bmdrocks21

lol you are taking one small downside of a union and trying to use that as an argument to dismantle unions. 

That is why we need laws to strengthen unions.

not usually no. They want to maximize profit. If the best worker costs 50% more and earns them 20% more money, they will go for the cheaper employee. Higher skilled workers sometimes increase profit. But cheaper employees always save money. 

no, they lock up much fewer of their people than america does. 

I was responding to your comment about how america's laissez faire capitalism industrialized faster that russia. That was a lie. I was pointing out that was a lie. You wanted to pretend like laissez faire capitalism was a requirement for industrialization when that obviously isn't true. 

And if all companies have shitty, unsafe worker places? then they don't have to worry about doing those things because it is literally not an option anywhere the employee could go. 

Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible

America also locks people up for carrying around a small amount of marijuana or trying to actually enforce your rights to a cop. 

It is always seen through the prism of labor laws though. If the law says you must make X safety precaution and the employer didn't do that, then that is negligence. If the law says the employer doesn't have to take any precautions at all and they chose to put in some minor safety precautions, then they have exceeded what was required of them. That wouldn't be seen as negligence. 

But this allows the courts to have the exclusive ability to determine worker rights. If the courts decide the employee is always in the wrong, companies can do whatever they want to whoever they want. The 1 place that we the people have a voice in determining what the rules should be is the government. The judiciary was not intended to decide what rights people should have. 

Actually studies have shown that even small changes in the high or length of stairs significantly increases the odds of people falling on the stairs and increasing injuries and deaths. Having a consistent high and length of stairs saves lives. There is no reason that an employer should need to determine what the right stair height is. 

. But the government needs those working class people to vote for them and therefore has much more reason to protect those workers. 

That's because it's in the interests of the U.S and it's Israeli puppeteers to have a destabilised Middle East.

Ok, you should definitely tell foreign investors that if they want to fire an incompetent employee, that won't be possible because the union will sue them.

i never said that was a good thing. You are straw manning me. 

You should also let them know that they can't do anything to discourage unionizing and pay them whatever they want and promise pensions they will never be able to afford. If they don't, they can just take millions in losses per day. 

absolutely we should do that. No company should have the power to prevent their employees unionizing. 

most americans can't afford even a reasonably small unexpected expense without going into debt. Most americans cannot afford to leave their job without another one already lined up. This leaves them trapped. Also, without labor laws to enforce safety standards, most companies would reduce safety. So if all companies are unsafe, what exactly would their options be?

Wait a minute. This machinery is IDIOT PROOF, yet it likely to kill many workers who will then be replaced (despite the fact that we have millions of more jobs than people?!?!?). Give me a break.

umm yes. What exactly is your objection to those facts?

you are arguing that regulations are bad. I am arguing that they are good. You are advocating for heavily reducing the restrictions on avarice. That avarice pretty much always results in misery and death for the working class. 

no one is advocating for a centrally planned economy. 

so america and russia are equally exploitative of the weak and powerless. 

if the law says the employer doesn't have to take any safety precautions, then if an employee gets hurt the employer can honestly say they took all the precautions necessary. The employee will just be screwed. 

of course there would be. Because the law requires employers to protect their workers. It has for decades. Do you think there was a shit storm when am employee got killed in say the 1920's. There wasn't because it was just normal. If we repealed regulations, things would start sliding back in that direction. 

Because the law says the employer needs to protect their workers. If the employer doesn't do that, they get sued. If the law says the employer doesn't have to do that, then the employer would win the lawsuit. 

People might be upset for a little while. But in a matter of days or weeks something would happen that would distract them and everyone forgets all about it. It happens all the time. 

no i didn't. 

Because I know history better than you do? 

I prefer that a president sticks up for his country, yes. No pride in your country, says a lot about you.

more slander without substance.

Great in the world power sense of the word (ex alexander the great). Not in a morality sense. America has pretty well always been an imperialist amoral country. 

Toyota can get away with treating their employees worse. You're right that this kind of union busting gives them an advantage. We should use the law to prevent that. 

If your options are to work in an unsafe environment or your family starves, you will do what you have to do. All you have to do is look at the industrial revolution. Workers suffered and died in large numbers to try to feed their families. If every company cuts safety corners to save money, then workers get no choices. 

Why? Expensive machinery is more and more designed to be idiot proof. You can teach someone to run it in a day or 2. If they get maimed or killed it isn't very expensive to replace them. Alot cheaper than it is to install expensive safety equipment and do regular safety checks on the machinery. 

Unrestricted greed leads to a boom and bust cycle. Look at the 2008 recession. Banks were able to make ridiculous money making terrible bets. All the banks got in on it because the profit margins were crazy high. When those bets eventually went bad they all lost huge amounts of money and triggered a massive recession. Some government regulations could have prevented the banks from making those ridiculous bets. They would have bitched and moaned about how government regulations were costing them money, but a massive financial crisis would have been avoided and everyone would have saved a TON of money. 

central planning lead to a massive increase in industrial capacity due to central planning. This arguably gave them the ability to win WW2 while america was dicking around. There was a significant human cost to this process. From that point of view it was a failure. From a purely industrial point of view it was a huge success. 

America is still using prisoners for cheap or free labor. Tell me again about how evil russia is for doing this 100 years ago....

That's exactly the problem. If the employer gets to decide what is safe and what is not, then literally nothing is negligence. If they are setting the rules, then whatever they decide to do is the right thing to do. And since companies love saving money, they would cut down of safety equipment, reduce checks of the machinery etc leading to the unnecessary death and dismemberment of their employee. 

But it would significantly increase the number of employees being maimed or killed. The company doesn't care about that, they can just replace them and make more money. But the worker is now crippled. They can't work any more. The government has to pay them disability and/or unemployment for the rest of their life. So the company is happy because they save alot of money and they can offset the costs associated to the accidents to the government. For the company it is a big win, for society and the government it is a massive loss. Not to mention the people who have gotten killed or crippled and the pain and suffering to them and their families. 

If they had enough power, maybe they could. However you yourself have argued that they are already too powerful and need to be weakened. 

 

Additionally, safety would be extremely uneven. Some companies with strong unions would have good safety standards. Other companies with weaker or more corrupt unions would have shitty safety standards. People would still die. 

Depends on the industry. If it is a computer programmer, expensive. If it is a factory worker, it is dirt cheap. That is why factories treated their workers as expendable until the government passed labor laws. 

True, it was explosive growth that couldn't be sustained. But so is lassez faire capitalism. The massive problems it causes leads to death, recessions and worker unrest. 

I'm not sure. A hell of alot of people died in america because of capitalism. 

That very much depends on what that minimum is. In practice what that meant is that if a few dozen poor people burn to death the government just looked the other way. 

correct, I am in favor of going back to the sort of taxation levels that made america great. It is only in the last few decades that tax levels on the rich have dropped through the floor. 

The US government and the people of america would pay much, much more. 

While America did industrialize under laissez-faire economics, other nations in Europe managed to industrialize just fine under a mixed market.

Russia wasn't socialist during the industrial revolution. 

They'd continue to be backwards under a laissez-faire economy.

The industrian revolution, by definition, is when industrialization began and when a large amount of it happened. Russia went from a 2nd rate power to a super power in a couple decades. It took america much longer than that. 

lol no. Workers were literally burning to death because employers were locking them in until the government forced them to stop. Unions are good for fighting for wages and things like that. But when it comes to safety standards, pollution, etc. a union will never be able to do anywhere near as much good as a government. 

You're right. It was more efficient to lock employees in the building so they couldn't take breaks or steal things. It also lead to lots of dead people. Efficiency is important, but worker safety and rights are far more important. 

The soviet union increased their total industrial output by 118% during the 1st five year plan. They industrialized much faster than america did. 

Laissez Fairre is basically just letting the rich do whatever they want to whoever they want. That can cause them to make lots of money, that is true. It can also cause them to enslave people, burn their workers alive etc. Removing all restrictions on greed and avarice is an extremely dangerous thing. Putting reasonable limits and rules in place gives you all the advantages of capitalism without the massive levels of abuse Laissez Faire capitalism causes. 

This would be reductio ad absurdum. I have never said to "tax the crap out of anyone successful" or to "regulate so much that compliance costs can only be afforded by big firms". You are making up things and pretending I am saying them. It is a sign that your argument is weak. 

Those targets are based on a cold war world where the possibility of a war with russia was very real. Even without spending 2% NATO countries spend more than most of the rest of the world. 

Contribution to what exactly? how does spending a billions on tanks actually accomplish anything? They aren't at war. There is little to no chance of them getting into a war because collectively, NATO massively outguns everyone else. 

The US invasion of Iraq created the power vacuum. That's on Bush. 

Help how? By bombing women and children and creating more terrorists? Because that is what america is doing.

How exactly is that? He has had to be arm twisted at every step into doing anything at all about russia. 

lol you prefer treating american allies like crap than treating them like equals. That says alot about you. 

The industrial revolution was in the 18th and 19th century. There were no socialist countries. Russia only became communist 80-100 after the end of the industrial revolution. So no, a capitalistic, cutthroat american system out performed an incompetent monarchical system. In some senses it was just 2 different version of oligarchy competing. 

It also saw almost unparalleled suffering for workers. The rich got massively richer while the poor struggled to survive. 

Why would you think that?

And even then, no one is advocating for Socialism in america. They are advocating for reasonable regulation and limits on the abuse and greed of capitalism. That isn't socialism. 

No, I dont. None have voluntered to be models for me and I cant afford to pay them.

Why can't we trade with western countries more instead of China?

It must be russian hackers and Bernie bros that were the problem, not her. Never her. 

because it is unnecessary. Cuts to military spending started to be made because there was no real threat that required that level of spending. As an alliance, NATO's military spending massively dwarfs anyone they could theoretically fight. Don't blame other countries because the US is addicted to massive, runaway military spending. 

How? What are those other countries doing that undermines america? 

The US created ISIS. The power vacuum that was created by the american actions in the middle east created the problem. Then republicans whine that other countries wont spend billions of dollars to help clean up the US's mess. 

In order to be a leader, people have to be willing to follow you. America has decided that it doesn't give a crap what anyone thinks. It will invade anyone, murder anyone, sanction anyone they want at any time no matter what anyone (even their allies) have to say about it. At least under Obama or even bush, the US government pretended like they cared what their allies think. Trump has dropped the game entirely and is just trying to dictate orders. The only "allies" he listens to are the Saudi's and the russians. 

 If POTUS, I'd sanction China entirely until they give Hong Kong and Macau independence.

By that metric, america should just stop doing anything.

 When america just gives it's allies the middle finger and does what it wants, it's "allies" realize they aren't really allies.

 I think the far better way of looking at it is to look at the world as a community that you need to get along with

For example, right now most of america's allies are just sort of planning around the US. There is no point talking to the US about things because trump will just throw a fit or break his word at the drop of a hat anyway. Germany has largely become the leader of the free world in america's absence.  

maybe america should stop assuming it has the right or the authority to go to war with everyone.

non-adictive

GPA's, for instance, sounds like a more reasonable alternative. 

I see dozens of posts every week saying 'the left defends terrorists' but - and this is odd since I also hear constant complaints about how this site is so dominated by leftist - I have yet to see anyone on here actually defending terrorists. Perhaps you could help cure my confusion by pointing me towards a few examples?

So because workers have some sort of leverage to bargain with, you see that as a multi-billion dollar company being powerless? They are incredibly powerful, they just don't have absolute power like they would prefer.

The reality is very different from your fantasy unfortunately. Insurance companies have found that it is more profitably to co-operate with the medical companies and pay outrageously over priced costs for hospitals and drugs because they know they can squeeze it out of people anyway. When your choice is pay the cost or die, it doesn't leave people with any options. 

Of course not, you get bargaining power. When you represent the entire US health insurance industry you have the power to negotiate better prices. When individual companies who have no problem squeezing the money out of their customers are in charge of it, the result is ridiculous runaway costs. 

The details would be highly important. Would the schools be obligated to take students who choose to use their voucher or could they refuse students? Because at that point it would be very easy for rich parents to make a donation to a school and get their child a spot while a poor person's voucher is refused. You would then see the exact same problems we have now where the rich just go to private schools and the poor have public schools. 

I have seen sources vary based on what numbers they are using. Here is a study showing that between 2010-2016, every single drug that was approved received government funding. This was over 100 billion dollars. 

You are assuming a few things that would have to all work, all the time. 1) you assume that there are honest, trustworthy competitors. If they are all corrupt, which most of them are, then this wouldn't happen. 2) you assume the market would react. Companies are doing shitty things every minute of every day all across america. the "market" hears about a teeny tiny percentage of them. And even if the "market" hears about them, they can only react to so many stories. If there are 10's of thousands of companies doing shitty things every day, only a tiny percentage of those are going to receive significant blow back from them. It is much more profitable to be crooked. And if you get caught, you apologize, maybe pay off a few lawsuits for grieving families, then go right back to doing it again. 

The market cannot ever, under any circumstances, force companies to stop being assholes. They will continuous screw people over as frequently and as severely as the possibly can. You can punish a few of them for these actions. but people's attention spans are too short and there are just too many cases for it to ever be effective. The much better plan is to have strict regulations and laws in place that will severely punish them if they do shitty things.

General electric is a massive multinational conglomerate. They are reported to be the 4th largest corporate polluter in america. They have massive holdings in oil and chemicals. They have on many occasions been found to have caused massive contamination including one time they dumped more than 100,000 tons of chemicals from their plant in Waterford, New York. 

They invest in green energy with one hand to get some good publicity, while massively investing in pollution, poison and death with the other. This is a perfect example why "the market" can never hold these companies accountable. They will us their massive resources to publicize the handful of good things they do, while making huge amounts of money exploiting people and spreading poison. But that money buys alot of good headlines. 

However, an all knowing God can't change his mind like that if he's all knowing.

Cursing I think means swearing at your parents.  The punishment for that shouldn't be death.  I don't know what else it could be.