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Ender
Guest
The conclusion may be correct but the premise is wrong: a just wage has nothing whatever to do with how badly an individual needs the money but with whether the employee and employer both freely agree to the amount of compensation. If two people do exactly the same work should they be paid different amounts? Would that be just? That situation would be inevitable if wages were based not on the work to be done but on the need of the worker. Suppose a high school student and man with a wife and two children apply for a job at McDonalds - should the man be paid twice as much as the student for the same job? Who do you think the manager would be more likely to hire? The result of increasing the minimum wage is to increase the pay of some and to eliminate the jobs of others.
You look at this problem as if it were a coin with only one side. Where is the money to come from with which the business owner pays his employees? Why does it seem that practically everything we purchase these days is made in China? Obviously Chinese labor is cheaper than American labor. It might be ten times as expensive to build widgets in the US than in China - which is why Chinese widget makers have jobs and US widget makers are out of business.
Look at the jobs that are being lost to technology as the costs of labor continue to rise, job losses that will accelerate with increases in the minimum wage. This is so obvious to Vern that he believes it is immoral to ignore this fact and raise the minimum wage. He and I differe here only in that I don’t hold it to be immoral to be irrational.
Ender
