A friend of mine recently posted this to Facebook in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting. She and her husband are fairly left-wing, and never allow a lack of information or a warped set of data deter them from sharing their opinion on something, sometimes with derision.
She recently shared this photo from Janis Ian:
"How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion-- mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, and ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Lets close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?
My friend adds:
This applies of course to every (young) person who wants to buy a gun, not just every young man.
Of course, the comparison isn't exactly apples to apples: When a woman has an abortion, there is a life being snuffed out. You can argue viability all you want, that's not the point. Human beings, for their life span, have a heartbeat. Stop the heart, or cause the heart to stop, and the body dies. A person purchasing a firearm might never use it to cause the heart of others or himself to stop beating. However, a woman who has an abortion will almost without exception terminate the heartbeat(s) of the life or lives growing inside her.
Waiting periods? Most firearms have them. Those that don't are because it doesn't take that long to execute a background check on would-be buyers. Parental permission? Federal law allows minors to only legally possess long guns and long gun ammunition. Many locales will allow those same minors to get an abortion without parental notification.
Let's not forget that a minor having an abortion has already made a misjudgement about the laws of nature: Have unprotected sex, and play Russian roulette with the odds that one of a billion sperm finds its way to the egg.
And the snark about having to travel hundreds of miles? Personally, I waffle on the topic of abortion, but if we accept the premise that it's just a medical procedure, without the moral issues around the termination of one or more heartbeats, then shouldn't we, as an industrialized nation, have a high standard for medical care? In the wake of the horrors of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, shouldn't we mandate safe, sanitary conditions for such a procedure? If you were to have your appendix out, you'd want it done in a sterile environment by well-trained medical professionals. If some facilities can't meet government standards for hygiene, safety, etc., why should those facilities continue to operate?
Finally, are we certain that, in a day and age of widely-available contraception and post-intercourse abortifacents, is it possible that demand for this particular medical procedure is down?
In conclusion, the post makes a false equivalence between a young man assumed to be a murderer just because he chooses to get a gun, and woman who goes in for a medical procedure, knowing that it will terminate the heartbeat of another human being.
Yesterday, the author used the example of a plumber to illustrate how wages should be set by market forces, and not by some bumbling government bureaucrats. The gist of the post was how the plumber is a skilled laborer, one whom can charge more for the service of fixing a leaky pipe than a fast-food cashier or burger-flipper.
Enter Dog Gone and her cognitive dissonance:
OK, not all plumbers are unionized. And even the ones that are, in fact, skilled laborers: They spend years learning the trade, be it from vocational schooling, apprenticeship, or some combination thereof. They have to acquire the skills somehow. When they take their licensing exams, or whatever plumbers do to get licensed, they have spent considerable time learning their trade. The licensing just says that knowledgeable people in their field have evaluated the plumber and deemed him or her as competent enough to upgrade your plumbing without flooding the basement.
So you admit that the job requirements are low. In other words, the job is a low-skill or unskilled labor. Answer me this: When an overqualified person takes a job, does the employer pay for the employee's skills, or the work product they produce?
Which is why said person should learn a marketable skill and/or gain experience so they can justify the higher wage he or she earns, in line with the quantity and quality of the work product he or she outputs.
To compare low-skill and unskilled jobs with high-skill jobs is the false equivalency.
Why do progressives always whine about unfair life is? Did they not hear or heed that lesson from their parents? Yes, it sucks that people with college degrees are flipping burgers. But I would ask what sort of degrees these people have that they can't effectively market themselves in an economic downturn. I would ask if they had a plan "B" for when their niche degree failed to land them a good-paying job. My ex-girlfriend sat for and passed the Minnesota Bar Exam in 2007, along with 600 other new lawyers. She quickly learned that in the legal business, it's not about what you know, but who. She clerked for a judge for a lot longer than is common before securing a junior prosecutor position, or associate position at a law firm. Ultimately, she moved to Texas and is working as an insurance agent now, a far cry from her goal of being an intellectual property attorney. She learned that in Minnesota, with some 500 new lawyers being admitted to the bar every six months, that supply simply outstripped demand for her skill set.
Come now, you don't get to make blanket statements and then not back them up. How are conservative policies at fault? The sub-prime mortgage fiasco is partly the responsibility of reckless lending, encouraged by a meddlesome government that thinks it's unfair that some people can't buy houses. Again, life is not fair. In its attempt to create fairness, both the government "watchdogs" and predatory/reckless lenders not only failed to help people buy houses and stay in them, but the policies resulted in a sudden dumping of real estate on the market. Great if you're a first-time home buyer with the means, lousy if you're a homeowner responsibly paying his or her mortgage, only to suddenly end up upside-down on the mortgage when your house loses a huge chunk of its value.
Who sets this adequate wage? Who defines what adequate is? The dollar value? What criteria are used to determine this value? What mathematical formula? How much emotion goes into it?
The determination of this value, I've always felt, is a contractually-negotiated number between employee and employer. That's what capitalism is. That's what free enterprise is. What makes the enterprise free is that the employer is free to decide what wage he or she is willing to pay to an employee for the work product, and the employee is free to negotiate for more or seek employment elsewhere.
Every time the minimum wage is raised, the employers operating on the thin profit margins have a couple of options: Raise their prices, which endangers the business' life expectancy; Fire employees to cushion against the increased labor cost (and likely replace the employees with automation); or close their doors. In two of the three scenarios, employees end up as beneficiaries of those same subsidies you're trying to get them off of, only now there's more of them.
Wow, quite the arrogant statement. What makes you an authority on how a specific business runs, and how many local, state, and federal laws they're required to comply with to stay in business? But I'm not surprised: Progressives are enigmatic mixture of arrogance with benevolence (in spending other people's money that is).
Other countries may be able to do that, but in this country, that's called age discrimination. If a fast-food joint has a choice between a teen and a senior citizen, which do they hire? The senior citizen who's likely to have a more business-like attitude and work ethic? Or the teenager with the energy to work the longer or harder shifts and ability to learn how to more quickly work the cash register?
The thing is they are not in direct competition. Wal-Mart and Costco cater to different groups of customers. Here is an excellent dissection of that false equivalency, courtesy of Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lauraheller/2014/06/29/walmart-and-costco-are-not-the-same/
Well, an employer who requires unskilled or low-skill labor does.
Paying people what they're actually worth, instead of what someone arbitrarily decides they're worth, is a failure?