Here's how you discover the true beliefs of minimum wage supporters.

1. They claim that a forced $15 wage does no harm to the economy and that it is "fair".
2. They inherently know that a forced $100 wage would indeed harm the economy and would be unfair.

So...they know that a forced $15 wage is inherently unfair and would harm the economy as well--however slight--but they're willing to lie about their beliefs because getting what they want (a forced $15 wage) is more important than revealing the truth.

The choice is between living off the proceeds of your own labor, or living off the proceeds of someone else's labor.

Man is nature, and nature will always follow the path of least resistance.

So long as THE LAW allows people to sustain their lives at the expense of another person's labor...so long as THE LAW makes plunder less dangerous and less difficult than labor, plunder will be continued.

Observe, however, that this is the original purpose and intent of THE LAW...to make plunder more difficult and more dangerous than labor.

"The choice is between living off the proceeds of your own labor, or living off the proceeds of someone else's labor."

Every capitalist chooses to live off the proceeds of someone else's labor. If I run a business employing a thousand people, then I have captured their labor and marketed the products of their labor to someone else.

That is the central key to capitalism. The value of a man's labor is not just what he produces, it is what he produces PLUS the marketing necessary to make other people aware of, and desirous of purchasing, what he produces. People who run companies understand that. Employees, by definition, either don't understand that, or cannot accomplish the necessary marketing (or they would be self-employed).

So, EVERY successful businessman is, by your definition, a "plunderer". A successful CEO understands that government is, when properly used, merely an extension of his own marketing efforts, an enforcer of his own successful corporate policies.

Government is a multi-purpose corporate tool that every corporation can access. Any corporation that manages to mold government regulation to his own advantage will succeed. Any that allows his competitor to mold government will fail. Now, some government regulations are good for corporations across the board, but the best government regulation - from my corporate perspective - is the regulation that benefits ONLY my firm and actively harms everyone else's. Writing such regulations and paying legislators to pass them into law is the hallmark of the superlative CEO.

don't think your view is accurate...
"Every capitalist chooses to live off the proceeds of someone else's labor. If I run a business employing a thousand people, then I have captured their labor and marketed the products of their labor to someone else."
any person (capitalist, as you refer to them...) who hires another person only "lives off" the new hire as much as they 'live off' of him - BOTH benefit from the interaction but your description focuses only on the benefits that the hiring person receives... it is a skewed and biased view

"So, EVERY successful businessman is, by your definition, a "plunderer""
again, every 'employee' is a plunderer as well... the term is meaningless and using it with its implied negative connotation is misleading at best, lying at worst.

When I seek out to purchase an apple for the best price, am I 'plundering' the retailers? When a person seeks out a job with the best wages and benefits, are they seeking to 'plunder' their new employer?

It is the case that corporations write the legislation that government officials enact.

Individual workers do not.
Your reply needs to take that into account.

I didn't say whether the definition of "plunderer" was accurate or not. I merely point out that the quoted definition could equally be applied to any businessman. Which is true. So, if you don't LIKE that this is true, change the definition.

What a marvelous argument for a government of few and limited powers...

But, since corporations write the legislation, a government of few and limited powers necessarily leads to business owners with few and limited powers. Government and corporation are at least synergistic, and in many situations are often synonymous.

Whatever strike you make against "big government" will necessarily be a strike against "big business."

Good. I'm an anarcho-capitalist. The less ability any business has to force me to use its products/services, the better.

If your business cannot succeed on its merits in the market place, it deserves to fail...

Karl Marx, Richard Wolff, Noam Chomsky and their ilk would never understand the TV show "Shark Tank." Every entrepreneur risks his capital to hire workers, develop the products, marketing, etc. And the entrepreneur often does lose it all, looking at the failure rate of most start-ups.

Once businesses grow and succeed then come the carpet-bagger corporatists whose specialty is legislative payoff (sorry, "lobbying" and contributions), and shady tax shelters instead of innovation.

"Every capitalist chooses to live off the proceeds of someone else's labor."

While providing opportunity for others to perform the labor, contributing to creation of goods/services and getting their share for it.

"That is the central key to capitalism. The value of a man's labor is not just what he produces, it is what he produces PLUS the marketing necessary to make other people aware of, and desirous of purchasing, what he produces. "

What you missed is that such marketing qualifies as one of such services I mentioned in previous paragraph. There are most certainly employees responsible for marketing in most if not all companies past certain size.

I didn't miss that marketing is a useful service. I was the one who remembered it and included it.

Employees who are responsible for marketing are generally and famously NOT involved in the production of the good, thus they tend to make promises about the good which the actual producing entities in the company cannot honor. Entire cartoon strips (e.g., Dilbert) are built around this FACT.

The CEO is the chief marketer, the one who harnesses all the disparate elements of the corporation together to make a well-known and useful product (having a product that has only one of those two attributes is pointless).

Your first paragraph contradicts the other.

So what, if marketing people are not directly involved in product creation? Thanks to their work, product is capable of reaching greater audience, which means higher profits and better pay, also for people directly involved in creating it.

And why do you even assume marketing makes promises that are not met? If they aren't, company's long term credibility is questioned, and that means potential loss of profit.

And as for CEOs, you are laughably wrong. Do you even know CEOs of all the brands you are recognizing? CEO's job is not to create marketing, but to make executive decisions regarding company. Those decisions will impact the very same people, who create the product, and you seem to be obsessed with - if CEO's decisions are good, workers get their share as company flourishes. If not, company goes belly up, and workers are back to job hunting...

CEOs push their company, not necessarily themselves. I don't know the names of ANY of the people whose products I purchase, but that doesn't mean the product was not produced or marketed.

CEOs and corporate owners capture the wealth created by the people who produce the companies' goods. To the extent they can, they use the government as part of their corporate structure.

You want to call government predatory, rapacious, etc.. Fine. But recognize it is made so primarily because corporations and their owners and/or governing boards want government to act that way. Corporations write the laws and pay the legislators to enact and enforce the laws the corporations have written. Government is an extension of the corporation. It is a legitimate market actor, as legitimate as any of the corporations whose fingers operate the government puppet.

> I don't know the names of ANY of the people whose products I purchase,
but that doesn't mean the product was not produced or marketed.

But that doesn't mean CEO is directly responsible for marketing or production. There are managers for both, respectively.

That also doesn't mean CEO doesn't do anything productive, obviously.

> CEOs and corporate owners capture the wealth created by the people who
produce the companies' goods.

Yet their enable wealth to be created in the first place. What good will bunch of skilled workers do without access to right capital? Not as much as they do with such access...

> To the extent they can, they use the
government as part of their corporate structure.

> You want to call government predatory, rapacious, etc.. Fine. But
recognize it is made so primarily because corporations and their owners
and/or governing boards want government to act that way. Corporations
write the laws and pay the legislators to enact and enforce the laws the
corporations have written. Government is an extension of the
corporation. It is a legitimate market actor, as legitimate as any of
the corporations whose fingers operate the government puppet.

Which is a problem because of government having power to enable them to do so, at taxpayer's expense.

If government would simply force everyone to pay a million dollars an hour, we could all work for a week, retire as multimillionaires and move to South Florida.

Recall, the largest supporter of $15/hr min in LA was the unions.

Note, the first entity to be exempted from the $15/hr min in LA was the unions!

Unions are big business...

Many union contracts have wage escalators based upon the prevailing minimum wage. So, when minimum wage increases, union wages go up...

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

I love redpanels https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Best HuffPost article *ever* says that compared to supposedly immigration-friendly, but high minimum-wage Sweden, US “immigrants have to work [and can find work easily so], the United States does not have ghettos full of permanently jobless and alienated young immigrants, as does France, for example,” explained Robert Guest, a journalist for The Economist, in his 2011 book Borderless Economics. “This is perhaps why... immigrants [in the U.S.] rarely riot. They are too busy earning a living."
http://m.huffpost.com/us/en...

$15/hr, though more than I'm making now, is not a liveable wage in my area (where rents in bad areas start at $1000/mo and car insurance adds another $300/mo). That said, if the minimum wage were to rise that high, many stores (already under price pressure from Amazon and other Internet-only sellers) will close, putting thousands of people out of work.
Even where the change in the number of workers on-site is minimal, that workforce will be shifted from full-time to part-time workers, to avoid the steep costs of subsidized health insurance and paid time off.
At its worst, minimum price hikes will convince stores that remain open to shift to a mostly-robotic "crew".