I saw the mom and her two little kids camped out in the shopping center parking lot. She held a sign asking for help to feed them. I bought some oranges and bananas for them. Imagine if someone from the government had swooped in to explain that my bag of fruit was hardly sufficient to feed the struggling family. What if the government then passed a law saying that if anybody decided to donate food (or cash) to people begging on the street or in a parking lot, the contribution had to be worth at least $15? Anybody caught giving, say, a $1 bill or a small bag of fruit would be fined heavily. Does that sound like âpro-homelessâ legislation?
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 5th, 2015 |
 22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Anyone would think that minimum wage laws are a cynical ploy by politicians to attract votes.
Actually, I don’t think they are even that. I think they’re a cynical ploy to give supporters a stick to beat the opposition over the head with.
Pro-homeless? You mean to encourage having more homeless people?
I don’t know about the “pro-homeless”, but it sure sounds like legislation.
Clearly. A great many government policies are aimed at producing problems for government to then alleviate.
Well, as you know Perry, “sin” taxes are to discourage and reduce the occurrence of certain activities, and subsidization is to encourage the occurrence of, so of course taxing personal production and earnings is to discourage the sinful act of personal productivity for “selfish” reasons, and subsidizing poverty is to increase the occurrence of poverty, to encourage the individual to fail oneself, one’s community and one’s family. (Because, of course, poverty is lack of other people’s money).
…or is the “philosophy” of the left self-contradictory?
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Speaking of “at least $15/hr”, what cracks me up the most about this rhetoric is the insistance from the left that businesses like Walmart pay their cashiers a “living wage” of $15/hr, when anyone can walk in off the street and self-check themselves out at the automated check-out lanes for free, with no skills and no training. And who ultimately pays for this “living wage”, the evil corporation? Nope, all revenue ultimately comes from the customers. So, why would any customer want to pay some skill-less worker $15/hr to drag bar codes accross a scanner and hit a total button when they can do it themselves for free with just a moment’s trouble? Why don’t we just pay people a “living wage” to dig holes in the ground and then fill them back up again? That would make an equal amount of sense, (or lack thereof).
@Thailover
> Speaking of âat least $15/hrâ, what cracks me up the most about this rhetoric is the insistance from the left that businesses like Walmart pay their cashiers a âliving wageâ of $15/hr,
To think any different would be to suggest that the left either knows about or gives two figs about the most basic laws of economics, which they don’t.
I see that the UK is introducing this idea of the “living wage.” I notice because I have taken up the amusement of watching Prime Minister’s Question time on the web. I am actually confused by it though. Harriet Harmon is so mellow it looks like she smokes some dope before she goes out there. What is that all about?
Nonsense. Real, live cashiers can, at least sometimes and if they speak English, answer actual, complicated questions like “Can you tell me where to find pet supplements?” (Highly idiomatic, by the way. No, this does not mean “supplemental pets.”) There’s even a 60% chance that they will have a correct answer.
Everybody sit down: You’re not going to believe this, but just this last week the cashier who checked me out actually counted back my change!
I almost fainted with shock and ecstasy. Talk about returning to a more civilized age!
I’m afraid I don’t think the analogy between these charitable acts and the minimum wage really works. There may be some employers who offer jobs to very low paid workers from charitable motives, but in most cases, employers hire workers because they want their labour. And the minimum wage regulationists are betting that the employers will continue to want almost as much labour as they did before. Precisely how much the demand for labour will fall as a result of any particular minimum wage obviously depends on all sorts of practical matters, such as the ease and cost of substitution, the freeness of trade with un or less regulated places, and all that swaddling.
A charitably minded person faced with any of the delightfully nutty schemes suggested, can always walk away with a rueful smile, at no cost to himself aside from a dull regret at the madness of crowds. An employer faced with the minimum wage has no “walk away free” option. If he walks away, his business collapses. He has to calculate whether to close down, or if not, how to adapt.
I am rather heretical about the minimum wage, as far as this blog is concerned. I really don’t think it’s very important to the economy as a whole – most production is done by more productive workers. Sure it’s a bad thing for the workers who lose, or never get, jobs, and it’s a bad thing for society to have an unhappy lumpenproletariat glued to its collective sofa. But the minimum wage is popular. Its worst effects can be mitigated by letting nutty places increase it so that it has a real and obvious effect, and that’ll keep it in check in other places.
It’s a foolish and wicked crime against the poor – but it’s the two and and eighteenth windmill along, for libertarians to tilt at. Tilt as easier and more important ones first.
Lee, of course minimum wage isn’t important to the economy as a whole, as minimum wage workers in the states make up about 3% of the labor force, and 80% of that 3% are people simply adding to the other income they get from their primary jobs, and virtually all the rest of that 3% make most of their income in tips, and let’s not forget young teens working part time, and the elderly and retired who have an income cap they can’t exceed without jepardizing their SS income. (Think skycaps, valet’s etc). The median income of minimum wage earners in the states is about 50K/yr, no doubt driven up by the aforementioned 80%. As you suggested the people who are taking raises to MW on the chin are the kids, the elderly, and businesses who rely on unskilled labor, like fast food joints. The tragedy of MW is that it harms the very people it perports to help.
Fraser, “Living Wage” is a prime example of how pro-union arguments and pro-Marxist arguments are identical except for the use of (or lack of) certain buzz phrases like ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’. Nothing much funnier to me than a patriotic all-American pro-union guy who hasn’t a clue that he’s actually a Marxist. LOL.
Harriet gave up trying to get the top job (previously PM then Leader of the Labour party) after several attempts proved that Labour MP’s might be stupid, but they aren’t stupid enough to vote for a misandrist, nagging harpy who used to support the UK equivalent of NAMBLA called the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange
As a token, she was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 2007 and as such, when the Labour Party loses an election (2010 and 2015), she ends up doing a brief stint as Acting Leader until they decide which Muppet to elect as Labour leader next.
Harriet is pretty tainted by the Blair, Brown and Miliband era’s and it’s clear she’s never going to get to be PM, so when they elect a new Labour leader, they’ll be electing a new Deputy Labour leader as well as Harriet says she won’t run, so she’ll just become another backbench MP.
In short she’s on the down-slope of her political career, spending her last days in the limelight and under strict orders to not be embarrassing and not make any commitments about anything.
In those circumstances you can understand why she’s a bit muted. If the US Vice Presidency isn’t worth a bucket of cold piss then Harriet’s role is even further down the scale.
I had a bloke I used to use from time to time in the old rental business to assist me moving furniture.
He has mildly retarded, nice bloke and built like a brick shithouse. Wed spend a couple of hours shifting stuff and Id pay him $20.
I didnt need to use him but it made my life easier, he enjoyed it so it was win-win.
The funny thing is, the same government that would decry my using his labour so cheap had no problems of making nearly the same amount from him by ripping him off for one of his vices.
The excise on a pack of 20 will climb from $8.13 to $9.25, an increase of $1.12. The excise on a pack of 40 will climb from $16.26 to $18.51.
Morally sick people.
Which, if you work it out is equal to the current gross wage less the tax as Adam Smith Institute fellow Tim Worstall keeps pointing out.
So if the government agrees with the concept of the “living wage” then they just need to stop taxing folk under the threshold of about 17k per annum in London and about 14k per annum outside of London.
In fairness to George Osbourn, he’s trying to do this to “make work pay for the less well off”, but needs to balance the books too.
More work is needed to raise the tax free allowances for income tax and national insurance, but they’ve risen substantially since Osbourn became chancellor in 2010.
John Galt, as a friend of mine pointed out, even pond scum can be used to feed the ducks, and a bucket of cold piss can at least be used to treat athletes foot and coral scrapes. The American VP position is less useful than that.
đ
John Galt wrote, “So if the government agrees with the concept of the âliving wageâ then they just need to stop taxing folk under the threshold of about 17k per annum in London and about 14k per annum outside of London.”
John, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. It just wouldn’t do for them to get rid of their ostensible justification for stealing from the productive (using G-men with guns) and doling out a small, small, small percentage of the booty to those who haven’t earned it themselves. The last thing the gov is interested in doing is to eliminate themselves as useless middlemen.
Lee Moore said:
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Thailover,
The US VP position has its use. Where else would anyone have put a Spiro T. Agnew or many other fantastically named characters? So in effect it is a repistory for stray Gormenghast characters.
According to the article, the minimum wage “attacks the benefactors of the unskilled.”
No proponent of the minimum wage sees the world like this. To them, employers are not benefactors. They *exploit* the unskilled. It’s cheap labour. It’s akin to slavery. For them the world is capitalists vs. workers, not state vs. individuals.
Doubly impressive if he was checking you out at the same time.
“You’re not going to believe this but…”. Why? Is it such an obvious lie or do you think you know me well enough to accurately judge my gullibility quotient?
Our local Waitrose has great staff. On Saturday I had a conversation, with the very nice lady on checkout, about how often they stock Ostrich Eggs. They are in stock at present and were last so about two years ago, it seems. She didn’t think prices had varied much in that time. You don’t get that in Aldi but they do sell some decent German cold meats and have a seeming disregard for any sort of “product association” in their displays which is quite amusing.
Watchman, lol.