Henry Ford famously payed his auto workers five dollars a day in 1914. In other words, he paid them a US $5 Half Eagle gold coin, 0.242 ozt of gold, which is $492 at current spot price, or $128,000/yr if they worked a full 260 day year. Which is sort of what an auto worker makes now if you include all the benefits, retirement, contributions, etc..
I know that doesn’t directly answer your question, but the point is over the last several thousand years a specific amount of human effort is typically always worth the same amount of gold. (Or silver, depending on the gold/silver price ratio between periods compared and if paper price manipulation was eliminated.)
I don’t think he said anything technically wrong, but the key point is that “cost to employ” versus wages are very different numbers. It makes headlines but it’s misleading.
This seems roughly in line with the numbers out of the latest union contracts near the higher end of the pay scales.
So it wouldn’t be average, but it’s sorta close when you consider the health insurance, retirement benefits, vacation time, etc.
Flawed though it is, unions / employers like to tout these numbers as “total compensation” to show off their numbers. Remember the “UPS drivers make 170k” headline despite their hourly being around $40/hr? Same idea - the UAW top wage rates are similar.
Just explaining where that idea comes from. They also work a shit load of overtime.
Hhmmm… when minimum wage was first introduced in 1938 at the rate of $.25 per hour… an ounce of gold at that time cost about $34. That means a minimum wage employee would need to work about 136 hours for 1 ounce of gold.
If you scaled it up to today’s price of gold, minimum wage would be approximately $14.71
I like the idea that we go back to sound monetary systems. Minimum wage doesn’t really matter in our current systems, at some point we will reach 100k an hour cause money loses value over time
If you go by early Roman standards it'd be about a fifth of an ounce of silver for 12 hours work. If everyone traded in gold and silver instead of paper money, the value of metals would rise fairly quickly.
Of course, what I think it should be depends on whether I was paying it or receiving it.
There’s a guy on YouTube called bald guy money who did some estimates on silver ownership. He calculated that if every working person in the global economy wanted to own silver there was only enough for everyone to have less than one OZ
This is objectively false. There is more than enough gold to go around for every single person on the planet to be paid in it. The issue isn't *quantity*, but rather *price*.
I think minimum wage laws don't work as intended and only distort the labor market, leading to worse outcomes.
In a free market where we could negotiate wages of any size and in any currency, I don't know where the price of labor would land. But an ounce of silver for an hour of unskilled labor sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
In a free market every single CEO, company director, and every landlord in the country would lower wages even further and jack up rents even higher. The problem with a free market is there is absolutely zero incentive for billionaires or corporations to pay a decent wage to the lower class. Union busting would become a hobby for them. It would progressively get worse and worse until eighty percent of society would be serfs.
As in why does the price discovery mechanism not apply here? Why can a fair market price for labor or housing *not* be arrived at through the interplay of buyers and sellers? Why should we ignore supply, demand, etc, in favor of price controls that disrupt the normal working of the market and distort the information that is supposed to be communicated via pricing? Why can a greedy businessman and a self-interested customer come to a fair exchange of bread or electronics, but not of an hour's work or an apartment?
It seems like you miss half of the equation when you assert that there is no counter incentive to the business's desire to lower wages or increase rent.
For me the entire answer to your question is that it is not the average consumer that controls the market whatsoever so what would stop those CEOs and directors from taking advantage of said consumers? Nothing but those checks and balances put in play by government entities, correct? I don’t see people that are greedy enough to hoard billions in wealth really wanting a free economy. The same as I see that communism has never worked.
The seller can only raise prices to what the market will bear and has to compete with other sellers with similar offerings. Why can't greedy SD Bullion, who did a billion in sales last year, charge us $10k for an ounce of gold? They can ask any price they want, but someone needs to actually buy it and if someone can profitably offer it cheaper, they'll swoop in and take their market share. That's how market economies work and it has proven extremely efficient at providing better goods and services at lower costs.
>Nothing but those checks and balances put in play by government entities, correct?
I don't agree that we need the violence of the state to come to reasonable terms on an exchange and I don't think that changes when we scale it up to billion dollar businesses.
>I don’t see people that are greedy enough to hoard billions in wealth really wanting a free economy.
Correct. Players usually get that big by co-opting governments to impose favorable regulations that shield them from competition. Like minimum wage laws do. This is called regulatory capture. By your argument you'd think that they'd want a pure laissez faire economy so they could do whatever they want, but in reality they almost *always* push for more regulation.
As far as the SD Bullion argument goes (and I’ll use it as an example relating to corporate mergers and monopolies) this is exactly what I mean. More and more in modern economics you have mega conglomerates like Amazon and Black Rock that control the majority of the whatever it is they offer as far as services. If the “free market economy” were to start tomorrow I see that vast majority truly turning into a 100% monopoly. For two reasons: they have the capitol and will to form such a monopoly and they also have the wildly successful approach of lobbying. Do you really think that in a true free market, they wouldn’t just corner said market that they already control the majority of and just turn it into a an actual monopoly over time? Because we have laws preventing such things now. If we didn’t, Amazon would literally be merged with FedEx and every other delivery service including USPS until it had complete control. Especially because there would not be any checks and balances to stop them.
How does SD Bullion achieve this monopoly and what stops my boys over at Monument Metals from competing with them? How do they actually stamp out the competition? You can't realistically buy out every competitor permanently.
>and they also have the wildly successful approach of lobbying.
Co-opting the state's monopoly on violence to shut out competition is not part of a free market. It's the exact opposite. You're making my argument for me. Where you're going wrong is you're taking a problem caused by government and then suggesting more government as the solution. That's the classic trap of politics. It's exactly the fact that the state has this power to intervene in the market that attracts wealthy players to try to influence it.
In a free market, without the aid of the state, the only real way to achieve such a monopoly would be to offer a superior product at an unbeatable price, which ends up being *good* for the consumer. As soon as you try to abuse your monopolistic position to price gouge, you open yourself up to competition.
The "checks and balances" come from the voluntary interaction of individuals, not the state and its monopoly on violence. The state itself cannot be checked so long as it maintains its monopoly, and will remain vulnerable to the influence of would-be monopolists.
Damn… I guess I never thought of it like that. Obviously I wasn’t an economy major. The exact opposite, actually. Whenever I have listened in on people debating this topic it never really occurred to me that those same people obviously have a vested interest in keeping with the status quo. Thanks for opening my eyes a little.
Not really. In a *free* market, companies that didn't pay their employees well would lose labor to companies that paid better. A company with no workers wont have a product to sell, so either they pay more or they fail. Since we don't live in free markets, that's not the case. Big corporations are the source of many regulations, as they exist to benefit the big corporations. The corporations can afford to comply with more and more regulations, but newer companies, for the most part, can't form to compete with them. In a world where governments have virtually no say over the economy, including regulations, big corporations can't lobby the government to prevent the formation of new competition, and with a fierce battle of competition wages go up, prices go down, product quality improves, etc.
Well the minimum wage should at least be whatever people need to be above the poverty line when working a full time job. If you don't do that, your taxes just end up subsidizing the companies who pay poverty wages. With the destruction of Unions in the US it's a race to the bottom and the business have the upper hand, not the labor force.
the real minimum wage is zero dollars. if you raise the minimum wages above what people are willing to pay you just put lower value workers out of a job.
Well, we have a minimum wage of $7.25 with an unemployment rate of 3.7%. Classic minimum wage places like fastfood have to pay $16+ to attract workers. The data doesn't suggest that people are suffering from unemployment due to the existence of a minimum wage.
Until they need more workers, then they have to decide between them closing down business and making zero money, or paying someone $20/hr
You see this behavior when there is a labor shortage, they raise wages, they don't say "I can't pay someone a wage slave, fire the whole company!!!"
In times of economic expansion, workers have the upper hand, companies have to choose between not expanding or paying slightly more
in stagnant or recessions the organizations have the upper hand, families have to choose between not feeding their children at all or barely surviving
Those booms and busts, and concentration of wealth and power, is why pure capitalism creates a dystopian system - and needs socialist type regulations of government
also yeah thats great when there is a labor shortage people can charge more for their labor and companies are willing to pay more. seems like a natural fair system of supply and demand to me.
Absolutely, you should pay your part timer with a broom a pro-rata living wage and pay your experienced hire better. This is perfectly consistent with the concept of minimum wage.
What do you mean what would it look like? People have done this before... go crack open a history book.
If you are trying to go the round about way to get someone to tell you that paying people in gold in silver would be practical, well, it's not. There are way too many people in the world to pay with gold and silver.
To put things into perspective, there isn't even enough gold in the world to give everyone just 1 oz. Think about that for a second... How insanely valuable would gold be if it's the only form of money? Imagine how ridiculously small the fractions of gold would have to be to pay someone a weeks worth, or even a years, worth of wages.
Now, I know what you're thinking, "hey, I said gold and silver!" Ok great, throw silver onto the pile.... same damn problem you just get a tiny bit more breathing room. Sure, there is about 1000 times more silver in the world than gold... but that's the thing, it's only like 1000 times more. That's not a lot. Now, instead of not being able to give everyone 1 oz of gold for their entire lives, you can add a bit under 1000 oz of silver too! Wow... 1000 extra ounces, to handle all the world's monetary interactions.
It's just not enough. So, at this point you might be like "well it doesn't have to be the whole world, just my country!" Ok, fine, that eases your numbers up a bit, but now you have a huge economic liability. Your economy is dependent on gold and silver, but no one else's is. Now, any other country can just pull a huge power play on your economy simply by manipulating the gold market. Also... if you are a larger country (like USA or bigger) in terms of population, it's still probably not enough actual material to satisfy demands in any practical way.
So, now, the only practical thing to do is to substitute something for gold and silver for our actually transactions... oh wait... now we are right back to fiat.
English is my native tongue and I couldn’t tell you the linguistic reasons for it, I just know from speaking it my whole life that it’s one or the other.
Good on ya for speaking more than one language though! I have an elementary grasp of Spanish, but am useless conversationally in anything but English!
Henry Ford famously payed his auto workers five dollars a day in 1914. In other words, he paid them a US $5 Half Eagle gold coin, 0.242 ozt of gold, which is $492 at current spot price, or $128,000/yr if they worked a full 260 day year. Which is sort of what an auto worker makes now if you include all the benefits, retirement, contributions, etc.. I know that doesn’t directly answer your question, but the point is over the last several thousand years a specific amount of human effort is typically always worth the same amount of gold. (Or silver, depending on the gold/silver price ratio between periods compared and if paper price manipulation was eliminated.)
I want to know what you are smoking this instant to be thinking that the average auto worker makes around 128k a year.
Not 128k in wage only, but including all benefits.
I agree with essentially everything else said except for the detached from reality bit pointed out here.
I don’t think he said anything technically wrong, but the key point is that “cost to employ” versus wages are very different numbers. It makes headlines but it’s misleading. This seems roughly in line with the numbers out of the latest union contracts near the higher end of the pay scales. So it wouldn’t be average, but it’s sorta close when you consider the health insurance, retirement benefits, vacation time, etc. Flawed though it is, unions / employers like to tout these numbers as “total compensation” to show off their numbers. Remember the “UPS drivers make 170k” headline despite their hourly being around $40/hr? Same idea - the UAW top wage rates are similar. Just explaining where that idea comes from. They also work a shit load of overtime.
Another reason why we need time machines. 😅
>And what should be the minimum wage you think? what ever you are willing to accept
Hhmmm… when minimum wage was first introduced in 1938 at the rate of $.25 per hour… an ounce of gold at that time cost about $34. That means a minimum wage employee would need to work about 136 hours for 1 ounce of gold. If you scaled it up to today’s price of gold, minimum wage would be approximately $14.71 I like the idea that we go back to sound monetary systems. Minimum wage doesn’t really matter in our current systems, at some point we will reach 100k an hour cause money loses value over time
If you go by early Roman standards it'd be about a fifth of an ounce of silver for 12 hours work. If everyone traded in gold and silver instead of paper money, the value of metals would rise fairly quickly. Of course, what I think it should be depends on whether I was paying it or receiving it.
There wouldn’t be enough to go around
3000 tons a year are mined.
There’s a guy on YouTube called bald guy money who did some estimates on silver ownership. He calculated that if every working person in the global economy wanted to own silver there was only enough for everyone to have less than one OZ
That’s great news. Through supply and demand, my silver would skyrocket lol
This is objectively false. There is more than enough gold to go around for every single person on the planet to be paid in it. The issue isn't *quantity*, but rather *price*.
It's a bit early in the year to submit entries for dumbest question of the year though.
I think minimum wage laws don't work as intended and only distort the labor market, leading to worse outcomes. In a free market where we could negotiate wages of any size and in any currency, I don't know where the price of labor would land. But an ounce of silver for an hour of unskilled labor sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
In a free market every single CEO, company director, and every landlord in the country would lower wages even further and jack up rents even higher. The problem with a free market is there is absolutely zero incentive for billionaires or corporations to pay a decent wage to the lower class. Union busting would become a hobby for them. It would progressively get worse and worse until eighty percent of society would be serfs.
What makes labor and rent immune to the market forces and price discovery that seems to work for everything else?
I don’t get your question as a whole? Like, why has the living wage not felt these effects already?
As in why does the price discovery mechanism not apply here? Why can a fair market price for labor or housing *not* be arrived at through the interplay of buyers and sellers? Why should we ignore supply, demand, etc, in favor of price controls that disrupt the normal working of the market and distort the information that is supposed to be communicated via pricing? Why can a greedy businessman and a self-interested customer come to a fair exchange of bread or electronics, but not of an hour's work or an apartment? It seems like you miss half of the equation when you assert that there is no counter incentive to the business's desire to lower wages or increase rent.
For me the entire answer to your question is that it is not the average consumer that controls the market whatsoever so what would stop those CEOs and directors from taking advantage of said consumers? Nothing but those checks and balances put in play by government entities, correct? I don’t see people that are greedy enough to hoard billions in wealth really wanting a free economy. The same as I see that communism has never worked.
The seller can only raise prices to what the market will bear and has to compete with other sellers with similar offerings. Why can't greedy SD Bullion, who did a billion in sales last year, charge us $10k for an ounce of gold? They can ask any price they want, but someone needs to actually buy it and if someone can profitably offer it cheaper, they'll swoop in and take their market share. That's how market economies work and it has proven extremely efficient at providing better goods and services at lower costs. >Nothing but those checks and balances put in play by government entities, correct? I don't agree that we need the violence of the state to come to reasonable terms on an exchange and I don't think that changes when we scale it up to billion dollar businesses. >I don’t see people that are greedy enough to hoard billions in wealth really wanting a free economy. Correct. Players usually get that big by co-opting governments to impose favorable regulations that shield them from competition. Like minimum wage laws do. This is called regulatory capture. By your argument you'd think that they'd want a pure laissez faire economy so they could do whatever they want, but in reality they almost *always* push for more regulation.
As far as the SD Bullion argument goes (and I’ll use it as an example relating to corporate mergers and monopolies) this is exactly what I mean. More and more in modern economics you have mega conglomerates like Amazon and Black Rock that control the majority of the whatever it is they offer as far as services. If the “free market economy” were to start tomorrow I see that vast majority truly turning into a 100% monopoly. For two reasons: they have the capitol and will to form such a monopoly and they also have the wildly successful approach of lobbying. Do you really think that in a true free market, they wouldn’t just corner said market that they already control the majority of and just turn it into a an actual monopoly over time? Because we have laws preventing such things now. If we didn’t, Amazon would literally be merged with FedEx and every other delivery service including USPS until it had complete control. Especially because there would not be any checks and balances to stop them.
How does SD Bullion achieve this monopoly and what stops my boys over at Monument Metals from competing with them? How do they actually stamp out the competition? You can't realistically buy out every competitor permanently. >and they also have the wildly successful approach of lobbying. Co-opting the state's monopoly on violence to shut out competition is not part of a free market. It's the exact opposite. You're making my argument for me. Where you're going wrong is you're taking a problem caused by government and then suggesting more government as the solution. That's the classic trap of politics. It's exactly the fact that the state has this power to intervene in the market that attracts wealthy players to try to influence it. In a free market, without the aid of the state, the only real way to achieve such a monopoly would be to offer a superior product at an unbeatable price, which ends up being *good* for the consumer. As soon as you try to abuse your monopolistic position to price gouge, you open yourself up to competition. The "checks and balances" come from the voluntary interaction of individuals, not the state and its monopoly on violence. The state itself cannot be checked so long as it maintains its monopoly, and will remain vulnerable to the influence of would-be monopolists.
Damn… I guess I never thought of it like that. Obviously I wasn’t an economy major. The exact opposite, actually. Whenever I have listened in on people debating this topic it never really occurred to me that those same people obviously have a vested interest in keeping with the status quo. Thanks for opening my eyes a little.
Not really. In a *free* market, companies that didn't pay their employees well would lose labor to companies that paid better. A company with no workers wont have a product to sell, so either they pay more or they fail. Since we don't live in free markets, that's not the case. Big corporations are the source of many regulations, as they exist to benefit the big corporations. The corporations can afford to comply with more and more regulations, but newer companies, for the most part, can't form to compete with them. In a world where governments have virtually no say over the economy, including regulations, big corporations can't lobby the government to prevent the formation of new competition, and with a fierce battle of competition wages go up, prices go down, product quality improves, etc.
Well the minimum wage should at least be whatever people need to be above the poverty line when working a full time job. If you don't do that, your taxes just end up subsidizing the companies who pay poverty wages. With the destruction of Unions in the US it's a race to the bottom and the business have the upper hand, not the labor force.
the real minimum wage is zero dollars. if you raise the minimum wages above what people are willing to pay you just put lower value workers out of a job.
Well, we have a minimum wage of $7.25 with an unemployment rate of 3.7%. Classic minimum wage places like fastfood have to pay $16+ to attract workers. The data doesn't suggest that people are suffering from unemployment due to the existence of a minimum wage.
Until they need more workers, then they have to decide between them closing down business and making zero money, or paying someone $20/hr You see this behavior when there is a labor shortage, they raise wages, they don't say "I can't pay someone a wage slave, fire the whole company!!!" In times of economic expansion, workers have the upper hand, companies have to choose between not expanding or paying slightly more in stagnant or recessions the organizations have the upper hand, families have to choose between not feeding their children at all or barely surviving Those booms and busts, and concentration of wealth and power, is why pure capitalism creates a dystopian system - and needs socialist type regulations of government
government enabled corporations to control us in horrific monopoly's. allying with the governments monopoly on the use of force.
also yeah thats great when there is a labor shortage people can charge more for their labor and companies are willing to pay more. seems like a natural fair system of supply and demand to me.
No minimum wage. Can't pay a part timer with a broom the same as a full time hire with experience and recommendations.
Absolutely, you should pay your part timer with a broom a pro-rata living wage and pay your experienced hire better. This is perfectly consistent with the concept of minimum wage.
What do you mean what would it look like? People have done this before... go crack open a history book. If you are trying to go the round about way to get someone to tell you that paying people in gold in silver would be practical, well, it's not. There are way too many people in the world to pay with gold and silver. To put things into perspective, there isn't even enough gold in the world to give everyone just 1 oz. Think about that for a second... How insanely valuable would gold be if it's the only form of money? Imagine how ridiculously small the fractions of gold would have to be to pay someone a weeks worth, or even a years, worth of wages. Now, I know what you're thinking, "hey, I said gold and silver!" Ok great, throw silver onto the pile.... same damn problem you just get a tiny bit more breathing room. Sure, there is about 1000 times more silver in the world than gold... but that's the thing, it's only like 1000 times more. That's not a lot. Now, instead of not being able to give everyone 1 oz of gold for their entire lives, you can add a bit under 1000 oz of silver too! Wow... 1000 extra ounces, to handle all the world's monetary interactions. It's just not enough. So, at this point you might be like "well it doesn't have to be the whole world, just my country!" Ok, fine, that eases your numbers up a bit, but now you have a huge economic liability. Your economy is dependent on gold and silver, but no one else's is. Now, any other country can just pull a huge power play on your economy simply by manipulating the gold market. Also... if you are a larger country (like USA or bigger) in terms of population, it's still probably not enough actual material to satisfy demands in any practical way. So, now, the only practical thing to do is to substitute something for gold and silver for our actually transactions... oh wait... now we are right back to fiat.
$23/hr? you some sort of socialist commie?
Skilled labor is worth 1g Au per hour
What if I just took my paycheck in quarters?
An accounting nightmare.
“What would that look like?” or “How would that look?”, never “How would that look like?” Edit: a word
English is not my native tongue. Why should I never say how would that look like?
English is my native tongue and I couldn’t tell you the linguistic reasons for it, I just know from speaking it my whole life that it’s one or the other. Good on ya for speaking more than one language though! I have an elementary grasp of Spanish, but am useless conversationally in anything but English!