There is often an argument made against the minimum wage on the basis that it must cause unemployment. This seems pefectly logical. If the minimum wage is higher than a worker MRP (marginal revenue product) then it stands to reason that an employer will not hire this worker. Indeed, assuming perfect markets any minimum wage will confound its intentions by causing unemployment. That is the crux of the issue however, assuming perfect competition. In reality many employers benefit from a degree of local oligopsony (a market with a small number of buyers). This is primarily due to a lack of knowledge regarding job opportunities, different preferences among workers, job-search frictions among other things. All these issues combine to mean that an employer can employ workers at a wage less than their MRP, thus leader to an equilibrium with both lower employment and lower wages. (more detailed explanation regarding monopsony on wiki: Monopsony). This leads to an interesting conclusion, under certain conditions an appropriately set minimum wage can raise both wages and employment (contrary to intuition). For an explanation: Oligopolisticexpialidocious or The Case for a Minimum Wage
It depends. Here are two papers: http://www.lowpay.gov.uk/lowpay/pdfs/forth.pdf http://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/pdf/wp342.pdf The first makes the argument that the higher wages force employers to compete on quality and to invest in training to increase productivity (to counteract increased wages) and to reduce turnover. The second says that the impact of the minimum wage in this regard is not as effective as had been hoped primarily due to other constraints.
The arguments pro Federal intervention on wages are irrelevant. The Federal government has no place setting wages. So the tired old response is always, "what, the government has no say about business? What about safety laws and stuff, dude?" The federal government has a limited role in insuring employers do not render a dangerous work environment, but even that should have limits and is another discussion. For this discussion, it makes no difference at all what economic effect minimum wage laws create. It is simply a matter of choice between employers and employees as to what each is willing to give in order to foster a partnership.
Matter of opinion. Please attempt to provide some relevant material regarding the effect of minimum wages on employment and productivity.
No. I'm not playing by your rules. It makes no difference at all, none whatsoever the effect of government intrusion on private contracts. I don't care.
Waah! Waah! A good scientist (in this case social scientist) ascertains the effects of a given policy. It matters not whether or not one considers it immoral. If you cannot honestly consider the effects of a minimum wage due to ideological blinders then I find I would find it very difficult to take any opinion on a policy from you as an honest appraisal of that policy's effects. I could very well make the above arguments and conclude that, due to monopsony, a minimum wage will raise employment but that does not translate to the statement that we should have a minimum wage. I am not in the business of normative statements.
Pretty full of yourself, kid. But hey, everyone your age thinks they have the goods. What you fail to understand, due to your myopic focus, is that the very basis of your argument stems from a failed premise of philosophy. There is no need to argue whether or not X effects Y, because X is an anti liberty contrived mechanism whose sole purpose is to take power away from individuals and put it in the hands of Big Brother. I'm not whining. I just reject the discussion as irrelevant.
Sorry. That is a normative statement. One does not make the argument that we should not study nuclear physics because it might lead to more powerful weapons. Or that we should not study the effects of radiation on man because it might make people use nuclear weapons. Likewise, one does not argue that we should not study the effects of policy because it might lead people to enact that policy. To do so is merely junk science, bad science and useless. How can I take anything you say to be wholly honest if you admit that you have an ideological bias that prevents you from even studying the effects of policy? How can I know that when you say (for example) "Policy X caused the recession" that it isn't nonsense? As you yourself have stated you do not study things which counter your 'philosophy'.
Nothing to get all wound up by Raskolnikov. Travis is a typical T-Person. They don't care about FACTS. They don't care about SCIENCE. They don't care about EQUALITY. They don't care about SOCIETY. and evidently... They don't care about PHILOSOPHY...which in itself is a rather silly statement. They CARE about THEMSELVES. This is a short sighted outlook that never seems to consider how THEMSELVES would exist without FACTS SCIENCE EQUALITY SOCIETY and yes even PHILOSOPHY This is not an argument for "good governance", its a blind argument against the CURRENT governance. Regardless of the policies.
Of what use is it to play parlor games on theory, when the premise of the theory is itself antithetical to one's view of liberty? Answer, none. If you want to discuss the effect of minimum wage on economics, that's fine, because you happen to be okay, or at least indifferent with the concept of Federal intervention in wage structures. I am not, as I said in my first post, so the discussion is useless, and your comparison to nukes is simply not an accurate analogy. If for instance, if I did not believe in nuclear science as a moral venture in any form, and someone wanted to discuss the pro/con of nuclear energy, I would say the discussion is irrelevant because nukes are bad. But that is not how you made the analogy.
If there is little use in playing these 'parlour games' then why are you posting in this thread? Are you merely popping your head into the parlour to say that you shan't be coming into the parlour? The comparison to nukes is apt. One does not stop studying a phenomon simply because one may (or may not) find the application of the gained knowledge to be immoral or dangerous.
I gave my two cents in my first post. I only continued the discussion because you do not understand what I was saying. My fault for trying to explain a different view to a myopic teenager. The analogy is a failure. You don't see that because the very concept of the philosophy I posit is alien to you. Not my fault. Come back in ten or fifteen years and revisit the issue if you want.
O.K. that is fair enough, you merely wanted to say that you didn't want to participate, fair enough. The analogy is, as I said, apt. Another? I find the concept of dropping a nuclear bomb onto a population to be appalling and horrendous. Does that mean one shouldn't study the effects of dropping a bomb on a population? I am very familiar with the libertarian philosophy and have ruled it to be....bar-stool philosophy if I wish to be kind. It falls at the is-ought fallacy before it even gets off the ground. Indeed this thread so far highlights the is-ought fallacy, nicely.
What point would that be? That leftists have a logic block? Well I thought that was understood by anyone with a functioning brain, but happy to be of help.
Irrelevant. It doesn't matter what effects dropping a nuke has if your philosophy is that it is wrong to use nukes. It's an exercise in futility. Besides that, the issue is liberty, and where the government has a say in private transactions, which is nowhere. It doesn't matter what the effect is, the strong arm of intervention is manipulation by a power structure which can fine or imprison people for failure to comply with their contrived regulations. You know little of liberty, other than what you have heard regurgitated by ignorant liars who wish to manipulate the social structure of society.
Indeed, the pursuit of knowledge is irrelevant, sigh. There is a plethora of threads where I have discussed this so I won't bother to entertain your rhetoric here.
The problem with the first is that it measures "value"(and by extension "value added" and "productivity") in terms of what the product would sell for in the market, and aside from the more obvious and superficial problem of inflation inflating this, that isn't an intrinsic measure of "value". Now if I actually wrote to the authors of one of these papers they'd tell me to take it up with the philosophy department, but the point stands. I expected you to know I would have said something like this, what with me being a skeptic of the entire field of economics.
Well, that's convenient. If you don't have to pay attention to results and consequences are irrelevant, all kinds of crazy things start to sound good.
