Sunday, January 15, 2012

How Simon Gets Smacked by Minimum Wage Laws

4 comments:

  1. Nice,

    Just emailed it to my youngest.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Excellent video, thanks for posting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Apologists for the minimum wage like to completely focus on those whose wages may be raised by the minimum wage rather than those who are unemployed because of it. Even if a person is not a libertarian, I think many would agree that if one person is forced out of receiving $5.00/hr and receives $0.00/hr instead because of the minimum wage, the minimum wage is immoral. Of course, the "majority rules" folks may be able to ignore such a claim of immorality because of their belief that the majority is better off at the expense of the minority. Largely a liberal crowd, they will not even realize their hypocrisy while generally standing up for minorities. Yet their belief will be completely wrong: the majority itself would be far better off in a market with completely free and open competition without stifling regulation, allowing businesses to compete with each other for workers, bidding up their wages to their respective MRP's by necessity. Here, everyone would have an opportunity to productively employed, violence would not be immorally imposed on an innocent minority, and each and every individual would have free choice to buy whatever suited his subjective valuations the best.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The debate over minimum wages and employment seems to me to really miss the core issue. Minimum wage earners can't make ends meet on the wages they make without being provided welfare assistance by the US government. If we were to lower their wages, this would only increase the amount that the government would shell out in poverty-threshold welfare benefits, thereby increasing taxes for the rest of us. As I see it, the system as it exists is simply a scheme that transfers the true cost of labor to the taxpayers, in effect subsidizing organizations that depend on business models which do not provide living wages. Lowering or eliminating the minimum wage would increase employment, but that doesn't really address the core issue, much less provide a workable solution to what is essentially a social problem.

    ReplyDelete