From: ctm@ardi.com
Subject: Minimum Wage laws
Organization: ARDI
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 04:46:25 GMT

Dear Folks,

Minimum wage laws are even more insidious than they appear.  It's not
just that they cut the bottom rungs off the ladder of employment, hurting
those who truly are at the bottom, but they also reinforce the artificial
"employer" "employee" distinction as well as the "educator" "non-educator"
distinction and the "work" "play" distinction.


Employer/Employee

Potentially any citizen is both an employer and an employee.  The current
set of regulations creates and maintains the artificial distinction that
you're one or the other, because starting a small business is a real
pain in the butt (lots of forms to fill out, lots of regulations to
watch out for), but if you hire one babysitter, or pay one person to rake
your leaves, you're an employer as well as an employee.  With fewer
regulations, more access to cheap legal advice (i.e. get rid of UPL
(unauthorized practice of law) rules) and cheap arbitration, more people
would set about becoming employers as soon as they could.  Until they're
able to get rid of their day job, they'd be both employers and employees;
this is not an artificial state, it's a natural one.  It consists of people
formalizing the helping of one another, using contracts to make sure that
everyone understands what's being asked and what's being offered as
compensation.  I know many people with small businesses who have been
employees in the past and are now employers; were it sufficiently painless
to *try* to be an employer, were the penalty not so great for failure, more
people would have a feel for both sides of the issue.

As it stands now, the vast majority of people consider themselves employees
strictly and have little appreciation for difficulties of being an employer.


Educator/Employer

<--+--------------+-------+-------+#######+------------------+--------->
Ivy League	State	Local	Watching  On the	 Job paying
Univ.		Univ.	College	  TV	  Job training   Tuition at school

There are many ways to learn, some involve paying large amounts of money
to educators, some involve being paid for doing useful work while learning
new stuff.  Minimum wage laws hack out part of the spectrum that pays small
amounts to iffy trainees.  Yes, there are exceptions to minimum wage laws,
but much of it is special cased per industry and it's much easier to just
not hire someone than to fiddle with the paperwork and possibly bring the
state labor board breathing down your back.

Of course those who sneer at anything but a liberal arts education may not
accept as legitimate other types of education.  In fact, many backers of
minimum wage laws implicitly do not recognize such.


Work/Play

Consider the case of a company that writes Macintosh (r) (Macintosh is a
registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.) emulators.  Part of their
business is to test programs to make sure that they work properly under
their emulator.  This includes games.  Somewhere along the line it is
necessary to pay people to play games using their software.  Minimum Wage
laws don't allow paying below minimum wage, so instead of looking for
an individual who may have no traditionally "marketable skills" and hiring
that person at a token wage of say $2.00/hr., the company will wind up
hiring someone who is more skilled and can be used in a variety of ways.
The potential "game player" hiree is cut off from an exposure to business
that could help immensely to make relevant the high school classes that
he/she may currently be blowing off.

As usual, I picked an example in the computer field because I like to speak
from what I know, but it's no stretch of the imagination to see that in
addition to the specific scenario depicted above, there is room for gophers
in a variety of fields that could introduce people with less skills to
businesses and help those people either appreciate the value of said skills,
or perhaps deglamorize a given profession.

Of course those who sneer at capitalism will be glad that there is less
exposure as depicted above.


Summary

Wages are only one component of the benefits that may come with having a
job.  Different jobs have different spectra of benefits, but when talking
about low paying jobs, some of the overlooked benefits include the
self-esteem associated with earning your own money instead of having it
handed to you and education about the workplace in general.
Most middle-class raised individuals already have some degree of self-esteem
and workplace knowledge, as such in the presence of a law that compels
industry to hire at or above a given wage, the middle-class has yet another
leg up on the poor.

There are a variety of reasons why employees may want to take a job at
a rate lower than is imposed by Washington (or state capital).  One of the
most common is the need for an employee to prove him/herself in the absence
of education or past work history.

Not surprisingly many of the first jobs that people have had
are either specifically exempted from minimum wage laws or are part of
the underground.  My first jobs were mowing lawns and babysitting.  After
that I received my first paycheck illegally (I was 15, not the state
sanctioned 16) programming computers (at significantly above minimum wage).
My mother's first job was picking blueberries (agricultural exemption
to minimum wage) and my sister's first job was waiting tables (actually
she babysat as well) (also exempted from minimum wage laws).

Note that there isn't a whole lot of demand for agricultural work or lawn
mowing in the inner city.

Now you can go ahead and paint me as an ogre; in previous posts I've admitted
that I'm a libertarian (and even a Libertarian), but I do care for people
(and other animals) and do believe that minimum wage laws are majorly
detrimental.  Obviously they're not quite as simple as they seem or we'd just
need to make minimum wage $50.00/hr. and then everybody'd be well off.

With people's current prejudices disguised as education, it's not surprising
that the statement that minimum wage laws hurt the poorest-of-the-poor is
counter-intuitive.  But in the absence of science, it's counter intuitive to
believe that a heavy canon [sic] ball falls towards the earth at the same speed
that a light canon ball does.  Of course the test for the latter is much more
cut and dried than that of the former, but it's not unreasonable to believe
the former, especially in consideration of what I've pointed out and what
has been pointed out by various capitalist think-tanks.

Libertarians come in all sorts of flavors, in addition to the
anarchist/minarchist split there's also the ideologue/pragmatist
split.  I'd say that most libertarians care about their fellow human
beings just as most socialists, democrats, republicans and
non politically bent people do.  As far as I'm concerned, caring about
ones fellow human being is, in fact, a human trait that is more common
than not.  Many of today's pragmatic libertarians actually had socialistic
leanings in our misspent youth; we actually believed that you *could* solve
problems by throwing money/regulations/government at them.
Now, for a variety of reasons, we don't believe such things.

I hope that at least w.r.t. minimum wage laws (and formerly food labelling
laws), I've helped explain myself and the viewpoint of some (but certainly
not all) other libertarians.  Remember, demonstrating a point on usenet
is tough; to do so usually takes a fair amount of time and a fair number of
lines posted; it's much easier to snipe and be sniped.  If you want to feel
smug about your superiority of your views vs. those of _____________ers
(fill in the blank with any newsgroup), it's easy to do so.  The very
medium itself lends itself to quick, perhaps poorly thought out, frequently
poorly executed posts.  As such, just use a very wide brush and ridicule
everyone in ______________.  You'll certainly get enough posts that can
justify your prejudice and make you feel good.  And it's not taxed or
fattening.  Of course you'll have to limit yourself to reading just that one
group or it will become all too obvious that illogic, missing references,
anecdotal evidence, faulty reasoning, inconsistency and malice pervades the
net making _______________ers not much different than everyone else.


--Cliff	ctm@ardi.com
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian