Five minimum wage points

Back in the old Livejournal "political cartoons" forum, maybe ten years ago, a huge slapfight erupted over minimum wage laws, and I got drawn into it. That resulted in a few pages of talking points, pooped into a document and then forgotten. Today I had a spare half hour and needed a counterbalance to eight hours of programming, so I cleaned up those points, and here they are:

1.

Raising the minimum wage raises the minimum human efficiency level needed for a business to stay solvent. Say the minimum wage in your region is 15 bucks an hour. If you employ a human to scoop ice cream cones and make one dollar profit per sale, but the human can only scoop 12 cones in an hour, then you can't pay the human a decent wage. You need to find a way to make that human more efficient, or your business sucks and should not exist at scale.

This could be enforced with a threshold, and audits. If a business grows to the point where it consumes more than 500 human hours in a day, then minimum wage laws come into effect. If the business can't meet that bar, then that business is legally prohibited from making its employees work more hours. Lawsuits, shutdowns, etc., enforced by a city, country, or state agency perhaps. They could also commission studies every three years to set that wage, with the new wage taking effect three years after that to give businesses time to adjust.

This carves out a nice hole for "small business" owners who want to hire high schoolers or unskilled migrants to scoop ice cream, do clerical work, rake leaves, et cetera, but prevents conglomerates from exploiting people en-masse and steamrolling those same small businesses. There are other details and exceptions we could add to this law, no doubt, but the core idea seems solid to me.

2.

A "living wage" is something that needs to be calculated by region, since the cost of living in one part of the country is actually quite different from the cost of living in another. However, the current minimum wage is generally well below this amount, and should be increased in almost every area I've seen so far.

3.

Historically, on balance, increases in the minimum wage have not had any effect on employment rate, positive or negative. There are a number of meta-studies that bear this out. However, this is not actually a strike against a minimum wage: Employment rate is not a good measure of economic health or of prosperity. Linking the minimum wage with job growth can neither justify it nor rebuke it. That link is a red herring.

4.

Any increase of the minimum wage beyond the "living wage" threshold will have diminishing returns, and also erodes the economy. We can't just vote everybody a pay-raise high enough to magically lift them into the middle class; that requires tangible things like infrastructure and material goods that don't exist in sufficient quantity. And when those quantities become sufficient, we are sure to move the goalposts, just as we've moved the goalposts countless times since the beginning of civilization. That said, ight now a good minimum wage should get a person a bed to sleep in, enough food to stay healthy, and some decent medical care. In past eras that seemed like an absurd demand, but today, it isn't.

I look forward to the day when smartphones cost 50 cents to make and are 100% recyclable, and we decide to proclaim that everyone on Earth gets one by law. That day is not today, even though a smartphone has accidentally become a vital instrument for participating in large parts of society. We may eventually guarantee everyone their own two-bedroom house, their own electric car, their own theme song, and their own petting zoo. I look forward to that day as well. Those things seem far-fetched now ... but a roof, a good meal, and some medical care do not.

5.

Raising the minimum wage is not going to "cure" poverty. I'm pretty sure there is no "cure" for a condition that, in some cases, actually is brought about by things like bad life-decisions and being a shitty human being. Nevertheless, people acting shitty is not a counter-argument to a minimum wage, because people do not choose to find themselves in an environment where almost every dang job around them doesn't pay enough to get by.

This is why the whole "personal responsibility" argument against wage laws and poverty in general is so vicious. Runaway corporate growth and unregulated exploitation are not the result of people failing to work hard enough, they're the result of people being prevented from passing sane labor laws (of which the minimum wage is one) and organizing, unionizing, and being heard in general.

Unchecked capitalism remains the 500-pound gorilla in the room, and that gorilla needs to learn some manners.