Converation thread

Higher minimum wages increase production costs, which then raises the prices of everything. Minimum wage is not meant to sustain a family, it is meant to teach someone how to work before they learn more valuable skills that merit a higher wage.

“Minimum wage is not meant to sustain a family, it is meant to teach someone how to work before they learn more valuable skills that merit a higher wage.”

That is historically and logically untrue. Minimum wage was explicitly designed so that EVERY worker would be guaranteed the wage to afford a quality life. The notion that minimum wage is only meant to be some kind of "starter wage" is blatantly ahistorical and anti-worker.

The number one rule of good economics is to not just look at the effects certain laws and programs have on favoured groups, but rather to study how they affect society as a whole. And while minimum wage laws might in theory help those lucky few workers who keep their jobs, there is much more to take into thoughtful consideration.

For starters, if the employer is forced to pay more money to each worker by the government, he will have to compensate for the extra expense by (1) reducing the numbers of workers under his care, thus reducing employment and harming a large amount of workers (2) cut…  Read more corners and costs of his product, which is seldom good for quality and often makes things much more poorly-made than ever before (3) raising the prices of the goods he produces, which inevitably forces consumers (including the workers who are now earning higher wages) to pay ore for everyday items (and since minimum wages are seldom imposed on a certain industry, this raises costs in virtually all areas of the economy) (4) going out of business altogether because of artificial and unrealistic legal obligations, which means the destruction of the jobs of ALL of his workers and a subsequent spike in unemployment.

I find it incredibly funny that you do not recognize how all of this:

"if the employer is forced to pay more money to each worker by the government, he will have to compensate for the extra expense by (1) reducing the numbers of workers under his care, thus reducing employment and harming a large amount of workers (2) cutcorners and costs of his product, which is seldom good for quality and often makes things much more poorly-made than ever before (3) raising the prices of the goods he produces, which inevitably forces consumers (including the workers who are now earning higher wages) to…  Read more pay ore for everyday items (and since minimum wages are seldom imposed on a certain industry, this raises costs in virtually all areas of the economy) (4) going out of business altogether because of artificial and unrealistic legal obligations, which means the destruction of the jobs of ALL of his workers and a subsequent spike in unemployment."

So your "solution" is expecting people to work without the benefit of pay or a chance to rise in station in the world (it being a classless society) – that people who do not work will make just as much as those who do work? You must have great faith in the purity of human nature if you expect everyone to altruistic work for the common good with nothing in it for them, hold hands, and sing koom-bye-ya. Classless societies have been attempted before in history (yes I mean TRUE classlessness, not just a socialist dictator and a political ruling class dictating the lives of peasan…  Read morets, which is what socialism USUALLY leads to) take for example the Pilgrims at Plymouth. They had an anarchy-marxist system like you advocate for going where there was no government but a private enforcement arm forced everyone to share the produce of their farms. There was no private property, no one was allowed to be more successful than anyone else, and all this was enforced without a government. Well in about six months they discovered anarchy-marxism didn't have much to it (I mean to say "anarcho" but it keeps auto-correcting me). Everyone was starving to death and no one was working. So they introduced private property rights and didn't have the private enforcement arm setting a ceiling on success and BANG the population exploded and Massachusetts became a highly profitable colony that eventually led the War of Independence. Take also Jamestown, where the same exact thing happened. Anarcho-marxism has been attained before and it's never been good.