Yes, Americans will Do Those Jobs

Actually, I was challenging you to put your estimates into practice. If it is easy to pay workers more than current rates and still put produce in supermarkets at current prices, then there ought to be huge profits available picking fruit. There is no magical division between the income available to the workers and that available to the employers - you can be both, yourself. If current workers make minimum wage or less, and you think they could make twice that and still sell as current prices, then all you have to do is go pay them twice the going rate, get the best fruit pickers in world history, and grab the whole market. You think it would not have any appreciable impact on the end price, so it should be easy. So put your money where your mouth is, get off your tail, and become rich proving you are right. Isn't that the capitalist way?

Also, what I actually meant with my original illustration is that any wage is set by two indifferences not by one. It doesn't matter if the result is a lettuce price or a price for removal of steaming piles. The consumer as well as the worker states what the service is worth and costs, and the productivity of said worker either means there is a deal possible between them or not. When there is, there is profitable work and it gets done. When there isn't, there is no work at that demanded wage. If everyone wants a million dollars to touch a shovel, they don't become millionaires - everyone just walks around with dog crap on their shoes.

As I showed you, if the marginal cost to an employer of hiring me is $5.74, and marginal benefit to him is sloped down at 1 cent per hour at $5.75 for the first hour, he will only be willing to hire me for 2 hrs total and I will only make $11.50. However, if the minimum wage is lowered to $5.60 under the same conditions, he will now be willing to hire me for 15 hours paying me at most $85.12, but at least $84. Which one depends on the labor market. If the average marginal cost to a laborer of working 15 hours is $5.67, then that is what the employer will be forced by the to hire at.

Trying to convince that 15 cents hour difference is going to entice that employer to let you work 13 more hours is pure hyperbole.

Sorry, I copied a quote from some other unintelligible argument.

You think it would not have any appreciable impact on the end price, so it should be easy.

I still don't think it would. But, since there are people willing to do it so cheaply we will never really find out.

I agree that the market will mostly correct the prices for labor and goods but when the market is flooded with cheap labor the market is cheated out of its corrective ability. That's not capitalism that is manipulation.

"we will never really find out."

Why not? What is stopping you? Nothing on earth prevents you from paying more than the going rate for any form of labor. Go to California, borrow at a bank, get yourself a ranch, hire Americans at nice fat salaries to work in the pleasant sun, and since it won't raise your end prices appreciably, you will still be able to sell your produce. After all, the employers are just rolling in gravy exploiting the workers, so if you give a little of it to the workers you will still do just fine. So go do it.

If you don't recognize the principle, it is "you cut, I choose". Also known as willingness to "make a market". If you tell me the price of something ought to be X, then if you are honest you are willing to take either side of a trade at that price. If you honestly think employers should be willing to pay fruit pickers $10 an hour, then you should honestly be willing to pay them $10 an hour yourself. If you aren't, then you don't believe it yourself. You are "just jawing" - talking up a price when you intend to be a seller but not a buyer of the thing talked up.

Do you understand why unemployment in Europe is regularly in double digits? Unions do exactly this, they refuse work that pays less than some arbitrary "we want this much" amount, set by whim and political muscle, having no relation to what their efforts actually produce for consumers at the other end. There is a giant tax wedge there, a worker costs 3-4 times more for the employer than the worker himself actually keeps, after he is done paying his own taxes on top of those the employer pays. Plenty of people simply cannot produce several times the value needed for the standard of living to which typical Europeans have become accumstomed and regard as their birthright. They demand more. The real price of the services they provide do not rise in consequence, because their real productivity does not rise, and consumers are no more satisfied with their output just because their noses are an extra 5 degrees in the air. So no jobs exist for them.

>"Only if they paid $9.50 an hour with medical and dental benefits!"<

Nothing wrong with even poor U.S citizens wanting to work for an hourly wage commensurate with costs of living (albeit one in poverty)...but where did you come up with this arbitrary figure of $9.50, and the issue of benefits? do you have any documentable source, or did you simply pull a number out of your hat?

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