This is a good thread on Minimum Wage. The initial article was written some time ago, and since then the minimum wage has gone to $7.25/hr nation wide as of July 2009, higher in some states ($9.32/hr in Washington state, and now, thanks to Obama's Executive order it is $10/hr for federal contractors.

All through the thread there is some excellent commentary - particularly on the economic issues (see Bill Dwyer's posts, for example).

Here is a bit of history on the minimum wage:

Sidney Webb was a British socialist, economist, and an early member of the Fabian Society in the early 1900s. He believed that establishing a minimum wage above the value of “the unemployables” (that's what he called them), would force them out of the market place thus eliminating them as a class.  "Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners,” Webb said.

This was when Progressivism first began to run rampant, and at that time it was joined at the hip with eugenics (the so-called scientific racism). Another economist, and yet another Progressive, Royal Meeker, out of Princeton University, who became the U. S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics under Woodrow Wilson, said, "It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work… better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”

As you can see, this was before Progressives worked so hard to establish the facade of a caring attitude.

And we don't have social catastrophe now?

Give it a couple years, Obama is not done yet..

If there is going to be a MW, then why must such a concept be federal, and not state based?

IOW, what is the rationale for a MW in Lancaster Coounty farmland to be the same MW as in downtown Manhatten, or San Francisco CA?    Centrally planned, command conttrol 'the' economy running makes about as much sense as centrally planned command-control 'the' weather running; Should we turn 'the' heat up or down today in 'the' nation?   Let's let the folks in Anchorage and Miami send their representatives to the ttribe's steel cage death match struggle for dominance and work that one out.

If 'the people' of one state wanted to set a local MW at $20/hr, and another wanted to set it at $0/hr, then on what basis is it dangerous to let those experiments proceed, in freedom, in parallel?    On what basis does the federal government attempt to set a national MW?

People would supposedly flee one state and flock to the other.   And,  some of us claim to know in advance which way that migration would be.    Would some flee towards jobs, or away from them?  Do jobs breed jobs, or does subsidy breed jobs?   Subsidy from ...what?

OneSizeFitsAll.   All your eggs in one basket.   Single point of failure system design.  

These are some of the great ideas readily accepted from DC.

Why?

regards,

Fred

Re # 85

Yes, Fabianism was socialist by saying that gradualist reform would lessen the real possibility of an armed revolution.

That's becauise the avowedly anti-socialist of this era had their heads buried in the sand, thereby ignoring the possibility of losing everything.

And yes, many Fabians, like many conservatives, accepted eugenics--ostensibly cross-cutting political loyalties.

Polanyi's 'Transformation ' is read by any scholar that's interested in English economic history. Refusing to read him based upon ideology is as puerile as assuming one who has read Polanyi shares his political beliefs.

By the 1832 repeal of Spreenhamland (1795), parliament declared that realistically, Poor Laws made people poor. Actually reading Polanyi would paint this picture rather clearly. Likewise, an actual reading of Smith will clearly indicate that paying workers market value would increase their prosperity.

The voting dymanics of 1832 were an alliance between the Smithsonians, who cared about workers, and the followers of Townsed, who didn't. Hence, the 'Townsend Acts', repealed in 1834.

This leads to my own point, and to a certain degree my own beliefs--to wit:

You can either be opposed to the increase in minimum wage because it's harmful to the wage earner, or because you don't care about the wage earner. Arguing both is obiter dictae, which I suppose is a fancy word for 'hypocrite'. I opt for the former, which is why I enter into discussion and read those with whom I disagree regarding ends.

My own view is that minimum wage is a canard caused by an inadequacy of the funds available for wage compensation by the employer. This is caused by excessive taxation.

In other words, the entire notion of 'market value' for wages is somewhat of a conceptual mis-nomer to begin with because an employer can only pay what he/she has. Moreover, there's tons of evidence to demonstrate that employer loyalty and retention is so low (thereby dragging productivity down.) because of aggregate lack of labor funds.

Releasing wage funds via a large lessening of taxes would make the minimum wage issue redundant. This is why, again the focus should be only upon the tax issue.

As to where that puts me on a Wolfer scale of 'socialism vs capitalism', I could care less. Obviously the drivelings of someone who stoops so low as to cut my citations of English history and paste them in as my own beliefs.

So again:

"Given the cultural inevitabllity of some form of welfare, would it not be better to follow the 'Amerrican model' to pay all workers market-value , and to simply make up everyone's difference though welfare entitlements and benefits? Besides, unemployent is a huge affront to personal dignity"

In context of my previous post, this refers to how the English conceived of their own policy with respect totheir own history.

So is Wolfer unable to intellectually walk and chew gum at the same time?.

Or perhaps he's just a garden-varietty fascist who refuses to believe that "unemployment is a huge affront to human dignity"?

EM

Eva:

I have to assume you didn't mean 'everyone.'

I have to assume you meant "make up the level of earnings of those few who earn less than some bare level of sustainance,  as in Hayek's safety net, due to some severe disability."

But that would certainly not be 'everyone' nor, very many at all.

Fred

With libertarians like Eva who needs to worry about socialists!?

Eva:

Well, as anyone with any street sense at all knows, the only thing that bitching up leads to is greater demands to bitch up.   As in, a national policy aimed at avoiding the urge of mobs to riot to get what they think they want by giving them what they want only invites such mobs to want even more. "Pony up or we riot" is pure criminal logic, period.   At some point, those who can realize there are more effective ways of avoiding the clumsy forks of those who can't.  Because along the way to the revolution, there is power to be gained by pandering to idiots and telling them what they want to hear; the mob sells itself incredibly cheaply, and is taken advantage of by those seeking power, but in the end, they do it to themselves, by accepting the pandering.

In the 80s, in my clueless youth, I drove around my berg in a red Porsche.   True enough, I got tired of coming out not to rioting mobs complaining about the flesh of the proletariate ground into the treads of those Perellis, but to anonymous acts of cowardly 'keying' by perp weasels long gone and out of reach.  So I suspect when it comes to riots in the streets, the mob is going to need to bring its lunch, after finding its balls.    Loved the car, but got tired of the scratches in the arrest me red paint.

So I wised up.  Now I drive through town in a virtuous ten year old red Jeep Wrangler-- my second, most of the time with no doors on it in the summer.  Love that Jeep-- and as far as anyone can tell, I appear just like decent folks.   I'm right there cheering on the last true working men and women in America.   Power to the people.   Let's go get those rich bastards holding us all down.    And at my tiny, tiny, office, I dutifully file all the resumes that wierdly get sent to me, by folks blindly looking for jobs; do they do any research at all on the firms they apply to?  I havent had any employess of any kind in over 20 years. Hope their rage and faith in government works out for them, and have long stopped wondering how long they are willing to wait for that to happen.  Apparently it is endless and boundless, because they keep begging for even more of the same.

God Bless America.

Just finished reading "Fragging" by George Lepre, because it has always been a mystery to me; why so little of it, after one of the biggest government atrocities ever.  The lessons of "Fragging" are a surprise.   The practice was rare, and what little there was of it, usually in rear areas, and seldom in combat units.  Little political insight, in the end a fringe form of the usual crime over the usuall human causes of friction, only, augmented by olive drab and access.  I was hoping for some greater insight, but perhaps the lesson was the nature of the 'access.'  The actual perps were not at hand.

  The achievement of the effort and sacrifice in Korea has been over half a century of a free South Korea.   In Vietnam, after over ten years of conflict, the same weasels in DC who sent America's best into a meatgrinder and pumped money into and out of Ike's MIC safely from Georgetown bistros ended the conflict with "never mind, America really didn't mean it."    If it was acceptable to end that conflict with that sentiment, then it was acceptable to have never entered the conflict to begin with, before sending so many Americans into a meatgrinder going nowhere.  So, why were government heads not placed onto pikes so to speak, by the thousands?   I will never understand the meek complacency of either the victims or those who sanctioned their sacrifice in the service of that sad ending, for nothing.  If it was for nothing, then heads needed to roll.   Nixon's lonely symbolic resignation was not even close to paying that bill.

And now, we add Iraq and even Afghanistan to the 'never mind, America really didn't mean it' roll of national shame.   And by national shame, I am not talking about the actions of our military; I am talking about the nation and its weasely civilian command, and what our nation tolerates in its name.  How dare we keep using America's best to serve the sad resume building political ends of America's worst.

Neither America--nor any nation-- can afford to enter a conflict that it is willing to lose.  If losing it is acceptable, then not entering the conflict is also acceptable, before the sacrifices.   And here is where out military gets politically abused; if an administration and Congress  enters the nation into a conflict, then it had better enter it in such a manner that the conflict is over quickly, with massive out of balance force, because allowing the conflict to grind away for years, as profitable as that might be for the corrupt CronyFest on the Potomac, will soon result in a change of administration who sees nothing but short term political gain in ending the folly of the previous administration, national interests be damned.

Fred

You can either be opposed to the increase in minimum wage because it's harmful to the wage earner, or because you don't care about the wage earner.

No, those of us who can intellectually walk and chew gum at the same time know that's a false alternative.

You can be opposed to minimum wage legislation because the government has no legal or moral authority to dictate terms to the private arrangement between two people. Because you are opposed to forced association. Because you support individual rights, and that includes the right to enter into private agreements that don't involve the initiation of force. In other words, for the same generic reason that one would oppose rape. It is morally wrong. It also happens to harm the economies that are effected by the legislation, and it does not help that very class of people that it is intended to help (if the minimum wage is set to low, it is just a meaningless meddle that establishes a bad principle and wastes time and money - if it is set higher, it generates unemployment, aids competitors in foreign countries, and harms businesses, their suppliers, and their investors). But the first concern should always be that minimum wage legislation is immoral and illegal.

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Employer's don't pay a wage rate that is dictated by money on hand. You clearly have never been in business. And your understanding of "market value wages" is also flawed. Market value wages is what is paid in a market where they are legally free to pay what they can get workers to work for and that they are willing to pay and that will be sustained over time as a productive business result. It is just the average taken in a free market.

There are many reasons why a business has less money rather than more: decreased market for their goods, increase in effective competition in their market, increased taxation, deflation, side effects of inflation, higher costs of production or capital, etc.
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Matthews claims that I can't intellectually walk and chew gum at the same time. Isn't that a sad excuse for an argument?  And given how confused she is on so many issues and what with her still being in her tender, gum-chewing years, it's hardly the best metaphor to trot out.

She also says I don't care about the human indignity of unemployment and therefore I must be a fascist. I won't go into my history either as employed, as unemployed, as self-employed and as an employer - that might not be fair to her, since she has only been out of her diapers for such a comparatively short time and hasn't yet been out there working for a living as a grownup.  (My guess... she won't leave the university - she'll fasten firmly to academia's teat and never let go.)

Being called a fascist is offensive, but it is also strange. It is the far left that always blathers on about the need to help the unemployed while at the same time they enact the very policies that caused the unemployment. Me, I advocate for liberty - which is the greatest single source of employment ever known. That's not fascism and that I need to explain that to her is really telling.  Isn't the heart of fascism forced association?  I think of facism as one of the places where you end up after you do enough compromises on political principles.

re 97:

All this rant for a l'il o'l 'K'? This puts me in the 'far left?!