Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Unreasonably high minimum wage ..... ?

Sort of torn here.


On one hand, I believe in free markets and as little govt intervention as possible but there's little doubt if you did away with minimum wage, there would be a couple million jobs paying even less than they do now. If it were me and the only job I could get in my area was laying bricks or doing some other back breaking work and the wages were less than the minimum, I suspect desperation would make me consider some unappealing alternatives. When a person is forced to work long and hard yet are rewarded for their troubles by struggling to put a decent meal in their stomachs, you can pretty much see where the crime rate will go.


Some folks just don't have the capacity to improve their plight. Even if they're hard working. I guess some better off people just don't understand that there's many places in our country where the job markets are abysmal and many don't have the money to move or the idea of it it too overwhelming for them. You force millions in our country to fall even further in their struggle to get by, I don't see how their desperation won't end up costing us more in the form of more law enforcement and additional costs of more prisons as well as the insane cost of taking care of prisoners.



Tough question and I see no real good answer.

Hawk,



From later posts I figure Bristoe was more interested in just arguing with Steve than defending the minimum wage.

You might want to be careful with that talk. Could come back to visit! grins.

Lots of folks would have failed miserably in the early years of this country.. RE work vs monetary rewards.... hard work, REALLY hard work, and you barely had enough to eat....

If ever given the opportunity for the two of them to meet up in real life, this image comes to mind.

Safe to say that few, if any, here want to return to the capitalism of that in David Copperfield.

Indeed.

The point you seem to be missing, my friend, is that the option isn't between X number of available jobs without a minimum wage and precisely X number of jobs available with minimum wage. Government price supports for anything have an adverse effect on the availability of the thing in question. This is why in the old pre-MW days, when you pulled up to the gas pump, you'd be greeted by two or three workers attending to you and your car, and today it's all self-serve. Those jobs disappeared because the minimum wage made them no longer economically feasible. Those were first rung jobs on the ladder of success, and now they're gone, so the folks who would have had them started on the track to becoming government dependents instead of first time job holders on the track to becoming experienced and higher paid job holders.

He was only addressing bad form, not that Steve wasn't correct in opposing the minimum wage, i.e., he's saying that perhaps Steve isn't the right source for the message (since he supports policies that impoverish Americans, such as central economic planning by the Fed, and an American world empire) rather than that his message in this case was incorrect.

I can buy into that.

That wasn't free market capitalism, and certainly wasn't due to development in the direction of free market capitalism. England at that time was in a transitional phase from mercantilism into free market capitalism, but the reasons for mass poverty were more to do with displaced land workers forced into the cities than to anything else. Land was routinely confiscated and handed over to lords by royal decree in exchange for favors. Hardly a laissez-faire situation.

Thanks for making my point.

Awesome.

a twisted up angry failure, lashing out at the world which refuses to recognize his genius.

he can get away with insulting daughters here, whereas in the real world it would get him crippled.

Why support someone who has absolutely no chance of winning?

Steve,
I agree with most of what you said but I think you left out one word, so I hope you don't mind me adding it.

That's a message that's been programmed into you by the establishment. Unless we learn to overcome the messages the establishment tries to program into us, nothing will change. Don't be a chump.

I am coming into this late and just read the first few post and skipped to the end, so forgive me if this has already been mentioned. Some here have bought into the myth that everybody is guaranteed a certain standard of living. I believe that your standard of living should reflect your desire and ability to get a job done. More desire, more ability, more money. If you do not have the standard of living that you desire, you need to better yourself by working harder or training for a job that pays more. The government should have no say in the matter. miles

And the gov't gives grants even for this. State sponsored Vo-Tech schools are mostly FREE and are being scuttled for lack of participation.

Hard to have any sympathy except for those who have truly fallen on hard times through no fault of their own and there are many in that position now days.

There's been a lot good arguements for and against the minimum wage. It's been interesting.

My first post was in regards to current minimum wage being consisdered unreasonable. I'm not in favor of raising it, I just don't consider it to be unreasonable where it's at or think it's right to eliminate it.

One of the arguments against minimum wage is employers are forced to pay more than what a person is worth. I have a problem with that. There's a problem with two parties in that situation.

First the employer. If you can't get someone to show up to work on time and put in a fair day's work you've hired the wrong person for the job and you're not motivating them.

Second is the employee. If you can't show up to work on time and put in a fair day's work - shame on you. You don't deserve the job which brings to the final point.

Every employer has the right to hire and fire whoever they want. Forced into paying someone more than they're worth? NOPE. If you can't get $7.25 an hour worth of labor out of someone - Fire em'.

Go back to just what written in the the constitution? NO WAY. Society and the workplace has been vastly improved by legislation and the implementation of workers rights/protections. I'm not talking about unions or socialist ideology but just basic standards in regards to safety, health, working conditions and along with it a minimum wage. My father began his working career in a cotton mill when he nine years old for pennies an hour.

Those days are long gone and they should remain so forever.