My reply is that with or without government cronyism, the laissez faire capitalist system would produce impoverished workers. It happened time and again.
Let’s say I own a coal mine.
I’m paying $1 a day to my miners. They don’t like it. They go on strike. “Fine,” I say, and walk down to the docks to hire the latest group of immigrants just off the boat. Meanwhile, my lawyers are evicting the striking workers from company housing. And now my just-off-the boat workers are digging coal for 75 cents a day.
The only help I require from the government is assistance in keeping the disgruntled strikers from destroying my property or shutting down my operation. (And of course, that is one of the things the government is there for under your Libertarian system: to keep the striking workers from using violence to “coerce” me.)
Of course, I pay my all my workers in company scrip, which is only redeemable at the Company Store, a place where all the goods are overpriced (but where I happily extend credit, the better to keep my workers in debt and beholden to me).
Voila! Impoverished workers with no government cronyism required.
(How do you think we wound up with an Italian community in West Virginia?)
I don’t think it happened one time, much less again.
Okay. Since you’re supposing, I get to suppose too, right? Okay, you pay your miners $1.00 a day, they strike, you go find guys to work for cheaper, and so on. Fine. I’ve been waiting for just such an opportunity. I offer the guys you fired jobs paying $2.00 a day with a $100 bonus if they stay on for one full year. I build them a community that they design themselves, and I reduce their work hours. I use my superior organizational and entrepreneural skills to streamline my operation so that I’m more than twice as efficient as you. Within two years, I have the lion’s share of the market, and you’re forced to emulate me.
Ah, there’s the rub. For your example to work, you have to assume that the altruistic employer has far superior business skills to the mean employer, in order to make up for the altruistic employer’s very high labor costs.
Such cases are necessarily the exception: on average the bastard employer will have equal or greater skills than the nice guy.
With equal skills, the bastard can outmaneuver the nice guy. In your example, if the bastard sees the nice guy coming (say, he sees the nice guy’s arrival by six months), he can offer a twenty-five-cent raise to any employee who signs a two-year contract, thereby protecting his workforce. Anyone who doesn’t sign that contract gets fired, and he lets folks know this.
Who’s gonna let themselves get fired in the hopes that the nice guy will still open the factory up in six months? Maybe some folks will, but not enough to populate the nice guy’s factory.
Established businesses have more power than new businesses in this respect. This is not some pinko commie notion of mine; this is what you’re hoping to achieve when you’re playing the Top Hat or the Little Dog or the Shoe.
Workers at the low end of the wage spectrum have much, much less power than their employers, and the employers can therefore use sneakily coercive measures to ensure that contracts unduly favor them. This is why we have overtime laws, minimum wage laws, worker safety laws.
Rune’s suggestion that it doesn’t take much capital to open a small business ignores entirely the way that small businesses work; I’m not even sure how I can address something so in the face of evidence.
I can’t make heads or tails of this; would you mind rephrasing it? Which part of “exactly as * say” are you talking about?
Of course we can rely upon industrialists to look out for the best interests of “their workers,” Lib.
I wonder who ever came up with that crazy minimum wage idea. Man, they pulled that idea out of thin air. Surely industrialists were taking care of their workers and the minimum wage was unnecessary. What could have possessed Congress to pass a minimum wage law? Surely there was no demand for it. Surely it wasn’t addressing a concern of American citizens. Why on earth did they enact it if it wasn’t needed? Do you have the answer, Lib?
Yes. And I spent about two seconds worrying about what would be a better single-word description of the wage-raising employer, compared to “altruistic,” before deciding, “fuck it, I’m just distinguishing between two strategies here; people will know what I mean.”
And you do know what I mean; you’re just being difficult.
If I’d written that post, Spoke, because someone would have Pitted me and complianed that I was talking to people like third graders and on the verge of a meltdown. You have the luck of the birth, I suppose. Henry Ford instituted a minimum wage long before government ever did. Here’s some stuff about minimum wage logic if you care to read it.
That’s not true. I think the person just being difficult is the one who describes Henry Ford’s industrial strategy as “altruistic”. He did what he did because it was good for his business.
And a whole helluva lot more employees making just barely above minimum wage.
Let’s get real, here. Companies will pay their workers the minimum they can get away with. The companies that only pay minimum wage either have employees who work for tips (with a few exceptions, casino dealers get paid $5.15/hr, the lion’s share of their income comes from tips, and no, they never get raises. If you work at a casino for ten years, you still get minimum wage), or their employers don’t give a damn about the quality of their workforce, or the work they do (I have worked for more than one of these, so don’t give me some bullshit about how it’s in a company’s best interest to have the best workers working for them. They don’t see it that way.)
Employers who actually do give a damn about having good workers pay more than the minimum for unskilled and low skilled labor because it gives them the ability to pick and choose the applicants they hire.
Even in more highly skilled operations, there are too many employers who don’t give a damn about the quality of their workers, or (as seems to be the case here in Vegas) actually prefer poor workers over good ones, and will pay $6-7 an hour to put a live body on a job that requires a fair amount of skill and attention to detail rather than shell out $9 or $10 for an acutal good worker who will actually do the job instead of sitting at their desk all day applying nail polish and making personal phone calls.
If there were no minimum wage, employers who didn’t give a damn about the kind of workers they hired as long as there was someone with a pulse on the floor would pay $.25 an hour, which means that someone who paid thirty cents an hour would be the ones who could pick and choose for unskilled labor. For more skilled occupations, like secretaries, pay rates would come down from $7 an hour to maybe seventy five cents, because these rates of pay would be determined relative to the lowest common denominator. A bit more skill requires a bit more money than no skill, but it would still come down to the minimim the employer could get away with paying, and a job that requires computer literacy and a professional phone manner plus some math skills really doesn’t pay that much more than pushing a broom or putting an electrical terminal on a piece of wire now- the wage will come down relative to what unskilled labor was making.
And with outsourcing and offshoring now available, the highly skilled technical jobs would also come down in pay because they would be competing with some guy in Bangladesh…
Oh, and it’s been my experience that experience on the job does not give you the ability to move on to a higher skilled, higher paid job. It may have been true twenty or thirty years ago, but no longer. It just gives you a better chance of being hired for the same job you’ve been doing all these years at about the same pay, just for a different company. People don’t work their way up the ladder. They may top out at a low-level supervisory position but that’s about the best they can hope for. A factory worker who has demonstrated an ability to learn to operate any machine in the shop, repair it if it breaks down, and recognize design flaws and offer solutions for fixing them will not get a job as an engineer. That job will go to the kid fresh out of school with no real-world experience. A billing clerk who was good enough to become the department supervisor and showed a lot of business acuen twenty years ago might have become the business manager for a company. Now, she’ll just remain a glorified business clerk. The business will, again, hire the newly-degreed MBA with no real world experience. And now, experience will not even net you a good paying job in the same field.
Ask my mother, who was the business manager for a major medical practice for twelve years, with experience in medical billing, who increased the profits of the practice she worked for every year until she was fired by part-time consultant who was given canning power. A year later, the place was running in the read.
She looked for work in medical offices for six months before she gave up and went to work as a pit clerk in a casino.
See, you’re operating under the assumption that companies function in a rational manner, in which they place the best person in the job that they’re best suited for, and are willing to pay well for a skilled person with a strong work ethic.
On the subject of the minimum wage, I think a more Libertarian approach to dealing with the “problem” of poverty would be to give direct cash (or something like food stamps) to poor people, and leave the market alone to find the proper wage for the proper job. With the min wage, you end up subsidizing the lifestyles of quite a few teenage workers or other secondary wage earners.
The minimum wage is a broad, blunt intstument that attacks the problem of poverty indirectly. Let teenagers earn $2/hr bagging groceries, but give the single mom earning $4/hr the added cash she needs to survive directly.
Don’t know how this fits with the Libertarian ideal (probably not very well), but how 'bout imposing heavy tax penalties on companies that pay their companies so poorly that they qualify for government aid?
But I don’t understand how any libertarian can make that argument when you consider the coercive environment over half of the population lived in. I suppose what I’m getting at is the sneaking suspicion many of us have on the left, that for most libertarians the social/personal freedom side of your philosophy (which I agree with for the most part) takes a back seat to the lower taxes, “get govmint off our backs!” hooey. Now, if you want to say “in some ways pre 1900 (or pre 1932/new deal) US was more libertarian than the present, in some ways it wasn’t,” fine, I’d agree with that.
But there was an orgy of monopolistic frenzy as the 19th century came to a close. And how did those early monopolies come to an end? Stronger, trust-busting government.
Well, for one thing, we do live in a more liberal society nowadays, both in terms of social equality and government intervention/regulation. Therefore I can say “post 1932 America is more liberal than pre” without having to choose between different aspects of my political philosophy. Libertarians can’t make this argument – you have to choose which is more important to you. I find it very revealing of the libertarian mindset.
Fair enough, the sentence was ambiguous – I thought you were implying other Americans needed to live up to the founders.
Well, I should add I agree that limited government is important, in the sense that I don’t want to live in a dictatorship. I just don’t want it limited to the extent libertarians do.
I am gonna need a cite for what you consider “just barely above minimum wage”, and how many are making it.
Precisely. And 97% of the time, “the minimum they can get away with” is more than minimum wage. And therefore for the vast majority, the market is driving wages higher than your worst-case scenario of collapsing wages and widespread recession because no one can afford the goods they themselves produce is not likely.
The libertarian proposal to eliminate the minimum wage therefore does not lead to widespread wage collapse, but it does reduce entry costs to the labor market. You can get a job, in other words, even if your labor is worth less than $5.15 per hour.
It was this post of yours:
I don’t see how minimum wage laws prevent any of this from happening, just at a somewhat higher wage level. Was that your point?
Feel free to disregard me; I got less than four hours sleep last night and I am running a bit ragged. I may not have understood your post.
Have you ever been in a discussion with a communist who claims that “true communism” has never existed? Forget the Soviet Union, China, etc - they’re not the real thing. Why? Cause the real thing would work.
You seem to follow the same pattern. You’re right that it wasn’t very libertarian of 19th century powermongers when they teamed up to squash the little guy, just as those poor, naive reds are right when they say that it wasn’t very communist of Stalin to murder millions. But the exploitation of the 19th century could arguably be considered a likely result of the very libertarian atmosphere of early America, just as Stalinist purges could likewise be considered a likely result of an attempt to create a communist world.
I can concede that the exploitation of years past wasn’t really libism, but that doesn’t make libism any more feasible. Such shittiness might very well be the inevitable result of an attempt to create a pure libertarian society.
You notice it because that’s the part that makes us out of the mainstream. There are already loud proponents against gun control, for school vouchers, for school vouchers, for abortion rights, etc. Even legalizing drugs at this point is not so utterly controversial.
I know this is may be hard to accept, but not even most conservatives seeking a return to Jim Crow and women being unable to vote. Those are settled issues.
How about, “By and large, pre 1900 (or pre 1932/new deal) US was more libertarian than the present, though not in every way.”
Agreed, but has been pointed out, they arose because of trust-enabling government.
I do not understand this point. We must choose to live in one or the other? I can’t hope for the enlightened racial attitudes of the 21st century while keeping the rugged individualism of the 18th?
FWIW, for this Libertarian at least, those are the least essential things: I’ve never made money and never plan to (I’m a teacher). But I believe that the US is in decline as a nation because we are fat and lazy, and have developed a mentality of victimhood and blame-ducking. I have been a social worker and seen first-hand the culture of dependance, and seen how bureacracy cheats hardworking people trying to do their best to be productive members of society in favor of those who are compliant, tell the caseworkers what they want to hear and know how to work the system. I saw first-hand and in concrete terms “the system” do more harm than good. My ideas also became reinforced from living and traveling in Asia and seeing both a superior work ethic occasioned by very free marketplaces and also the problems with stultifying cultural pressures.
On a personal level, the biggest benefit of Libertania for me would be legal weed.
Actually, most companies don’t really care if she’s a decent secretary as long as she has big boobs and wears low-cut blouses. But I digress. When the wage scale drops, the pay scale for everyone except degreed professionals (and I worry about them sometimes) will fall. No, they don’t actually calculate that “I’m gong to pay my secretary X% above minimum wage”, but the least they can get away with paying will amount to that as the general wage scale falls.
Shodan I’m looking for that cite, but I can"t seem to find a search engine that, when I type “percent of American workers earning $6.00 an hour or less” will actually link me to an article that has the statistic of the percentage of American workers earning $6.00 or less.
Did you even check the link?