I don’t pay much attention to political Facebook posts because commenting on them is too tedious, but I feel I need to address something I saw earlier. It was a post about increasing the minimum wage to $15, and that we only need the will to do so and everything will be fine.
This denies reality. This supposes that there are no negative effects to this policy or that those negative effects don’t exist. If $15 is such a great panacea, why not $25 or $50? or $100? Rich people pay themselves way more than that, after all, so they can just bear the costs, can’t they? On the opposite side, calls for price controls are the same way. On the extreme end of the example spectrum, imagine what would happen if the government decided that everyone needed a Porche, and that Porche should start selling its cars for $15,000. One of two or three things would happen; they would shut down immediately, they would hire on a huge workforce, expand production, and sell shitty, cheap cars or they would try to keep up with regulation and slowly die off.
And in a final addition to the stupidity, “the 1% all hoards their wealth so they can certainly pay for it with all the money they have”. I have yet to get any sort of explanation to this that makes any sense at all. It is as if some people think that rich people are Scrooge McDuck and they swim around in gold coins all day.
Why do more people not see how stupid this is? You can’t simply legislate that a society make more in hourly wages without trading off something else, and if you force employers to pay more than an unskilled worker is worth in revenue then eventually they won’t be able to pay any of their employees unless overhead declines or productivity rises spectacularly.
Calls for economic sense fall on deaf ears, because reality stands in the way of politicians’ promised utopia. And it always will. But they blame the other team instead.
