violentprojectilebile:

If you are working for minimum wage, you are an unskilled hand mover. Minimum wage is essentially, “We need someone, anyone to labour for us.” Not even skilled labour. Skilled labour is in short supply.

Any student of economics will agree that a price floor on any good is a bad thing. It means the good is artificially priced high, the supply is higher than equilibrium, and the demand lower than equilibrium. For jobs this means that asking for a higher minimum wage causes more people to apply for less jobs.

Letting go of minimum wages and allowing the market to price wages would result in a larger number of people being employed.

Jobs where workers are paid per unit of work done, for example, square meters of houses insulated, buckets of apples picked, etc are inherently good, as the work is done, the employer has a fixed cost for the work, and skilled workers are paid more, as they accomplish more.

So, without minimum wage, people who want to earn more will have to gain skills which cause their time / labour to be valued higher to an employer. The more effective your skills and the less people with those skills combined with the need of those skills by an employer will cause you to be reimbursed more highly.

It’s not that there are no jobs, it’s that your expectations are too high. Go flip burgers, stack shelves or whatever. You are utterly replaceable.

There are advantages and disadvantages to dropping the minimum wage, I won’t make it black and white, but we are certainly better off with it than without it. Yes, it raises the price of some goods and services, but the only worth in having the prices lower is in allowing people to buy them. Remember that because the poor spend a higher percentage of their income, it is in our society’s interest to funnel money into them. Taking money away from the poor creates less demand for goods, which lowers the prices, which would in tern lower their wages. It is almost a perfect example of a race to the bottom. Taking money out of these people’s pockets, while it wouldn’t shut down the economy, would certainly slow it down. 

Remember that the end goal is having every labourer earning a living wage. Full employment isn’t intrinsically good if it doesn’t provide people with the means to live. Minimum wage as it is right now doesn’t allow us to hit that target, and allowing the market to price it would only exacerbate the problem. The people going after these sorts of jobs are generally under educated our society’s standards, and ill-equipped to bargen for themselves. It ends in relationships where the employers take advantage of employees, who have imperfect information.

Secondly, your idea about people getting payed per unit diminishes the quality of the goods. The soviet union did that in their later days and they manufactured shit for practically the last forty years of their life. That is not a good idea, but on the other hand that point isn’t really integral to your argument.

Third, you say that without minimum wage people would be incentivized to be more educated so that they could earn more money. I put it to you that with the minimum wage you get the same effect. Dropping the minium wage just lowers the income of the poorest people and a way that is detrimental to the economies.