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And the employees.....take the job or, not.......stay or, not.
If I like your work.....I will make it worth coming to work.
And if I as an employer, am forced to pay $15/hr to someone to perform some small tasks, I'll just refuse to hire anyone to do them, and possibly create signs, ask customers to do it instead, or choose to go the automation route, and buy some new equipment to replace employees.
There should be no law for a wage minimum in a country where nobody is forced to work. The primary reason for this is that even assuming you could create a perfectly fair, perfectly viable, perfectly sound law that addressed the issue perfectly, a semi-free market economy moves infinitely faster than the glacial pace of legislation's ability to keep up. A perfect law today is perfectly useless 10 minutes later because with so many markets, so many economies, and so many individual actors operating within them, economics becomes the irresistible force and law making is pretty close to an immovable object.
This is the main reason government scan do little good and a whole lot of bad to an economy - law making is purely about process with no regard for results, and economics is pure results that does not honestly care about the process.
Mircea, God love him, keeps trying to explain basic economics to everyone, but this forum is a fine reflection of history itself. No matter how lucidly and concisely someone explains the basic immutable laws of Economic nature, the majority of people hearing it dismiss it because they DON'T LIKE WHAT THEY HEAR. They cannot refute it, they are nowhere near knowledgeable enough to make a proper rebuttal, so instead they go with "that's not fair and it sounds mean, therefore your argument is invalid" appeals to emotion to ease their cognitive dissonance.
The minimum wage SHOULD BE the lowest number an employer can convince a desired employee to work for. Period. The minimum wage for someone with my resume is about $50-60 an hour. Nobody with a similar resume will work for less because we know we don't have to. Employers know this and salary negotiations are typically very brief because everyone knows. Mircea commands $650+ an hour, and I would hazard the guess that compensation discussions take minutes, maybe seconds. Pay me this. OK. Done.
In the case of fry cooks and other unskilled labor, the supply of workers capable and willing to perform that job is very high, and the demand is kinda low. Supply and Demand says that if S >>> D, then price is loooowwwww. So back to fry cooks....you can change that price point, and since you didn't change supply, guess what MUST CHANGE? That's right, demand must and WILL change. You can try to dismiss supply and demand, but you'll be as successful as thinking that simply dismissing/disregarding gravity will make you able to fly. Actually, dismissing gravity is better because you'd only hurt yourself, while dismissing supply and demand with legislation hurts millions.
Now, to the utter nonsense about having corporations pay for what I am now calling "The Hippie Approved Minimum Lifestyle" instead of taxpayers. EL OH EL. Somewhere, hidden inside that foolishness, is this belief that corporations "pay" for things like the rest of us, and that all a minimum wage hike will do is simply cut into rich peoples' profit. EL EM AY OH. Corporations already don't pay tax....you do. Corporations don't fund cost increases....you do. In a free market, if a company raised prices well beyond their competition, they would reduce demand for their product and begin losing market share. When the government, however, decides to raise the cost for all corporations equally....they all raise their prices euqally. Enough for you to notice? Maybe not, but in the end...YOU PAY for these legislated cost increases. So if you use a totally absurd minimum wage or traditional welfare, YOU PAY. You don't replace welfare with this junk...you simply add private business to the list of relief agencies, and let them demand work in return for the money. But you pay. Not them, not government, not the Flying Spaghetti Monster...YOU, me and every other consumer....we pay that tab.
Economics is not about fair. It never was, isn't and can never be. It is about the allocation of scarce resources. Period. Supply & Demand is as unflinching in the face of human emotion and sociological sensibilities as gravity, electromagnetism and the weak/strong nuclear forces. All attempts to bend it to our will do not repeal the law, nor alter it...they just work around it for a while until the energy fighting against it is less than the power of the law itself. Back to my gravity analogy. It is approximately -9.8m/(s*s). To "get around" it with airplanes, you pass air over a parabolic surface fast enough to create a pressure differential that provides a lifting force in the opposite direction and in excess of gravity. This lifting force is how flight occurs. But it requires an engine and fuel to continue to oppose that immutable force of the universe that simply will not go away. Run out of fuel or lose the engines, and does gravity simply pause while you work it out? Nope. Same for supply & demand. In the short term, you can actually feel like you've beaten the immutable law. YOU HAVEN'T. All you have done is oppose it with greater force for a small period of time, but your opposing force will fall below the law's natural force at some point, and then the law wins. It wins eventually no matter what. Seattle is going to show you this soon enough, SeaTac already is, and the tuna canning industry Guam already showed you in no uncertain terms how much folly artificial wage floors can be.
How about letting the employers decide, based upon the job being done, and the skill, training, and circumstances and level of difficulty required to perform the job?
My first summer job as a boy was picking up golf balls at a driving range, it paid $1 for each basket full of golf balls.
I once got paid 5 cents for every dandelion I dug out of some lady's front yard. Not clipped, but actually dug out to the roots. Digging out like 2-3 dandelions a minute, I made like $7 an hour, and this was in 1979, when minimum wage was like $3.25 or something. Not bad for an enterprising 12 year old.
Heck, shoveling snow for people paid me and my buddies like $10-15 an hour when we were kids. Tell someone you'll shovel their driveway for say $5-10, and with a couple of us it took like 10 minutes, and before you know it, you just got paid pretty well. Nobody negotiating those deals except the employer and employee, and everyone benefits from the trade.
It's not really that difficult to figure out.
All of these minimum wage discussions are essentially welfare proponents trying to make sloth more profitable. Any hard worker can get paid more than minimum and we all know, but oh noes, what ever shall we do with the folks who simply refuse to leave the sofa, advance their skills or just simply bust hump for 10-12 hours per day? They simply must be looked after, or we're all just mean. Right?
That's where all of this ends up. How do we care for our lazy and unmotivated?
And if I as an employer, am forced to pay $15/hr to someone to perform some small tasks, I'll just refuse to hire anyone to do them, and possibly create signs, ask customers to do it instead, or choose to go the automation route, and buy some new equipment to replace employees.
At one time we drilled with three guys on the rig......now with the new rigs...two is all we need.
One could do it....but, being alone with that much power is just not safe.
I once got paid 5 cents for every dandelion I dug out of some lady's front yard. Not clipped, but actually dug out to the roots. Digging out like 2-3 dandelions a minute, I made like $7 an hour, and this was in 1979, when minimum wage was like $3.25 or something. Not bad for an enterprising 12 year old.
Heck, shoveling snow for people paid me and my buddies like $10-15 an hour when we were kids. Tell someone you'll shovel their driveway for say $5-10, and with a couple of us it took like 10 minutes, and before you know it, you just got paid pretty well. Nobody negotiating those deals except the employer and employee, and everyone benefits from the trade.
It's not really that difficult to figure out.
All of these minimum wage discussions are essentially welfare proponents trying to make sloth more profitable. Any hard worker can get paid more than minimum and we all know, but oh noes, what ever shall we do with the folks who simply refuse to leave the sofa, advance their skills or just simply bust hump for 10-12 hours per day? They simply must be looked after, or we're all just mean. Right?
That's where all of this ends up. How do we care for our lazy and unmotivated?
If someone can satisfactorily demonstrate that I have caused harm to them, their proper recourse is a tort action against me. Using government to impose prior restraint on property owners is not a proper recourse.
If your zoning inflates my rent N dollars, haven't you harmed me? Where is my proper recourse?
What if your zoning deflates my home value? Haven't you harmed me? Where is MY proper recourse?
The minimum wage SHOULD BE the lowest number an employer can convince a desired employee to work for. Period. The minimum wage for someone with my resume is about $50-60 an hour. Nobody with a similar resume will work for less because we know we don't have to. Employers know this and salary negotiations are typically very brief because everyone knows. Mircea commands $650+ an hour, and I would hazard the guess that compensation discussions take minutes, maybe seconds. Pay me this. OK. Done.
Meanwhile in reality..., recessions cause desparate people to take desparate wages. Minimum wage exists for a reason. Every developed country either has a minimum wage or extensive collective labor bargaining. Without them, there will always be an unemployed person willing to be paid for a penny wage.
Ideology and logic just never coincide
Quote:
Originally Posted by Volobjectitarian
Economics is not about fair. It never was, isn't and can never be. It is about the allocation of scarce resources. Period. Supply & Demand is as unflinching in the face of human emotion and sociological sensibilities as gravity, electromagnetism and the weak/strong nuclear forces. All attempts to bend it to our will do not repeal the law, nor alter it...they just work around it for a while until the energy fighting against it is less than the power of the law itself. Back to my gravity analogy. It is approximately -9.8m/(s*s). To "get around" it with airplanes, you pass air over a parabolic surface fast enough to create a pressure differential that provides a lifting force in the opposite direction and in excess of gravity. This lifting force is how flight occurs. But it requires an engine and fuel to continue to oppose that immutable force of the universe that simply will not go away. Run out of fuel or lose the engines, and does gravity simply pause while you work it out? Nope. Same for supply & demand. In the short term, you can actually feel like you've beaten the immutable law. YOU HAVEN'T. All you have done is oppose it with greater force for a small period of time, but your opposing force will fall below the law's natural force at some point, and then the law wins. It wins eventually no matter what. Seattle is going to show you this soon enough, SeaTac already is, and the tuna canning industry Guam already showed you in no uncertain terms how much folly artificial wage floors can be.
What the heck are you talking about? Economics is all about fair. The markets are regulated by the government to ensure a "fair" allocation of resources. No 21st century power will legislate the poorest of its country to starve on the street. That is just irrational.
All of these minimum wage discussions are essentially welfare proponents trying to make sloth more profitable. Any hard worker can get paid more than minimum and we all know, but oh noes, what ever shall we do with the folks who simply refuse to leave the sofa, advance their skills or just simply bust hump for 10-12 hours per day? They simply must be looked after, or we're all just mean. Right?
That's where all of this ends up. How do we care for our lazy and unmotivated?
Hogwash.
Minimum wage proponents is about getting working folks off Federal assistance. If your darn-near-slave wage still means you need food stamps to eat, it is too low. It has nothing to do with being lazy.
Your entire post is the typical right-wing strawman argument that laziness is crippling the country. A person who works full time should not be in poverty, period. It is non-debateable.
Economics is not about fair. It never was, isn't and can never be. It is about the allocation of scarce resources. Period.
I snipped this bit, missed the whole "economics laws" part but people can read it in your post.
Look economics is never as simple as you are representing here. Its amazingly complex, and the interactions are complex. Even more importantly economics laws aren't laws, they're more suggestions. Anyone who starts going on about the immutable laws of economics is often wrong.
Oh don't get me wrong...they ARE in fact right the majority of the time. But too often people try and use one small piece of it without looking at the whole. You mention Mircea as someone who explains economics, however he does this a lot.
Economics is not about fair is a good example. you are in fact correct, but heres the thing, society often is about whats fair. and economics works within a societal framework.
So for example when people say minimum wage should be the economically set value that the labor is "worth" based upon supply and demand.....economically they are right. Reality? not so much. Society objects to slavelike working conditions in the modern times. When you fail to see reality, and how a society works, your argument turns into blindly following a religious belief. Because what you believe has no basis in reality or how things actually work. Removing the minimum wage is a good way to have your economy fall apart as a result of the society disintegrating.
edit-took me too long to type, prior poster beat me to the point quite eloquently.
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