<"The top 1% (rich) has as much after-tax income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest income, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports. The top 1% already has nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95% of Americans combined. ... About 39 million Americans, including more than eight million children, have no health insurance of any kind - not private, not Medicaid, not anything. Lack of health insurance is associated with a 25% higher risk of death. Inadequate health insurance is one reason the United States ranks number 1 in the world in wealth, but only 32nd in child mortality under age five.

--Holly Sklar, co-author of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies that Work for All of Us"

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." -- Economist John Maynard Keynes



Holly Sklar's Economic Bill of Rights:

The right to a job at a living wage
The right to equal pay for equal or comparable work
The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively
The right to adequate health care
The right to a decent home
The right to a good education -- from preschool through college
The right to paid leave for the care of newborns and sick family members
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of illness, old age, disability, accident and unemployment
The right to national and international regulations ensuring fair labor practices, environmental sustainability and
worker/consumer health and safety.

A "right" to something material implies that you can get it whether or not you pay for it. Otherwise, you're just buying it in the normal way, right? This implies that the people who produce these things must supply their labor whether or not they get paid for it. There is another word for this.

Oh, God. I am so tired, and the idiots like Sklar are so numerous...

Yeah, let's try socialism, yet again. I just know that if we strip those horrible rich people of their wealth which just FELL ON THEM FROM THE SKY, and pass it around evenly, that paradise will surely result. This time, I just KNOW it will work, instead of creating a reeking, murderous hellhole on Earth like it has every single other time it's been tried! And hey, if they play their cards right the Leftist academics who push this crap will get to be the guys who get to loot the wealth and pass it around! That is the general idea, of course.

In the name of eighty million dead, how the hell does one convince a person of reasonable intelligence that a centralized economic system not only does not work, it cannot work, and MUST be accompanied by a totalitarian political system to even be installed in the first place?

More from the brilliant Holly Sklar can be found here.

And oh, yeah, I'm going to let Keynes tell me how it is in the world of economics.

And please don't make me have to give out--again--the third-grade explanation on economics and minimum wages. Damn few families run on raw minimum wage. I can't even FIND a job anywhere around here that pays as low as minimum wage. Starting wages at the burger barns are about nine dollars an hour.

Unions like high minimum wages since they want as little competition as possible for their own artificially-bloated wages, so most "raise the minimum wage" proposals generally have unions somewhere behind them. Check for yourself.

Just answer one question: why not raise the minimum wage to $150 an hour? Wouldn't that make everyone rich? No? Why not? And if not, why is it assumed that raising the wage to a lesser amount would have no economic effect at all?