laliberty postulates:
First let’s understand the damage the minimum wage brings about: it creates unemployment, makes goods and services more expensive, potentially drives otherwise employable people to illegal activities, shifts demand to off-the books hires and thus illegal immigration, among other things. And all this socio-economic destruction especially affects the people it purports to help: the poor.
No. This has been empirically proven false in a multitude of studies. If this were true, states with higher minimum wages would have higher unemployment — and this categorically untrue.
If the minimum wage was good, why isn’t it higher? That is the argument for minimum wage, isn’t it? That without a government set wage, corporations would pay us in steel dimes and peanuts, so to speak? So if a minimum wage is good for society, and raising the minimum wage is always better, why not set the minimum wage at $20 an hour? How about $100/hr? Or $1,000/hr? Who wouldn’t want a job at $1,000 an hour?
Yes, there is a continuum and a trail off of decreasing returns. But no person that toils for a living should be paid less than a living wage. To do as such is indeed a mark of bondage or slavery.
The problem with that is that very few people would be hirable at that rate. It’s not difficult to see that the higher the minimum wage, the higher the unemployment. Conversely, the lower the minimum wage, the lower the unemployment.
A classic case of zero sum thinking. What happens when workers are paid a decent wage is that they, in turn, spend those dollars and goods and services. Dispensed coin which fuels revenue and profits of other human entities conducting business transactions. Which, in turn, feeds more and more. Win win win. It’s the velocity of money. And the nation’s history is replete with such empirical evidence, most evident the New Deal reforms which transformed the “middle class” into an ubiquitous state, a perch hitherto never existing on such a scale.
So, minimum wage creates this domino effect of negative unintended consequences, which makes the argument against minimum wage very clear.
Sorry, but the fulfilling of labor will always chase the lowest common denominator. Without restrictions, regulations, humane labor law, etc.… employers will always “race to the bottom”. And there truly is no bottom, as humankind will suffer being treated like animals just to squabble over a few crumbs tossed their way. It’s why immigration law exists, unions battled to win humane treatment of labor, professional guilds are chartered — to ensure suitable compensation that an unfettered labor exchange would never fetch.
In sum: unemployment would be tiny; overall wealth and productivity would be high; crime, illegal immigration, and prices would remain low.
No, and it’s a ridiculous assertion — one that is gobsmacked by economic civilization across the historical breadth and depth of civilization. Without freedom from want, there can be no other freedom(s). Furthermore, I challenge such libertarian lunacy to demonstrate for me even one small pocket of economic history where such a libertarian reverie was ever more than a deluded materialistic fantasy novelist. Or other than states transformed into “rule of the jungle” states like Somalia.
