The difference between markets then and now is the increasing concentration of market share in a handful of international megacorporations and the decreasing willingness of the government to use anti-trust laws to target (ubiquitous) anti-competitive practices or even pursue the basic policies needed to guarantee the economy runs at full employment.Occluded Sun wrote:Because market forces mean nothing, the differences in the markets between now and then mean nothing, and wages should be what you decide they should be.Shatner wrote:However, the amount Americans on-average are getting paid has, when you adjust for inflation, gone down since the '60s, so raising the wage to back up to historical levels is more of a correction than an unheard of imposition.
You do not live in a world of rational healthy markets which have, unfortunately, decided that the value of a United States worker is less than what it once was. You live in a world where a handful of people have won at capitalism and are buying governments, and they dress up their "preserve my empire" platform in a lot of pseudo-libertarian bullshit targeted at people like you. But the forces which have drove down wages since the 60's are not actually unfortunate but inevitable changes in an ultimately functional market economy. They are symptoms of the total collapse of our market economy into a modern aristocracy of oligarches who, absent the competition necessary to restrain them, are able to push up prices and push down wages without being punished by competitors.