[jtkratzer]

And a lack of minimum wage would put us right back to the Victorian era of sweat shops and people working 16 hours a day and still not making enough to pay for even the basic necessities of life.

False...basic supply and demand. 100,000 jobs and 10,000,000 unemployed...the wages are going to be lower as there is demand for those jobs. If there were loads of jobs and fewer unemployed people, there has to be an incentive to pick one job over the other. The most basic example was when I was 16 and got my first "real" job (not carrying golf clubs or other stuff to make cash)...I had three offers and took the one with the highest pay, which was offered above minimum wage. It all boils down to supply and demand, and the quality/skill of the available work force.

How do you think restaurants get away with paying wait staff $2 and change an hour? People are willing to do it for one, and there are tips involved. How many of those folks accurately report their tips? How many of them qualify for government assistance because of their "reported" income levels? I have clients that are in that boat, don't truthfully report their earnings, and collect government benefits.

I'm not claiming to be smarter or know more than anyone here, but when you see it first hand and deal with people on assistance on a regular basis in your professional life, you have a very different perspective. Government housing, government benefits while driving vehicles with stupid expensive rims/rubber, cell phones, huge TVs, cable/satellite, video games, tobacco products, the works. It's a scam.

The problem isn't minimum wage, the problem is "shareholder value" which puts the interests of people who have nothing to do with how a company operates in direct conflict with the people who work on the manufacturing/sales floor.

Nothing to do with the company? If that company fails, I'm pretty sure the investment in those shares loses value.

That is a stock market issue, not a salary issue. It comes down to the money. People invest money to make ROI, not do a company a favor. This isn't borrowing a couple hundred bucks from mom and dad for a down payment on your first car.

It's about making money. Facebook appeared to be doing just fine financially and a IPO wasn't necessary, except to make more money.

The problem isn't corporate profits, the problem is that corporate profits have taken on all the hallmarks of a scorecard, where the requirement is to drive the numbers ever higher at the expense of everything else.
The problem is people believing that no matter how big a slice of the pie they have, believing that they have to have a bigger slice of it, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt in the process.

Again, it's about making more money. Why do sales quotas always increase? Same thing in sports. Performance incentives...me scoring a touchdown as a receiver directly takes a touchdown away from a running back, or at least the opportunity.

America offshored it's manufacturing not because American workers couldn't build good stuff, (General Motors being a notable exception), but because shareholder value forced manufacturers to close American factories and lay off tens of thousands of able bodied men and women in order to pad dividend cheques.
Meanwhile, people who are living off the sweat of others keep pushing for ever more return on their "investment", while the people who actually produce this income get pushed to the sidelines because someone in an undeveloped part of the world is thinking 30 cents an hour making iPhones beats the heck out of slogging around in a shitty rice paddy for a nickel a day, and someone in corporate America is thinking that taking a guy out of the rice fields and putting him into near slave labour assembling circuit boards is doing him a favour, and gee, isn't it a happy coincidence that my shareholder value just increased a thousand fold.

So it has nothing to do with the ever increasing cost of overhead from government imposed healthcare law, taxation, regulation, and everything else the government and OSHA say you have to do/provide? I'm sure profitability and the cost of labor are part of it, but where is the cost of labor coming from? It's being driven up by labor unions who always want more when negotiating contracts. Show me a labor union that willingly conceded on anything when it came to financial benefits (current or retirement pay, health insurance, etc).

Why is it wrong for the people at the bottom, who actually do the work to expect a fair living wage? Why is it right that the people at the top, who do next to nothing at all think they have a right to all the money?

Define fair wage. It's all subjective. The guy at the bottom pushes a button or swings a hammer or operates a piece of machinery. The guy with the idea or the design is the reason the other guy has a job. A million people can learn the skill to assemble circuit boards. A few on the planet have the ability to design/engineer/invent what Steve Jobs/his team did, since you used the iPhone as an example.

Where's the real moneymaker? The guy that can be replaced by just about any one of the 6+ billion people on the planet or one of the few who are designing and inventing this stuff? I guarantee you there are far more people assembling Pentax cameras than there are designing the next imaging sensor. Without those designs, you don't have the assembly jobs, the sales jobs, the delivery jobs, the service jobs, the marketing and advertising jobs...all from the small group who comes up with the design/ideas and brings it to reality.

Why is there a thing called intellectual property rights and not assembled property rights?

I know you keep harping on this, but why does pointing out the obvious automatically mean a dislike? Why do a statement such as "Americans like to kill each other", and "killing each other is their national pastime" mean anything more than the obvious?

Because it's completely idiotic to suggest Americans, as a society enjoy killing each other.

Interestingly, my company has located a lot of jobs in Canada. Due to the healthcare up north, the cost per employee is lower than in the USA, and one of the results is that employees actually get paid better. The cost of healthcare is one of the reasons why American salaries have stagnated.

My daughter attended Susquehanna so I'm familiar with some of the areas you mention. Is there some regulatory / taxation or Curley thing going on in the depressed areas vs Lancaster county?

That's right where my mom and dad grew up - Northumberland and Sunbury. Family in Selinsgrove, Milton, Danville, Bloomsburg, etc.

The economies there were based on blue collar work and there wasn't much going on in the tech world. When the blue collar jobs/factories/coal mines/saw mills closed down, there wasn't much else for people to fall in on.

It's not that it's political, but there's definitely a mentality to the people up there that's very different than what you see in Lancaster, Chester County, etc. I don't think education is as valued and there's a reason why that part of the state is endearingly referred to as Pennsyltucky.

Yup, and the Lincoln administration was a large part of that.

Yes. Please note that I did not say all relevance. I said a good deal of relevance. The diminishment of relevance happens to all foundation wood-pulp, because nations outgrow the original vision. Why should the US Constitution be any different? It should be used as a building-block - or perhaps the keystone - to a new National Document. Authored on an iPad, of course.

I'll quote you:

But there's a difference between a document being irrelevant and outgrown. That's the purpose of the amendment process.

There is far more relevant and legit about the Constitution than the crap the government does without documented authority. If something needs to be addressed, go through the process of amending the document. All of that was put in place for that reason...it would need additions/modifications. I don't think people give the authors credit where it's due.

[Chex]

But there's a difference between a document being irrelevant and outgrown. That's the purpose of the amendment process.

The scary part of this is who would be writing the amendments now days.. which corporation(s) would be influencing the final drafts etc..

[Nesster]

The scary part of this is who would be writing the amendments now days.. which corporation(s) would be influencing the final drafts etc..

But corporations are people too! Who could argue that Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft and J.P. Morgan are not full peers of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams et al?

[Wheatfield]

False...basic supply and demand. 100,000 jobs and 10,000,000 unemployed...the wages are going to be lower as there is demand for those jobs. If there were loads of jobs and fewer unemployed people, there has to be an incentive to pick one job over the other. The most basic example was when I was 16 and got my first "real" job (not carrying golf clubs or other stuff to make cash)...I had three offers and took the one with the highest pay, which was offered above minimum wage. It all boils down to supply and demand, and the quality/skill of the available work force.

With the numbers you cite, if there is no minimum wage, there is going to be sweatshops.

How do you think restaurants get away with paying wait staff $2 and change an hour? People are willing to do it for one, and there are tips involved. How many of those folks accurately report their tips? How many of them qualify for government assistance because of their "reported" income levels? I have clients that are in that boat, don't truthfully report their earnings, and collect government benefits.

They get away with it because minimum wage laws (in the USA, anyway), presume that a wait person will make tips to cover the shortfall. In my country, minimum wage covers all workers, restaurants don't get away with that kind of exploitation.

Nothing to do with the company? If that company fails, I'm pretty sure the investment in those shares loses value.

I'm pretty sure you need to go back and read what you quoted. Your reply is a non sequiter.