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My whole point is that we should be talking about fewer laws.
When you use legislation and regulation on a case-by-case basis as you described, you're playing whack-a-mole without ever looking up at the bigger picture. You create a patchwork of laws that, unintentionally, start to bleed into one another and now you have "spaghetti code" of legislation. Businesses - and consumers! - are painted into corners without realizing it and after it's too late. It is also extremely unlikely that these corners will "balance out" fairly across various industries and consumer segments. And then you have the situation we have today.
Complexity is the enemy, especially when refactoring of the system is slow or difficult. Congress likes to pass laws, but it very, very rarely retracts previous legislation.
I could tell by context that that's what you believe, and I am contesting that.
My thesis is that sometimes moles should be whacked, otherwise your yard turns to shit. You state that bad case of having too many laws, and I state the bad case that the rules are being created to attempt to stop a bad thing, so without them you have the bad thing. An example that was brought up was rotating interns baited by promises of full-time work. You might claim that it is a symptom of overcomplicated hiring laws, and I might claim what I see as a simpler explanation - they wanted cheap labor but felt bad about it.
I have a suggestion on that that I think should be followed regardless of my feeling of being more big government. The government should have an agency or committee dedicated periodic review of laws to see which laws can be retired, or if multiple overlapping laws can be combined for clarity and brevity.
Yes! So ask the next logical question; why is labor so expensive? Why is there the need to exploit interns? Why can't they just hire a guy or gal who wants a job for a reasonable price? Because labor laws make it too expensive to hire people cheaply!
And then what?
The only body who can actually change laws in Congress. Do you know how many congressionally mandated reports there are? Approximately eleventy billion. Do you know how many congress deeply reviews to implement their recommendations? Approximately negative eleventy billion. What would be the point of your hypothetical new agency? And, in order for it to be created, Congress would have to authorize and fund it. That's not going to happen. You're suggesting a "fix" that is obviously and demonstrably untenable.
Because in a prosperous society people want a lot of money for their labor, because they have a lot of opportunities and everything costs more in a prosperous society.
Begging the question. You assume they did it because they needed to, yet somehow most other companies don't do this. Why did those other companies not need to?
Yes, and said body uses agencies and interns to provide them information, because they are old men whose major skill is campaigning. Hell, Republicans actively campaign on there being too many laws. An agency designed to find laws that are obsolete and clean up spaghetti laws sounds exactly in line with what they claim to want.
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I've talked about this, not at great length, but I've mentioned it, before- cheap labour is cheap for a reason. Interns are a vast improvement over people who'll work for $15/hr in a corporate setting(and BTW, the tenth percentile wage is just above $14/hr. American labour is just really expensive).
There's plenty of working class people who happily make $15-$22 hr. There's a reason they don't get better jobs eventually. Corporate interns generally know things like 'how to keep themselves on track to hit deadlines without constant supervision' and 'how to follow directions correctly without asking for fifteen clarifications every sentence'. These may not be specific skills, but working in a white collar office environment requires abilities like this. Yes, requiring a college degree for this work is excessive, that's why students(who don't yet have one) are doing it as an internship. No, there's not really a solution here(go ahead, name it- no, things like 'flying pigs will provide character references' and 'we'll just kick everyone out of highschool who isn't college material so a diploma counts for the same thing' don't count).
I'll caveat that this is, at least for now, partly a coastal thing. Toward cheaper COLA areas, 15 USD/hour is more a crapshoot than a guaranteed problem; you get great dedicated workers and potheads who can't empty water from a boot if they were hung upside down, people who just need space to grow or get experience and people who I don't trust to drive tricycle to or from the office. At pretty much all levels of education.
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