The minimum they should do: How Politicians vote for high wages With the money of others

Pittsburgh Tribune ^ | 08/13/2015 | By Donald J. Boudreaux

[SeekAndFind]

Putting at risk other people's money and livelihoods is easier than putting at risk your own money and livelihood. Anyone with the power to put at risk other people's money and livelihoods is prone to take unjustified risks with that money and those livelihoods.

This fact is one reason for private property: With private property, each person has control over only property that is his or hers. I decide what happens on my side of the fence while you decide what happens on your side. If I decide poorly, I suffer the consequences; if you decide well, you reap the largest chunk of the rewards.

The discipline of this system lowers the frequency of rash decisions while it raises the frequency of prudent and productive ones.

Unfortunately, politics destroys this discipline. Every voter and politician has a say over how countless other people's money is spent and how other people live their lives. And every political commenter typically offers opinions without suffering personal consequences if his or her opinion proves flawed.

For no issue is the irresponsibility of politicians and pundits worse than it is for the minimum wage. It's easy to moralize about how workers should be paid more. But such moralizing carries no consequences for those who indulge in it.

Politicians and pundits who clamor for a higher minimum wage never risk anything of their own on their claim that raising that wage helps low-skilled workers. If these advocates are mistaken to think that such legislation improves the lives of the poor, the costs of that mistake fall chiefly on the workers who lose jobs because firms can no longer afford to employ them.

[I want the USA back]

The government has no right to set pay rates.

[DoodleDawg]

The government has no right to set pay rates.

And yet at the same time they all say that they will end the wage stagnation that the middle class has been going through for the past three or four decades. How would they do that except through forcing business to increase salaries?