So? If companies treated their employees fair and gave them safe working conditions on their own then unions wouldn't be necessary either. Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk
Sure they would. Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale were pretty well paid pitchers for the Dodgers. http://voices.yahoo.com/sandy-koufax-don-drysdales-bid-baseballs-1st-million-2940502.html
That was the initial raison d'etre for unions. We needed them because they saved us from Communism at the turn of the century. However, government has taken over that role through labor laws. Now unions exist to extract extra-market wages and benefits. Their role has changed and is less important. I'm more than fine with private unions. They have a naturally adversarial role with company management. I think public unions should be outlawed, however. In that case, unions help elect the people sitting on the other side of the table. It's a conflict of interest.
And the minimum wage is another market-distorting affect. If you want to raise the minimum wage without government intervention, stop illegal immigration. You decrease the available labor pool and you increase wages without doing a thing. Besides, the setting of the minimum wage is so arbitrary. It's the very definition of Hayek's knowledge problem. There's no way the government can set a wage more effectively than the market. And the problem is that difference in information costs jobs.
So you'd distort the labor market by having government limit it? The threat of "take this low wage or I call the migre" isn't competitive.
Look at that, we do agree on something. Unions are outdated and public unions are a farce. I wouldnt outlaw public unions though, I would just knee cap them to limit their bargaining power. Big problem I see with minimum wage jobs though is that you cant unionize so you are dependent on the laws and/or the good graces of the company you work for. Just for clarification because I know Denny will say they can unionize, they can, but it wouldn't do any good because of the vast pool of minimum wage workers willing to break the line. Would you guys favor a minimum wage increase if it was also accompanied with a real reduction in welfare, food stamps and unemployment benefits? That seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
You can unionize minimum wage jobs, and you have the proposition backwards. Eliminate the minimum wage, but have real increase in welfare, etc. it would cost less and be far more effective.
Cost who less? Seems to me in that scenario we end up with companies like walmart double dipping, keeping pay down and having their employees rely on federal assistance at the same time.
Cost the taxpayer less. Those welfare programs are targeted at keeping the poor from being dirt poor. Walmart is subsidizing welfare. If the poverty level is $20K, and Walmart pays $5/hr x 2000 hour/year, then the government only has to cover $10K to meet the poverty level. Your alternative is the govt. covers the whole $20K, since Walmart will fire their most inefficient workers. The way the OP suggest only requires poor people get welfare. Mags' wife doesn't need more pay to keep his family from being poor, nor do his kids working part time for their allowance.
So your saying Walmart is subsidizing welfare rather than welfare subsidizing walmart? Ill mull that over for a bit. Cutting back (not eliminating) food stamps and unemployment would be the big savers IMO, the idea is to make enough money to afford that stuff yourself rather than relying on government programs, and really if you devote yourself to a full time job there should be no reason you can't make ends meat. Add the savings of the social programs to the increased payroll tax revenue of raising the minimum wage and things are looking better IMO. Free market question, why does the free market not work with a baseline wage to start from? Like say if we built an economy solely from your ideas but made $10 the start point, is that still no good?
Yes, I'm saying Walmart is subsidizing welfare. It's also subsidizing a pretty great standard of living where a lot less money buys a lot more goods. I'm not saying they're perfect - hardly. I can name a few things that bother me about Walmart, but I also think those things are creations of govt. Your proposal is going to pay the HS kid working part time for allowance a big raise when he's lucky to have a job at all. It's not a free market if you have ANY rule or regulation at all. A $10 starting point makes it a managed market and managed markets are messed up. You can see it in health care costs, single providers of utilities and cable/internet, etc. ObamaCare is a perfect example. Mandate everyone gets it, and you think the companies will pay and eat the cost. But they don't and won't. They'll cut hourly workers to under 30/week to avoid the law's requirements (which is how it was in Hawaii for decades, where employer mandates existed). You've distorted the market that much. It's even dubious that a public/private partnership works. The govt. did provide land for the railroads, but the railroad barons put up enormous amounts of capital (at risk), so they deserve the reward. The land? Worthless to anyone else, so no loss to anyone including the taxpayer.
Protecting our borders--which is one of the primary jobs of the Federal Government--isn't distorting the market. Nice try, however.
Our borders always have been protected. We used to have the longest peaceful borders north and south of any nation in the world until we tried to keep people out for no good reason.
My proposal is pretty vague and obviously not complete. So we could make provisions for highschool kids working. Heres a thought though, currently high school kids dont find work as easily as the use to, I know cause we have one in our house looking, mainly because there are plenty of grown ups who will work harder and be more responsible for the same pay so business owners figure why bother with the young punks? So even if the worst thing to come out of my proposal is a few highschool kids, who actually find jobs, get overpaid then I can live with that. Obamacare is another issue that is tied to this issue, much like education and immigration. We can go on a huge tangent with this but for the sake of this thread Ill save it for the next chain email someone posts here. I do however feel that all these issues are intertwined and part of the same problem. For the record there are plenty of things I dont like about Obamacare but there are more that I do like, but I think you knew that already. Your no rules free market is just to radical (dude). Does that extend to the EPA regulations on business also? Doing a quick search on countries without minimum wage yields the results of such economic goliaths as North Korea, Malaysia, Somalia, Burundi, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan and Suriname. Actually on further investigation Malaysia now has a minimum wage, and the reason stated is "The Malaysian government is seeking to transform the country into a high-income nation by 2020, which would require the average annual income to rise to the equivalent of $15,000. Mr. Najib said last month that per capita income had increased to $9,700 a year, up from $6,700 two years ago" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/business/global/malaysia-enacts-minimum-wage.html?_r=0 Heres an interesting article I found on our minimum wage and its history and effects. Interesting that we didnt have a minimum wage till 1938 and what followed after that was the least amount of income disparity in our nations history along with a the most robust and flourishing economy the world has ever seen. http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/24/opinion/greene-minimum-wage/ So in effect, we've already tried no minimum wage and some other countries already dont do it, so we dont need to reinvent the wheel on this issue.
Sure, we had a booming economy after 1938. Shortly after, we bombed Japanese and German production into oblivion. When we were the only industrial nation left standing, all bulked up from massive military production, boom! Austria has no minimum wage. There are quite a few others. It seems like our economy is strong enough that you don't see the negative effects of poor policies as much. Unemployment at 7% is better than more socialist nations but is maybe double what it could be. How has minimum wage worked for Bosnia, or African nations, Caribbean nations, etc? Not too good. You've got many of those places providing $75 to $200 per month along with struggling economies. You might also look at how we grew big cities and people owned real assets (land, homes), etc, before 1938.
The Chicago Fed wrote this report in 2003. The short version is minimum wage hike of 10% results in a 2-4% job loss for unskilled workers and a 1-3% job loss among skilled workers. On top of that, any higher cost of employees is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. The caveat is this is for the food industry, which employs "only" 11.5 million workers. Over half that number is high school kids working for an allowance. http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/working_papers/2003/wp2003-17.pdf
I don't mean to spam the thread, but I've been reading Robert Reich's blog for a few years now, and I am stunned by the lunacy of what he talks about. For example, http://robertreich.org If the Affordable Care Act were repealed, hundreds of thousands of Americans would have to go back to working at jobs they don’t want but feel compelled to do in order to get health insurance. We’d create jobs, but not progress. Progress requires creating more jobs that pay well, are safe, sustain the environment, and provide a modicum of security. If seeking to achieve a minimum level of decency ends up “killing” some jobs, then maybe those aren’t the kind of jobs we ought to try to preserve in the first place. For starters, he concedes ObamaCare costs hundreds of thousands of jobs. Then he goes on to profess he's some sort of psychic who can devine those people don't want those jobs, or the we shouldn't have those sorts of jobs. All in the name of "progress." Yikes!
