The minimum mage should be abolished

I'm now going to rebut his case, without addressing his rebuttal of mine until the next round. Before I begin, there is one issue I'd like to address--and that PRO's use of sourcing. His points 1 through 5 are copy and pasted from two CATO articles he links below without being footnoted or placed in quotation marks. Obviously, this is not the proper way to source an argument and can be taken to be plagiarism, especially since he copy and pasted most of these arguments instead of writing them himself. PRO's failure, also, to footnote his sources akes them much harder to track down. Rebutting PRO's case PRO provides no framework analysis or way in which the judges ought to evaluate arguments—so I urge our judges not to allow him to initiate his own in latter rounds after I don't have a chance to rebut it, as it would be grossly unfair for him to present an original framework analysis then. Therefore, I urge you to prefer my framework of evaluating economic impacts ahead of moral impacts. 1. PRO argues that an employee pay should be decided between an employee or employer. His justification for this is, first, that if an employee doesn’t want to work at a certain wage, he can work elsewhere. There are several glaring problems with this overly simplistic contention: it does not hold up under the slightest bit of real-world scrutiny. If you look at the trend over the past three-decades, where productivity has nearly doubled but wages have been flat in real terms, it is clear that workers lack adequate bargaining leverage to properly negotiate wages. PRO’s remarks make the assumption of perfect competition for labor, perfect information amongst buyers and sellers about alternate employment, perfect rationality in the sense that employees and employees will be mindful of alternate employment in making their decisions, and perfectly equal bargaining power, all of which he provides no evidence for—because they only hold under a ceteris-paribus microeconomic model, not with real-world data. PRO claims, “If an employer does not wish to pay a worker a certain wage, he or she does not have to hire him or her. ” First, you should note how utterly facile this argument is because it lacks a warrant. His argument against the minimum wage is “employers should not do what they don’t want to do. ” But why is that? He provides us no reason with why that ought to be the case. Employers are forced to do a lot of things they may not want to—be it complying with taxes or regulations, or even providing a safe work environment. Restrictions on freedom exist even in the sense that my freedom to swing my fist ends where another person’s nose begins. There are plausible, sound restrictions on freedom—and one of those is ensuring that employees are properly compensated for their labor, and cannot fall victim to differentials in bargaining power that have contributed to most of the gains over the past thirty years and since the onset of the 2009 recovery to the top of the income distribution. This is especially true not only by virtue of my arguments on pareto optimality in my framework analysis, but also because employers will tend to benefit immensely not only from greater efficiencies from a minimum wage hike, but also from the decline in income inequality which depresses consumption, feeds speculative bubbles, and destroys future innovation. PRO then argues that “[i]f there is consent between the employer and employee as to how much be or she wishes to get paid, the government should not have the right to intrude upon that decision. ” Once more, there’s no warrant for that claim: why should that be the case? Thus far he’s provided only moral arguments, but doesn’t explain why these morally or logically follow, nor is there an optimal moral framework, all of which supports my analysis from the last round that you should weigh economic arguments higher than moral arguments. He is assuming that all contracts ought to be enforced, in spite of what the terms of agreement actually were. But what if one of the participants was under durress--e. g. , predatory lending that led up to the subprime crisis--or imperfect information or was being exploited? Moreover, what if that contract originated from the fact that employers, by virtue of a myriad of developments over the past thrity or so years--globalization, attacks on labor unions, tax cuts for the affluent coupled with the abiltiy for rich people to donate unlimited sums of money to political campaigns, etc. --have significanlty more barganing power than their employeses? There is ultimately no reason at all that we ought to accept this claim, or the supremacy of any human action which may in fact be tainted. There are perfectly reasonable for the government to interfere in contracts to correct for inherent, systemic unjustices, among which are is the perpetuation of poverty-level wages in spite of rapid productivity gains over the past three decades. PRO then claims that "Economic Theory states that businesses and jobs will move to where conditions are most favorable. (Assuming that no new tariffs or restrictions on foreign trade are added). The Minimum Wage could aid in shipping jobs overseas where these restrictions on wages are not placed and increasing domestic unemployment. " This claim is patently false for several reasons. First, the theory he speaks of is in fact nothing more than the fact that people respond to incentives. But you will note the deceptive language he uses in the form of "most favorable. " What is most favorable? Businesses could relocate to, for instance, Somalia--but they wouldn't do well at all because Somalia is a poor country, without enough people willing to purchase their products. Second, this claim is, per most microeconomic models, "ceteris paribus," or else equal. The problem is that the real world is *never* "all else equal," and there are always, constantly a multitude of other factors which affect business decisions. Third, and most importantly, I will cross-apply my evidence from the last round from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman which demonstrates clearly that the vast majority of minimum wage jobs cannot be exported. Krugman states (transcribed from the linked interview): "The fact of the matter is that most minimum wage workers in the United States are employed in non-tradeable industries. Production can't move to China. They're employed in areas where, yeah, you can mechanize some, but not very much actually. For the most part, they're in common-sense industries where the reason you need a person is because you require the kind of flexibility that I think we're still a few decades away of getting out of computers" (1). PRO goes on to state that there are "better options and ways to ensure better pay other than government intervention. " The problem with this, first, is that it's non-topical--because, even if there were better options and if he were to prove that these options were superior to the minimum wage, he needs to establish how these policies are mutually exclusive: why should we have his proposed policy in lieu of the minimum wage? The resolution requires me to support the existence of the minimum wage, but it by no means precludes me from supporting additional policies. For instance, he brings up colletive bargaining--but the resolution need not require me to argue against this. In fact, it was the disregard for collective bargaining under Ronald Reagan's Administration, which by itself was extremely hostile to labor, which contributed to stagnating wages over the past three decades, as I noted in my case (2). There is no reason at all that collective bargaining is incompatible with a mandated minimum wage, nor is there a reason, in light of efforts in states such as Ohio (3) and Wisconsin (4) to destroy collective bargaining, as well as a number of Supreme Court decisions limiting the power of labor unions (5). He then brings up Switzerland. First, his argument on the Swiss having "lower unemploymnet" is utterly preposterous, as this has nothing at all to do, one, with the minimum wage--but rather the fact that the U. S. has just emerged from the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression, which was caused by a market economy run amok, not by the institution of the minimum wage. Second, you cannot simply compare cross-country unemployment rates because there is no magic number--the "natural" rate of unemployment is dependent on structural issues within countries and varies by country. Second, he's comparing apples to apples because collective barganing rights are much stronger in Switzerland than in the US, but yet we're debating whether the US ought to have a minmum wage. Moreover, even with those collective bargaining rights, income inequality persists--Switzelrand is 31st out of 34th on the list of OECD countries in terms of Gini Coefficient, whereby a higher ratio signals more widespread inequality (6). Labor groups in Switzerland, in fact, were clamoring for the implementation of a minimum wage to offset exceptionally low wages in industries such as retail and personal services (7). In fact, the latest measure to implement a minimum wage in Switzerland was the third referendum on this in the past 18 months (8), signalling a clear concern that wage disparity is a clear and present issue. "They argue that surviving on less than 4,000 francs a month is not possible because rents, health insurance and food are all prohibitively expensive. A key element of the campaign in favour of a minimum wage was the argument that the Swiss welfare system was being forced to subsidise businesses which refuse to pay a living wage" (9). Sources1. . http://tinyurl.com...2. . http://tinyurl.com...3. . http://tinyurl.com...4. . http://tinyurl.com...5. . http://tinyurl.com...6. . http://tinyurl.com...7. . http://tinyurl.com...8. . http://tinyurl.com...9. ibid