Helpling the Poor
By making them unemployed.
This year, it’s harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University described summer 2007 as “the worst in post-World War II history” for teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is poised to be “even worse.”
According to their data, only about one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer, and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even worse.
Minimum wage is a really bad idea. Its built off the assumption that entry level positions should be able to support a person. The problem is that the value a minimum wage position offers an employer is not valuable enough to justify the cost of supporting the employee. As a consequence, using the states monopoly on coercion to forcibly regulate the cost of labor in these positions forces employees to eliminate these positions to avoid a loss in value.
This really is a perfect example of how liberal regulation to ‘help the poor’ actually hurts the poor. Just think, liberals want to regulate health care to help the poor. I’m sure that will end well.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Minimum wage laws have been around for decades. Not sure how you’re justifying putting the blame for this extremely current new trend on them. One might almost think that the difficulty getting summer jobs is a symptom of the poor economy (which you deny exists). I could even claim that minimum wage makes entry-level jobs appealing enough that they’re all taken as permanent positions by peopl who would otherwise be intermittently employed or on welfare, which is why those jobs aren’t available as summer jobs for teens. Find the study showing that minimum wage leads to a decrease in the total number of jobs avaiable over time and we’ll have something to talk about.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am
I think it is pretty obvious that a minimum wage decreases the total number of jobs available. It’s basic economics that when the price goes up on some resource, demand goes down. If the price goes up on labor, employers hire fewer. Minimum wage is a perfect example of the government distorting a market. It forces employers to pay an employee more than they are worth to the company. Thus the company hires fewer people at artificially inflated pay, an obvious decrease in economic efficiency.
I completely agree with Steve here. Why not have jobs that pay crap wages? Teens and poor people would take the jobs and learn valuable skills. Teens generally have their parents to help support them, and for poor people a crappy job is better than no job. Besides, it’s not like employers hold a gun to your head to make you work–if you don’t feel the pay is adequate for what you are doing, then quit. Work somewhere else.
The government should not dictate how much people are paid.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:30 am
also, lol @ “Helpling the Poor”
I think someone needs to “Helpl” Steve’s spelling.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:31 am
The problem is that if you’re allowed to pay people 1/2 of a living wage for a 40 hour work week, that’s what employers will pay, and poor people will work 2 jobs for 80 hours a week because it’s better than starving to death. Certainly there will be more jobs, but enough of them will be performed by the same person that unemployment won’t go down any (may go up).
The basic problem is that, given automization and efficient corporate models, we have way way more citizens than the number of employees we actually need to keep things running. However, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, so we have to make up things like middle management and ‘greeters’ and so forth in order to make sure most people are allowed to eat. Our society doesn’t have a real solution to this problem (which will only get worse in the future), but minimum wage is one of the ways we keep everyone starving to death. I think that if we really let the market dictate the price of labor, huge segments of the population wouldn’t get paid a living wage, and whole sections of various cities would degenerate from slums into actual third-world-level squalor.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:32 am
BTW, yes, free markets will lower prices more than markets with government intervention. Remember that on the labor market, prices are WAGES. We don’t actually WANT to minimize wages.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
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