Dave wrote:
When you have conflicting experts, like economists, on subjects like minimum wage one either should concede that he is incapable of determining who is right and therefore hold no opinion. The other approach might be to apply common sense to commons sense things that you know. Let me try that on minimum wages - and let me know if any of the simple statements I made in applying common sense are wrong in your opinion.
If wages are increased, all else being equal, all those engaged in profit making business will do one of the following, or a combination of the following:
- if the job is "portable" move it to a location where the wage has not been increased and therefore became more competitive, and/or;
- look to somehow automate the work, and the more expensive the work, all else being equal, the more cost justifiable capital investment would be, and/or;
- increase the price of the product/service that the work produces, and as happens when a product or service becomes more expensive, all else being equal, the demand for it will decrease.
Each of those outcomes all lead to a decrease in the jobs.
Further, all else being equal the wages one earns in a market based economy is largely driven by the demand for the work and the supply of the workers seeking it. For those jobs at or near minimum wage, those with low skills and education are the ones most likely to be working on them.
If we increase the supply of low skilled people by importing them in large numbers, legally or not so much legal, we suppress the wage scale for them. Further, if we allow our schools to, for whatever reason, generate many more non-skilled and uneducated people entering the workforce, we further suppress the wage scale. If one doubts that we're doing that in our educations system, one needs but look at our urban schools, both the graduation rates and the achievement rates of those that graduate.
So, by making it more expensive to employ people - and there are many programs in addition to minimum wage that does that - Obamacare but one of the more recent - thereby decreasing the number of low skilled jobs - and by making sure the number of unskilled workers far exceeds the number of positions they can aspire to we make certain that the number of people who are not afforded the opportunity for economic independence.
I think it is clear that those who are most responsible for both ends of that spectrum are those who most expect to gain votes for themselves
When you have conflicting experts, like economists... (
show quote)