« Contrived Inequality and Equality-Becker | Main | Should the Minimum Wage Be Raised to $9?—Posner »

02/18/2013

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Terry Bennett

To paraphrase George Will, if you penalize something you get less of it. Employment of the unskilled, for instance.

The purest implication of a minimum wage policy is that government believes that the value of work is a not a continuum, i.e., that there is no such thing as a task that is worth $6 per hour. Nobody is saying that. Everybody already admits the other explanation, that it's a form of welfare.

If it's welfare, it should be funded by a tax on everyone, not on the employers of the unskilled. Is McDonald's somehow immoral for not requiring its servers to have a college degree, and not charging $12 for a hamburger? McDonald's should be thanked, in some substantive way, for managing to eke productivity out of the dubiously productive. A minimum wage law is the economic equivalent of shooting the messenger.

I often hear people say, "I need to get at least $500k when I sell my house, to cover the mortgage payoff." This is stupid, right? The fact that you are in debt does not make your house worth more. The rationale for the minimum wage is equally non sequitur: a person can't live on $6/hour. True, but irrelevant. Many people can afford to do low-productivity work because they live with other people, such as their parents. If a particular worker needs to support himself and can't, that's what welfare programs are for, and we all chip in to support those programs. There is no need to distort a functioning market with ill-conceived meddling from a self-righteous public sector so notoriously ignorant of the workings of its private counterpart.

Karlajordan2012

Employers are indecent to not pay a man a wage that pays their bills. Support the passage of legislation of $9.00 an hour. Hillary Clinton would have had the minimum wagers in the soup lines starving because the moment you get a raise..the company would lay off the entire crew and rehire at the minimum wage level to cut company expenses or send the job overseas to get their products made with $2.00 hour labor in China/Japan/India/ or Mexico!! Give us our pay to cover rent,utilities, food, auto ins, health ins, etc...and recreation.
Support my petition to the congress/senate.
Go to my site www.fightforlivingwages.org
Thanks for your support

Kokihon

Karlajordan2012> Before writing something, do some careful inspection. It's not possible to hire a Japanese worker for $2.00 an hour.

Thelongversion

Karlajordan2012 - Do you just ignore economic reality and hope its wrong when you go forward with you economy killing ideas and policies? Your last line is as telling as any "GIVE us our pay...." Looks like the words EARN and MERIT are lost in your vocabulary.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Become a Fan

May 2014

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31