Coercion; Moral Imperative
Darwin writes in response to my last post:
As I said, the basic problem is that we have way more labor avaialble than is actually needed
I don’t understand what ‘more labor available than is actually needed’ means. If the country can employ about 95% of the citizenry it seems to me that supply and demand of labor is being met.
As always, in your calculation of social welfare you leave out large variables. Arguing that minimum wage does not harm those in the middle class is wrong. Increased minimum wage means either reduction in jobs, which hurts the poor, or increases in price, which hurts the poor and everyone else. Admittedly, forced increased pricing in labor will harm the poor more than the middle class but nevertheless you seem to be oblivious to this harm. If you force an increase in labor value that increase has to come out of somewhere. More likely than not the adjustment for the increase will harm the poor more because they have less resources to absorb it.
There is a reality here you seem to be in denial about. People will only pay so much for minimum wage labor. It turns out that value in labor is not enough to support the person to a degree you seem comfortable with. Quite honestly, how much money do you think a person that can put keyboards on a shelf should be paid? Should such a basic skill that practically everyone can do fetch a ‘living wage’? Turns out when we ask the market, which is most likely the best measure for the value of labor it turns out no. People are unwilling to pay a living wage for basic labor.
Sensing an injustice, you demand the state step in and take care of the problem. You support an expansion in state power to forcibly take money from people unwilling to pay what you deem is appropriate for basic labor. For all your talk about fearing corporations it seems odd that you happily grant the state, the entity with a monopoly on coercion, more power simply to improve what you consider to be a social ill.
And let’s not beat around the bush. You want people with guns to take money away from people without guns (you deny the 2nd amendment don’t you?) and give that money to people you deem worthy. You justify one injustice by ‘curing’ another supposed injustice. It’s okay to steal from one group when you are helping another group. Unless of course you’re rich, then it’s wrong to steal from the poor.
And that takes me to this statement:
Your position seems to be that they should get paid what their labor is ‘worth’, as though the realities of a free market are actual moral imperatives rather than empirical facts that we can employ towards moral ends when appropriate.
I make no claim about moral imperatives. I simply make the observation that the market is the best measure we have of the value of labor. Attempts to ‘remedy’ that value will require moral justification. It’s you department to morally justify why it’s okay to use coercion to make people do your bidding.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
“I don’t understand what ‘more labor available than is actually needed’ means. ”
I mean that for jobs that have small or no requirements, such as picking crops, landscaping, working in fast food, etc etc, there are more orkers avaialbe looking for those jobs than there are jobs, and I believe that without the minimum wage, those jobs would not pay neough for anyone to live on. You can argue that factual point with me if you want, but if you disagree that removing the minimum wage would lead to lower wages, then I’m not sure why you’re against it.
“If you force an increase in labor value that increase has to come out of somewhere. ”
I agree, but I don’t know why you’re so dead-set sure that it will come out of the skins of the poor or middle-class. Why shouldn’t it come out of the hands of multi-billionaire stockholders? After all, it’s still a free consumer market; if one company tries to raise prices to offset their minimum wage losses, won’t another company just keep prices the same but lower their dividends, and drive the first company out of business with lower prices? I agree this is a complicated issue with many hard to predict variables, which is why I’m baffled that you seem to think you can perfectly predict the precise outcome of any action within the market.
“Should such a basic skill that practically everyone can do fetch a ‘living wage’? ”
YES! What’s your plan- the people doing that job steadily die off from starvation and disease after about 4 months of doing it, to be replaced by the next generation? I don’t know how on one hand you can say the problem with my plan is that it will increase prices, hurting the poor badly, while on the other hand say the good thing about your plan is it ensures the poor won’t make enough money to even survive.
“You want people with guns to take money away from people without guns (you deny the 2nd amendment don’t you?)”
No, as I’ve said EVERY SINGLE TIME THE SUBJECT HAS COME UP, I don’t favor a complete ban on guns, I just think that we’d all be safer if there were one. But I don’t find that a sufficiently compelling reason to ban them. Not that it’s relevant to this conversation, of course.
“I make no claim about moral imperatives. I simply make the observation that the market is the best measure we have of the value of labor. ”
That IS a claim about a moral imperative. ‘Value’ is a moralistic term, and when you reduce ‘value’ to a dollar amount, you’re carting in the assumption that a free-market economic system is the proper way to adress this particular ethical question. In many cases thsi is a good assumption- I think the free market is the best moral way to handle the value of Ipods and sneakers and so forth- but it IS a moral judgement, and in this particular case it’s not one that I agree with. When we talk about the ‘value’ of human labor, I think that ethical concerns beyond what the current US economic system is willing to pay have to be considered (not necccessarily followed, but at least considered).
“You justify one injustice by ‘curing’ another supposed injustice.”
I honestly don’t care about justice. ‘Justice’ is just a term that the greedy throw around to justify their rhetoric. All I care about is the pragmatic improvement of human lives. I recognize that the free market is a great system for improving human lives in most situations. I don’t believe this gives it any special moral signifigance, and I don’t think there’s any ideological problem with altering it in cases where there would be a clear benefit to humanity. I also don’t think that every economic regulation is an injustice- after all, these companies make contracts based on the US legal system and conduct international trade on the strength of the US military- without the government to enforce the deals the deals they enter into, and protect their rights, these companies couldn’t even exist (unless they hired private militias, which in your parlance would turn them into governments anyway). If it’s not an injustice that the government uses guns to prevent me from making copies of the CD I just bought and giving them to friends, then it’s not an injustice for the government to use guns to make those same companies pay their employees enough to live on.
The only argument you can make that interests me is a pragmatic argument that the minimum wage laws will hurt people more than they help, and you haven’t yet convinced me of that.