Are you that stupid? Miners want competitive fees, they make more money that way. Empty blocks help miners create a backlog and force people to increase fees, that's what miners want, MORE MONEY.
Do you think miners want lower fees? You think they want to help users out? They want to control the blocksize so they can increase it when appropriate so they can make more money not to help users but to help themselves.
the empty block is not about causing a backlog intentionally. its about instead of waiting 10 seconds/minute to validate a block before making a new block its about starting a new block WHILE validating the previous block. thus unable to add new tx to the new block attempt because they are unsure if the first one is all valid..
what you find is that pools do this alot. and after validating a previous block they start adding tx's (each round of using up all the nonces) and the only time you really ever see an empty block is when they are lucky enough to get a solution within seconds(first round) to not have been able to start adding tx's to a block
BTW, you posted a lot of irreverent information to my post AND you still didnt answer my questions," Tell me what size of a block increase (and how many transactions) will reduce fees for users to the 2014 level while maintaining or exceeding current levels of miner fees? Or do you think miners are going to give up that money out the kindness of their hearts?"
5. there is no need to push fee's to $1+ a tx EVER. far better to naturally grow the blocksize in levels nodes can handle (even core admit 8mb is 'safe') thus allowing a 2015 10c fee ($220 total) to be upto $1760 total just by allowing more 10cent tx's in. not forcing $1 fees by holding tx count limits down to cause a upto $2k total (which pools dont need right now anyway)
replace 2015 with 2014 and you have your answer.
mempool bloat changes.. but based on the last year where mempools average 3-4mb average.. then it would need 4mb blocks to bring conjection down. which to get to or exceed the 2014 fee of upto 10cent would far exceed the totals of 2014 tx fee income.. obviously