>Studies differ on the effects of raising the minimum wage. Sometimes the effects are to cut back hours or even cut wages for the higher-ups, the latter obviously being the ideal outcome for liberals.
Sometimes, but rarely. I'd like to see some of the studies you've got. I'm finding almost no evidence that that's the case.
>But there is no denying that the impact of higher labor costs is real and significant.
The impact of low wages is much more real and much more significant.
>And for many small businesses that survive on razor-thin margins, that impact can be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Businesses that can't pay a living wage shouldn't exist. They are exploitative, plain and simple.
>There are many other variables involved, but the whole point is that wages are ultimately set by the market. You're only paid as much as what someone else is willing to accept for the same work.
And that amount is dictated by how much employers can make sure people can be driven to desperation. Which they've gotten quite good at in the U.S..
>The minimum wage is there to prevent overt exploitation and to set a floor on wages, but that's it. It's never meant to provide a "living wage" because that's a rather arbitrary standard that doesn't take into account free market economics.
You know who also didn't take into account free market economics? Adam Smith: "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be ?ourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged."
The minimum wage is always going to be arbitrary. But people with other people's well-being in mind arbitrarily would like it to be higher, and people that think, "I've got mine, Jack." would like it to be lower
-Z |
