wage. Substandard wages should be allowed, but restricted. An employer should not be allowed to compensate more than 10% of its labor with substandard wages.
Let them eat slop.
Your arguments indicate an understanding of the concept of civil liability, but lack comprehension of the underlying principles.
In attacking the “corporate veil”, you are undercutting the foundation of the relevant component of civil liability. You are tearing down the wall of separation that restricts liability from crossing these boundaries, while simultaneously arguing in favor of the restrictions imposed by this wall.
You don’t seem to understand that these “two” issues are one and the same.
True. Very true. But the solution to that problem is a completely different conversation than what we have been having in this thread. That conversation starts with a “citizenship dividend”.
Democracy takes the political power of the individual, conveys it to government, where it is used to provide all manner of services. Those services are available to everyone, but they are not utilized equally by everyone.
The individual is not currently compensated for the use of their political power. We are taxed proportional to those services that we use, but those taxes don’t make it back to the source of the power that enabled those services.
That should change.
Each of us should be individually compensated for the government’s use of our political power. We should each receive an equal dividend. The most common term for this dividend is “Universal Basic Income”, and it should be enough for the food on our tables and the roofs over our heads. We should receive that income before we get out of bed on Monday morning. The 40 hours we typically work in the week should not be for basic subsistence, but should be entirely gainful.
You do realize that the prices in the store right now are already the maximum the stores can charge, do you not?
The market doesn’t see the price hike. You pay $100 today, before I hike the prices. I hike the prices to $111.11, but my shelf labels show you the “discounted” price of $100. You keep paying the $100 price that the market currently bears.
And why can’t the elderly or disabled use self-checkout?
That point was completely irrelevant. If someone can’t use the self checkout, ADA compliance requires accommodation, and the business can’t charge them extra. They get the same discounted price as the self-checkout. So, they put a handicap placard on the cashier stand, train the cashier not to ask any questions about disabilities, and give the same “discount” to anyone who uses the register.
For ADA compliance purposes, the human cashiers have to give disabled customers the same rate as the self checkout. If I’m running a store, all my staffed checkouts will have handicapped placards, and cashiers will be trained not to inquire as to disability status, but merely “accommodate” everyone in line.
Now everyone is getting the “discount”.
Sure they can. They hike prices 11.11% and the 10% discount brings them right back to their original price. Their 3% margin stays a 3% margin. They can even post the “discounted” price on the shelves to make it seem like customers are getting a good deal.
ADA compliance will kill the entire thing. You can’t charge someone for accommodation of a disability that prevents them from using the self checkout. All the human-staffed registers will be posted as handicap accessible, and they will default to the “discounted” self-checkout price.
If I have a $150 grocery bill, a 10% discount would be $15.
If you have a $150 grocery bill, it’s being hiked to ~$166.66 before you get to the checkout. Then the 10% discount is bringing it back down to the $150 you were paying before. The net discount is zero: you’re paying exactly what you’re paying now.
If you keep going to the cashier after this, you’re paying the company the hiked price, which gives them an extra $16.66 for maybe 5 minutes of cashier labor. The company turns around and pays the cashier $1.66, netting an extra $15 from you for their shareholders.
Turnover of cashier jobs is ridiculously high. They aren’t losing their jobs. They are leaving shitty jobs where they have been heavily exploited by dickhead employers, and they aren’t being replaced.
“Cashier” has pretty much always been a heavily exploited, poverty-wage position. Cashiers might be putting food on the table, but their dickhead bosses aren’t paying them a living wage. They aren’t putting roofs over heads, or kids through college. Turnover is ridiculously, criminally high. People aren’t getting fired when the position is eliminated. They are leaving just as fast as they already were, and they aren’t being replaced.
The position is used to systematically exploit workers. Eliminating that position is a net positive.
That doesn’t logically follow at all.
It does. When you eliminate the “corporate veil”, liability doesn’t end at the person, but reaches back to the person’s business as well. If we eschew the traditional liability limits of a partnership by eliminating the veil (such as by commingling personal and business assets), the legal distinction ends. The partners and the business all become a single entity. Liabilities of one become liabilities of all.
You do not have claim on someone’s house because of an uninsured motorist claim on a business partner on vacation
That is generally true, yes.
But it is only true because of the concept of the corporate veil. In saying that the victim can’t make such a claim, you are describing the veil. The only reason you do not have a claim on the partner’s house is because of the veil.
You do not get to simultaneously claim the veil is bad, and then hide behind it.
The alternative is that when your co-worker goes on vacation, gets in a car wreck three states away, and the victim’s family takes your house in compensation.
What I just described is the liability structure of a partnership, absent any remnant of the “corporate veil”. Liability flows from your partner through the partnership and back to you. It is the corporate veil that isolates the company from the personal actions of its employees, and the employees from the business operations of the company.
There’s a little more nuance.
Yeah, what they should have said is that corporate personhood is a legal fiction. Corporations exist solely for purposes of legally distinguishing the conduct of business from the actions of individual shareholders of that business.
Corporations exist solely to conduct commerce. Any “speech” by a corporation is an act of commerce, and commerce is well within the regulatory authority of Congress.
But that would be reasonable.
Speech = Free: People have the right to say what they want. You can’t keep a person from talking.
Spending = Speech: People have the right to spend money about political issues. You can’t keep a person from spending.
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Basically, Citizens United says that for-profit companies can’t be restricted from political activities. They are free to buy elections.
This, exactly. UBI is a citizenship dividend. It is what the government owes us, each, individually, for the use of our political authority. Without that political authority, the government has no power to provide the services for which they levy taxes.