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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

Wages are flat, buy and hold strategies are decimated by bubbles, and any job can be eaten by globalization.

At the same time, profits are up, access to capital has never been cheaper, and global market access has never had fewer barriers to entry.

The question is not how do we create living-wage jobs for the American worker, the question is how do we get the American worker to quit his job and start a business?

The economy is quite clearly slanted toward the entrepreneur. We need to start getting Americans to invest their labor accordingly.

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> The question is not how do we create living-wage jobs for the American worker, the question is how do we get the American worker to quit his job and start a business?

after starting a business and running it for nearly a decade, let me tell you, this is nonsense. 99% of people do not want to work that hard, or take that much risk, or learn that much new stuff. they just don't. or if they say they do, they just won't. this is pure fantasy completely divorced from human reality.

So, make it less hard, less risky, and less requiring special knowledge?

sure, but that doesn't sound like much of a money maker. go ahead and prove me wrong, i guess ... whatever that means.

Good first step: health care for everyone. How many people don't want to risk their medical future?

Another step: Affordable housing for everyone. How many people can't risk not having a place to live if they loose their income?

Another step: Affordable food for everyone. How many people can't risk not having food to nourish their bodies?

People won't start ventures if people aren't safe from coerced payment to producers of these commodities in order to survive.

How long will we as a society keep playing whack-a-mole trying to stop the symptoms while the disease is looking us right in the face? The problem with healthcare isn't necessarily that it's expensive, it's that it's a privately owned industry, and therefore free to gouge out prices. Internationally, health care is nowhere near as expensive as it is in the US.

The same thing happens with housing. Gentrification is a real problem that prices people out of their own homes. There are more unoccupied houses than there are homeless people. Housing/development corporations are also privately owned and price people out of living affordably.

Housing, education and healthcare are strange markets. The argument against nationalization is huge, monopolistic bureaucracies eliminate efficiencies that markets naturally create.

But what happens when the market creates an environment where a huge, monopolistic bureaucracy makes the purchasing decisions regarding homes and education (commercial lenders) and healthcare (insurance companies)? What's the practical difference between your insurance company/mortgage lender forcing life-changing decisions on you, and the government doing the same?

Only a small percentage of people can afford to pay 100% cash for housing, higher education, and healthcare. In a natural market, industries like this shouldn't be able to exist. So what's wrong with these markets?

Why does the median house cost ~$200k[0], but the median net worth is below $150k[1]? How can a market survive if most people can't afford what its selling, but they're buying it anyway?

You could also argue that over-regulation is part of the reason these costs are driven so high (nobody should have to pay $50 for an aspirin), but it's equally clear that market forces also gave overwhelming influence to these monopolistic bureaucracies.

It seems to me that the answer is either to nationalize the middle-man bureaucracies, giving everyone equal access to the services they pay for, or make the middle-man bureaucracies illegal - forcing the actual providers (hospitals, colleges, home builders/sellers) to subject their prices to real market forces.

I'd be fine with either, but none of the middling solutions so far have been effective.

[0]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/median-home-price-2... [1]https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-american-savings-statis...

I prefer collectivization instead of nationalization. I agree that huge monopolies aren't going to be great.

I would support a federated organization of local hospitals and care facilities. Private ownership or management of hospitals by people who aren't members of the community they serve doesn't really make sense to me.

Same thing for housing. Why should some corporation that doesn't even live in the area or have a vested interest in making sure it is in harmony with the local community have control over the living situations of the people who are affected by it?

I prefer the idea of a nationalized provider of last resort. If the market is so efficient, why does it fear competition from a government entity?

> The question is not how do we create living-wage jobs for the American worker, the question is how do we get the American worker to quit his job and start a business

Quite a bit, to be honest. Think about the response on social media to a post where a person starts a new company to one where a person announces he has a new job. The latter usually has more comments than the former. The narrative in America is still largely influenced by the post WWII and baby boomer eras. Go to school, find a job, work for a few decades, retire, and travel the world. Starting a business is considered risky. These need to change. The reality needs to be accepted by many people (including myself). Working for someone else is just as risky, if not more, than working for yourself. After all, you can put in a huge amount of effort, and find yourself on the street due to some exec's whim to reorg. Entrepreneurship is risky since the vast majority of new businesses fail, but the point that needs to be made is that each failure is a step in the process that leads to success.

Additionally, we need to reduce the message of consumerism. Think about it, after work and family, most people will sit on the couch and watch TV, rather than do creative or hard work. I do know the value of mental and physical relaxation, but the average American spends 5 hours watching TV. (how the hell do they find that much time?) If people took even an hour of that, and dedicated it to creative work or self improvement, they'd be in much better shape, mentally, physically, and emotionally. But that requires effort, and it's easier to live vicariously through others via some reality TV show.

If every employee quits their job to start a business, who will all these new businesses employ?

Wal-Mart eagerly await the day when they can fire all their employees and rehire them as contractors.

I don't see how a sudden increase in the number of freelancers/entrepreneurs changes the tax classification of Wal-Mart employees.

This is a great illustration of what reducing the labor pool will do for the demand for labor.

Every laborer that turns entrepreneur will have a positive impact on wages, because it reduces the labor supply while simultaneously increasing the demand for labor.

Transaction costs have fallen far enough that businesses can be small enough to be run by one person, or at least a small number of people.

Twenty years ago a small ad agency (say) might have been a couple of sales/client-management types who did a bit of writing, a dedicated copywriter, a dedicated graphic designer, and an accountant who also did payroll and basic HR/legal and handled the office lease. Today each of those sales/client-management types could have their own business, working out of a managed shared office, outsourcing writing and graphics as necessary to the copywriter and graphic designer who have their own businesses (because the Internet means there's much less overhead outsourcing and communicating with freelancers), with payroll/legal outsourced to service companies (which probably means less people - maybe 3-5 people handling 10 companies - but each company actually ends up with better access to dedicated specialists than when they had to have one person handling all of those).

Meanwhile the supply of full-time copywriting/design/accounting jobs is decimated and wages plummet.

that's quite a conclusion. how will the American worker deal with 90% failure rate of new businesses?

Start 10 businesses and stick with the winner(s).

+1 lol

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