(01-16-2019, 08:43 AM)jj82284 Wrote:

(01-14-2019, 08:18 PM)TJBender Wrote: I'm with you on the first part, not so much the second. Those laws exist because wages and hours were left for the free market to figure out, and it resulted in the majority of Americans getting screwed. The modern idea that minimum wage should be a living wage is ridiculous, but there should be a minimum wage in place to protect smaller towns with few employment options. If Walmart cuts its wage scale in Jacksonville so that cashiers get $5 an hour, Walmart's going to have problems because those cashiers are going elsewhere. If a Walmart in a small town with few other employment options cuts cashier pay to $5/hour, cashiers are screwed because there isn't really anywhere else to go.

This is precisely why AOC for all her factual errancy and her 12 year old personality has already won!  (can anyone deny that the last century has been dominated by a dramatic shift towards statism.)  This idea that the Market itself is inherently evil and that we need a set of Harvard educated benevolent disinterested expert to sort our lives out for us.  Today its common for people to say things like: If left to the market, our employers would pay us peanuts.  If left to the Market our producers would sell us products that would kill us.  If left to the free market this that or the other thing...  

No one ever steps up and points out: If left to the Market There never would have been a great depression.  If left to the Market there never would have been a great recession.  If left to the market everyone's retirement would be orders of magnitude more wealthy because of their participation in the most powerful economy the world has ever seen instead of begging for crumbs from a ponzi scheme.  If left to the market, doctors would be free to form Co-operatives and self insure and provide better care for less cost.  It's all true, and verifiably so.  But it's not something we say, its not polite.  It's not good form.  

Minimum wage:   Let's look at some basic numbers.  Right now roughly about half a million people earn the minimum wage.  That's less than 1% of all wage earners.  the overwhelming majority of those are the teenagers with part time gigs that still can't mop the WHOLE bathroom floor before they go on break.  Throughout the economy we just saw something close to 3% wage growth for 2018.  Was that driven by government fiat?  Are the other 99.5% of wage earners being floated by some invisible government mandate?  Of course not.  So why on Earth do we persist with the innate feeling that Freedom inherently = a race to the bottom.  

Maximum hours (The 40 hour work week):  Artificially inflating the price of labor leads to less of it.  Instead of investing more in the hourly employees companies hire more and more bean counters to make sure that everyone clocks off at 39.5 hours.  Thank God the employer mandate was never fully implemented or the work week would have been reduced to 30 hours.  And when there is extra work to be done, that just means more falls on the plate of the salary managers or God forbid people silly enough (like me) to be self employed or a small business owner to avoid paying overtime.  For the productive hourly workers there is less money in the system to differentiate their pay from the average hum drum hourly worker and if they are productive enough they become salary managers to pick up the slack associated with making sure their charges don't work more than 40 hours.  There are a lot of people who work hourly full time who would happily take on another shift at their normal rate that can't.  Instead the employer has to hire someone less qualified to take the shift and the extra work experience associated with it.  

Economic Isolation:  For the most part the poorest pockets in this country (and the world) are pockets of dramatic geographical isolation.  If you live in a mountain community cut off from society, then there are a myriad of challenges associated with providing goods and services to your community and thus a major drag on economic growth and in turn wages.  That isolation in and of itself is the problem.  A minimum wage law isn't going to change or alter then challenges associated with an individual in that community producing enough economic output to justify an artificial wage.  On the contrary, in the event that a person can't produce enough economic output to justify their wage (even in a pre-existing business model [larger chain store located in their community]) then it won't be paid (how minimum wage laws result in unemployment.)  So either a.) there isn't enough economic potential to justify the wage level in question and people in that community need to work at a wage level their output can justify or b.) there is enough economic potential and there will be competition for labor and positive wage growth.  

Child labor laws:  No one wants to see children being forced to work at the same level as adults.  Childhood is precious and should be protected.  At the same time, reducing or eliminating the ability of children to help feed and close themselves places higher and higher economic burdens on their prospective parents and creates and even greater disincentive for having children.  Luckily, we came up with a solution for that.  We just get rid of the children (about 1.5 million a year at current clip.)  If we could go back and poll the 60 million children that have been aborted since our betters in Black decided that natural rights was a quaint anecdote, I'm sure they would have a much different opinion about the COMPASSION of not letting them sweep out a corner store or carry around a craftsman's tools.  In the second case, the second leading indicator for the eventual economic success of a child is the age at which they start earning money outside the home.  In our current model we have created a society of prolonged adolescence where most kids aren't expected to work to provide for themselves into their mid twenties.  As a result that absence of character or experience in the real world leads to the same basic sense of entitlement and devaluation of work that lead to this very thread!

Moreover: I'd like to point out that those in the thread so far are talking about a true minimum wage for entry level employees not the living wage lunacy of the progressives.  Unfortunately, throughout the history of the country there have been times when the raising of minimum wage laws had adverse affects on real employees and job seekers that had low skill but the will to work.  During the later part of the 19th and early 20th century black kids and white kids had relative parity in teen unemployment.  In some years black teen unemployment was actually lower than white teen unemployment.  Obviously during that time was the greatest difference in wealth and earning capacity for white and black households thus the relative skill level for children raised in black households with less or no access to education was different from that of white.  With the introduction of minimum wage laws we priced out a lot of teen blacks from the labor market and the difference between the two unemployment rates skyrocketed.   During the 50's there was an overall decrease in the black poverty rate from around 87% to around 47%.  One of the greatest unsung economic miracles in the history of the world, much less this country given the environment that blacks had to deal with at the time.  This was driven by GI's returning from the second world war having proven their worth on the battlefield and generations of kids that had worked from a very young age growing up with developed trade that they could demand wages for.  When the unemployment rate for black teens went from single digits to the 20s 30s 40s and at some points 50s and 60s that served to arrest the trajectory of black ascendency.  

At large parts over the same time, black marriage rates were actually higher than that of their white counterparts.  Thanks to the benevolent compassion of Lyndon Johnson and the Great society a black child that had a 75% chance of being born into a two parent household in 1960 has a 75% chance of being born into a single parent home in 2019 (the leading factor in child poverty.)…  

If only it had been LEFT TO THE MARKET!!!

You've got a lot of your history right.
Black unemployment did get reduced during the 50s and then increase in the 60s.  But there had been a federal minimum wage since 1938, so it was there in both the good time and the bad time that you describe.  This minimum wage wasn't inherently bad; they just might have set it too high in the mid to late 1960s.

But your narrative connecting child labor to birth rates and abortion is specious at best.  Child labor laws at the federal level again date back to 1938.  Suction abortion wasn't attempted in the US until 1967. Before that, earlier abortion procedures were much more risky for the mother's health.  The timing of the baby boom also contradicts your argument there.

---

(01-16-2019, 08:58 AM)Last42min Wrote: As big a fan I am of the market, it does need some oversight. I think you grossly underestimate the amount of stupid and complacent people in this world. The market will take advantage of them. If you're cool with that, then it is what it is. I am for government rules that enforce competition. When there are regulations put in place, they should try to operate in the free market and have clear indicators when/how it doesn't.

I agree with you here, but from JJ's perspective, you are probably talking out of both sides of your mouth.  I get the distinction between what you mean by "free market" and what he means by it, but he probably doesn't.

---