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RE: Ontario Minimum Wage Hike Is Costing Us Money (Freedom Minute)
Wages (the red line) are as they are represented in the GDP. GDP is all the goods and services accounted for in an economy each year. So in 2000 49% of the GDP (value on the right side) declined to 44% in 2012. In contrast profits increased from 9% of the GDP to 12% in 2012.
During the period illustrated the GDP rose from roughly $10 Trillions dollars to $16 Trillion dollars.
I am sorry that you had to go through the distress of losing your job. I know that not only the employees but also the employers come under a lot of emotional pressure. That is a good thing about Steem that is represents an alternative stream of income which I hope will insulated you from that kind of event in the future.
I hope for your continued Steem success.
If that chart is yearly wages, then it is clearly faulty, as most wage workers don't keep a given job for longer than a year. Also, if cryptocurrency succeeds in it's philosophical goals, then things like minimum wage will be impossible because the state will be rendered powerless.
It has to do with all wages in an economy... but that isn't important as it shows how all personal incomes has been dropping for a long time while corporate profits have increased.
One of the directions that cryptocurrencies might take is that it establishes a commodity based coin. For instance there could be an egg_coin, milk_coin etc. This would allow commodities to establish their relative value automatically on exchanges. In this way there would not be an erosion of your personal equity because of inflation... one egg_coin would buy one egg in 1 year, 2 years etc. This cannot be said of fiat currency which constantly depreciates.
I wouldn't say that minimum wage would be "impossible" just moot. People could be paid a coin which is representative of the their job ... street_sweeper_coin vs teacher_coin representing 1 hour of their labour. Ironically some poorly paid jobs (septic cleaners, fireman) may attain a higher value due to the noxious or dangerous aspects. Negotiations would be eliminated as relative value could be determined by purely market forces on an exchange.
There will never be commodity coins because that defeats the whole purpose of a medium of exchange in the first place. We might as well go back to barter. And yes, without a powerful state to force employers to pay minimum wage—minimum wage will be impossible. I think you're missing the whole point of crypto... It's to castrate globally governments of their ability to regulate markets.
There are already commodity coins in play developed by Provenance which track for over 200 retailers and producers. These track commodities from the field/manufacturer to the retail shelf. When a person buys an item with BTC ... they receive a coin which represent the ownership of the specific commodity. It doesn't defeat the medium of exchange, it facilitates the trail of ownership.
Cryptocurrencies are just a tool which are meant to decentralize our societies. It changes the way that we can relate to banks. This pushes them back by decades to where they need to encourage people to loan money to them (so they can finance loans, mortgages etc.) instead of charging us to hold our money. They represent an opportunity to disrupt governments by giving us a mechanism to fund government budgets directly instead of having a couple hundred people deciding for us. The only thing preventing people from directly funding Education vs Healthcare vs Military vs Infrastructure spending instead of having governments voting on budgets is the necessary will of the people. Another thing is that if I elected to spend a government token on education and healthcare but not military, I could follow the transactions that token was used for on the blockchain. I could see if the token was used to fund areas that I did not agree with.
Any altcoin that is meant to be a "commodity coin" only has value based on speculation, and is bound to drop to 0. You think any dispensaries accept hempcoin? No, but investors do because BTC is valuable and cannabis is valuable, so naturally you can combine the two and scam your way to the top.
Cryptocurrency is meant to act as money, or as a way to use decentralized computing power to solve scientific applications, or a number of other things. There is no need to have a special medium of exchange for each commodity.
Currently commodities appear on exchanges such as the CMEGroup
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/
They have an important function to help farmers hedge for future price variations. A commodity based altcoin would aid/disrupt this process. For instance there is 300 times more gold offered in paper transactions then currently exist on the planet. A gold_coin would allow linking to a specific asset ... and would help to force speculators out of the market. Currently the medium of exchange is USD. Having BTC as the medium of exchange paired with "gold_coin" would also prevent a Central Bank (Switzerland, USA, UK, etc.) from manipulating the price of a commodity by printing currency to buy it. Contrast these two charts:
STEEM/BTC
STEEM/USD
In comparison to BTC, STEEM has become very stable while against the USD it has become very volatile. Is this volatility because of STEEM or because of the USD?
But don't you see? You don't push the speculators out of the market—you only push them to speculating the commodity coin price instead of/as well as the commodity price. Which they, as well as vendors, would more than likely say fuck the commodity coin and use the regular medium instead.
No commodity coin is needed to help farmers hedge against price fluctuations... Futures already do that.
Of course the USA does things differently but let me tell you about Canada. In Canada we have agricultural industries just as in the US. Our hog and beef Industries are similar to the US industry as its price is set by the futures market. We also have two industries milk and chickens which rely on a supply management system.
Just speaking about beef vs dairy, they have similar cost structures (you need land, barns and cattle). When I was young, beef producers were very flash. Each year they would buy expensive cars, swimming pools etc because they would receive a huge paycheck when they sold their steers. In contrast dairy farmers would receive a "paycheck" every month based on their production. Farmers were able to sell a set level of milk at a certain price (because of a quota they had). If they did not meet their quota, they didn't get paid. If they produced more than their quota they got paid a second rate ... which was priced at the international milk price. The rate for the quota priced was fairly determined to cover the costs and a reasonable amount of profits. Unlike the beef industry which might have huge profits some years and huge losses other years, dairy farmers were guaranteed a set price.
The problem with a supply management system from the viewpoint of a consumer was that it is a form of monopoly pricing which causes the price of milk to be slightly higher than the USA (because the farmers are being paid fairly). What this means is that the average herd size is 85 in Canada while in the USA the average herd size is 223. In other words US farmers have to milk over two and a half times the number of cows to achieve the same standard of living as Canadian farmers.
With beef farmers, because the prices fluctuate so dramatically both the man and the woman tend to have jobs (factory workers, teachers) outside of the farm. In other words they tend to supplement their farm incomes from other sources.
My point is that having a futures market is one solution but other solutions can be better.
As far as arguing about this speculators etc I am reminded of people who ask "where does the money come from". This link describes how fish are processed via a coin:
https://www.provenance.org/tracking-tuna-on-the-blockchain
Here is an image describing the process:
I am not talking about what could be, I am talking about something actually happening now ... it is just the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet.