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IPFS News Link • Economy - Economics USA

Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly

• lewrockwell.com

How about this: The law of gravity is applicable to the behavior of falling objects on the U.S. mainland but not applicable on our Pacific Ocean territories Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands. You say, "Williams, that's lunacy! Laws are applicable everywhere; that's why they call it a law."

You're right, but does the same reasoning apply to the law of demand that holds: The higher the price of something, the less people will take of it; and the lower its price, the more people will take of it? The law of demand applies to wages, interest and rent because, after all, they are the prices of something.
 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by McElchap
Entered on:

 I like Walter Williams and his basic premise. However, let me tweak the minimum wage issue a bit. The call for no minimum wage is a free market concept. I agree with the free market concept. But we have no free market, and if every other aspect is micro-managed for the tyranny of profit orchestrated by the FED Banksters and Wall Street grifters,  why should the average Joe be barred from a livable wage?  The point of working, morally, is to earn your keep, and in the present economic system, the average Joe is simply ripped off and treated like a slave.  If our wages are to be determined by free market principles, so should everything else.  Otherwise, employee abuses abound. 

Next point: It is not so much the minimum living wage that killed American industries as the communist-led unions pushing for extremely high wages in key industries while at the same time encouraging low productivity and imposing every costly, foot-dragging impediment they could on businesses. I am not opposed to collective bargaining for labor, nor do I support forced membership in unions or "closed" shops. But the unions have done much to destroy the economic backbone of American industries. It was planned that way.....

Case in point:  Many years ago, I worked in a non-union landfill operating heavy equipment like 35 ton bulldozers and scrapers. I saw an opening for a job in a quarry requiring membership in the Teamsters. I was eager to show my stuff. I was given an assignment and told it would take three days to do it. I said I could do iot in one day, and I did! But I failed to note the established Teamsters sat around all day drinking coffee and playing cards. Their equipment hardly ever moved. They were not pleased by my finishing that first job in one day. Then I got assigned to drive a giant dump truck, and got busy hauling as many loads as I could from the blast site to the crushing plant. But I soon found my truck's ten foot tires were often flat, sidelining me. I was warned the last busy fellow assigned to the crusher was killed when he was assigned to clear a snag and somebody turned it on. I was going to be assigned to the crusher next, and decided to seek work elsewhere!

Get the picture? Low-wage employees are lucky if they can pay rent, or eat  decent meals, and often get worked to death by unscrupulous employers who would keep chained slaves if they could get away with it. High-wage workers led by socialist unions have strangled businesses. Can't we settle somewhere in the middle and restore an equitable free market system for both labor and management, buyers and sellers?  We must stop pushing paper and move product! That is how America grew great and prosperous. Under the current corruption, a lack of minimum wage is only oppression legalized on paper underlying the rat race to the bottom of our cage set in motion by the robber barons. The system, as it is, is hurting us all. End the Fed!



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