Tag Archives: economics

A Case for Ending the Minimum Wage

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Well, I thought the article I wrote about the other day had a pretty good explanation of why it was not such a good idea to raise the minimum wage.

It looks like at least some people still don’t get it, so I’ll try again. 😉

I think a lot of people probably still have the mindset that there’s a simple solution to the problem of poverty. Just give poor people enough money to raise their income higher than the poverty level and then everything will work out fine.

Sorry to say it, but it’s not really that simple. If it was, we would have eliminated poverty a long time ago.

There are so many things that contribute to the problem of poverty (poor education, bad attitudes, destructive family life, etc). I don’t know if we will ever be able to solve it completely.

I think we have done a pretty good job here in America.  The poorest people here are better off than the richest kings were 100 years ago. They’re richer than billions of people in the rest of the world.

So, poverty is a relative thing. No one here in America really has to worry about starving to death. There ARE ways for them to get help.

As for the minimum wage laws, they are not going to help anyone for more than a short time. These laws have been tried in the past and they have failed. The main thing they always do is to keep the most vulnerable people (those without much experience or job skills) out of the job market. Without that foot in the door, they can’t ever move up out of poverty.

The unemployment level rises. More people go on welfare and other aid programs. More people get used to the idea that they can get by that way (NOT having to work) and so they’re worse off in the long run. So are the rest of us.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to have large numbers of people living on ‘charity’ (government aid or private aid). I think it encourages a bad attitude towards other people and about life in general. I think people do better when they have some sort of goals to work towards, some purpose in life. Maybe working at a minimum wage job isn’t the BEST way to live your life, but it does give you a decent way to start down the road to your chosen path in life.

As for the remaining low skill workers, the ones who did manage to keep their now higher paying jobs, they will not be better off for very long either. You raise the minimum wage and pretty soon all the rest of the wages will rise too.

Maybe you think that’s a great idea. Your paycheck will have more dollars in it! Yes, it will, but there’s a little thing called “inflation” that comes along when wages rise. That inflation will not only give you more dollars in your paycheck, it will make everything you want to spend those dollars on cost more!

How many people really think they will wind up better off once that starts? I’m pretty sure I won’t be. I know from past experience that most people are worse off than they were before they got that raise they wanted so badly.

Maybe the little video will help convince you. I know these guys (Thomas Sowell, Peter Schiff) are much more informed than I am, they’re experts on this kind of thing.

Maybe I’m not an expert, but I can extrapolate a few things. I read a lot. I listen to people who have been there, done that. I try to learn from other peoples experience.

I totally agree with the comments in the video and the well meaning people who say that a person shouldn’t have to live in poverty while they’re working a full time job. My objections are only about how to make things better for them. I don’t think raising the minimum wage will help.

I hope to start a discussion here along with the one that we should be having nationally. It would be nice if we could do something effective to help people instead of just try one more time to do what has already failed numerous times in the past.

How about we try to come up with some different solutions to the problem of poverty? Instead of the simple answer of raising the minimum wage, (that has already been proven a failure), we try to come up with some other ideas? Something that might WORK?

 

The War on Jobs Continues

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The War on Jobs Continues.

Here’s another good article from Doug French at Laissez Faire. He does a pretty good job of explaining (in simple terms) how the free market works in the job market. He could do a better job of explaining how government interference through regulations always screws things up, but overall he does OK.

I am simply amazed at the numbers of people in America (and around the world) who don’t have even this most basic level of understanding about economics. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at Americans, considering that most of them are stuck in government schools.

For anyone who doesn’t know the history of government schools in America, the purpose of those schools is NOT to educate the children, but to turn them into ‘cogs in the wheel’. Mould them into compliant workers to fill the factory jobs that we used to have.

Now that we have destroyed those jobs through over-regulation, we have a nation full of people with just enough education to fill those kinds of jobs and none of those jobs to give them.

Along with a number of other subjects, economics was not one of the ones thought important enough to spend any resources on for people intended to spend their entire lives working for GM. 🙁

Our ‘public’ (government) school system has not changed with the times. We are still training people to work in factories when we need to be educating them so they can be entrepreneurs!

In the meantime, because we have not educated them to understand the basics of economics (or much else), we have the situation going on right now (again) where people are clamoring for (another) rise in the minimum wage.

Because they don’t understand basic economics, they think that will improve their standard of living. It won’t. 🙁

Read the article again…

There are so many levels of ignorance and wishful thinking going on in this country, it’s sad really. Yes, it’s true,  the poor and middle classes here are not doing as well as the upper class. But the reasons for that are mostly to do with the government and NOT wage rates!

We are all going into debt. More and more and more! THAT is a huge impediment to a high standard of living (no matter what your income). The money supply continues to increase, causing inflation, which steals more of our income every day. Our government keeps on spending money like there’s no tomorrow and raising taxes in order to try to keep that up.

THOSE are the things that are hurting our standards of living. I could go on, but I hope you get the point I’m trying to make. Raising the minimum wage won’t really solve anybody’s problems, it will only delay the inevitable and make it worse in the long run.

I read a post, (“Dead Broke”), this morning by Joseph Rathjen. He writes the “Political and Social Chaos Blog”. It ties right into what I’ve been talking/thinking about. Economic illiteracy. Elites vs the rest of us. Amount of income a person has vs standard of living (personal happiness level).

The fact that ANYONE could believe the Clintons were “Dead Broke” (the way WE mean it when WE say it) says it all. I’m not sure how many people really believe it, or if it’s all just the usual media propaganda, but it seems at least a few people fell for it.

You ought to read Rathjens post. He makes some good points. I would take it even further. People like the Clintons belong to the class of the ‘global elites’. They are not JUST rich. They are rich and POWERFUL.

There is a group of people who are very rich and powerful and THOSE people do NOT care one whit for the rest of us!

THAT is why it is SO important for the rest of us to be educated! We need to know enough about how the world really works so that we don’t fall for their BS! We need to know enough to fight back when someone proposes a plan that might look good on the surface but will eventually work against OUR interests.

The latest minimum wage proposals are just one more example of this. It’s sad. Most people still don’t understand how things work. 🙁