[quote=The-Shoveler]
I view low wages as an external cost like pollution. Saying you need to pay low wages is like saying you must be allowed to pollute in order to compete.

They’ll whine that ALL those jobs will go away, but they won’t. Only some will. So instead of having the 100 people at the poverty wage paying place all dependent on the dole for food stamps and health care, we’d have some of them on the dole and many of the remainder would be working at the place that paid real wages and still made decent stuff that was worth the price paid. We’d all have to do with less disposable stuff.”
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Low wages are subjective. Why should we attempt to set the minimum wage at a level where you can support a family of 4 on a single income. Clearly there are numerous members in our society that work part time for some discretionary income that are not supporting a family of 4 and do not require a wage that supports a family of 4. Honestly is retail clerk, or pizza delivery driver, or burger flipper a career that we should inspire people to start a family around. When was the last time you walked into one of those places and saw mostly people that looked like family breadwinners on the other side of the register.

As you can see from Europe when you set various employment standards and work rules the result seems to be locking the inexperienced youth out of the work force. Youth employment is tremendously high in many European countries and a lot of that has to do with work place rules and wages that make it way to risky for business to hire inexperienced youth. If you make it risky and cost prohibitive to hire inexperienced youth where are your future experienced productive employees going to come from.

Do you think target and walmart are going to raise prices when minimum wage goes up to maintain what are small profit margins (<10%) or do you think one of them will take to opportunity to explorer more self check out stations and new technologies that bill your credit card as you walk out the door.