"You can't work for high wages, and simultaneously demand cheap goods. It's a very simple concept, that nobody here seems to be able to grasp. Cue China's industrial revolution. "
Good point, but who decides what is considered "high wages"? Is it $30,00-$50,000 too much for teachers? What is the threshold, who determines it, and what is the living wage index? This isn't 1932 anymore, it's 2011 and EVERYTHING is expensive. Heck our family makes almost 6 figures, and where we live we just getting buy (no extravagant spending/housing/etc). Real estate costs being a good chunk of the reason of the mess we in. it is a larger % of everyone's salary than ever before. Only now has real estate falling to what it should have been before the low borrowing rate rush.
Union membership is a popular whipping boy, but in reality we have lowest levels of union membership nowadays:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States
So the adage "its unions holding us down" isn't enough of a straw-man argument anymore.
The corporation and their politcal/lobbying powers has hurt us than unions ever did. Corporations send jobs outside the country, they pay low or no taxes thru MANY existing tax shelter loopholes.
Well suppose I say that 30 to 50 grand a year is too little for a good teacher, will that make you happy?
As far as the rest of your doggerel, try and wrap your head around these concepts:
1: "Currency" is the avatar of commodity, not services!
2: A self contained "service based economy" cannot exist because there are no commodities either manufactured, dug up, or grown".
3: If you want to maintain a working "service based economy", then you must take your, "service" (IE teaching) into an economy based on commodity, and bring that money back into yours.
4: People seem to embrace the idea that services can generate "currency". They cannot,! It's that simple.
And in example of that, let me point out that a nurse wiping an elderly person's a** doesn't generate anything other than s**tty rags. These are certainly not a "commodity", and consequently can't be exchanged for currency.
5: Look how far we've come from the Gutenberg Bible! Now we have gigantic printing presses that churn out tons of "currency" on a daily basis.
Suffice it to say, that automatically doesn't really make it worth anything.
I'd consider it a personal favor if you'd explain how you can print something, call it currency, then owe it to yourself, and still expect it to have a tangible value.
Let me remind you that the US has abandoned both the gold and silver standards. We're on the "paper standard" now.
At the end of the day, you could actually print money, then pay someone as much of it as they want! The only drawback would be, they wouldn't accept it at the grocery store.
People and Unions alike suffer under the illusion that any "big company" has pockets endlessly lined with gold. They do! And that's why the US has such a "thriving" steel industry. Non union made steel, now available at a Japan in your area.