Do Not Raise Minimum Wages

A successful economy works best with the least amount of government influence, either direction, for the same reason theocracy is a failure. Once you have finished reciting your propaganda lines, please, continue reading.

We see the reason clearly when minimum wage is increased in the USA, though not in other countries. The reason for this discrepancy will become clear very soon.

Consider the copyright system, originally it was made into law because offering the inventors a time to recuperate the costs of development would increase the number of people willing to invest in innovations. Today the copyright laws are outrageous, insanely oppressive because of a few corporations pulling the strings of the politicians.

So in order to sell a version of a product that is made more efficiently and with less costs the copyright holder must be paid whatever they ask, until the day the species becomes extinct. Resulting in absolutely no savings to pass onto the consumer and thus the original producer gets to decide the value of their product no matter how necessary it is for survival.

The end result is that the labor used in the entire process of selling the product to the consumer is added to the total cost, and the only people really earning massive profits are those who hold the copyrights. Walmart is often wrongfully blamed for this discrepancy.

Often people will use the profit value of the corporation, which is a total sum of all their holdings. The outlet stores are only a small portion of their profits, the company owns many other companies which it makes the bulk of it's profits from and no one ever looks at the problems these others are causing.

It's legerdemain, the outlets are given focus by the primary company so that no one realizes just what the company is actually guilty of. Most of the corporations are doing this now, using the minimum wage and their trademarked outlets as smoke screens to cover the real problems.

Should minimum wage be increased? Maybe. We can't know for certain at this time because the costs of everything are hyper inflated by the fact that super wealthy people are being counted as middle class.

Here's the guideline: if you can afford a new phone and computer each year and own a home or a car newer than 2005, you are super wealthy. Most of us are lucky to own a computer that's not more than a decade old or a phone that is now discontinued, and if we're really lucky we have a studio closet … sorry, I meant apartment.

My cat Pepper is the least expensive thing I own, compared to my PS2 that I have had for 7 years even. Ironically, she is more valuable to me than my own life.

So no, do not raise the minimum wage, simplify the fucking laws involved with the relationship of corporation and government so that the corporations cannot get away with atrocities or influence our politicians more than the voters do.

Money, Gold, Paper - What is money?

The funny thing is that this is more well known today than prior to the internet, though not because of the internet. When banks started pushing for purely electronic funds people started thinking about this very question a lot, and eventually figured it out.

But there are still many who make the common mistaken assertions, like saying we should return to barter and trade or abolish money completely. The thing is, money is barter and trade, always has been, always will be.

Think of it like this, a dollar is a mark that represents the value of what you have created and traded to someone else, but you don't want what they have to offer so you take that marker to a different person and then trade it for what they have. In essence it's a miniature loan between several parties.

So to keep this up, the original method was to use gold as the marker, a valuable metal that was rare and otherwise useless at the time. That was when this marker system started, but at that time it was primitive and rather unsteady, that gold may be of great value in a place with no mining operations, but in a mining town everyone had a lot of it, making its' inherent value less that standard.

So then banks collected all the gold and printed paper markers to represent this gold they now controlled. Well, not really controlled, governments still had more say in the matter than the banks, they were paid to maintain the value estimates and manage the marker system.

But then something amazing happened, which upset our original system completely, we found a use for gold, other than as jewelry or status symbols. Technology makes use of this once rare metal so much that the value of gold sky rocketed again, but for it to be valuable it had to be used. This meant it could no longer represent the marker value.

That was when people got confused, the banks and governments had to admit the entire system was nothing more than an arbitrary one, where value was just estimated based on supply and demand. This caused businesses to begin adjusting the prices of their products based on what they thought people would be willing to pay, instead of how much there was of it.

So without the wool over our eyes we all learned one hard fact, money is only worth what we say it is, it's arbitrary and has always been so. The latest generation is exposed to this early on, but some of the older generations are still in shock about this realization. Don't be too harsh on them or it, we had been made to believe money was more than arbitrary for a very long time, as a method of keeping us from asking other, more difficult, questions.

So the next time you get your paycheck, just think of it as equal to the amount of work you did for other people, not your value as a person. It represents what people think your work's value is, for which you can then give to someone else to match what you think their work is worth. Yes, it's all arbitrary, and that's why electronic funds are no different than paper funds.

Actually, electronic funds are superior, they can be adjusted based on their increase in value, while the paper one will only depreciate.