How the minimum wage is maximized to hurt the poor



Simply put, the minimum wage should be 0. And for you Bernie Sanders fans, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden agree with me. 

But that didn’t stop Florida from becoming the next state to require a minimum wage of $15. Like all recent increases in the minimum wage this too was touted as, "a huge win for the working people of the Sunshine State!"(1)


At first it seems simple. Well-meaning people want to help the poor by forcing businesses to pay them more money. If you look at the economy in a vacuum that would play out. But life is not so simple. The topics of prices and Karl Marx’ defunct Labor Theory of Value are worth spending a whole essay on, but suffice it to say that the price of goods and services are based on how much the customer is willing to spend.(2) And in this particular instance the goods and services are the employee and the customer is actually the business itself. Raising the minimum wage makes the employee more expensive. And when you make something more expensive the customer will seek more affordable alternatives, thus hurting the folks the policy was supposed to help. 


This logic plays out in the scientific data. Economists David Neumark and William Wasche looked at 20 years of data on the effects of minimum wage. They found minimum wage policies “reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers and tend to reduce their earnings; they are not an effective means of reducing poverty; and they appear to have adverse longer-term effects on wages and earnings, in part by reducing the acquisition of human capital.”(3)


Again, raising the minimum wage hurts the people that it’s supposed to help. This means that outside of ignorance (something you no longer have in reading this essay) the only rational reason one has for supporting something like #fightfor15 is if you are in favor of some kind of eugenics. 


And I wish I was being hyperbolic, but the minimum wage is in-fact rooted in eugenics and racism.((4) The relevant section starts on page 6)


Royal Meeker, Commissioner of Labor under President Woodrow Wilson, saw all these negative effects as a PERK. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work.” 


In his book Races and Immigrants, John R. Commons argued, “The competition has no respect for the SUPERIOR RACES.” “African Americans were “indolent and fickle,” which explained why, Commons argued, slavery was required: “The n**** could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man . . . [I ]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion.”


Logic, science, and history are very clear. The minimum wage doesn’t help the poor. It has never helped the poor. And it was never INTENDED to help the. poor


Sources:

(1)https://www.good.is/minimum-wage-measures-pass-in-florida-and-portland-maine 

 https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/florida-passes-15-an-hour-minimum-wage-bill/

(2) https://www.britannica.com/topic/labor-theory-of-value 

(3) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minimum-wages 

(4) (see sheet 6 of 18) https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf


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