Minimum wage removes information from the economy which is inherently a dampener on economic performance.
Socialists (who tend to be living relatively comfortably) like to think they're actually helping people by imposing minimum wages on workers. I do not think they are helping anyone except for a few select individuals. These few select individuals are not native to the country they tend to be foreigners.
That is right. Minimum wage mostly benefits foreigners over local workers (and Ill later explain; certain employers over the long run) This is because the minimum wage is actually TOO HIGH for the vast majority of businesses to function while employing local workers. Employers MUST then get foreign workers who would actually be productive enough given the minimum wage. The Foreign workers are much more productive than local workers because the foreign workers are used to significantly lower wages. Foreign workers working in America is like a miner or whatever going to a work camp to send money back home.
Socialist unfortunately make poor assumptions about the state of minimum wage workers as a result. They notice a ton of foreigners are working in work camp like conditions in America and then think that those workers need the socialist's help. Then they see that the companies which employ all these foreigners are very profitable which may imply that wages need to increase. The reality is that if wages do increase then they would attract local workers which are inherently less productive then foreign labor who are simply more desperate than the local labor. That is the key missing ingredient that socialists don't understand about the current state of low wage work.
The Minimum wage however ultimately benefits the employers. Well a certain kind of employer...Because who is the employer?
Well there are Working Class Employers (which many socialists may refer as the little bourgeois), but in today's economy the little bourgeois is land owning and rent seeking. Working Class Employers are workers who have saved their money working skilled jobs (which pay significantly above minimum wage) and eventually decided to seize the means of production for themselves and start a small firm. All they own is nearly worthless stocks and basic levels of capital (ie: tools/IP/etc). The Working Class Employer is still working class as they tend to require to put in more work than any of their employees in their company and ultimately what they provide is a labor service (which they assist in or manage using their vast experience) not renting out capital to the Working Class including the Working Class Employer.
The Working Class Employer is significantly more sensitive to minimum wage than compared to large conglomerate corporate competition. When the minimum wage increases then odds are this would impact working class employers more than multinational corporations. I would argue that minimum wage has had a negative impact on the growth of Working Class Employers.
You may argue that maybe Working Class Employers should not exist because they do not pay enough for someone to live but this argument has the assumption that they know what is best for the employee.
Socialists have this big problem with the belief that they know what is better for whom they consider "less than them". Socialists, while thinking that hierarchies are oppressive, tend to create hierarchies anyways which conveniently put themselves on the top. Socialists consider themselves the most "educated" (whatever that means) and they consider poor people to be sheeps that are led to suffering by evil capitalists. From my perspective most Socialist grand standing actually creates economic systems which support population replacement and increased powers of International Organizations/Multinational Corporations.
Lets say the Working Class Employer is a Barber who is well respected after decades of hard work. They rent out a store and they split the rent out to other younger but experienced barbers (to share the rental costs) who can easily make as much as the lead barber can. This is fine. Whenever the barbers run into an issue the lead Barber is always their to help them out of a bind. But the reality of life is that people get old and die. How do we get new barbers learning to cut hair? That lead Barber will die, and will need to be replaced by one of the younger Barbers and a new inexperienced Barber will need to be found. I mean barbers who come out of barber school are shit barbers and they require to go through an apprenticeship. Why should the Barber who runs a barber shop waste his time with an apprentice who will no doubt not earn minimum wage for the firm and most like cause problems which the lead Barber will need to fix for free? You may say that its a worthwhile investment considering the problem of generational replacement outlined above, but in today's economy there is no loyalty to the employer... if a Barber invests too much into an apprentice, this is ultimately a gamble because the apprentice doesn't have to continue to work for the Employer after acquiring skill.
This gets to the Meat and Potatoes.
Socialists assume that the only value an employee gets from an employer is monetary. We have turned relationships in the realm of work to exclusively transactional ones. And in the process of converting relationships to transactional ones we have isolated the transaction to only monetary value and that there is no other value in the transaction. In the case of Working Class Employers, the large transaction that is occurring is educational which in most cases is worth more than the minimum wage itself (proof: See cost of college and how useless graduates are even after spending all their money on what is essentially a worthless education).
The minimum wage has resulting in the emerging working class to spend money (that they typically do not have, they typically get loans for making them debt slaves at the start of their non-existent career) at universities and colleges which do NOT give proper training to their students compared to a similar term working under a Working Class Employer. If you're willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to goto university and college, why isn't there the option to just go DIRECTLY to a Working Class Employer making a minimal wage (basically nothing, but might get free lunches or something). University should not be a Working Class training site. University should be a privileged outlet for MATURE individuals to question reality...it is not a place for Workers. University should be considered a place only skitzos and aristocrats goto. This is a good thing. This is a form of Redistribution of Wealth... this is because the wealthy upper classes are paying to push the boundaries of humanity (under their own interests), rather than the Working Class (under financial stress)...whom are not pushing much at all. Most university graduate studies are still filled with foreigners because our Working Class doesn't belong in a university, whereas in foreign countries, they have aristocrats filling their universities and as such produce the best graduates to go onto pushing the boundaries of understanding in other country's Graduate programs. A benefit for the foriegner instead of for the local. In this case the local being punished is the local aristocrat and to the benefit of foreign ones.
Socialists have removed the option of the minimal wage from workers and as such workers now need to spend tens of thousands on education (supply and demand, this is the result of reduced options), and their countries are now being flooded with foreign workers (and as outlined above; aristocrats) who are simply more productive.
This then results in less growth for Working Class Employers and SIGNIFICANT GROWTH for Multinational Corporations which mostly control money supply, regulations, information, and labor itself. With less Working Class Employers you have less on-ramps for apprentices to learn the ropes of a trade, and their only option is to goto university or college. If the worker doesn't goto university or college they literally have no options for a successful career. They will compete against foreign labor for shitty multinational corpo jobs that have no avenues for employee growth.
To compare minimum wage to 1940s minimum wage is silly because the workers in the 1940s were a completely different worker with different skills (probably just more skills overall) then the workers of today (who tend to have no real skills whatsoever). Workers of today see no value in getting experience and education WHILE WORKING (its ironic) but they are more than content spending tens of thousands of dollars on "education" which poorly prepares them for the work they were going to be doing anyways.
I am an embedded engineer and I get a decent salary above the mean after many years of being supposedly underpaid working for Working Class Employers. I paid 30,000$ to goto university while living at home. Why couldn't I instead work for a Working Class Employer who runs a embedded consultancy firm for minimal wage while living at home? Why couldnt I have done that while in high school like in Grade 10 when I first started playing around with electronics? Why is this not an option for me? Socialists, do you have answer? Why did I have to pay over 30,000$ to get an education I never actually needed?
The Crux of my Argument against minimum wage is that if Working Class Employers were able to pay minimal wages, then given the option many workers would rather work for the Working Class Employer rather than a spiritually void corporation that feeds off of minimum wage regulations like Mcdonalds. With more people working for Working Class Employers, the skills which the average LOCAL worker possesses will increase over time and thus increase productivity over the long term to the point where a "minimum wage" can provide prosperity again. Unlike working at a spiritually void corpo like McDonalds, working for a Working Class Employer gives you skills which other Employers are in desperate need of. You will not be paid minimal wages indefinitely, and Working Class Employers who only pay minimal wages will see high turn over especially in terms of IP protection.
And I will not go into it to much but its a good concept to end this post on... but the most satisfying work is typically unpaid in the start. Consider a family farm. The Family Farm is ultimately a commune. This relationship with work has been effectively destroyed and replaced with transactional relations in work. This is also because Socialists think that nepotism is "bad" when in reality its only bad from the perspective of a multinational corporation, not a Working Class Employer. Many people's last names were intrinsically linked to their work. ie: Archer, Barber, Bowman, Brewer, Butler, Carpenter, Carver, Cook, Draper, Farmer, Fisher, Forester, Fowler, Gardener, Hunter, Mason, Miller, Piper, Potter, Sadler, Sheppard, Shoemaker, Skinner, Tanner, Taylor, Weaver and Wheeler. Image having a skilled labor job which everyone in your family contributes to. Wouldn't that have tied more spiritual connection to your work above the monetary value of it? If you can have a roof on your head, food in your belly, and the occasional form of entertainment... if you have fulfilling work (which is work that tends to make you feel important or needed...ie: a Gross/Dirty Job can be fulfilling if people need you to do it), then you are probably going to be a happy person.
In the end your civilization is mere reflection of what the individual people within that civilization are able to prop up. Civilization Decline is an aspect of the decline of capacity of the locals (workers and the aristocracy). The Solution to Civilization Decline is to provide a pressure to individuals to be able to do more things in the real world for the betterment of society. How this is achieved is complicated and not simple, but I do believe the eradication of a minimum wage is a simple policy change that would put our civilization back onto the right track. What provides the illusion that our Civilization is not actually in decline is because this Civilization (Western) is fully dependant on immigrants propping up the rest of society. Just like a Ponzi Scheme/Scam, the decline will become apparent the moment our Civilization fails to attract immigrants willing to work shitty corpo jobs. This also leads into the topic of declining birth rates. In the topic of declining birth rates, immigration is only a temporary patch as immigrant birth rates fall almost immediately once arriving in Western Countries. An economy of declining birth rates is an economy in decline, the decline is just not visible yet in the wilder civilization. Eventually all nations will have declining birth rates. Eventually there will be no immigrants.
I do not think Mcdonalds and friends should be allowed to exist over that of Working Class Employers and as such I am anti-minimum wage. Multinational Corporation's work should be considered a spiritual attack on work itself. No one needs to work at a mcdonalds. No one needs mc donalds. Let them die.
