Libertarian CEO says the 'mentally retarded' should be happy to work for $2 an hour

[ND-Dem]

A financial services CEO worth $70 million told the Daily Show on Tuesday that he opposes the minimum wage because workers are simply 'worth what they're worth.'

'I'm not going to say that we're all created equal,' Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and outspoken libertarian, told correspondent Samantha Bee. Schiff said some people are only worth $2 per hour, specifically the 'mentally retarded.'

'If we eliminated the minimum wage law then individuals would be free to accept jobs at whatever pay they're able to get,' said the millionaire Beverly Hills High School alum...

Last month, he posted a video online in which he protested Wal-Mart workers who were demonstrating outside a store as part of a campaign that would raise the retail giant's--and largest employer in America's--hourly wage.

The U.C. Berkeley grad, who's (sic) father Irwin Schiff is serving a 13 year prison term for tax evasion, made it clear on Tuesday's Daily Show that he believes that workers are too often painted as hapless underdogs. 'They don’t seem desperate and hungry to me,' he said of fast food workers after admitting he never really eats at such chains.

'It's socialism that creates scarcity, that creates famine,' Schiff said. 'In a free market, there's plenty of food for everybody, especially the poor.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2548492/Youre-worth-youre-worth-Libertarian-CEO-worth-70M-says-mentally-retarded-happy-work-2-hour.html#ixzz3SXD6jU9K

[daredtowork]

1. Good Will gets around paying minimum wage

People who are blind, deaf, and autistic also get to work for less.

The problem is it's not what you're "worth" - it's what the CEO can get away with paying you in the highly artificial labor markets of late capitalism. So he can stick his exploitative propaganda in his pipe and smoke it.

[HereSince1628]

5. V.A. program paid $1.32 an hour to outpatients in drug/mental illness recovery a couple years back

because work was limited to a couple hours a day it didn't even pay for bus fare.

[daredtowork]

8. Workforce Investment Act programs here were worse

You were required to go through all sorts of bureaucracy and attend their workshops. No one paid for your bus fare even if you were on welfare and had no income to pay for bus fare - and therefore had to BEG for the money. At the end of it all, they actually did NOTHING to help hook you up with a job.

I was so furious that they recruited people and wasted their time just to get paid WIA funds that I filed a complaint with the Department of Labor. It took over a year for that complaint itself to be processed. By the time it was, the program itself had already been disbanded (no more WIA funds to filch), so there was no point in pursuing it further.

[HereSince1628]

10. Yes that's the way the VA program worked multiple workshops

all required and neither time or transportation costs were covered.

Then a many months long waiting lists

[daredtowork]

11. All REQUIREMENT and NO JOB! NT

[Turbineguy]

2. Peter Schiff helped

put more people out of their homes than anybody in the world.

[ND-Dem]

4. that's why he's 'worth' $70 million. such 'worthy' activities prove our 'worth'. if you can get

the cash, it proves you're 'worth' it.

so say all pirates and thieves.

[sakabatou]

3. Sooo much wrong with libertarianism.

[shenmue]

6. What a piece of shit.

[Cal Carpenter]

7. Yeah well anonymous internet poster says 'Libertarian CEO' can go fuck himself.

[appalachiablue]

9. There's a place for people like Schiff. Conservative UK Welfare Minister, Lord Freud also said

that the disabled should be paid less, last Oct., for which he resigned.

[ND-Dem]

12. yep. "If you’re disabled, it’s not just Lord Freud who holds you in contempt"

You’ll know the observation attributed to Gandhi that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” – or, if not, you will recall a similar sentiment expressed by someone else. Samuel Johnson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer … just about anybody who’s ever appeared in a GCSE textbook has come up with such a line.

For most of my life the truism has seemed precisely that: so uncontroversial as to be a cliche. Sure, you could argue the toss over what good treatment means, or who should be included among the vulnerable. But no matter how moth-eaten and means-tested their welfare state, how dilute their social democracy, the first world, G7-club British would never publicly repudiate their commitments to the sick, the elderly, the poor. Until the past four years, and the election of a government that treats disabled people with a scarcely believable callousness.

The prompt for this piece is of course Lord Freud’s musings on whether people with disabilities should work for £2 an hour. Or, rather, it’s the debate that has dutifully followed in parliament and the press over what the welfare minister meant and whether in private he’s a sensitive flower. Because such semantics are entirely to miss the point. The comments are just the smallest injury Freud has dealt disabled people. Under the benefit reforms and spending cuts brought in by Freud and his colleagues Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and David Cameron, people with disabilities have been hit harder by austerity than any other group you might think of.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/disabled-lord-freud-austerity

[ND-Dem]

13. thanks for that. i just put up an OP about that one, too, because I think it's part and parcel

of demonizing people in order to cut up the social safety net.

[appalachiablue]

15. Glad you put that up. I'm thinking about the blind man mentioned & brutal austerity measures by

reactionary conservatives, libertarians & torys.

[Scuba]

19. ^^THIS^^

[brentspeak]

14. Yup, plenty of Oodles of Noodles and $1 pink slime chicken burgers for the poor

And plenty of correspondingly short life-spans, too.

You know, a certain 18th century French invention dealt with individuals such as the one quoted in the article with admirable decisiveness and efficiency...

[Panich52]

16. 'It's socialism that creates scarcity, that creates famine,' Schiff said. 'In a free market, there's

'It's socialism that creates scarcity, that creates famine,' Schiff said. 'In a free market, there's plenty of food for everybody, especially the poor.'

How can someone so obviously economically ignorant and uneducated on political systems get to be worth $70M?

[ND-Dem]

17. he's worthy, you're not. that's how. and he and his friends all say so.

[hobbit709]

21. He got his start the old fashioned way.

[hack89]

25. Any economic system can create famine and hunger

it usually has more to do with government policies and competence then anything else.

[RedCappedBandit]

33. Blatant lies. Incredible. nt

[alp227]

18. I remember this Daily Show moment from last year...

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ddm404/wage-against-the-machine

[HughBeaumont]

22. Love the comments from the anarcho-crapitalists.

Dumbest school of libertarian thought ever.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

One question is whether anarcho-capitalism would work at all as envisioned by its proponents, or whether there would be so much chaos that private defense agencies, the owners of private highways, private courts with their own bodies of law, and private medical associations among others would soon coalesce into a new de facto state - with no clue as to what sort of state, which could be a minarchist one but possibly could be one far more dictatorial than the one anarcho-capitalism replaced. We simply don't know.

Societies with minarchist governments have existed and worked; no examples exist of societies with no government that didn't soon evolve (or devolve) into government. Anarcho-capitalists cite medieval Iceland and 17th century Pennsylvania but if anarchism really worked why did they soon develop governments? Both were really minarchist societies to begin with - Iceland's althing and Pennsylvania's caretaker state government during the colonial era, and more to the point, both were monolithic, agrarian, and isolated cultures at the time; it worked in Pennsylvania at the time because of the Quaker influence of living in peace.[9] What might happen in a multicultural, globalized world with high technology, large cities, and weapons of mass destruction is anyone's guess.

One recent cautionary example of what could happen might be the failed state of Somalia, where warring warlords, gangs, and organized crime could be viewed as the competing private defense agencies envisioned by anarcho-capitalists but again, this is hardly reassuring. Somalia is riddled with crime and piracy, and ones' safety as well as ones' ability to conduct business depend on whom one can bribe. However, the question most Anarcho-capitalists ask themselves when looking at cases like this is not whether such an example of anarchy is bad, they ask themselves how worse it would be if there was a state in this anarchist territory. Somalia has shown improvement in all areas except in education since the collapse of its state according to a study conducted before the 2010-2012 famine that claimed nearly 260,000 lives.[10] Also, neither different territories controlled by warlords, nor the breakaway state of Somaliland, are anarchies to begin with; they are de facto states. Hilariously (and perhaps frighteningly), there are some anarcho-capitalists who cite Somalia as an example of a thriving stateless society.[11]

The problem is, how does one solve disputes without a government that maintains a monopoly on force to mitigate disputes under a single objectively defined framework of law? While there are very few known precedents within government-maintained economies, the consensus-based body of rules used to maintain order in the publishing industry before the advent of modern copyright law has been the subject of some attention.[12] Some have also studied the political economies of outlaws, such as Pirates.[13]

[hobbit709]

20. If people should be paid according to what they're worth, he should be paying us

for the privilege of being employed. What an oxygen stealing POS.

[Vinca]

23. Apparently the "mentally retarded" don't need to eat.

[whathehell]

28. Not as "well", at least..They're "a lesser cut of meat", as the Repuke from SC said about women

[LuvNewcastle]

24. God, that grates on my nerves every time I hear it.

'She's worth such-and-such,' or 'he ain't worth a fuck.' People usually attach a monetary value when they talk about someone's worth, as if we're all slaves or whores or both. Maybe we are. Under this system, it sure as hell looks that way.

I've always done poorly in job interviews. People tell me that you've got to 'sell yourself.' Ain't that pretty. I'll just walk out to the corner, pull up my skirt, and let it all hang out with a price tag and a bow tied around it. This is no country for the modest, that's for sure.

[ND-Dem]

32. +100

[whathehell]

26. What a scumbag!

Devaluing a person because they're mentally retarded!?!.

[dissentient]

27. Republicans wet dream = slavery returns

[whathehell]

29. That's about two steps from the Nazi ideology which simply killed the retarded.

These fucking people aren't 'libertarians', they're fascists.

[ND-Dem]

34. I agree, and that was one of the reasons I posted it, as well as the related OP about the

disabled being only "worth" $2 pay.

[Initech]

30. Sieze his assets. Make him live on $2 a day.

[Historic NY]

31. He'd be happier just to put them in a work house.....

where they can toil for food and meager wages. WTF is wrong with these people.

[RedCappedBandit]

35. I love how these scumbags always frame their lies and manipulation around freedom

Freedom to work for a pittance

Such nonsense. Out of touch airhead.

[alc]

36. both sides have valid points

Allowing exceptions invites abuse. No question.

For a few years (2009-2012?) a grocery store near me hired many people from the assisted living facility nearby. I shopped at the store 4+ times a week (good daily deals) and these employees were wonderful, friendly, and in many cases accomplished absolutely nothing that the store needed and in some cases were anti-productive (things took longer or had to be redone). Of course, not every shopper agreed that these employees were wonderful - it made them feel uncomfortable, and when a couple of these employees were bagging they slowed things down.

I told the manager I thought it was great (after hearing another customer complain). She later introduced me to the director of the facility. The director said this job was the highlight of their life for most of the employees. Until this job, they just stayed in the facility all day doing whatever activities were offered. And, while the paycheck didn't cover their living costs, they felt a sense of accomplishment and normalness just getting a paycheck.

Maybe that's a rare example. But, I'd hope everyone can imagine at least some cases where it's good to employ people who are "not worth minimum wage" for the purposes of

* getting other "normal" people to have interactions with them

* giving them an opportunity function in places where "normal" people function. And hopefully feel "normal"

Exemptions and even tax breaks are probably not a solution - too open to abuse. But I can image a way for a non-profit to pay the salary and businesses to provide the job. The non-profit would have incentive (limited funds) to makes sure the business is not taking advantage of "free labor" but is honestly helping their community by allowing workers who "are not worth minimum wage". There are many store managers who would love to help their community this way, but it makes no financial sense.