Friday, September 2, 2016

The Last Word on the Minimum Wage

Over at the Moonbattery blog Dave Blount has the last word about minimum wage increases. (Via Maggie’s Farm) You know what happens when governments force businesses to increase the minimum wage: people lose their jobs. But then, wanna-be socialists try to solve the problem by increasing the minimum wage some more.

Blount describes it well:

By then, mobs of underachievers will be demanding $20/hour for unskilled work that is worth less than half that, and that in many cases can be done more efficiently by machine. The collectivist demagogues in charge will be happy to comply, knowing that the more people who get laid off, and the more who are never able to get onto the first rung on the economic ladder, the more votes there will be for the party of coercive wealth redistribution — at least until we get to the point where there is no more wealth to redistribute.

7 comments:

  1. Cloward and Piven

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward–Piven_strategy

    What Blount correctly sees as a problem statists/democrats see as a benefit. Why does one think that Obamacare, plus most of the welfare systems lead to in the end? They are meant to fail.

    The sad part is that a significant number of people cannot or will not see the end game.

    If raising the minimum wage worked then why do we keep having to revisit the issue? The economy always adjust leaving the poor worse off than they were each iteration of this not very well thought out idea or scheme as one might look at it.

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  2. Minimum wage would seem always avoidable, like if you have a small business. Or tip-based jobs.

    Or some jobs, like afterschool programs that help with reading to kids pay "stipends" which are fixed payments that are far below minimum wage by hours.

    Or unpaid internships of course for the wealthy who can afford to work for free. And don't forget about undocumented worker - are they going to complain if they're paid illegally?

    Of course we can work this on the other side. If wages are suppressed because of a lot of poor people and no minimum wage, they can always sell illegal drugs to pay the rent.

    And there was that guy who robbed a bank for $1 so he could go to prison and get an expensive surgery he needed.

    I'm actually not sure if its fair to criticize WalMart when we find many of their employees are on public assistance for healthcare or whatever. Of course if we had universal health care, we could take that off the back of employees anyway, and then they could afford to pay employees more per hour.

    Where there's a will, there's a way.

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    1. Many Wal-Mart "employees are on public assistance for healthcare or whatever. Of course if we had universal health care, we could take that off the back of employees..."

      Magic money? If taxpaying employees don't pay for "universal" health care (which, by the way is always far from universal, just as VA health care is not universally available to the eligible), who does?

      I assume you were joking.

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  3. Personally, I think the minimum wage should be $1000/hr. Why screw around? Go big or go home.

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  4. Beggars are easier to please, I've read.

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  6. Trigger Warning, yes, a typo, I meant "off the back of employers" not employees. No other country tries to use employers to pay for health insurance.

    But I'm open to "money printing" to pay for univeral health care, if that's the only way forward.

    Perhaps there are "medical abusers" out there who just love going to a doctor every week for some fake illness, but I've not met very many of them. Perhaps they live on the other side of the track.

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