marshall wrote:
Jacoby wrote:
If we actually had honest money then lower wages wouldn't be a problem. The dollar has lost 97% of its value since 1913.
You can't force increases in wages, it only inflates prices and gives disincentive to hire lower skilled workers and cuts them out of the employment ladder all together. Nobody is going to pay somebody who's labor is only worth $5 an hour $10 an hour. If you raise minimum wage what do you think happens to purchasing power of somebody making $10? And those people cut out of the employment ladder are supported by someone, so money employed people make which is worth less now has to go to these dependents.
You've gotten the cause-and-effect completely backwards. Raising the minimum wage doesn't cause inflation. Increasing the money supply faster than the real rate of economic growth leads to inflation. Only a central bank can cause inflation.
The worst thing raising the minimum wage can do is increase unemployment.
I also object to the idea that a wage reflects the objective worth of what a lower skilled worker provides.
It can contributes to the inflation of prices, it's not the main cause of it now obviously since the minimum wage isn't that high and the amount of people actually making minimum wage is something like less than 3%. Higher cost of labor will result in higher prices tho, it's a fairly simple concept. You seem the understand how it creates higher unemployment and I would assume you understand why you can't just raise wages to like $80 an hour, so why do you still support minimum wage? Minimum wage laws do help cover up the the real damage our inflationary monetary has done I guess, wages actually haven't increased at the rate of inflation.
And I'm not sure what you're objecting to on that last part, I don't understand what you are implying by that.
Unless there is an actual shortage of labor, unskilled workers cannot effectively bargain for a higher wage so minimum wage laws are justified from an ethical point of view. The claim that the mere existence of a minimum wage causes inflation just isn't empirically supported.
Also, only right wingers seem to think that inflation is the worst thing ever, even worse than starving masses of unemployed proles. This is probably because it is in the logical self-interest of the wealthy hoarding class to despise inflation and pray for deflation.
10 Dec 2012, 12:43 am
