Can America afford to pay a higher minimum wage?

A minimum wage is not price fixing.
You cannot equate labor with merchandise,
That is mercantilistic thinking.
Wages are not 'forced'. You can always pay more than the minimum.
You need to climb out of your neoliberal bubble.

 

Workers in sweat shops in China work 16 hours per day, 6 days per week.

Are they exploited?

You seem to think everyone is in a position to walk away from work that is offered. You seem to think everyone has plenty of money in the bank that they can just say no and hold out for a better offer.

That's not reality for a lot of people.

Not when there aren't many choices, when they are starving, and when they have mouths to feed.

They are ripe for exploitation.

If there was so such thing as exploitation, the term would not exist, now would it.

Corporations are not about paying people enough to live on, they are only about doing whatever they can get away with for maximum profits.

WTFU.

 

Not true.

CEO makes 300x bottom rung.

so, change it to 250x bottom run, and pay bottom a few bucks more. No price change.

You think the top guy can live on 250x bottom?

You think the top guy can manage to squeak by on one less spoonful of caviar?

WTFU.

 

No one is telling anyone what to purchase.

What the **** are you talking about. Talk about strawman arguments.

All I am talking about i paying the bottom rung enough to live on, what's with the nonsense argument?

 

Sure, they are getting the workers output in return. The state is just putting a high enough value on it such that the person can live.
It's no different than if low skilled workers had a union to bargain for higher wages.
Without a union, the government doing the bargaining, it is just saying, 'you can't pay someone not enough to live on'.

THAT Is what is immoral. Paying someone not enough to live on is immoral, because they will seek government assistance, and that burden's the taxpayer, and the value the taxpayer pays is what the corporation should have paid in the first place.

No it isn't. That's ridiculous. Is stopping at a stop sign 'force'? Technically yes, but it's for the greater good.

Similarly, a minimum wage which allows people enough income to live on is for the greater good, lest they go on government assistance at a net higher cost to society. That is the moral path. What you are suggesting is a dog eat dog libertarian Utopia.

Your libertarian "freedom" is just slavery with different wrapper. Not paying someone enough to live on, when that person's bargaining power is nothing compared to the corporation is a kind of tyranny. Give the worker the same bargaining power as the corporation, give them a union. Short of that, the state must exert it's authority on the minimum wage, for the greater good.

 

Right now, the minimum wage is a living wage. Work 60 hours a week like I used to and you can get by. But when you're making that money, you can't piss it off on the latest i-phone, latest big screen TV, latest amazon/netflix subscription, new car, etc.

Friggin people in poverty in this country are better off than 98% of the world's population and we have to sit here as listen to this bullshit about "a living wage".

Tell you what, I'll go for $15 bucks/hour minimum wage in exchange for cancelling every welfare program in the country. Deal? After all, you're getting your 'living wage' (by your standards) so who would need food stamps and the like anymore?

 

Not at $7 bucks an hour it's not. Maybe $10, which is what it was in the 60s, adjusting for inflation, and no one complained, but now, all of the sudden, it' a big deal. I'm not arguing for a $15 minimum. Personally, though it would work it Seattle and L.A. but not in small towns in other states, but since it was $10 ( adjusting for inflation) in the 60s, the minimum hasn't kept up, and it should at least be that.

 

negotiation, the offer and acceptance of a contract, is the essence of capitalism. if the employee is in no position to decline the offer of dub standard pay, we are not talking about capitalism at all, but some kind of weird feudalism.

the minimum wage question really hinges upon the value of money. when the minimum wage was $2.45 (i had 1 full time job at 5.75 and a second job at the convenience store for minimum. my wife waitressed at $.90 per hour + tips.) i bought a house (g i bill) for $12,000 and a used chevy malibu for $1,000. 50 years later that same house is $750,000 (X60) but the jobs pay $12 (X2) and whatever the minimum wage is now (X3) until wages can be aligned more closely with the value of a dollar someone is being exploited.

discussing minimum wage with "conservatives" is never productive for all of the reasons displayed above. wages are not regulated by free market capitalism because a limited number of employers can agree to a fixed wage, and can always depend upon a desperate labor market to work for less, or provide more desperate immigrants to work for even less.

 

A totally silly argument that simply has nothing to do with whether or not we should increase the minimum wage.

 

Not sure if this problem is the same in the States as the UK, but here we have an issue where those being paid low wages are not those employed by the very wealthy. They work in the service industry in bars and coffee shops. These places are not owned by the filthy rich, but by families and individuals struggling to get by.
I am all for re-sharing of wealth (The wealth gap is obscene) but a minimum wage is not the way to achieve it.

 

Apples and oranges. People stop at stoplights because they don’t want to be killed. That’s a ludicrous analogy.

No minimum wage hike has ever caused people to work harder. If they know the government is forcing a minimum pay then they are not appreciative as if they earned it. As in a raise.

You keep forgetting a basic economical principle of value. People are FREE to work where they choose. I know freedom and Liberty are punchlines to the left, but they actually matter.

Yes it is slavery. Except employers are the slaves. Slaves to government will and force. In order to be a slave , someone has to have power over you. Can you understand that? Do you know what slavery is?

This is why your argument is immoral.
You can only implement your idea through force.
You overlook simple economic principles (value) that don’t consider freedom of choice.
You have to compartmentalize to justify your argument.

Also your argument rides on two simple false premises.
1. There is a finite amount of wealth.
2. You view the economy from bottom up instead of the top down.
Consumer spending doesn’t drive the economy. Production does.

 

This^^ With the exception of the idea that businesses are able to pass costs onto the public. Every business already charges the maximum they can get for the product or service they provide. Increasing the price translates into losing some customers, just as decreasing the price brings more customers at a lower profit.
After a very short time every business has worked out the best price they can get, anymore and they lose custom, any less doesn't bring enough new custom to cover the loss.

 

How is minimum wage not price fixing? Lol
You are literally fixing the price of labor.
Unions do the same thing. They aren’t getting paid more because they work harder. They just FORCE the employer to pay more until they go out of business. (Detroit)
Have you learned anything from the abandoned cities?

 

So you’re using a communist country as an example? With little freedom.
Yes Comrade they are exploited. Absolutely!
Apples and oranges.

You seem to think that’s a bad thing for companies to maximise profits. You must not have any money in the stock market.

The reason people start companies is to make money. Their purpose is not to employ people.

 

It is quite possible to make money and be fair, they are not mutually exclusive.

 

Who decides what is fair and by what standard?
I agree with you. In fact in a free society the contract needs to be win-win.

 

The government.

 

In my view the minimum wage simply gives employers and excuse to underpay people. It needs to go away. Get government out of the way and let the market handle what the market should handle.

 

I agree. Minimum wage creates a level for employers to aim down to.

 

You are applying every day transactionalism, merchantilism, the kind you see on Ebay, to wages.

But a corporation's bargaining position has vastly the greater advantage over the singular unskilled worker.

That leaves them ripe for exploitation. Your mercantilistic thinking can be criminal if it is used to justify exploitation, hence the need for minimum wage laws.

I doubt you will ever see that point. so, let's just leave it be.

Capitalism is not without flaws. Is it just that a large corporation undersells in a given market to bleed it's smaller competitors out of business, whereby the larger corporate intentionally sells at a loss, a loss they can afford, but their competitors cannot, to drive thei smaller competitors out of business? Is that just?

No, it's not, but it's done all the time under the banner of 'capitalism'.

Also, in your 'free markets' we see vulture capitalists who find it far more profitable to buy struggling companies, gut them, sell off their assets, than it is to fix them and develop products and market them and save jobs. Is that just? No, but it's done all the time under the banner of capitalism.

For capitalism to be just, it must be regulated, lest we get fewer and fewer competitors, and capital aggregates in fewer hands, jobs being exported overseas, which is what has happened in America, under the banner of 'free market neoliberalism'.

 

All arguments against the minimum wage are silly. But, that thought hadn't occurred to you.

 

I mean stop signs, which, without the law, they would roll past, (and some do, anyway) and thus, a perfect analogy

 

In the 60s, we had a minimum higher than now, and for years, unemployment was less than 4%. So, reasonable minimums do not cause unemployment.

Setting minimums is not price fixing because one can always pay more voluntarily, which means there is no fixed price.

Unions bargain for wages. That's no different that the price you bargain for on Ebay.

Your reference to Detroit is simplistic and unworkable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit

 

China's aggregate economy is not communist, it' capitalist. There are more state run enterprizes than America, but there is plenty of capitalism in China such that you can no longer call it a communist country. It's a mixed economy like Europe and America, but without democracy.. The gov is run by the communist party, but that's just the moniker now, they do not impose communism in toto like they used to. Those exploited workers can choose to leave, if they want to.

Apples to apples. sorry.

I'm all for profits, but not for exploitation. There is a happy medium.

 

Unfortunately for the left arguments against government interference in the economy such as minimum wage are imminently logical and completely logical where as arguments in favor of such interference are invariably couched in terms of emotional appeals and throw out argue such as the OP vouched on terms of envy and some ephemeral notion of fairness utterly disconnected from reality.