In Praise of George Will
By Repair Man Jack Comments (17) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
For someone as conservative as myself, I usually harbor far less respect and admiration for George Will than most people would think. He may gaze more astutely at his navel than I do mine, but there’s an asymptotic limit to what the guy can tell me about lint hair that I would really care about. Today, however, he cut through the mendacious cattle droppings with a sharpened broadsword of an opinion column.
Today, he unloaded on the farcical issue of the minimum wage. It seems that The Democratic Party has made it a cornerstone of their plan to fight poverty by beating down the poor as mercilessly as possible. No, in fairness, they actually claim that the poor will be paid more with a higher minimum wage.
However, this axiom becomes risible in the face of even an elementary understanding of how a linear constraint impacts consumer behavior. Employers are consumers as well as producers. They consume a large number of goods in the course of providing whatever good or service they output. One of those goods is labor. The price thereof, is synonymous with the laborer’s wage.
A voter dumb enough to think John Edwards has brought a fresh set of ideas to the table would assume a higher minimum wage means more money. They would reason that Wage A > Wage B implies a guy gets more money if the job he works stops getting paid Wage B and gets upgraded to Wage A instead.
If there really are two America’s, the America that buys John Edwards also fails to understand why that guy just got laid off instead of cashing in with Wage A. That America is also now angry that the person doing the job now instead doesn’t speak the English language, and doesn’t want to speak with anyone that might work for the INS. Assuming, of course, that the factory or office that used to offer these jobs hasn’t relocated to Phucket, Thailand and taken all the jobs it used to offer abroad along with it.
The other America, which includes George Will, understands good and well that labor exhibits an elasticity of demand. They also understand that this implies that the employer paying the wage is operating against a constraint and compares the return on investment for labor to every other type of expenditure involved in running a business. Even fairly rudimentary retail outlets buy accounting software can tell you that figure to the tenth of a penny.
So unlike the typical rube who buys into the Two Americas trope, the business owner can tell you how much employment opportunity can be reasonably doled out at a given time, in a given place. The slick faux-agony of the Democrats won’t change the laws of economics any more than Evel Kneivel could alter the laws of physics at altitude, over The Snake River Canyon, when he realized this whole motorcycle jumping thing had its professional drawbacks. There is only so much of the budget available for wages and the more it costs per worker, the smaller the workforce will have to get.
That’s how linear constraints work; that’s how minimum wage laws fail. That’s also how the Concilium Plebis wannabes infesting both our houses of congress will screw the poor to a wall and shake loose a fine rain of plaster dust. This minimum wage law exemplifies populist demagoguery.
This entire bill is political class warfare; waged to impress the terminally stupid. These legislators have a professional duty to do better. They should leave the cheap antics to Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs and actually care about what this legislation will do to the labor market.
George Will understood this well. That’s why I break with my usual distaste for Mr. Will and praise him. After all, he’s the only guy on the entire Washington Post roster who is smart enough to realize that the proper minimum wage is $0.00.
I think it's time to bring back apprenticeships. I have had too many co-workers who have gotten paid good money for incompetent work. They haven't had any experience and spend most of the time learning on the job. This should be considered part of their education - they should pay for it just like college.
We would get better political traction against the minimum wage with a federalism arguement rather than the economic arguement. This past election a number of state enacted their own minimum wage at a higher rate than the federal one. George Will states that 70% of workers are covered by these state minimum wages. Why should federal representatives from those states care about the federal minimum? Why should representatives from California or New York be allowed to set wages for workers in Alabama or Nebraska?
Why should representatives from California or New York be allowed to set wages for workers in Alabama or Nebraska?
So they can make the fly-over states as expensive, non-competative and difficult to afford to live in as their own Beautiful People™ paradises!
What do I win?
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"I don't know." -- Helen Thomas, in response to the question, "Are we at war, Helen?" - posed by then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
>>>>Why should representatives from California or New York be allowed to set wages for workers in Alabama or Nebraska?
Since the Civil Rights Era, that sort of institutional arrogance has become an excepted norm.
Praise the memory of Gerald Ford.
You have federalism confused with states rights. Segregationalist and racist based their arguments on states rights. States rights are bad. Federalism is good.
...for the Left and its media acolytes to demonize 'federalism' just as they have 'states rights.'
Any effort to stop the values of Northeasteran and West Coast elites from being imposed on the entire nation -- ususally by the courts -- cannot be tolerated by the Left. To them, turning to federalism to settle current hot-button issues (whether its abortion, marriage, or the minimum wage) is no different than the actions of the evil segregationists you speak of.
The left and the media will demonize anything conservatives advocate. If we stop ourselves because of their demonization then we might as well quit and spend the rest of our lives huddled in the fetal position in our beds.
Why should the same people be able to use the courts to impose abortion on demand, gay marriage, and a hostile reading of the Establishment Clause on the people of Alabama, Nebraska, and most other states?
They get away with it, and as long as they do, nothing will change.
Arguments about elasticity of demand and Federalism are not compelling to many, sounds like cover for the fact that conservatives just don't want the poor to earn more.
We have to articulate it better, the idea that a minimum wage means less jobs.
Although, I suspect many hard-core leftists don't care as much about causing more unemployment, since the unemployed should be nannied by the state. I've heard a similar argument made by a liberal about France, and why their higher unemployment wasn't a "bad thing."
Conservatives think throwing people out of work is somehow, I dunno, bad. Liberals shrug it off. The gummint will take care of them.
Another point about the minimum wage that gets lost is that it deprives people of hope. When the minimum gets increased, it takes that much longer for employers to have the flexibility to reward good work with raises. The result is more people dependent on an increase in the minimum wage if they're going to "advance". It sets up an adversarial relationship between employer and employee, full of envy and suspicion.
It's an insidious piece of malfeasance, but it just sounds so sweet. Free money.
The Academy: researching the Illiberal Arts
The average Jane and Joe intuitively understand cost of living. They know houses cost much more in California than in Nebraska, so why should both have the same minimum wage. It is much harder to convince them that increaseing the minimum wage less jobs. We shouldn't abandon that point, but it should be secondary to the federalism arguement.
And DailyKos immediately blasts George Will and anybody that doesn't think the minimum wage is great and and claims all the argumeents like Will's and minimum wage opponents are nonsense. Dailykos is the one with the nonsense. Written by somebody called mcjoan.
They don't get it. Raising the minimum wage will not stop the 1.4 million from earning below the minimum wage that they are so angry about. It will only increase this #.
They want to raise the living standards, then reform immigation laws and stop all the illegal immigrants coming in who will work for anything.
Please Define what a healthy single adult needs to live on please?? Why isn't $10,712 enough? So if the rent is too high, then move somewhere else.
They die from rational explanation. George Will just explained to these lameos the difference between real life and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This is something the nut-jobs who get stirred up by poulism don't want explained.
Praise the memory of Gerald Ford.
Seriously. Many people who are currently unemployable due to massive failures within our education establishment (drop-outs and graduates who are unable to read, write, or do basic arithmetic) would be well served by a master welder or plumber willing to let them sleep on a cot in the back room in exchange for learning a valuable trade.
And many who live with no hope could have a chance to better themselves, where minimum wage increases just decrease their chances of ever escaping the crushing poverty of their youth.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful 100 percent.
I posted a comment above in reply to the first one, basically stating what you said, except I hadn't scrolled down here. Next time, I'll scroll all the way down before commenting.
Employees should be allowed to pay for the privilege of working, in exchange for the experience they could not get otherwise.
One of the base assumptions glossed by minimum wage advocates is that workers cannot get a pay increase unless they all get one at once. Why anyone who has ever worked for the minimum, but no longer does, buys this assumption is a deep, disheartening mystery to me.