Victims of the $15 minimum wage

Minimum wages do not need to increase and keep pace with cost of living, but jumping all the way to $15 so quickly was never going to work.

 

This is also wrong. Government has a necessary role in regulating business because the free market is a fantasy entity that doesn't actually do anything and certainly doesn't take people's lives into consideration. But picking out a randomly high arbitrary number like $15 was as much of a mistake as not having a minimum wage would be.

 

What gives the government the right to take from one person and give to another that is called stealing. Free market is a system that has made the majority of the people in this country well to do. If there was no min wage employers would pay a much higher wage.

 

We do, when we allow the government to levy taxes. Common sense does too, because a country that doesn't invest in itself ends up like one of those places nobody wants to live. But just for fun, do a google search for tax free countries to live in and tell me how soon you'd be moving if all your expenses were paid. Tell me how good the quality of life in those places is.

Taxes are theft.... I don't know where you guys come up with this stuff or how you expect things to work in the modern world. It's all so childish.

Private businesses don't regulate themselves. It doesn't happen and we'd be silly to expect them to. Their goal is their bottom line and their shareholders(if they have them). They don't care about what's good for the nation as a whole, but that's not something that we as a country can just ignore.

 

In this country the Constitution gives the govt. the right to levy taxes.

 

Of course they don't. Their customers regulate them. Private businesses care about their customers (at least the successful ones do), and what's good for the public is good for the nation.

 

Customers don't regulate anything. They buy what they need from companies that sell it. Sure, you may have a handful of folks who are socially conscious and pick and choose what companies to buy from, but the majority of people buy based on three things. Cost, quality, and availability. None of those things have anything to do with solving the problems that actual real regulations are needed for. Expecting customers to regulate a business is essentially the same thing as not having any regulations. The same nothing gets accomplished, or rather, not accomplished.

 

Food trucks are on the rise here.

 

I decide. That is, it is totally my call which businesses I patronize and support with my money, and which businesses that I never walk through their doors. I am the judge.

 

Right, but that has nothing to do with solving the problems that many regulations are intended to solve. You as a consumer are looking out for YOUR best interests only.

 

Everybody should look out for their best interests only, that's what makes the world go round, with the exception of personal out of pocket giving of one's own substance motivated by real charity of the heart.

 

And what a wonderful fantasy world that would be if we could live in. But we are stuck with reality that doesn't work like that.

 

Of course the customers regulate everything. How many places sell black and white TVs these days? Did the government command everyone to stop selling them? The customers' wants are the only regulations businesses need. Government regulations only exist to help big businesses squash little ones. All we need are private property laws that protect the rights of property owners and that's it. Customers will control the rest.

 

I vote my pocketbook, just like the ABC political consultant democrat lady Cokie Roberts told me to do.

I lookout for no. 1 and mine, and I decide.

 

Right, which is exactly why we need to be able to make regulations to address a variety of different problems. The market will never regulate itself and neither will private corporations.

You keep looking out for you and yours, which is exactly what I would expect most folks to do, myself included. But since we don't live on islands with just ourselves and our families unconnected to a bigger outside world, we also need regulations that address problems larger than just one single individual and their family can handle.

 

We were made to go out and get it for ourselves. That's why parents and extended family ask you what are you going to do when you grow up. They don't want to be on the hook.

 

I for one support the $15 minimum wage. It will put a lot of loser deadbeats out of a job and I won't have to deal with them anymore. Bring on the robots!

 

The minimum wage is simply a mechanism to reduce market failure. We know, for example, monopsony effects impact on all markets (even apparently competitive ones). We also know that the market is incapable of delivering efficiency wage rates (as shown how unions are able to increase both wages and productivity, leaving unit labour cost changes ambiguous). But when we start talking about a living wage? The rationale changes. Transforming the labour market becomes key. Shocks, eliminating resources skewed in favour of profit reliant on low wage labour, becomes a long term positive outcome.