Another American city succumbs to an all too common political resume-padding exercise, and the story remains the same. On January 1st, Flagstaff Arizona imposed an $11.00/hour minimum wage. The Daily Signal reports that the local Chamber of Commerce polled 200 local businesses about the forced increase and,
More than three-quarters (77 percent) of the companies expect it to have an effect on their businesses. More than half (53 percent) said it would force them to make undesirable adjustments, such as raising prices, decreasing work hours, or laying off employees, just to stay afloat.
Everywhere this experiment is tried we hear the same thing. When the government decides on an arbitrarily inflated value for an hour of labor, we get fewer hours and fewer jobs.
We get higher prices, poorer service, and inevitably, less competition – which exacerbates the problems with higher prices and poorer service. In the absence of competition, there is no incentive to compete for customers.
By legal writ and force of arms, they continuously conspire to force that poison on everyone else. Do they do it because the government is traditionally the least cost-conscious, least productive, and least-responsive entity in any society?
Here in New Hampshire, we endure (and to date have survived) the same progressive legislative ritual. This years version contained the same willful economic ignorance as every other but with more hoops and hurdles under the presumption that these accouterments might make it more attractive.
State Sen. Donna Soucy, D-Manchester, described the bill as a bit more friendly than the typical minimum wage hike because it carved out a discount to the minimum wage for employers who offer health care benefits. For those employers, the minimum pay rate per hour would be $7.50 in 2018, $9 in 2019, $10.50 in 2020 and $12 in 2021.
Soucy argued that because neighboring states such as Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island each have a minimum wage set above $10 per hour, New Hampshire needs to do the same to be competitive.
Compare the genius of Donna Soucy with a market free from her shackles; the Dunkin Donuts around the corner updated their sign this week. They are starting new employees at up to $12.00/hour. New Hampshire has no minimum wage. The wage law of our land is the Federal one that the professional left ascribes to robber-baron slave owners disguised as risk-taking entrepreneurs.
Dunkin Donuts. Twelve dollars per hour to start.
I’m no legislator, and I don’t play one on the internet, but I know that even in the free market, $12.00 is higher than $10.00, and it’s not just Dunkin Donuts. And it’s not just today.
I’ve written at great length about New Hampshire’s average hourly wages using data from the Department of Employment Security (in 2014, 2015, and 2017, for starters). It is exceptional because the market is free to decide what labor is worth. This improves the odds that unskilled workers will not just get jobs but skills they can leverage into better wages, which New Hampshire’s data demonstrates, without any state minimum wage, year after year.
New Hampshire has a lot going for it. Low taxes, low unemployment, low poverty, high annual incomes, all without some shades-of-hey we need to mandate a ridiculously high starting wage forced down the throat of business owners.
But the Donna Soucy’s of the world will not relent because,
“Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.”
The business owner being the former and the legislator being the latter, but,
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
In Soucy’s defense, these employers did not prevent her elevation to the perch from which she seeks to command the economy as Biblical Moses commanded the waters.
Did they not suspect that she, with her progressive pedigree, would not abuse her authority to meddle in every aspect of their daily lives? Do they even know of it now?
Most folks don’t consider how much damage a few Democrats can do and the media loathe to report it.
But while New Hampshire is lurching left on any number of issues, despite a majority of “Registered” Republicans in its Legislature, the imposition of minimum wage shenanigans will have to wait another year with little chance its advocates will have learned anything about how bad it is for the economy between now and then.
Of course, none of that matters. They aren’t fighting for fifteen to lift the little people out of poverty. It doesn’t do that and just about everyone in political leadership knows it makes things worse. The Progressives are doing it as a favor to their union boss buddies who will use the forced wage hike to crank up the cost of the union dues that fill their own fat pockets. Pockets that lead right back to legislators like Donna Soucy.
And if the Supreme Court Rules in favor of Janus in Janus vs. AFSCME? Well, the Fight for Fifteen might just vanish from the face of the progressive earth.
I can’t wait to see if that happens.
