Socialism - Always a Surprise When You Open the Pretty Package!

Progressives will tell you how terrible it is that the minimum wage is not a "living" wage.

Well, duh! 

Low wage jobs available to unskilled laborers were never intended to be a living wage. Entry level wages are intended to be what they are - entry level pay for entry level jobs. These are jobs requiring little skill, training or experience. They get you in the door while you are in high school, college or just starting out so you can learn how to work, teach you how to manage money and give you some experience to put on your resume'.

The Progressive so-called "minimum living wage" proposes to force the economy to adjust itself to provide better money for people with no skills. The trouble is that with the higher bottom end wages, employers can offer no real incentive to entry level employees to do what they need to do to improve their circumstances.  Worse yet, it provides a disincentive to people who DID work hard to get that increase into living wage country, because employers find themselves unable to provide financial incentives to their ambitious employees without raising prices on the customers. And when they do inevitably raise prices for the consumers, the increased costs cause cascading inflation and prices go up enough to negate the raises the so-called "living" wage provided. Once again, thanks to inflation, the living wage becomes no longer a living wage and what was once a living wage becomes the equivalent to the former minimum wage and nobody is doing any better.

Ironically, the artificially inflated minimum wage winds up damaging the very people it purports to care about. It promotes inflation, raises prices on goods and services, closes small businesses, restaurants, small transportation and delivery companies, and such.. Centrally planned governments have to eliminate diversity, particularly business diversity in order to cope with their own bureaucratic paperwork. The more individual members of an economy, the more paperwork the bureaucracies generate for each other and the more bloated the government bureaucracy becomes.

Socialism favors, not mom & pop business, but massive corporations. Why? Because it's much easier to manage the integration of a a few massive corporations into the government planned economy than it is to manage millions of small entrepreneurial businesses into the government's economic schemes. Progressive socialism as it turns out, tends to kill local small business despite their pro-local rhetoric. Bureaucrats, always looking to ease their workload create economies that only work if all business is big business. Easier to manage that way.

It's like that whole, "You have to pass the bill before we can show you what's in it" business.

Socialism! Always a surprise when you open the pretty package!

© 2020 by Tom King