On the need for standards.

The conservative talking point of labor laws and environmental regulations "kill jobs". This has always struck me as an oversimplification, but until recently I'd never given much thought to exactly how it might be right or wrong.

Well, I found this blog post about minimum wage laws by "The Drage"... and I think I get it now. His argument against them is basically that employees should be able to charge as little as they want for their labor, and that establishing or raising the minimum wage increases unemployment by making employers pay more for the same labor. Emphasis mine:

"How long do you think the company will keep [its workers] employed [following a minimum wage increase] if they're not worth what they're being paid? Well, if they don't perform to their new standard then chances are they will be let go and the company will go find employees who are worth the $7.25 an hour that they are forced to pay. Furthermore, the company's total labor costs will increase. Is it likely that the company will be able to raise prices enough to offset the increase in wages in this economy? Probably not. Therefore, the company will have to find some way to cut costs and the first place they'll likely look is payroll."

Great Scott, I do believe I've found the problem.

Taking up too much space in the market.

I found this interesting little anecdote while roaming around on Digg, and since I don't want to be one of those people who only reads posts they agree with I read it through. It mentioned something that I've heard mentioned quite a few times since the Citizens United ruling went down. The writer of this post seemed to think that the only reason why a progressive individual (such as myself) would want to prevent corporations from contributing a lot of money to elections - or why we'd want to prevent them from doing anything, for that matter - is because we're a bunch of elitists and think that all the normal everyday Americans are gullible and stupid.

According to this guy's post, the liberal with whom he was talking did say that most people aren't "intelligent" enough to understand contracts they make with banks or other corporations. To be fair I've met a few other liberal-types who've expressed a similar sentiment... but I disagree. I don't think you'd have to be stupid to not understand a bunch of text that's really small, really dense, and full of legal jargon. The fact that some people (myself included) find that stuff completely obtuse and mystifying doesn't mean we're stupid - it means we aren't lawyers. The people writing those contracts know this, and they overload them with information, knowing that we probably won't be able to process all of it, and hoping that we'll miss something that will allow them to screw us over later.  The best thing you could call this is a dishonest business practice.

Now on to Citizens. For-profit corporations are not just a bunch of people who "choose to organize"- they organize specifically to make a profit. I don't have any problem with this per se. I do have a problem when those with more money start to feel like they are entitled to more of everything else as well - including more speech. Any asshole can get a free blog and write stuff on the internet, but if you want anyone to ever see it you've got to write good stuff, encourage people to link to it, and put forth effort to get more page views and be seen.