Why Increasing Minimum Wage is Meaningless

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That's the great thing about the market though, it will correct itself; if businesses can't find workers at the wages they're offering, they'll offer more, or more benefits, or some other enticement, and if the prices are too high and products aren't selling, they'll change the product or find a way to make it cheaper or go out of business and something new will pop up, it's part of the process. The problems come when people try to sever the cost of goods and labor from their true market value one way or the other, such as pricing labor above its value; ironically one of the beneficiaries of that is big business, who can absorb the cost in ways that small business cannot, and then behave much more abusively in the absence of competition. MacDonald's can afford to tack an extra nickle onto every item on their menu to offset a labor hike, a small operator doesn't have that scale and has to add dollars, and then people can't afford to go there and end up at MacDonald's, and then the little guys all go out of business and end up working at MacDonald's alongside their former employees, where everyone is making a "fair" wage, but they only place to eat is MacDonald's. Sounds great right?



Have you ever owned a business? There's nothing fast about it, it's more like "invest your life savings and work harder than you ever have in your life for less money than you've ever made, and hope like hell it eventually pays off", just working for someone else is much safer. You seem to have this idea that all business is big business and operating off of that playbook, but it's not, and if you treat everything like big business, pretty soon all you're going to have is big business, and I don't imagine you'll be very happy about it.

Sounds good to me.

I don't think of the market as some omniscient, omnipotent intelligence that capitalists seem to have convinced themselves it is. Business doesn't always do the right thing, because there isn't some all powerful deity called The Market that grants good business sense and prosperity to all.
No, small business isn't like big business in that respect. But the small businessmen I've known are mostly pretty right wing, and like to imagine that they're no different from big business. That means their sympathies are with big business, and they see the employee as the enemy, even though they have much more in common with their workers than with the wealthy captains of industry.

Last edited by Kraichgauer on 17 Jan 2022, 11:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

lol baby steps.. first we have to be able to identify who the landlord even is. Seriously - numbered shell corporations own houses and don't have to list who the beneficial owner(s) is(are). There are tenants with landlord problems and the government can't even figure out who owns the house to try to contact them to deal with it!

i would ban foreigners from buying property here.

We would, too. But too little too late now.. a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out. Plus if we told the rest of the world we were going to stop letting them launder money here I think they'd get a wee bit upset about it.

what a wicked world we live in.

Indeed.

And what am I going to do about it?

Maybe buy a home in a market that's cheaper than where I live and collect rent. If ya can't beat 'em, join 'em I guess..

There it is.

i can't be a renter nor would i be a landlord. to each his own.

People complain about raising the minimum wage. But prices for goods and services have been raising steadily while wages have stagnated. Something must be done to rectify the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots.

There is the market rate. I used to get a guy to causally cut my grass from the backpages of my local paper. I negotiated a flat rate of $20/hr and he worked for 2hrs. I would use him maybe three times a year so my annual bill was $120

Then one day he told me that he didn't want to work for me anymore as he was able to negotiate a higher rate with other customers. I told him bye.

I rang another contractor and it turns out the standard practice is not just a flat rate of $50/hr but monthly 2hr gardening contract which would cost me $100/month x 12 months = $1200.

I purchased an electric lawnmower for $600 and I do it myself now.

Last edited by cyberdad on 18 Jan 2022, 12:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

i use a decades-old puttputt mower that puts out the fumes but [barely] gets my 1/3 acre mowed. when i was laid up at the worst of my hip arthritis, i hadda hire somebody for $200 to mow the damned thing one time as the grass was 3' at that point.

In Australia we use outsourced phone messaging services to India
We use people on 457 work visas from South and south-east Asia to work in food, manufacturing and factory work
Nurses on 457 visas from the Philippines
fruit pickers and cleaners on 457 visas coming from Asia, the south pacific o Papua, Melanasia, Samoa and Fiji

I am a renter because I can't be an owner here. And I could be a landlord somewhere else - hence looking East to maybe buy a place. Move there, get it cleaned up and sorted out if it needs any super minor things, get it all rented out etc and then move back home w/ rent on auto-deposit & mortgage payments the same.

If people can own places here and collect rent from China while not being contactable at all, then I can do it from a day's drive away and if there's anything super ultra important I could hop in a vehicle and be there the next day, or airplane and be there the same day. But chances are unlikely I'd ever have to do that. I've heard of multiple people that each own a handful of homes in that area and they never have to go out there. As long as I had a good stable tenant(s), that'd be the dream..