This is why I shit on the floor instead of the toilet. As far as I know, Hitler never did that.

Hitler-gate.

This just demonstrates that they don't have a good argument against raising the minimum wage.

They don't want to talk about a generation of asymmetric negotiations in which workers' wages have been systematically reduced as trade unions and collective bargaining agreements were disassembled until we reach the point where even full time workers now require government assistance simply to pay rent and feed their children.

"With different words, this is what Hitler was saying" has now become my "go to" phrase. You can apply it to anything.

I just don't understand these people. If the minimum wage went up it would benefit him as well since it would be spent on products and services his business supplies driving up sales, boosting stocks and etc. Instead they'd rather force us all to stay on the same course we've been on for decades and continue to endure class stratification, wage stagnation and a diminished lifestyle for the middle class. Cause, you know; America, freedom and apple pie! But I guess it's nice they let us keep the delusion that everyone can be a millionaire in free market capitalism if they only would work hard. As if a pyramid was ever built upside down.

@ 6, they don't see it that way. For the past 30+ years, businesses have been allowed to believe that unlimited profit growth is their birthright, and that everything they can do to accomplish it is correct. It's the whole "greed is good" concept, and America's corporate executives and boards have bought into that fully.

The problem with things like paying workers fair wages is the fact that that means executives and board members have to sacrifice maximum profits and multimillion dollar bonuses for it. It doesn't matter that they'll STILL be profitable, and STILL make more money than 99% of us. It's a loss for them, so it's bad.

Arbeit macht frei? Nope. According to Ken, income inequality and theft of labor will truly make you free.

It's in extremely poor taste to make light about Hitler, and what happened under the Nazis. Not only were Jews persecuted and killed by the millions, but bi, trans, and gay women and men were as well.

To makes jokes about this history (and ongoing reality) just to score rhetorical "points" against a contemporary political rival is just liberal-bourgeois white male privilege, not activism.

If business owners can not afford to pay a decent wage, they should have chosen to either make more money or lower any possible expenses. They should not have made so many poor decisions that leaves them unable to pay a fair wage. They chose to start this business and they chose to not be successful enough.

What, it doesn't work that way? Funny how that is.

@9: I am eating an orange. I hope that's okay.

@9 Almost got me. Dan stepped in it though.

@ Dan

Well, vitamin C deficiency was a major source of malnutrition, gum disease, and other suffering in concentration camps, but I'm glad you find that funny enough to gloat about.

Well Hitler was a socialist, not unlike your new city council member, right?

But thank goodness we're having this discussion about a higher minimum wage law, following in the example of such progressive European countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Cyprus ... oh wait, none of those countries have minimum wage laws.

This move towards a ridiculously high minimum wage of $15 an hour is largely directed at the resentment that's been earned by conglomerates like Walmart and McDonald's, right? But guess who has the capital to back up a wage like that? Conglomerates like Walmart and McDonald's, and not the majority of small to mid-tier local businesses who aren't chasing stocks profits, and run on slim profit margins to survive. What a great win for the mega corporations who won't have to be burdened by actually having to compete with more small businesses.

@ 14, Hitler was not a socialist. The early Nazi party DID have a lot of socialists, but Hitler wasn't one of them. They were all purged once he got to power and that was the end of the "socialism" in National Socialism.

@9, 13: http://soepic.pl/stor/items/135872513704…

@14: Hitler and the other Nationalist Socialists are "socialist" the same way the DPRK is "democratic" and Taco Bell serves "beef" tacos.

Cute, a troll pretending to be Raku...

When will these out-of-touch billionaires realize that trying to label your opponent with the Hitler-brush just makes them look like stupid, out-of-touch assholes?

I yearn for the day we have actual rational political conversations in this nation. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime though.

@14 - Wait, the US is "progressive"? Since when?

The countries you mention have the right to organize and workers can bargain collectively, unlike in the US where unions have been remarkably de-fanged and can't seem to obtain even reasonable concessions from the owners who have the power & profits. (Cf. Boeing)

So choose from either column A, or column B, but you can't demolish both columns without guaranteeing more misery for the majority.

How's that 8-hour workday working out for you, btw?

And it's not "ridiculously high". If wages had kept pace with productivity and profits, we'd have a $20+ minimum wage right now. A true living wage.

@14, So you're for socialism? Because, allowing businesses to pay a non-living wage is ultimately socialistic. (At least in the sense that the word is being used here, which is not really accurate.) All of us have to support the people that currently earn minimum wage. Shouldn't that cost be borne by their employers who directly benefit from their labor?

Somehow, paying a living wage works for Costco:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/06/news/eco…

If your local small business can't afford to pay their employees a living wage and stay in business, maybe their owners should hang a tin cup on the door and ask for donations because that is exactly what they are doing when they pay their employees less than a living wage.

@ 11 - An orange!!! Your are positively wallowing in your liberal bourgeois white male privilege. Think of all the workers in poor countries who made so much efforts to get that orange to you, working for much less than the minimal wage you advocate!

(I, of course, am only joking. I'm pretty sure most oranges in the US are grown there.)

As some Republican asshole said on The Daily Show last night, the poor need to decide to stop being poor. He actually said it with a straight face and not a drop of snark. He really believes that poor people choose to be poor. When the revolution comes, I call dibs on a guillotine.

The rich love telling the poor that the poor are helpless so that the poor don't undercut them with lower salary and overhead requirements.

http://business.time.com/2013/08/07/meet…

That Costco article randoma linked to is a fine example of a business that voluntarily pays their employees a good, competitive wage, no government force required. I imagine it took those companies a long time to develop the infrastructure required to be able to employ the number of workers they do.

If you think a small start-up business, being coerced through the governments monopoly on force to pay an entry-level worker a wage that's five dollars higher per hour than where the minimum sits currently (thanks government mandated inflation), then you have either: never worked at a small retail business, never worked retail period, never had even the slightest entrepreneurial leanings.

And as for unions, I'm fine with a union that's voluntary. Unfortunately the majority of unions in this country are not. Ironically, the origin of minimum-wage laws in this country were designed by the unions to restrict the ability of businesses to hire low-skill workers who might gladly work for lower wages in order to gain experience. Union members thus face less competition from workers who might threaten union jobs.

A 2004 study in the Journal of Human Resources by economists William Wascher, Mark Schweitzer and David Neumark determined that lower-wage union workers typically see a boost in employment and earned income following a mandated wage hike. Never mind the corresponding drop in jobs and earned income for nonunion minimum-wage workers. They may have been priced out of the jobs they need, but that is not the union's concern its members have landed higher wages and reduced competition for jobs.

@19,

Some companies have tried that before. Remember that theater down in Columbia City?

@21,

Why can't poor people just buy more money?

When they come for the billionnaires, I definitely won't speak, since I'm not a billionnaire.

@24, But you could be! You just have to work hard. Just ask most of the billionaires! They just worked hard, you know.

The rich should be taxed for being alive. And there should be a huge birth tax on them to discourage them to reproduce.

@25 - Do you know how hard it is growing up rich and inheriting your family's wealth with fast cars and loose women, mom's flask and dad's dead eyes?

And coke, lots and lots of coke.

@26 - I <3 you Catalina.

You know what the solution to envy is? Reducing the reasons for people being envious.

I don't know why y'all engage Spindles on any level.

@ 30, it's best not to leave things like what Spindles said unchallenged.

@14 if Hitler was a Socialist then Saddam Hussein's Elite Republican Guard were members of the GOP.

@14: You really, really really don't want to start citing European (and especially Scandinavian) countries in this discussion. Your petard, it will hoist you.

I find that phrase "voluntary union" hilarious. Did you come up with that, or are you parroting some RedState/FOX talking point as usual? (Wait, never mind, found it on my own. You're regurgitating some Heritage Foundation bullshit.)

Funny thing about that. Say what you will about Hitler's foreign policy, his nationalism, his rampant racism...

You just can't fault his economic policies. He took an economy that was completely and wholly broken, and built it into an economic powerhouse capable of taking over half of Europe in less than 6 years.

I don't think Dan Savage (the orange-eater) is really Dan Savage. I think NotDanSavage is really Dan Savage. True?

@34, Hitler's economic powerhouse was munitions and munitions only. I think you need to read a book about that period. Any book would do.

@16, you hit it right on the head. The Nazis were FASCISTS, not socialists. And the asshats who use the name to condemn socialism are drinking the NHF "bug juice." (trying not to use a brand name) IF there were such a thing as an impartial observer, I bet he or she or it would pretty much figure that the teabaggers and paulyboyz and ryanters are pretty much 21st century fascists.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism]

@36: be that as it may, first he had to repair the basic infrastructure at the bottom to feed the munitions factories at the top of the economic pyramid. Trains had to run on time, coal and iron and copper and tin had to be mined, all those people fed, scientists and engineers had to go through school, and so on.

What did he start with? The depths of the Great Depression, but with the added bonus of an extra 17 years of economic catastrophe thanks to war reparations. To say that Germany had suffered the depression worse than any other industrial nation is laughably understated. And every government since 1918 had failed miserably where his succeeded.

So while it might have been "munitions, munitions, munitions", it was also roads, rail, telecommunications, power generation, farming, mining, and building. Just as importantly, using massive government spending to dig your way out of an economic depression was unheard of at the time.

So yes, lunatic racist warmonger sociopath, but you can't fault his economic policies, because they actually worked.