Should Low-Wage Restaurant Workers Be Paid More?

[StMichael]

I have no idea what you are talking about. Sounds very nationalistic and jingoistic to me. I was born in the USA but I can still see the value of other countries' systems. It doesn't sound like you have any idea what the rest of the world is like. If you have something useful to say about economics, that would be informative, but this just sounds like fanaticism to me.

Actually, I do. O Boy do I. Not seeking to reveal much of myself in a public forum, but you can't take Italian Marinara Sauce and add in soy sauce and serve it as authentic (or pineapples on pizza, ugh..). Never in the history of the world has a nation been established like the US. One where the government feared the governed, as opposed to the other way around. Whatever nation you are in, it is under the same system that has existed since there were Kings. The state "cares" for you. You get your pittance from whatever you contribute. 

The once free market of the United States, not the government, but the freedom of the people, provided the world with inventions that changed every nation across the globe from the now simple light bulb to medical advances to the creation of the internet to almost everything tech. 

I am either related to, work with or have been to socialist countries in Europe & South America, third world nations (where clean water is hard to come by) and find it hard to believe that the citizenry of those nations do not rise up, instead they accept what is provided to them by the paternalistic overlords.

Right now, America is gagging on Fabian Socialism. 

[Didacus]

Why can't we make it a law so that everyone makes the same amount of money?

[Nihil Obstat]

The right to rule is derived from the consent of the governed.

[Peace]

Well, I can see you have zero to offer.

Well in that case let me offer you this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries#20th_century

It is a list of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. You can click on the names and tally the numbers for yourself, but the number of European inventors and institutions outnumbers the number of American inventors and institutions on that list by far.

So your statement that "Where every major leap forward for humanity in the last 100+ years has originated from medical to industrial to technology." is incorrect.

But You can keep on drinking the Kool-Aid if you want.

[AccountDeleted]

Actually, I do. O Boy do I. Not seeking to reveal much of myself in a public forum, but you can't take Italian Marinara Sauce and add in soy sauce and serve it as authentic (or pineapples on pizza, ugh..). Never in the history of the world has a nation been established like the US. One where the government feared the governed, as opposed to the other way around. Whatever nation you are in, it is under the same system that has existed since there were Kings. The state "cares" for you. You get your pittance from whatever you contribute. 

The once free market of the United States, not the government, but the freedom of the people, provided the world with inventions that changed every nation across the globe from the now simple light bulb to medical advances to the creation of the internet to almost everything tech. 

I am either related to, work with or have been to socialist countries in Europe & South America, third world nations (where clean water is hard to come by) and find it hard to believe that the citizenry of those nations do not rise up, instead they accept what is provided to them by the paternalistic overlords.

Right now, America is gagging on Fabian Socialism. 

Sure.Yeah. Whatever.  

[StMichael]

Well in that case let me offer you this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries#20th_century

It is a list of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. You can click on the names and tally the numbers for yourself, but the number of European inventors and institutions outnumbers the number of American inventors and institutions on that list by far.

So your statement that "Where every major leap forward for humanity in the last 100+ years has originated from medical to industrial to technology." is incorrect.

But You can keep on drinking the Kool-Aid if you want.

From the light bulb to putting a man on the moon to the internet. There is not a significant invention that didn't originate from the United States.

That swivel chair, that you are sitting in while you troll, invented by a Founding Father, namely Thomas Jefferson.

The way we are interacting, the internet, invented by the United States.

And more recently the 3D printer.

And if you want to have a debate, posting a link, saying you add it up and then turn around and make a baseless claim, hardly worth my time.

But here are a few links for you:

Timeline of United States inventions (before 1890)

Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)

Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)

Timeline of United States inventions (after 1991)

So wherever you are in the world, if you are listening to a radio, have a fire hydrant outside or zipper your pantaloons or jacket. You can thank the United States.

As for medical innovations the United States leads the world - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-thorpe/medical-advancements-who-is-leading_b_807796.html

Happy reading!

[Nihil Obstat]

From the light bulb to putting a man on the moon to the internet. There is not a significant invention that didn't originate from the United States.

That swivel chair, that you are sitting in while you troll, invented by a Founding Father, namely Thomas Jefferson.

The way we are interacting, the internet, invented by the United States.

And more recently the 3D printer.

And if you want to have a debate, posting a link, saying you add it up and then turn around and make a baseless claim, hardly worth my time.

But here are a few links for you:

Timeline of United States inventions (before 1890)

Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)

Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)

Timeline of United States inventions (after 1991)

So wherever you are in the world, if you are listening to a radio, have a fire hydrant outside or zipper your pantaloons or jacket. You can thank the United States.

As for medical innovations the United States leads the world - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-thorpe/medical-advancements-who-is-leading_b_807796.html

Happy reading!

Wonderbra. Checkmate.

[Winchester]

Colt 1911

[AccountDeleted]

 

[Peace]

From the light bulb  . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan

Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, D.Sc.h.c., FRS (31 October 1828 – 27 May 1914) was a British physicist and chemist. He is most famous for inventing the first incandescent light bulb.

Swan first demonstrated the light bulb at a lecture in Newcastle upon Tyne on 18 December 1878, but he did not receive a patent until 27 November 1880 (patent No. 4933) after improvement to the original lamp. His house (in Gateshead, England) was the first in the world to be lit by lightbulb, and the world's first electric-light illumination in a public building was for a lecture Swan gave in 1880. In 1881, the Savoy Theatre in the City of Westminster, London, was lit by Swan incandescent lightbulbs, the first theatre and the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity.^[1]

 

The common coupling of Swan's name with that of Thomas Edison in connection with the incandescent electric lamp has often led to the notion that Swan collaborated with Edison in this invention. That was not so. Their work was completely independent, and although each knew the other was working on the problem of devising a practical lamp, they had neither met nor communicated with each other. The conjunction of their names came about in 1883 when the two competing companies merged to exploit both Swan's and Edison's inventions.^[17]

In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and started an advertising campaign that claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in the United Kingdom.

The way we are interacting, the internet, invented by the United States.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, Great Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network , CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Donald Davies was the first to put theory into practice by designing a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, the first of its kind in the world and the cornerstone for UK research for almost two decades.^[1][2] Following, ARPANET further led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990 ^[3], and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, the work of Tim Berners-Lee in the United Kingdom, on the World Wide Web, theorised the fact that protocols link hypertext documents into a working system,^[4] marking the beginning the modern Internet. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.^[5] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

 

And more recently the 3D printer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing

 Earlier Additive Manufacturing (AM) equipment and materials were developed in the 1980s.^[3] In 1981, Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute invented two AM fabricating methods of a three-dimensional plastic model with photo-hardening polymer, where the UV exposure area is controlled by a mask pattern or the scanning fiber transmitter.^[4][5] Then in 1984, Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corporation^[6] developed a prototype system based on this process known as stereolithography, in which layers are added by curing photopolymers with ultraviolet light lasers. Hull defined the process as a "system for generating three-dimensional objects by creating a cross-sectional pattern of the object to be formed,"^[7][8] but this had been already invented by Kodama. Hull's contribution is the design of the STL (STereoLithography) file format widely accepted by 3D printing software as well as the digital slicing and infill strategies common to many processes today. The term 3D printing originally referred to a process employing standard and custom inkjet print heads. The technology used by most 3D printers to date—especially hobbyist and consumer-oriented models—is fused deposition modeling, a special application of plastic extrusion.

[AccountDeleted]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan

 

Yes, and there are so many inventions that Americans claim when they were really invented first by people in other countries. That isn't to say that the Americans didn't improve inventions or make them more readily accessible to the general public, but it does seem to be a kind of inferiority/superiority complex that some Americans have that they are the only nation in the world to have contributed anything to the rest of the world when this isn't true. I hate the whole 'Ugly American' thing that starts to happen sometimes but it probably comes about from some kind of need to assert dominance or something. I am American but I am also Australian, and my ancestors are from Europe/UK, so I really can't get into this whole 'our country is better than yours' type of thing. There is good and bad in every place.

[Nihil Obstat]

My priest gave a lecture at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Nebraska about why the US is not the best country in the world.

[Peace]

Yes, and there are so many inventions that Americans claim when they were really invented first by people in other countries. That isn't to say that the Americans didn't improve inventions or make them more readily accessible to the general public, but it does seem to be a kind of inferiority/superiority complex that some Americans have that they are the only nation in the world to have contributed anything to the rest of the world when this isn't true. I hate the whole 'Ugly American' thing that starts to happen sometimes but it probably comes about from some kind of need to assert dominance or something. I am American but I am also Australian, and my ancestors are from Europe/UK, so I really can't get into this whole 'our country is better than yours' type of thing. There is good and bad in every place.

I don't quite understand how people get into that mindset, but I suppose you can't fault them because they don't know any better.

I've been to 20+ countries and lived overseas for 5+ years. I love the US and there is nowhere else I would rather live. But yeah, to start making assertions that we are the only country that has contributed things of significance is incorrect, not to mention extremely arrogant.

I am a US patent lawyer by the way - so I know that is plainly not true. 5 or 6 out of the top 10 companies that are granted US patents every year are foreign companies.

[AccountDeleted]

I don't quite understand how people get into that mindset, but I suppose you can't fault them because they don't know any better.

I've been to 20+ countries and lived overseas for 5+ years. I love the US and there is nowhere else I would rather live. But yeah, to start making assertions that we are the only country that has contributed things of significance is incorrect, not to mention extremely arrogant.

I am a US patent lawyer by the way - so I know that is plainly not true. 5 or 6 out of the top 10 companies that are granted US patents every year are foreign companies.

I guess we have been fortunate to have lived in other countries, just to appreciate what's good in each one.

[Socrates]

 I don't recall having written anything about immediately taking all problems to the federal government.

It is not only a matter of efficiency but a matter of necessity. Some of the things that poor people need are money, food, clothing, and shelter. It does not particularly matter how deep of a personal relationship I have with my neighbor if he is incapable of providing those things. At least in the United States of America, the people who are capable of providing those things (the wealthy) by and large choose to live far away from the poor, in large houses out in the suburbs. Because most people with abundance do not choose to live among, associate with, or assist the people who are most in need of their abundance, taxation becomes a necessity to ensure that the wealthy pay their debt of justice to the poor. If you do not have some programs like SNAP I believe that some people would go hungry.

 

 

 

Again, I think there needs to be more Church and voluntary giving, such as in my parish, which takes up collections for families in need.

While perhaps at this point we can't go back immediately to all-voluntary giving, the modern welfare state has had a corrosive effect on family and civil society which make such voluntary giving possible.  Witness the disastrous affects on inner city communities, where a check from the federal government has largely replaced husbands/fathers, and helped enable a vicious cycle of illegitimacy, poverty, and crime.  We've abdicated too many responsibilities to government bureaucrats.  Seems John Paul the Great was on to something there . . .

 

I do not recall having written anything about it being an unqualified glowing success. No system is perfect, but I believe that the universal health care systems that have been freely implemented in most first world countries are preferable to the system that we have in the USA.

Personally, I have lived in a country with universal health care for 6 years. I have lived the rest in the USA. I've had 4 major surgeries in the USA and 3 while living abroad, so I think I have some basis for comparison. If I had to choose between the two, I would choose a country with universal health care. This is not based on any political inclination, but rather my personal experience with both systems. And that seems to be the same for everyone I have met that has lived under both systems. Just a few weeks ago I asked 3 foreign colleagues of mine how they prefer the two systems, and each of them said that they much prefer the system in their home countries. I do not think I have met a single person who has actually lived under both systems, and who prefers the US system - have you? I am not saying that universal health care will lead to a utopia - but I think one has to ask why every first world country in the world except for one has freely adopted it.

As for "death panels" - the closest thing I have seen to that was right here in the USA (before Obamacare). My insurance company refused to pay for a surgery that my doctor wanted to perform. Think about it - insurance companies in the USA are in business to make profit. If they do not pay for medical care, their profit increases. If they pay out money for medical care, their profit decreases. I think you can put two and two together.

 And under the old system - good luck getting any kind of insurance if you found yourself out of work and with a medical condition. There is a reason why medical costs are the leading cause of medical bankruptcy, you know. . .

By the way, exactly how is it that Obamacare is going to result in increased "death panels"?

Both FactCheck.org and Politifact called BS on that years ago, but I am not surprised to see that people are still repeating the mantra:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/whoppers-of-2009/

I am not a particularly big fan of Obamacare, by the way. It seems to have a few good things in it such as prohibiting bans on people with pre-existing medical conditions, but I do not think it is a particularly good law. I think it did not go far enough. I wanted the public health insurance option, which the Republicans managed to take off of the table. Without the public option you pretty much have the same health care system at the core, with a few tweaks here and there. I think that we are still pretty far away from what most other countries have, despite whatever spin there may be to the contrary.

What specific provisions of Obamacare is it that you think are bad?

I've heard mixed things about healthcare in other countries, but so far I've seen no solid evidence that socialized medicine will help anything in the U.S.

As for "death panels," it's a likely consequence in a socialistic system where limited public funds must be used to save lives, and it's left to panels of government bureaucrats to determine which lives are most worth saving.  It's a prediction of the future - you can debate whether or not it's a good prediction - but that's not the same thing as a lie.   Seems it's already happening to some extent in the "utopia" of Britain.

Regarding Obamacare, it seems foolish to believe that if the effects of a little socialism is bad, more socialism will be the solution.  The so-called "Affordable Healthcare Act" (which most Americans oppose) is doing nothing to make healthcare more affordable, and is already causing the closure of many rural hospitals.

It's not just certain provisions of Obamacare that I have a problem with.  The entire idea of the federal government being able to essentially force citizens at gunpoint to buy a certain product is wrong, and outside its powers enumerated in the Constitution.  (And yes, I've heard Robert's weaseling on that one, and it's b.s.)

As a Catholic, I'd think you'd at least be somewhat concerned about the contraception mandate (you may recall the U.S. Bishop's "Fortnight for Freedom"), which remains in place to a large extent, despite some legal rulings against it in certain restricted cases.  I realize it may not be a necessary component of socialized medicine in general, but this is exactly the kind of problems you can expect when we grant the government the power to dictate what private employers' healthcare plans must cover.  Who's to say that in the future it won't dictate that actual surgical abortions be covered (since our almighty Supreme Court has ruled killing babies in the womb to be a "constitutional right")?

The reality is, when you grant new powers to government, it's not a question of if, but how and when, it will abuse them.

No. I am in favor of a strong military, actually. I would eliminate most of the agencies that adminster social welfare programs and replace them with a guaranteed minimum income. I would just tax and give people the money directly, without having to administer programs like SNAP, public housing, etc. I would also take a look at downsizing a lot of agencies like Energy, Education, Transportation, etc.

Except for the problems in inherent with giving away "free" money to everyone, regardless of whether or not they are working or in need, I actually for the most part agree with you there, though I'd take it further, and say most such agencies should be eliminated altogether.

 

I see. It appears that I misunderstood you. Other than the military, public infrastructure, and the courts, what do you think are legitimate functions of government?

I'd leave it basically to those powers enumerated in the Constitution at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights.