Increasing Minimum Wage Will Backfire

The left has become completely unhinged in their approach to economics. Here in Quebec, the powers that be decided it's a good idea to install price controls for books. It's as if they've never heard of the internet and the revolution it's causing. Clueless, they stumble around with antiquated notions of economic policy that quite never were any good to begin with.

In the U.S., it's the completely insane push for a $15/hr minimum wage. How they arrived at this figure is very much arbitrary because there are no reliable statistics that suggest this is a living wage since the term itself is a vague and silly. Living wage means different things to different people. There is no ONE way to achieve this no matter what they may tell you. Some people can get by on $11 better than those, for example, who earn $14 because they manage their money and lives better.

You can't keep superficially pushing wages and taxes up. Now, if you are so inclined to think business is evil and greedy so they can afford to be forced into such terrible actions, then there's not much anyone can say to change this mindset. It's a mentality stuck on stupid.

It's an irresponsible position to take froth with pending unintended consequences. Do you think for one second business will simply accept terms forced upon them by unions and politicians? Of course not. Rationally, they have to answer to their margins and shareholders.

Guess what will happen?

That's right. It'll marginalize all the people the government claims to want to help (on a side issue, I read somewhere that a family earning $62 000 a year will have to pay $1300 a month under Obamacare. Whereas a family earning, say, $58 000, will qualify for a subsidy and pay very little. Is this the fair and just system progressives like to brag and boast about? All I see is middle-class incomes not only getting raided and raped but being treated unequally among their own class! I digress) notable low-skilled workers and young people who want to work.

Just look at some statistics. Again, the Obama administration is willing to uproot for a tiny section of the population.

Europe suffers with high youth unemployment because of the same, insane, unworkable and impractical policies we're beginning to see here.

Not only that. The more you raise the cost of business the more the costs are passed on to the rest of society. The only business can keep price points at levels we're willing to pay is to - can anyone guess? - outsource. Where they may have to pay someone $22 an hour for a job that really is worth $14, they can suddenly pay much less abroad.

Above all, with robotics only entering a golden age, a lot of these jobs will simply be replaced. Want $15 to flip a burger? Fine. I, Robot. You're hired!

That goes for all menial tasks: You're replaceable. 

As we learned long ago, if Wayne Gretzky can be traded, anything can happen.

Again, it's just a rational response to irrational, coercive political policy sometimes simply rooted in nationalism and populism.

Bring back jobs? At this point, you will only be able to do that if the government forces this. At which point, it may as well truly take over the economy. Or, it can relax regulations and tone down the anti-business rhetoric that will serve absolutely no one any good.

Alas, I hear whispers of Elizabeth Warren - the happy warrior (wonder if that's an unintended  pun regarding her alleged and tenuous Native lineage) - may run in 2016. If true, free markets and free minds will be fed far worse than what they're digesting at the moment. In Canada, the PQ and the Liberals also represent a problematic view on economics.

Things may have to get worse before they get better.

We see what goes on in Europe. Yet, we seemed too intoxicated with our own verbal shit to even notice.