Pretty much what I said. The point being that Ford didn’t raise wages to increase the sales of Ford cars - the math on that never made any sense in the first place. The truth is that he raised wages to lower his overall labor cost. He gained more in savings from lower training costs and reduced downtime than he gave up in wages.
The same is true today - employers don’t treat their employees well out of the goodness of their hearts, or to provide a ‘living wage’. They treat them well because workforce turnover is extremely expensive: especially so when your workforce is trained and experienced. As workers learn and become more productive, you have to pay them commensurately or your competitors will.
It’s not the government that forces them to do that, it’s the invisible hand of the marketplace.
I like “Economic Creationism” better. It describes a sense that there is some God defined correct price for something independent of what the market actually values the thing at. That something has some intrinsic worth apart from what someone else is willing to pay for it. That the economy needs to be planned and designed instead of allowing people to make it what they want. Because, heaven forbid, someone not value something at the designated level.
Or, as one poster tried to convince us in this thread, that you can wave your hand over the world and say “let there be a living wage”, and there will be no negative consequences. That somehow the “living wage” is the correct wage, irrespective of whether the market can actually sustain that wage.
That’s a good phrase as well and I agree. People throw around figures for a minimum wage of $10, $12.50, and $15/hr but never explain why such a number is the sweet spot. Johnny L.A. comes the closest by his simple declaration that $12.50 seems to be the point where, from talking to his friends, is “enough” to live on and have some extra spending cash.
However, what people say is the minimum they can live on is so subjective as to not be a reliable data point. A person’s lifestyle increases with his wage, so what people consider to be basic living coincidences with the wage they are currently receiving.
Second, everyone’s minimum is different. If I’m a single guy, my minimum is different than if I was married with 3 kids. Setting a wage based on a generic minimum would be too high for some and too low for others.
Third, it doesn’t matter because a market wage is irrelevant to what I think I need to live on. If my job is to punch a tool on the assembly line that a trained monkey can do, then the job won’t be there if the law prices it out of the market.