Minimum wage must be abolished!

People don't have a choice!! Market dependent people at the lowest wage levels cannot choose to avoid exploitative relationships, because they would starve otherwise. If the choice is between housing and food for you and your family, or an exploitative employment relationship, there is an extraordinary amount of coercion inherent to that relationship. There are government programs which make those decisions less prevalent, but that then just makes the exploitative relationship be between the state and the individual.

 

Like I said, I guess they are too stupid to decide for themselves if such a relationship (exploitative or not) is preferable to starving or whatever other fate awaits them with no wage and no place to go? Even a small job can give someone a sense of worth and dignity, much better than just wasting away in a gutter somewhere. You would deny them the opportunity to extricate themselves from that position or to supplement their already meager existence with a small wage? I just don't understand what, exactly, is accomplished by telling people they are not allowed to work for X, aside from making the advocates of such feel better about themselves. Do we really think the cause of crushing poverty is a low minimum wage? I sure don't.

 

The solution is to fix the root of the problem, which is an inflationary monopoly money called the USD. Even if you succeed in getting the minimum wage raised, you will be back in two or three years fighting the same battle. And you can talk about indexing it to inflation, but that is a very tenuous proposition given the uncertainty of future interest rates and money supply dynamics. So, the only real way to solve the problem is to institute a Friedman-rule that targets inflation at zero percent. That does not mean the money supply remains fixed. Only the ratio of the money supply to the economy remains fixed. Simply put, the money supply expands in response to real economic growth, not as an attempt to induce or sustain it.

 

It helps curb Marxist tendencies in the ranks of poor workers, but I still wouldn't agree with your argument if that were not the case.

 

There is also the matter of unequal land distribution and regulatory barriers to entry in many sectors of the economy.

 

Capitalists will pay their workers as little as they can possibly get away with. Even without a minimum wage, any government social programs to assist the poor will keep that number higher than the market would do. However, without a minimum wage or social programs, exploitative relationships are inevitable. I am sorry, but working in soul crushing conditions for little pay strips people of all their dignity!! The idea that this would be character building is unimaginably absurd!!

 

You aren't even addressing the substance of my argument. Come back when you're ready to have a mature discussion.

 

There is no substance!! You are making a fallacious argument about intelligence, which is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with people being intelligent, and everything to do with people being coerced into exploitative relations by market forces. Saying people are smart enough to make their own decisions is irrelevant nonsense. If structural conditions create exploitative relations, those people are making decisions within those confined structural conditions. You are talking like people have unlimited agency, when in reality their agency is constrained. That makes a huge difference.

Also, a minimum wage doesn't alleviate poverty. The lack of a minimum wage wasn't the source of poverty. However, within the confines of the current system, a minimum wage and welfare programs eliminates the most exploitative conditions. You don't see them anymore, so you are able to ignorantly pretend they don't exist. However go to other parts of the world or just look at American labor history, and you will see exactly that. People worked to death to keep themselves and their families from dying. Just go look at coal miners in the late 19th and early 20th century. If you want to reproduce those conditions, created by the capitalist market, be my guest, but no one else will want to join you.

 

There you go again, trying to besmirch "market forces" and conflate it with your favorite Marxist bromide "capitalism". What "market forces" cause prices to continually rise, necessitating increases in the minimum wage? I guess for the purposes of your argument, you get to ignore the pervasive and elitist influence of the progressive monetary system and attribute all the ills of poverty to some unspecified "market forces'? Talk about a lack of substance!

I already acknowledged that. If their choice is between working in an "exploitative relationship" and starving, then why would you take away their best option, which is working? You think it's better to have no income at all?

Thanks for admitting the truth. So maybe instead of wasting your time defending an economically unsound price-fixing scheme and lobbing Marxist bromides at markets, you could concentrate on the actual causes of poverty.

I am not defending the "current system". The "current system" is statist centralization of power with politicians and other elites that began in the late 1800's with the progressive movement, not "laissez faire" or "deregulation" based movements.

Those working conditions were largely a function of the limited technology and knowledge of the time/region. All countries have to go through a process of industrialization before they can lift themselves out of abject poverty like China and India. You don't go from subsistence farming to white picket fences on a bed of roses. Of course, it didn't/doesn't help that their central government were working so hard on behalf of special interests to make this process of growth and development so unfair and harsh. Perhaps if they instituted more market-based reforms during those eras, it would have turned out better for the people.

 

it's only a min wage, businesses are free to pay more, just the min wage is the least you can pay someone

 

Well I'm going to watch the evil capitalist NFL exploit everyone or something. Have a nice day!

 

I wonder if republicans think this is really a winning strategy, taking away the min wage from millions of Americans?

.

 

They don't care.

But, that is how they lose.

That is why the first order of business for a Republican governor is gerrymandering.

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The tax-exempt organization that uses TAXPAYERS to fund its stadiums?

 

The era when the Government used troops to gun down workers who had the nerve to protest horrid and unsafe working conditions (Haymarket affair).

Hopeless.... simply hopeless, you have been brainwashed by your masters at WND and FAUX.

 

Fine. You can exchange it for whatever the market will bear, and if the market does not want your labor, or if it decides (as it has for many older workers in our country) that it has no need for you whatsoever, good luck.

 

Yeah, it's up to the patrons of the market to pay the employers wage....just like in the restaurant industry. Let's make those 'managers' serve the patrons. They make all the money, huh? That oughta increase profits. I think we should do it immediately. One 80K manager, as server, manager, food preparer, dishwasher, and cleanup crew. After all, if he's making 80K, he's making good money, and is a corporate 'success story'.

 

Yes, it's the beginning of the progressive era of government in the US.

The great depression occurred in the era of the progressive income tax and the federal reserve system. Those were both creations of the progressive movement in 1913. Maybe you should read some actual history instead of Rachel Maddow's blog.

If you're trying to solve poverty by raising the minimum wage, then you'll need a lot more luck than me.

 

I don't see Obama trying to tax them...

 

Working for pennies? Hmm, before a minimum wage came along our living standards went way up. How do you explain this?

Also, if you abolished the minimum wage, who would you find that would agree to work for pennies?

 

Excellent post.

Even more astonishing is the fact that they believe a system is more "fair" when one negotiator in a transaction has the power of coercion.

Somehow two people freely interacting with each other is exploitation, whilst one party having the power of force isn't?

What an Alice in Wonderland world we live in.

 

Ok, I come up with the capital, risk my life savings and a few years of my time starting a business. You come along, demand a big salary, assume none of the risk and accrue all the benefits.

Do you think I'm naive?

 

It is why such endeavors should only be attempted, from a risk capital fund for that purpose.

 

I don't think that limiting opportunity is a good approach. We should have a market based economy in which everyone is given the maximum opportunity to succeed, rather than a politically directed one in which players with large amounts of capital are the sole originators of new enterprises. I have nothing against risk capital funds but they shouldn't be the only source of funding.

 

Not accounting for risk may be accounting for Firm failure due to any risks involved in those markets. It may be why good Capitalists require capital to work with, to make more money.

 

And it was the Progressives who brought an end to such practices by the corporate thugs. I suppose you would like to go back to a time when the corporate masters could use machine guns against workers who had the nerve to strike.

No you should do the actual reading of history (my area of concentration in my degree then and now to get a country out of Recession or Depression were wrong then and wrong now. They have never worked anywhere they have been tried, they have only made the situation much worse since they result in a deflationary spiral.

Some good books on the period
“Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal,” by William E. Leuchtenburg.
"The Glory and the Dream" William Manchester
"Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox" James MacGregor Burns
"The Great Crash: 1929" John Kenneth Galbraith
maybe you should start here http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/01/stiglitz-depression-201201 with a bit of Joseph Stiglitz.




If you're trying to solve poverty by raising the minimum wage, then you'll need a lot more luck than me.[/QUOTE]