Topic: Would killing the minimum wage help? - page 8. (Read 10732 times)

But surely you wouldn't argue that someone handing over their wallet in exchange for not being shot was consensual, even if the person really truly preferred being a little poorer to being dead. So presumably your opinion would be that they did not have the third option, which is to say "no, i'd rather not give you my money /or/ be shot" and walk away.

However, since we cannot walk away from the table of "making a living" completely -- (those born landless are forced to sell our labor to the owning class to literally survive) there must be mechanisms for making that relationship as equal as possible.

A relative equality of power is not required for there to be true consent. True consent simply requires each side to understand the deal sufficiently to genuinely believe that they are better off taking the deal than rejecting it.

This is only true if there is true consent -- ie; a relative equality of power on both sides of the table. This is not the case currently at labor vs capital owner negotiations.

Again,

http://c4ss.org/content/4163

(and that is a market anarchist site BTW)

http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2011/07/06/minimum-wage-law-backfires-american-samoa

I should qualify my previous statements that I don't think that the minimum wage law would affect many people.  It's still true, but aparently it would affect an entire protectorage state.

The problem is that we don't have a free market. So either side can claim the benefits. That's why we need to reduce things to certain undeniable facts.

1. Human action is based on improving our position.
2. People that want to work for a certain amount of pay think that their position will be improved.
3. Employers will only pay as much as the employee can return in productivity.
4. Minimum wage forces low productivity workers to be unemployed.
5. If we didn't have minimum wages then employers would compete for employees and their wage would tends towards their productivity level rather than a race to the bottom, etc, etc.

These are all facts so therefore we can deduce that minimum wage only hurts low productivity workers. You know who tends to favor minimum wage workers? Unions, because it keeps competition out of the market. Instead of hiring a bunch of guys with shovels that can compete with a bulldozer operator without minimum wages, employers don't have that option so they hire bulldozer operators. Who loses? We do through higher prices, the unemployed low productivity workers lose because they don't have a job and employers lose because their costs are artificially raised.

Oh yea, even if this wasn't all true, it's still immoral to prevent adults from interacting however they want, be it gay sex or low wage work.

well see this is where we get into the sort of argument where all the beneficial outcomes of a "free market" are attributed to the market, and all the bad outcomes are attributed to "regulation". In any case, it still doesn't address the fact that myrkul claimed there was too much regulation is favor of unions/labor power. If that was the case, why would compensation be so skewed towards the ultra-elite?

Pay disparity is often the result of government meddling. CEOs that drive up shareholder value through political entrepreneurship  get compensated accordingly. 

I'll admit I haven't done a lot of study, and it's highly likely GM was run into the ground by a combination of factors.

But one needs only to look at how Kia has revitalized a - I believe Georgia? - town by building a factory, and then look at Detroit, to see the difference. I'll admit that may have as much to do with corporate policy as government, though.

What I do know is that these regulations distort the market, causing one group to be inherently more powerful than the other, and that never works well.

Right on.


Uh, which laws are these exactly?

riiight. because in an economy where workers have too much power, the rumneration scale looks like this

Even worse are the laws that give unions too much power, resulting in.. well, in GM.

Yes, but currently there are laws (like Taft-Hartley and even the Wagner Act) as well as other laws like "right to work" agreements etc that greatly limit collective bargaining power. Though we may have different interpretations of how we think a voluntarist society will eventually evolve, surely you will agree with me that among the capital-L Libertarian movement in the US there tends to be much more handwringing over things like minimum wage laws and safety-net programs that provide some kind of "soft-edge" to the predatoriness of state/corporate capitalism than many of the regulations that give corporations that power to exploit

Here is a very good analysis of what labor struggle in a free market could look like, combined with a critique of the labor analysis the Libertarian Right often uses

http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/C4SS-Labor.pdf

I think it is a fallacy to assume that every step towards "liberty" is a step in the right direction, when it greatly matters what order things are done and how they are done. Repealing social safety net type programs without dismantling the state/corporate imperial power apparatus is incredibly fucked up. For instance -- look at the way both Reagan and Thatcher used Libertarian rhetoric to dismantle safety net type programs (while of course increasing the power of monopolists, increase the police state, increase the military-industrial complex, etc).

This is just the sweatshop thread in another guise.

When it comes to dismantling state capitalism, abolishing the minimum wage (and other safety net type programs) is pretty fucking low on my priority list (though I think that in practice maximum wage laws that limit the ability of any person at a corporation to earn more than say 15X more than anyone else employed by the corporation would work far better than minimum wage laws) -- I'd rather start from the other side and eliminate present forms of state intervention that weaken the bargaining power of labor, and which thereby coerce workers to sell their labor under incredibly warped conditions of unequal exchange --- I agree that the current labor market is incredibly warped, but it is warped towards the employing class, not against it.

I can agree with that - although I have a feeling a lot of other people are going to disagree with your stance on the place of unions.

That's where collective bargaining comes in. supergreedymegacorp inc only has the massive bargaining power because of its size. with collective bargaining, you take away that size advantage. Without the distortions placed on the market by state regulations, the two groups could come to an amicable arrangement, that benefited both parties.

I wasn't responding to your "unemployment and experience" argument. I was responding to your Horatio Alger fantasies of robber-baron capitalism being a time where hard workers can rise to great wealth and prominence, when in fact most hard workers were dying in coal mines or being shot by either government or private militias for trying to organize.

From what I've seen you post, I have no doubt that you have nothing but the best of intentions in mind and that you (are?) would be a fair employer in this kind of situation. However, I would be more inclined to agree with your point of view if there were some sort of way to prevent the aforementioned problem - if we eliminated minimum wage, what would there be to stop huge corporations like supergreedymegacorp inc. from treating people like dirt and hoarding every last penny for the capitalist class?


If wages were to sink so far that I would have to work most of every day to pay for the essentials, I would probably look for a new form of money-making activity. If starting my own business were obviously not viable (in this scenario we're discussing a dirt poor economy where this whole wage-cutting situation is necessary), I honestly can't say that relatively profitable criminal activity would be out of the question - and I guarantee you that I wouldn't be the only one with it on my mind. Perhaps that makes me a bad or immoral person - but life isn't worth living if you're miserable going through it every day and have no time for your family or for 'self' things. From my point of view, though, it's just the nature of man.

Mininum wage only "protects" people who already have a stable job.

But it hurts those who need the most "protection" - the unemployed. It lessens their chance to get their foot in the door and pushes more of them into a vicious cycle of long term unemployment.

Minimum wage is regressive and anti-social.

No. We need a minimum wage so long as there's any kind of safety net to stop people starving en-masse in the street, be it government-provided or charitable or even just assistance from more well-off relatives and friends. Otherwise employers' wage costs will end up getting subsidised by that safety net - they'll be able to employ workers for less than it costs to keep them healthy and fit for work - which is going to lead to some, errm, interesting distortions in the market for labour. You might be able to "solve" this by prohibiting anyone from providing this kind of support to anyone else, but this has the issues that it's unenforcable and will lead to people starving en-masse in the streets.

While the race to the bottom would indeed screw over lots of people currently working for the minimum wage, they're not the only ones it could affect. Suppose you're working 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of $7.25 a week, which is just enough for you to survive on, and when the minimum wage is removed your employer looks at all the unemployed people out there and decides he could get away with paying you $6 a week - not quite enough to make ends meet. What do you do? You get a second job - say, for 10 hours a week at $4/hour. Except that everyone else is doing the same too, and the resulting increase in labour supply pushes wages down further until you're now working 80 hours a week at $3.50/hour. (That's the optimistic version - if the amount of employment doesn't keep up, some people will end up working 0 hours a week for $0/hour as they get replaced by better employees that are suddenly desperate for more work.)

Of course - and this is the fun bit - said increase in labour supply makes it harder for the unemployed to get a job, counteracting the benefits of increasing the number of jobs available. In fact, removing the minimum wage may well make finding a job harder, not easier!

The problem with supporting the minimum wage is that the situation looks increasingly more and more like slavery.  As the race to the bottom prevails, as we regulate markets (and therefore people), below subsistence level jobs will be erased and we will create unemployment depriving some workers of even the very little they could get.

The idea that 50% of the people think that there should be a minimum wage means one of the following to me:
1) People are unbelievably cruel and hateful and believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery by any other name
2) They are millionaires and also think that there is nothing wrong with slavery and grinding poverty due to their oligarchical disposition
3) They are trolling
4) They have no historical, political or economic understanding outside of a few Keynsianist economics classes and Paul Krugman articles
5) They believe fundamentally that humans are unable to know what's best for themselves and should not be allowed to voluntarily trade and exchange with other human beings



Edit: I'm not trying to be a troll, and would sincerely like to have a rational dialogue with you, but do you see how easy that is?