Posted on 09/15/2014 10:23:44 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
I've only done some cursory searching and unfortunately don't have my books readily at hand for citations, but early legal cases in America found that unions were "criminal conspiracies in restraint of trade" and comprised "illegal combinations to fix prices". Thus the sordid history of Big Labor from the Molly Maguires to the IWW up to the present has been anti-liberty and violently opposed to the workings of free enterprise.
Commonwealth v. Pullis
What was found in 1806, when unions were still relatively small, is true to a far greater extent today when Big Labor thugs have nearly unlimited power. It's well past time to cut off the oxygen supply of unions and abolish the slavery of the minimum wage.
“The abolition of the minimum wage would mean an unstoppable American economy...”
It might be ‘unstoppable,’ but it wouldn’t be American. The history of the American economy of the last thirty years is that the only beneficiaries of “No Minimum Wage Required” are foreign workers. They have driven Americans wholesale out of construction, hospitality, fast food, and countless other industries by working for wages Americans won’t work for.
“The minimum wage impedes the invisible hand of the open marketplace”
An “open marketplace” doesn’t mean no rules — it means all competitors play by the same rules. It means be in the country legally, pay taxes, not get welfare for American-born children while taking cash under the table from a contractor. We know this open marketplace doesn’t exist anymore. It is artificially rigged — by the US government, which erased the border — to favor the foreign-born over the American.
You’re asking the lowest skilled and most vulnerable Americans to play “fair ball” — to compete by the old rules of the free market — in a crooked game where the free market doesn’t exist anymore. American workers can’t win. They don’t have a chance.
It is impossible discuss the free labor market and minimum wage laws without acknowledging the fact that erasing the border has changed everything. Until the government does its job and closes the southern border, American workers are entitled to at least the protection a minimum wage would give them.
You're obviously a person of intellect (as I consider myself to be) and can put forth good points. So, "come let us reason together" even though we not necessarily persuade the other.
Yes, swarm of the criminal invaders is a tremendous problem and demands a war-like footing to come to terms with it. I've frequently advocated a renewal of "Operation Wetback" for the 21st Century, using the latest technology and an all out marshaling of America's might to stamp out this menace. That said, the illegals are here and undermine the workings of the economy. Therefore, more than ever, the very existence of the minimum wage puts the legal American at a severe disadvantage over the "off the books" criminal invader. As I see it, the abolition of the minimum wage would allow the legal American worker's pay to self-adjust to what the marketplace deems as correct. Thus the American worker would be free of the minimum wage artifice and undercut the criminal invader. And prices would drop, benefiting all of us.
It doesn’t really matter in the end there won’t be a job.
I won’t pay 16 bucks of a McDonald’s meal. It is not worth that much money. So I won’t go to McDonald’s. Why do you need anyone working when there is no one buying your stuff? you don’t.
Already McDonald’s is up to 8-10 bucks a meal in NJ. It isn’t even really worth that.
Everything you’re saying makes sense and has been proven to work over and over, but only in a true free market economy. Which doesn’t exist in America anymore. That’s my only point.
Millions of aliens have been been granted work permits, and millions more are about to be. A flood of surplus low-skill labor is an artificial disruption of the free market, and unprecedented in America.
In this artificial — not free — market, unleashed by the U.S. government and embraced by business, wages can “self-adjust” in one direction only — down.
We are cruel to the most vulnerable among us to keep up the “free market” charade and say it’s okay for a Vegas hotel to pay its maids three bucks an hour. In a truly free labor market where everyone played by the same rules, you couldn’t get someone for that wage.
So I’m willing to vote the American some wage protection on the books, since we’re too feckless and cowardly to protect them at the border.
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