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Yes

81 (90%)

No

9 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 88

[hector13]

Arg 4: Specious; personal value judgement. Have you ever worked as a janitor? It's quite a bit of physical labor and near-constant exposure to harsh chemicals. In a more general sense, tying back into Arg 2, any job that is valued at below a living wage is admitting its own irrelevance. If a business needs a job done, then it needs to be able to support the worker doing said job. Business can't do this, business fail.

As an addendum, this could be extended to other jobs which have no great value to society. What of those in the financial, insurance and entertainment industries, among the highest paid in the US? Do they deserve to be paid the quite frankly ridiculous amount of money they get paid for moving numbers around, profiting on fear and providing entertainment?

Despite the hypocrisy that exudes from my use of the next argument, who are we to judge someone's worth to society? Any individual has the potential to go to school and learn to do something useful, but they need to pay for it (at least in the US) which is quite difficult to do if you get paid nothing.

I'm going to make an argument against minimum wage.

Argument 1: Minimum wage laws reduce the number of jobs in existence.
Proof:
1. Deadweight loss. It's a microeconomics term for the loss in mutually beneficial transactions produced by a price floor or price ceiling, or some other laws.
2. Minimum wage is a price ceiling on the price of labor.
3. Hence: several mutually beneficial transactions go unexploited as a result of the minimum wage law.
4. In this case, a transaction is a worker working for a company/supplier/whatnot.

In the short-term, perhaps.

Consider all the people on minimum wage now have disposable income, though. What do you think that's going to be doing for the local economy? These people have needs to be sated (places to live, goods for sustenance and a little bit of entertainment) and they're going to be using that income to pay for them. This will help the economy grow, providing more jobs in the long-run.

[Sonlirain]

Funfact 1. Sweden, Finland and Norway don't have a minimal wage.
Funfact 2. Sweden, Finland and Norway are hardcore welfare states where people can say "fuck it i won't work for this pay" and actually live in (relative) comfort so basically no one works for a slaves pay anyway.
But i repeat. Those countries are bleeding tons of welfare money on their people and it would certainly not work like that in countries like US.

[Loud Whispers]

In all fairness it isn't like the United States doesn't ALREADY have Slave labor AND jobs that pay less than minimum wage. (and no, not making either of those up! Look it up!)

That's really lazy Neonivek, for starters some people won't be able to find it if it exists due to search results being tailored to person and country, which forces one to take your word for it. And you are a random person on the internet, as much as I like the identity that could be you.

As far as I could tell, your slave labour referral was to the abuse of illegal migrants as labour in conditions equivalent to forced labour and this clickbait.

Oh, speaking of which
Seattle's $15 minwage experiment
Good read that

[Sheb]

I'd think he was talking about convict labor? But then, I wouldn't know, because his post was so vague.

[mainiac]

I think it's a travesty that we have a minimum wage.

...

A minimum wage would be completely unnecessary if we just implemented a universal income already. 

It's actually interesting how little we know about minimum wages and the labor supply.  There is the famous argument between Card and Krueger vs Wascher (I tend to think that C+K's follup up work did a good job responding to Wascher's concerns) but neither of those are a holistic model of labor demand.  And even then, there is the fantastically important point that when we talk labor demand curves and the minimum wage we are basically saying "Well we only have a hammer so let's assume this is a nail".  Even within the real of single variate classical economic thinking there is the whole labor supply curve that we are ignoring.  But more fundamentally there is no reason to think that this is a single variable single period rational market of well informed agents.  We are falling into what Noah Smith calls 101ism

But for some reason, people seem to come away from 101 classes thinking that the cases that are the easiest to draw on the board are - God only knows why - the benchmark cases.

I think it's a pretty good bet that a hike of the national minimum wage to $10/hr would do a lot more good then harm and that we should link it to inflation.  Once we see the effects of a $10/hr hike we can look at the variations between states and cities and decide whether to hike again beyond inflation.  But that opinion is very ad hoc, basically all I know is that minimum wages aren't really putting much downward pressure on demand yet.

[Strife26]

So, something I want to spin here, see how folks respond. Doesn't really reflect my opinions, but I like the argument it presents.


I've seen that most of the economically-conservative folks I've met want to privatize various institutions. I imagine welfare is one of those institutions. What is a living wage other than a privatized welfare system? You're putting the onus of giving people enough income to live above the poverty line on the employer, not on the taxpayer. It's ideally capitalistic compared to those damn European welfare states. The only folks who would even need welfare at that point would be the unemployed.

Nah, because that's forcing welfare down all sorts of throats that are likely as complicated as the welfare system. The cool hardcore libertarians suggest universal basic income instead. Lord only knows what'd happen, but divide all the money that gets spent on welfare, divide it by population, and cut everyone a check.

[zombat]

Arg 2: Nope. The question is, what level of pay is required to sustain a single worker? Below that level, there is no significant difference between "some pay" and "none": if your workers cannot live, they will soon not be your workers. This is the concept of a "living wage", and in many places in the States even the current minimum wage is not a living wage.

Neither does the UK for that matter.

[nenjin]

My arguments are as I've presented them. My opinion is that minimum wage is theft.

As to earnings - here are average earnings in the US in 2004 dollars:
1950 - $17,076
1960 - $22,051
1970 - $28,100
1980 - $27,206
1990 - $28,439
2000 - $31,089
2004 - $30,513

So the answer is - the society as a whole is getting richer but with more and more socialism in the US the process has slowed down quite a lot.

Wow. Your math skills really sold your point there....

[mainiac]

It's an interesting choice, 2004 dollars.  I wonder where he got that from.

If anyone wants a good source, check out the federal reserve of st. louis data.  And remember to use a natural log scale for wage data.

[Neonivek]

I'd think he was talking about convict labor? But then, I wouldn't know, because his post was so vague.

Yeah convict labor. Being paid less then minimum wage was just something I found trying to search for how many jobs in the USA are minimum wage.

Just kept it vague so people wouldn't argue it.

Minimum wage is a price ceiling on the price of labor.

Its a Price floor... not a price ceiling.

The Price of Bread... was a Price Ceiling.

[Sheb]

Mainiac, why the log scale?

[Madmachine]

The thing that bewilders me about everyone trying to raise the minimum wage so that you can live off of it is the fact that it's entirely possible to have a fair system where you can't live off minimum wage, but don't have to live off minimum wage because it's easy enough to get a non-minimum wage job if you really need to support yourself or your family. Minimum wage should be for high schoolers looking to earn more pocket money, and for young people who are contributing to a family fund but, and this is the important part, are not the primary breadwinner for their family.

I feel like raising the minimum wage is treating the symptom, not the disease. I work near-minimum wage, but I'm part of a family that doesn't rely on me for money: I'm just contributing.

I suppose in a culture like America that's really really intent on adhering strictly to the nuclear family model, a higher minimum wage might be a good solution. But even then, more readily available non-minimum-wage jobs would be a better one.

[mainiac]

Mainiac, why the log scale?

Going from 5000 to 10000 is the same as going from 10000 to 20000 on the log scale.  On a linear scale, one is twice the size of the other.  With wages we generally care about how much of an increase it is compared to what happens before.  We could use a rate of change but a log scale lets you visualize the trend over time better.

[sluissa]

If you're not supporting yourself or others on a wage, then no, you don't need the minimum wage. However other people are doing that, and do so and it's not fair to say "well, you shouldn't have this job because that's not what this job is intended for."

You think a single parent would be working a minimum wage job if they had an easy opportunity to do better?

Besides, by just saying "create more jobs." You're getting to an issue we're just now starting to have a taste of. There simply isn't enough work out there for everyone and it's going to get worse. Any attempt to stop that from happening is just standing in the way of progress and making people work for work's sake.

We are at a point now where you could provide low quality, but edible and nutritious food in a fast food style, with minimal human interaction and none required actually touching the food at any point from farm to plate.

It's not quite widespread yet, but you know that companies are going to pick up on it soon and you'll within a couple of decades you'll find "hand made" food a luxury even among drive through burger chains. If you want that burger that's slightly off the bun with the ketchup all on one side and the cheese stuck more to the paper than the bread, you'll have to pay for that luxury.

The fact is the amount of work require to run society is decreasing faster and faster. Self driving cars and trucks are in the testing phases. Warehouses are already becoming computerized. The whole logistics sector is on the verge of a job crash. And while some of these jobs are simply being shuffled (someone has to make and program the robots doing the jobs.) many of them are simply disappearing. And that's just one (albeit very large) sector of the economy.

Rather than fight that for the "right" for everyone to have employment, why don't we just admit that society doesn't really need us all anymore?

[Flying Dice]

My arguments are as I've presented them. My opinion is that minimum wage is theft.

As to earnings - here are average earnings in the US in 2004 dollars:
1950 - $17,076
1960 - $22,051
1970 - $28,100
1980 - $27,206
1990 - $28,439
2000 - $31,089
2004 - $30,513

So the answer is - the society as a whole is getting richer but with more and more socialism in the US the process has slowed down quite a lot.

Wow. Your math skills really sold your point there....

Hey, at least he only used unsourced mean income. He could have tried to use wages without adjustment for inflation instead.