Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
>>>In an unregulated market there is nothing to prevent a full time job from paying less than a living wage.
Sure there is. Competition. It never fails, and it never has failed. Until 1997, Hong Kong had no minimum wage laws. It had zero unemployment, and everyone who produced a living-wage worth of value earned a living wage or above.
Minimum wage supporters have a fantasy about the so-called "living wage." They think that someone who works as a dish washer in a fast-food restaurant "ought" to earn enough doing low-value work to be able to rent a nice apartment, get married, support a wife, have kids, send them to a nice private school, take 1 or 2 nice relaxing vacations a year, get his teeth capped, buy a car, and retire comfortably. Sorry, but in order to have all those nice things, you have to be in a job where you're producing the equivalent value of those things. From a dish washer's point of view, the purpose of a low-paying job is to get enough experience to become a manager of a fast-food restaurant, and then, perhaps, a franchise owner. The purpose, from his point of view, is simply to gain enough experience to use as a stepping-stone to something better: something that produces higher value, and which therefore is higher paid. That's simply economic reality.
Additionally, as I've already pointed out several times, the great majority of minimum wage earners are teenagers who still live at home with their parents. We don't have to worry about paying them a "living wage" because they are not worried about it either.
The ones we do have to worry about are the extremely low-skilled, inexperienced workers who would like to work at $1, $2, or $3 per hour, but who cannot find work at $9.00 an hour. They were priced out of the labor market. It's not the fault of employers that they are unemployed. It's the fault of minimum wage laws.
I notice, however, that the most vocal supporters of the minimum wage — all of whom are upper-middle class and wealthy, including, of course, most politicians — believe that unpaid internships — where the worker is paid NOTHING — are just great. This, despite the fact that the unpaid intern is obviously not getting a "living wage".
So paying someone nothing is apparently OK with minimum wage advocates, as long as that someone is labeled an "intern" and not an "employee", and as long that someone admits that he's really just there to learn a skill and gain experience. Yet paying that same someone $2.00/hour while labeling him an "employee" is suddenly defined as exploitation and morally wrong.
Got news for you. It's pure hypocrisy. If it's OK to pay someone zero in order for them to learn skills and get experience, it's also OK to pay them more than zero — e.g., $2.00 hour — for the same things. If the former is not exploitation, then neither is the latter
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Quote:
The ones we do have to worry about are the extremely low-skilled, inexperienced workers who would like to work at $1, $2, or $3 per hour, but who cannot find work at $9.00 an hour. They were priced out of the labor market. It's not the fault of employers that they are unemployed. It's the fault of minimum wage laws.
No problem there. We have regulations that keep y'all from filling your sweat shops with 5 & 6 year olds.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Really? Inexperienced workers willing to work for a dollar an hour?! If they worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week they'd earn $6570.00 a year! Subtract the rent or the mortgage and you're very lucky to have $3000 left for groceries. That $8.22 a day to feed your family. Of course I didn't subtract the utilities, but you can live without water, heat and electricity...they're just amenities only the successful deserve. Yeah, you're right! Competition is Kick Ass. Hope no one gets sick.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Greed makes people do strange things.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
>>>Really? Inexperienced workers willing to work for a dollar an hour?
Yep. Absolutely.
Because if an inexperienced worker is willing to work for nothing (in an "unpaid internship"), then he's also willing to do the same kind of work for some amount above nothing.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
>>>Greed makes people do strange things.
So does envy.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Greed's just an aspect of envy.
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
Quote:
Originally Posted by
paulclifford
>>>Greed makes people do strange things.
So does envy.
I think what you're aiming for is a system where you can maintain your advantage in wealth and at the same time keep the masses at bay. If you overreach, for instance, by recommending a wage so inhumane that people can scarcely survive on it, you may find that the teeming underclasses don't really want to be part of this system and that their disobedience need not be civil.
In our case, we have a system where you can become insanely wealthy. In fact, you can aggregate enough wealth that neither you nor your great grandchildren will ever have to work again. This is one of the benefits of a system that rewards entrepreneurial ingenuity, and allows people to reap benefits for intellectual contributions far beyond what they contribute in terms of labor.
Your comparison of a one dollar per hour wage to internships is nearly offensive. The fair labor standards act has standards that prevents internships from being unduly exploitative, and even if these standards are not always enforced stringently, the purpose of an internship is that the employer provides it primarily for the benefit of the intern. Internships are not supposed to keep mature workers in a chronic state of underemployment or poverty nor do they generally provide employers with much of a work product. There is a big difference between interning at a financial services firm over the summer while attending school and working full time in a factory to barely earn enough to subsist.
Your vision of America is not a very charitable one. I hope you don't think I come from a place of envy, but moral disapproval.
Edit: Regulatory guidance from Department of Labor on unpaid internships
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
Re: Charles Koch wants to eliminate minimum wage
>>>If you overreach, for instance, by recommending a wage so inhumane that people can scarcely survive on it, you may find that the teeming underclasses don't really want to be part of this system and that their disobedience need not be civil.
"Pay me $50/hour for washing dishes or I'll bash your brains in"? Sounds to me as if you're the one with the very uncharitable view of America. "Support me . . . or else!"
>>>In our case, we have a system where you can become insanely wealthy. In fact, you can aggregate enough wealth that neither you nor your great grandchildren will ever have to work again. This is one of the benefits of a system that rewards entrepreneurial ingenuity, and allows people to reap benefits for intellectual contributions far beyond what they contribute in terms of labor.
Most of what you said was true and correct up to the last part of the last sentence. Labor qua labor contributes very little to any sort of productive activity without "brain power" behind it. Conversely, brain power greatly enhances the value of labor. That's why someone in a non-capitalist country can labor for hours and hours, scratching the soil, pushing it into the shape of an elongated cube, firing it in a hand-built oven, and 12 hours later, creating a beautiful hand-crafted product called "1 brick"; while someone in a western capitalist economy can push a button, and 1,000 perfectly formed identical bricks come streaming out on a conveyer belt in some production line, and all of this can be done in one hour.
Who expended more labor: the guy scratching the soil who produced 1 brick in 12 hours, or the guy who pushed a button and produced 1,000 bricks in one hour? Obviously, the first guy expended more actual labor. His wage, however, will be much lower than the second guy's wage, because despite all that labor he's expending, he only produced 1 brick in 12 hours. The 2nd guy — who expends a lot less labor — can produce 12,000 bricks in the same amount of time. It wasn't labor that made the 2nd guy so much more productive. It was other people's brain power invested in his labor. Another word for "brain power invested in pure labor" is: capital.
Because the 2nd guy can produce more than the 1st guy in the same amount of time, the 2nd guy's wages will be a lot higher.
>>>Your comparison of a one dollar per hour wage to internships is nearly offensive. The fair labor standards act has standards that prevents internships from being unduly exploitative,
"Unduly" exploitative? You mean, it's OK by you and the Department of Labor to be "duly" exploitative (in the opinion of some bureaucrat)?
In other words, in your view, if a person accepts a job in the summer for a wage of $0.00/hour, then she's only being "duly exploited", and that's OK by you and the DoL, because we have a pretty name for such an employment relation: we call it an "internship" instead of a "job". But if the same person were to accept the same job from the same employer in the summer for $1.00/hour, then she's being "unduly exploited" by her employer, and it's not OK by you and the DoL, because the jump from $0.00/hour to $1.00/hour semantically changed what was previously an "internship" into some other DoL category called a "job".
In your opinion, she may not legally accept any offer below $9.00/hour if her relation to her employer is semantically called a "job".
In other words, in your view, she can legally accept $0.00/hour and call it an "internship"; or she can accept $9.00/hour (or more), and call it a "job" — even if it's exactly the same work, same employer, same expectations, same hours, etc. But she is legally forbidden from accepting an offer to perform exactly the same work for any amount between $0.01 and $8.99.
Bizarre. Only the mind of a bureaucrat from a government bureaucracy like the Department of Labor could twist itself into a pretzel and come up with an argument like that.
Anyway, as I've pointed out before, the majority of those working in minimum wage jobs are teens still living at home with mom and dad, or still being supported by mom and dad. In fact, the majority of minimum wage job holders are white teenagers who come from families with median incomes of over $50,000.
The narrative about the "great masses of destitute, working, blue-collar, poor folk", each with a "Tiny Tim Cratchit" on crutches at home, is a myth.
The fact is this:
Most of those "great masses of destitute, blue-collar, poor folks, with Tiny Tim Cratchit on crutches" are simply unemployed. Period. Their problem is not "low wages"; their problem is "no wages", as in "no jobs." And simply increasing the hourly wage of white teenagers living in middle-class homes will not get them any.
Your minimum wage laws help the wrong group of people.
