These people exist?
Or the fact that they vote in elections?

Texas flag or go home.

Respect the ex-country .

….. Firefox really needs to add that to spell check, by now.

A 2005 study found that the Australian federal minimum wage was 58% of the median wage, compared to 45% in the UK and 34% in the U.S. The typical minimum wage worker is in a middle-income household

Australia looks set to stay out of recession while USA and most of Europe are nearly certain to enter recession soon. Australia also enjoys lower unemployment.
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Obviously it would be stupid to increase minimum wage to Australian
levels at a time like this, or at any short period of time really, becaue of the inflationary pressures and pressures on employment. But a slow change would not be to the detriment of the people.
On the other hand, cutting out the minimum wage altogether would also be horrible because it would cause deflation in wages much faster than deflation in prices, and would be political suicide.
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I am almost certian that those people in your anecdote didn’t change their plans because of you. If they did change their plans, it would have been for a different reason.
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Oligopolies aren’t good, because they tend to collapse into cartels. Regulation is needed to prevent this.

BTW, can you actually call yourself a _maverick_? Doesn’t that label have to be given to you by everybody else?

Is that like smoking weed? ‘Cos this honky ain’t never seen that word before.

[raises hand eagerly]

Can I be Wonder Woman plz?

I already have long black curly hair, but I want red boots and a magic lasso!

I also made up out of wholecloth the record job losses of the past eight years, the well-documented shift in tax burden from corporations to the individual since the mid-1950s, the steady erosion of unions and regulations since the first St. Reagan administration, the obscene and shameful and ever-growing disparity between worker pay and CEO pay (while *some* CEOs may work harder — and I’ve personally met some who do and some who don’t — they don’t work 600 times harder than their staff), the massive outsourcings and layoffs, the elimination of entire industries (so how are those steelworkers doing lately?), the ongoing thirty-odd-year decline in real wages relative to cost of living… and do we all remember the recent robbery, uh, bailout, when the greedy slobs on Wall St. reached into taxpayer pockets to the tune of 700 million dollars, and promptly turned around and blew it on golden parachutes and $100,000 luncheons?

Please feel free to offer any sort of factual refutation that you care to, by the way. Please cite any examples you wish to of how well trickle-down has worked for you or anyone you know. Please offer statistics of job growth, minimum wage growth, improved workplace safety laws, improved labor laws, or a healthier environment directly attributable to large corporations. Please prove that our bestest buddy Halliburton didn’t oops! “lose” 9 billion dollars in Iraq, or that our second bestest buddy Enron wasn’t caught on tape (or at least the hard working executives were) snickering about how “Granny’s gonna freeze this winter”, or that the Euro isn’t kicking the dollar’s ass right now despite Europeans’ pansy insistence on silly things like health care and vacation time and child care and subsidized education.

You silly, pathetic fool. Your self-destructive pandering to the corpocracy while you chase after the “true troublemakers”, whoever you imagine those to be, won’t save you. Dick Cheney and Ken Lay despise you as much as they despise everybody else who makes under a million dollars a year, and your delusional cheerleading for the ruling class will never, never make you one of them. They’ll squeeze all the money and cheap labor they possibly can out of you, and throw you away like garbage when they’re finished, just like they will with the rest of us. We’re all getting screwed here, but at least some of us have enough of a grasp on reality to realize it’s rape, not love.