The US minimum wage recently rose again. The US government forces all people to use at least this minimum wage for employment compensation. This is regardless of what the employee and employer would have otherwise agreed to in the free market.

Supporters naively champion increases in the minimum wage as help for the poor. Summed up in the adage “let’s make the minimum wage $1000/hr, then we’d all be rich,” minimum wage laws attempt to achieve a fantasy.

More important than the number of dollars in one’s pocket is the buying power of those dollars. When a loaf of bread costs $300, $200 is not much money.

Yet many minimum wage supporters expect the poor’s buying power to increase while ignoring the increased costs of all goods and services that result from forcing the minimum wage upon all wealth creating businesses. After the market prices stabilize after a minimum wage increase, the poor are in the same position as before, but instead of paying $1.50 for a loaf of bread, they pay $2.00.

Their buying power is unchanged. The only effect of the minimum wage is to reduce the buying power of those who are not poor (i.e., those who create more wealth and/or spend less of their earnings).

This should be so obvious to adults, especially to politicians, that their motive must not be to help the poor but to attack anyone who creates wealth.

Socialists tend to not look at real wealth and quality of life improvements, but at relative wealth. They would rather force squalor upon all wealth creators than to allow the quality of life of all people to improve proportional to their productivity.

The minimum wage law should be recognized for the fraud that it is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 6:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.