Minimum Wage – the economics version of Obamacare

by
Skip

Which is to say – the turning upside down of a system for not a lot of benefit for anyone and will result in higher costs (in more ways than a few) for everyone.

The average family income of a minimum wage worker is more than $44,000 a year – far more than can be earned by someone working at minimum wages.  But 42 percent of minimum-wage workers live with parents or some other relative.  In other words, they are not supporting a family but often a family is supporting them.  Only 15 percent of minimum-wage workers are supporting themselves and a dependent, the kind of person envisioned by those who advocate a “living wage.”

Ponder these facts along with the related fact that more than half of all

minimum-wage workers in the United States are younger than 25 years old.  These facts alone make incredible the allegation that minimum-wage workers are so desperate not to lose their current jobs that one result of this desperation is that employers of such workers enjoy monopsony power over them – monopsony power so real and widespread that government is justified in stripping low-skilled workers of the legal right to compete for jobs by offering to work at hourly wages below those deemed acceptable by politicians, professors, pundits, and popes.

Think of it as the Progressive way to have Government to shove its welfare apparatus onto others – yet, according to Progressives, isn’t this the highest calling of Government?  To directly give other peoples’ money to others?

(H/T: Café Hayek)

Author

  • Skip

    Co-founder of GraniteGrok, my concern is around Individual Liberty and Freedom and how the Government is taking that away. As an evangelical Christian and Conservative with small "L" libertarian leanings, my fight is with Progressives forcing a collectivized, secular humanistic future upon us. As a TEA Party activist, citizen journalist, and pundit!, my goal is to use the New Media to advance the radical notions of America's Founders back into our culture.

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