Thursday, August 01, 2013

Why Not Set Our Minimum Wage At $100 an Hour?

I was listening to NPR yesterday and they were going on and on about the minimum wage and how it needs to be raised.  It should be $15 an hour.  It should be $22 an hour.  It definitely needs to be higher than $7 an hour.  They could not understand why our minimum wage is so low.  Raise the minimum wage!

And yet there was so little discussion of negatives, of unintended consequences.  And these are smart people!  But they could not get beyond their emotional belief that poor people should be paid more money.  And rich people are paid too much! 

They feel the market is unfair and unjust.  And their reaction to this unfair and unjust market is to pass a law

Okay.  What would happen if we raised the minimum wage to $100 an hour?  We would all be making $200,000 a year.  And what is the problem here?

The problem is economic reality.  Your ideology gets smacked in the face with economic reality.  In real life we have to fire people so that we can pay our remaining workers $100 an hour.  So unemployment goes up.  And inflation shoots up.  That $100 is not worth a hundred dollars anymore.  You can't buy all the cool stuff that you want to buy.  The value of the dollar is destroyed by economic illiterates. 

Here is Paul Krugman proposing that the government mints a trillion dollar coin and put it in the bank.  He is a Nobel prize-winning idiot.  Do you really think that if you counterfeit a coin that you have somehow added to the wealth?  We cannot mock this enough.     

Reality!  Take your head out of your ass and take a whiff of reality!  Thank you.

2 comments:

edutcher said...

These people are so insulated from real life, the only people they can reach are the ones so stupid they don't understand how life works.

dc said...

What you need is a $22 an hour minimum wage plus price controls.That would work even better.Any marxist English Lit prof could tell you that.