[lit-ideas] Re: Illegal Immigration
- From: Paul Stone <pas@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:02:18 -0400
At 12:47 PM 9/14/2005, you wrote:
Mike Geary wrote:
"Raise the minimum wage. It's as simple as that. Make the minimum wage in
this country a living, family, saving wage."
This a defeatist proposition. Let's say a professional makes 25 bucks an
hour. She went to school for 6 years. She has a graduate degree. She owns
her own company. She can only charge what the market will bear for her
service. Now... let's say, a guy, working at McDonald's with absolutely no
education (he dropped out when he was 16) is suddenly told by the
government, "hey, it's okay, you can make 20 bucks an hour -- a fair,
living, family, saving wage." This hardly seems fair to the woman who work
her ass off to get where she is. NOW, instead of being 5 times richer, she
is 1.25 times so.
Now, this goes on for a few years, and what happens? EVERYONE goes directly
to McDonald's. Why not, it's completely economically feasible. And... it
punishes [certainly does NOT reward] the ambitious people.
Now... I hear you say, well, the professional can jack her price up to 50
bucks an hour, the market will bear it, everyone is making tons of cash
now. AND... we're back to the beginning again. It's all relative. Then the
people making 'minimum' wage would start crying again. As Chris Rock puts
it "you know what minimum wage says? If I COULD pay you less, I WOULD."
A society cannot reward everyone without penalizing a lot of people.
Raising minimum wage is a bad idea because a LOT of people who can't get
good jobs (I wonder why they can't get good jobs) are forced to settle for
minimum. If you "settle" for 80% of what someone who is truly 'worth'
something makes, then you aren't really settling are you. The reason that
illegal immigrants do the shitty jobs is because they CAN. ANYONE can, and
if you make those 'anyone' jobs worth something, you have not given a whole
pile of people good jobs, you have cheapened a whole pile of people's hard
work.
The reason that people in the "civilized" countries won't work for minimum
wage [and certainly not for below] is that it's a shit wage. They THINK
that they are entitled to a 'living'. Well, they ain't. For most people
[those not born into money] in order to have a nice comfy life, you have to
work hard and get a good job. Raising minimum wage so that everyone was
comfortable would make a WHOLE lot of people uncomfortable.
bordering on the uncomfortable
Paul
##########
Paul Stone
pas@xxxxxxxx
Kingsville, ON, Canada
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