'Strengthen' and 'limit' are not mutually exclusive. A guard dog kept muzzled and in a kennel is indeed useless. To remove the muzzle and allow it to wander within a building after hours is empowering it, but limiting it from biting customers and/or terrorizing the neighborhood. You argue that taking the muzzle off the dog implies an intent for it to eat the neighbor's children.

No, the language is there to be so misinterpreted. The 'general welfare' clause modifies the taxation power within the enumerated powers; it is not an enumerated power in itself. I don't deny that yours is the prevailing and legally binding misinterpretation, but we've also already established in discussion of the takings clause that 'legally binding' and 'reasonable and correct' are two different, and unfortunately sometimes unrelated descriptions of jurisprudence.


Another factor that everyone here seems to ignore is that the majority of workers of the 50s and 60s generally had first hand experience with the Depression and/or WWII. Having to beg for a handful of bread, see others die often due to nothing more than bad luck of location, and/or be drilled in following orders sometimes even unto death can have a significant psychological effect. Those workers were glad to be alive, glad to have a job, and glad to be doing something productive (and not life-threatening). Too many workers today feel entitled to start off at above-entry-level wages, to work as little as possible to avoid getting fired, and generally approach life with an entitlement attitude. The 50s-60s were a time of productive workers, with post-war fallout of improved technology, supplying exaggerated markets recovering from war destruction, against competition that was playing catch-up. Higher wages were not the driver of middle-class wealth so much as both were concurrent 'symptoms' of the circumstances of the world economy at the time. Now if TSG's plan included starting off with a major war to destroy some major portion of the rest of the world's productive capacity, it might be workable...


Most of the time. But what about when it does? A friend of mine closed his record store and let at least 2 people go when his costs went up (rent rather than labor, but the result would be the same) because he couldn't afford a family on the reduced profits and getting rid of the store seemed preferable to getting rid of his daughter. I'm sure any 'reasonable' plan wouldn't result in wholesale closings of businesses, but what happens to the 1% or so who find out first hand that increased wages result in fewer jobs available? Especially when the fewer jobs have more competition to get into, given that they have 'new, improved TSG wages'?


But the whole plan still falls apart. Japan deals with China to get cheaper goods. This effectively reduces the markets available to the other, 'truly moral' companies, resulting in incrementally fewer jobs. Meanwhile Japanese workers are making 'moral' wages while paying 'immoral' prices for goods. This may result in their standard of living becoming notably higher than that of their 'moral' bretheren and inducing jealousy. More likely, or perhaps in conjunction, Japanese companies can/will cut workers' wages (or perhaps just raise them more slowly than the 'moral' average) - given their lower consumption costs, Japanese workers will still effectively be the richest workers in the world, so they won't have much room to complain. Meanwhile, these lower costs would enable Japanese companies to undercut 'truly moral' producers' prices, again resulting in incrementally fewer jobs in the 'truly moral' countries. As taxes rise and/or wages resultantly drop for the 'truly moral', the gap in the standard of living compared to Japanese workers increases, again making room for a reduction of Japanese wages, resulting in a spiral of more production and jobs being available in Japan, and less for the 'truly moral'. At some point some equilibrium would be reached since Japan cannot produce everything for everyone in the 'moral' world, but there would be a permanent gap in both the employment rate and standard of living between Japanese workers and the 'truly moral' ones. In the face of such differences, the 'truly moral' will soon adopt the 'Japanese model' and we're essentially back where we started, with the net effect having been a transfer of wealth from the 'truly moral' to the Japanese during the course of the experiment.


This made me think how your plan depends on our being able to bully other countries into following the plan, which we may or may not be able to do. So what about applying it to an environment we theoretically Can control - The internal US economy?

We don't have a lot of manufacturing jobs in Detroit in particular, and cities in general. It seems whenever new manufacturing is set up, it does so in the comparative boondocks of Tennessee, or central Illinois (vs Chicago-area), or small-town Ohio, or someplace comparable. Are the companies doing this not exploiting cheap, comparatively downtrodden labor in non-urbanized areas? Shouldn't they be required to pay big-city wages to these small-town workers? It would seem so, based on the TSG-morality plan.

Thus considerable inflation and economic disruption are introduced to the small towns as they adjust to this largess, until such times as the manufacturers figure out that they aren't really saving much if anything anymore, and they abandon the small towns for the larger labor pools, increased infrastructure, and proximity to sales markets that city manufacturing entails. The net result? Disruption in the small towns that have factories, Major disruption in those that Had factories, higher costs for all consumers, and decreased competivity of US goods in export markets.

Not the same problems that a world-wide implementation would face, but certainly indicative of a plan that hasn't been thought all the way through.

__________________
Today's forecast: Government corruption.

Tomorrow's forecast: 100% chance of more 'politics as usual'

Maybe it's finally time to vote Libertarian