The Minimum Wage is Racist

This is one of those issues where I realize just the vastness of the cultural divide between the US and over here.

I live in Sweden, we've got lower unemployment, better average living conditions, free health care, all that jazz AND of course minimum wage. As often is with labour issues in Sweden, it's not dictated by law but by a voluntary agreement between unions and employer associations (called kollektivavtal, or the collective deal), but it is established in most all sectors. I know companies like McDonalds refused early on, but were forced to cave in due to strikes.

Of course a minimum wage will take away some jobs. Jobs that doesn't support your LIVING on those jobs. They suddenly become jobs for the sake of fueling companies, not jobs for the sake of sustaining yourself, which is sort of bizzarre. I'd rather we as a society pay for people to have a dignified life then force them to work three jobs to make ends meet. YMMV.

Wharrgarbl. Economists frequently state this as a fact, with zero recourse to empirical analysis.

It's a theoretical statement based on microeconomic reasoning which itself has flawed assumptions (assumptions like "people make rational economic decisions" and "consumers and employees are well-informed about their options). The econ 101 supply and demand model is an extremely poor model of most real-world economic systems, employment included.

When it hits the real world and a standard of evidence, it doesn't hold up. The wealthiest countries in the world with the highest employment rates and the lowest poverty all have minimum wages. Implementation of minimum wage laws is highly correlated with improved standards of living among the poorest, and is not correlated with significant increases in unemployment. (Empirical studies show things like a 0.6% decrease in employment, and only among teenagers, for a 10% increase in the minimum wage.)

There are many side effects of having an entire strata of impoverished people. A minimum wage is actually one of the mechanisms that is available to the state which it can use to re-internalize many of the social cost (i.e. externalities) of a below-sustenance level job.

From a personal perspective, I am actually quite wary of the idea of a minimum wage since that is usually set by the government but for a different reason. If the government is really pro-business, I wouldn't trust them to set the minimum wage high enough for sustenance.

What I would prefer a system as described by marcusf where employers and employees are required by law to periodically negotiate with each other to set a salary floor in each of their localities where they do business.

Like what unions are supposed to do. Before they got demonized and destroyed in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.

And yes, the article is horse manure.

If someone's going to assert that socialism is bad, as an accepted fact, I really can't take them seriously. He also immediately calls his opponents children, and says that they want people to be "dependent" on the government; by contrast business owners aren't at fault for racial discrimination when they hire, that's apparently nobody's fault. How is it not racist that minorities would be hired, if only they didn't have to be paid as much as white people?

An economist (who is coincidentally black) explains how the minimum wage kills jobs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMN3UIQmEk&feature=youtu...

This article is the biggest load of guff I have read this year. Absolutely no proof or argument is given that the minimum wage hurts the lower income population. Simply that well trained "economists" know it so. Elitists right-wring garbage.

Absolute horse-shit. Don't waste your psychic energy reading this trash.