Reflections From a Murky Pond

As I write this article, the minimum wage has risen or will rise this week in 20 states, the most widespread non-federally mandated raise in the minimum wage in US history.

This is the result of a national “movement” of low-wage workers, their advocates, labor unions, and Left-wing politicians fomenting anger, discord, and hysteria about the supposedly widening gap between the rich and the “poor” in the United States.

Raising The Lowest Rung

Of course, the presumably unintended consequences of raising the minimum wage is that teens just entering the workforce, especially Black teens, will find it more difficult to get a job. Simply put, raising the lowest rung puts it out of reach of the less able.

So what will happen is that more youths will find it harder to break into the employment market and that this barrier will “disproportionately impact” Black youths, thereby helping to perpetuate and exacerbate the syndrome of Black unemployment, poverty, criminality, and dependence upon- and cognitive servitude to government largess.

Not so oddly, I predicted this a year and two days ago. Also not so oddly, I’m less than perfectly pleased by being right.

Tags: America | Blacks | Economics | Employment | Jobs | Law | Minimum Wage | Politics | Racial Politics | Small Business | Teens | Unemployment | Wages

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2015 at 8:04 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

So it’s 2014 and, like the 1st day of every year, people get busy dreaming of- making predictions about what the new year we’ll hold for them and for the societies that they live within.

I’m not really any different; I too place an arbitrary importance upon the new year even though I know that such temporal compartmentalization is illusion.

My prediction – safe, stolid, and lame as it is – is that 2014 will be the beginning of people finally noticing that we have been and are continuing, in an accelerating manner, to move rapidly into an automaton’s Utopia. At least that’s how I see it going in America.

An Automaton’s Utopia – 100% “Employment”

The constant drumbeats from the Left of raising wages and demanding greater and more comprehensive benefits for any and all employees combined with the needs to compete with foreign companies which do not suffer from these problems will continue to drive companies into greater and greater levels of automation.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of the fast-food chains, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., makes this point very clear.

When they talk about raising the minimum wage or providing health care for employees over 30 hours, you’re really encouraging automation.

— Andy Puzder,
CEO, CKE Restaurants

Of course, what is a Utopia for our friendly automata is likely to be cruel and harsh Dystopia for those people living within America’s borders who will find themselves replaced by more efficient and less humanesque “workers” and practices.

Tags: 2014 | America | Andy Puzder | Corporations | Dystopia | Economics | Employment | Globalism | Healthcare | Leftists | Liberals | Minimum Wage | Politics | Progressives | Robots | Society | Technology | Unemployment | Utopia

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 1st, 2014 at 9:35 am and is filed under Politics, Society, Technology. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

There are those, including Obama, who continually clamor for the Minimum Wage to be significantly increased. Indeed, calls for such an increase are currently part of Obama’s repertoire of his ever-ongoing campaign speeches. In truth, a majority of the masses – including 60% of the GOP, who should know better – want the federally mandated minimum wage to be increased significantly.

Self-interest, sympathy, and a national pathology of equating work with worth have conspired to make people believe that increasing the minimum wage is a good and proper thing. The Biblical admonition (1 Timothy 5:18) that worker is worth his wage still resonates strongly in American society.

The greatest and most societally damaging piece of this is the thought that the worker is worth anything at all in this context. The worker isn’t worth anything; nor is the worth of that worker properly measured by his or her wage. The work, and only the work, has worth that can be measured by a wage or price. Hence, it is the work that the worker performs that is worth the wage that he or receives for it.

This is the problem with attempting to raise the Minimum Wage. Doing so ignores the simple economic fact that the work often isn’t worth more than what that wage is now and, in some cases, isn’t really worth even that. These jobs are already paying the Maximum Wage that can be afforded for the work being done.

Most minimum wage jobs are either in industries with low profit margins or in fields where the work being performed by the menial, low-wage workers is, or was, of the nature of a customer perk or bonus. Most of the latter were service-oriented and have already been reduced or deprecated in favor of customer self-service options, e.g., trollies replacing skycaps and disposable flatware and such replacing dishwashers. Raising the labor costs in the low profit margin industries such as the fast food industry will, one way or another, put people relying upon these jobs out of work.

It will also effectively cull many younger and minority workers from those jobs because they’re less productive than other workers. As profit margins drop lower the employers will be forced to apply higher standards for such employment, standards that haven’t been necessary to-date.

These are just some of the negative impacts of trying to force employers to pay more than the maximum effective wage for a job.

Tags: America | Economics | Economy | Employment | Jobs | Liberals | Minimum Wage | Obama | Politics | Progressives | Unemployment

This entry was posted on Friday, August 23rd, 2013 at 7:41 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

I got an interesting tweet from the White House Press Corp earlier today. I can hardly wait to see how things spin out on this issue, especially with the election season in full bore.

RT @mckaycoppins: ! RT @dylanbyers: Just informed by MSNBC that avg. cost for 2 gallons of gas is higher than the minimum wage.

— WhiteHousePressCorps (@whpresscorps) October 16, 2012

So what is wrong with this? The answer one will likely arrive at depends upon one’s ideology and loyalties.

The average American, upon seeing this, is likely to say that obviously gasoline prices are far too high and rising far too sharply over the course of Obama’s attempted reign.

The Liberals and Progressives, on the other hand, are likely to see this far differently as they endorse and support higher gasoline prices as part of their strategy to “starve away” Global Warming. Hence, this sort of tweet, if the content gets any real play, will likely be used as an excuse to rant that minimum wage obviously needs to be greatly increased.

Tags: 2012 Elections | AGW | America | Employment | Gasoline Prices | Global Warming | Green | Liberals | Minimum Wage | Progressives | Unemployment

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2012 at 12:52 pm and is filed under 2012 Election, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.