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Originally Posted by Seaver
God I just LOVE this thread.
First I'm a racist, now I'm reduced to simply a mouthpiece that doesnt have an opinion.. just throws up on everyone.
However I do admit when I'm wrong. And in the case of income distribution I am wrong.
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Seaver,
I never said you
didn't have an opinion. I'm not sure where you pulled that from. What I was commenting on was the persistence of people to continue to spout their
groundless opinions, despite the evidence, repeatedly.
The post immediately precending yours is an excellent example. Both stevo and ustwo walzt into the thread, declare they personally know a union leader, and that they have knowledge that unions always support minimum wage increases because they can demand more money for their workers (usually these two are bitching about unions not doing shit for their members, so this twist is odd to say the least). They move from those factless assertions to additional factless claims: that places down the road, they know for a fact, pay more than the federal minimum wage and somehow this morphs into an empirical basis for their claim that the bulk of entry level positions pay more than the federal minimum wage. Then conclude that all minimum wage arguments are really just union grabs for power...vote pandering as it were.
Inconsistent argument layered over inconsistent argument, a complete disregard for the objective evidence, and regurgitation of talking points repeatedly despite being shown evidence to the contrary all coalesce into an annoying trend on this board.
To your credit, you actually capitulated on a point some of us made that is backed by solid empirical evidence. The part of my post you quoted was pointing out that people like you, who argue for self-sufficiency, should at least take the time to research a point before you start telling other people they are wrong. And if you aren't going to take the time to research a point, you should not build entire arguments around baseless claims (as stevo and ustwo did above).
Now, you'll notice that I have never denigrated you for your
ideological stance: that government
should not regulate wages. If your personal belief is that the market will take care of wages, there is a debate to be had over how or whether it can actually best do that without government intrusion. But that debate should be held within a context of facts. But I have NEVER made fun of you for being a free-market propoent. But if your basis and best argument is that you talked to someone down the road, and they aren't upset about their wage, and therefore you can speak on behalf of the rest of the minimum wage earners in this country, then I will certainly poke a hole or fun in that statement.
Or lets suspend disbelief for a minute and actually think that ustwo has a union leader as a friend. And that this union leader told him that all unions favor minimum wage increases because it empowers them to make demands for their members. Well, now we have some contradictions, workers (from your anecdote) are not supportive of minimum wage increases, yet union leaders (from ustwo and stevo's anecdotes) support them and are basically the political pressure behind increases.
Well, at this point it seems out of one of you three, someone should be able to actually post some kind of factual basis for those claims. A representative survey of workers' attitudes, a graph comparing union wages to minimum wage increases,...something. Yet, not one single point is supported by anything other than referring to one another's comments. And this thread will die eventually and one of you guys will start something like it back up months from now and the same people will trot out the same arguments that have already been refuted by empirical facts. Given those trends, it appears to be a fair assessment that a number of people in this thread are regurgitating points instead of taking the time to look at the actual facts of the issue before deciding and telling other people that
they don't know what they're talking about.