Posting today has been a real chore, because I began it with a funeral and a Catholic Mass, both of which always exhaust me, and the old friends I saw there (most of them, anyway) looked so much older than the last time I saw them that I am afraid to look in the mirror.
That makes two reasons I’m grateful for Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal).” I’m exhausted, and the ethics issue he raises is a crucial one without an obvious solution.
Here it is:
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The horrible thing about this conversation is that people like Lee have this nugget of truth, uncleverly hidden inside the fragrant package of their bullshit proposals, and that is that we need a plan going forward for labor. Workplace participation is going down, wages have been stagnant, cost of living is increasing, food back participation and foreclosure rates are rising… “Stock line goes up” be damned, the bottom seems to be falling out.
I don’t know what you realistically do about this. A “$50 minimum wage” seems like the kind of toddler thinking Democrats are good at: Address the problem by treating the most surface level of symptoms, realities of the market be damned.
Because the reality is that automation is already stealing jobs, and increasing the cost of labor just makes automation investment that much more appealing. That spirals into a situation where I think the average person is going to be unemployed.
And I don’t have the answer. This is a topic that keeps me up at night.
Frankly, I think that the decent into a laborless economy is unavoidable, it’s just a matter of time, regardless of whether or not we speed up the process with stupid policy. Right now, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in 29 out of the 50 states. As technology gets cheaper and as labor gets more expensive, eventually, I don’t think it’s impossible that in 20 years, self-driving vehicles will have made that job obsolete. What do you think that does to the market?
I think the fight that’s coming up is going to be whether we purposefully throttle innovation in order to preserve jobs, or we accept that the majority of people aren’t going to labor physically, and we start to conceptualize what that looks like. And again… Thoughts that keep me up: Even if we throttle our technology our adversaries won’t, so I don’t think that choice is viable, and I think the alternative is a deeply taxed, deeply controlled form of socialism. Which is obviously undesirable, but what else does capitalism look like when your average person owns nothing, and has no prospect to move forward with?
Ethics Alarms 
A laborless economy will result in the extermination of people who are deemed a drain on resources.
Fortunately, the fact that humans have opposable thumbs and a brain will preclude the creation of such an economy. Sure, we might see automation eliminate jobs in mass production but the capital costs of automating many services households buy will be prohibitive.
Nonetheless, HT’s concerns are legitimate because we are seeing fewer and fewer children having the academic qualifications to compete in a technologically advanced economy. This will cause greater strain on already strapped households with producing member to support an increasing number of non-producing households.
I believe that ultimately the axiom will be if you can build it or fix it you will get paid. The era of social pontificators will come to a screeching halt and those who lived by suckling on societies teet will be the new homeless.
I’m sorry for your loss, Jack.
Does anyone ever consider that it isn’t incompetence when the Democrats propose and implement these disastrous policies? Maybe it is on purpose. I mean, we know they can clean up San Francisco in 2 weeks with the people they have, the budget they have, and the laws they already have. They only need someone like Xi to come to town they want to impress. San Francisco looks like that because they WANT it to look like that. It isn’t a debate, we know it is true now.
When the minimum wage gets increased, the skilled people suffer. Suddenly, fast food workers make as much as paramedics and LPN’s. Then, people wonder why they should go to school and work stressful jobs when they could just work a checkout register at Hobby Lobby for the same money and benefits. Eventually, you don’t have a continuum of incomes anymore, you just have the elites and everyone else (who all make the same money). If you implement a $50 minimum wage, think of all the jobs and careers that would suddenly become minimum wage jobs. College professors and McDonalds cashiers make the same money. Why go to college for a decade to become a professor if you lose 10 working years and make less money in your lifetime than high school dropouts? This is the result of communistic thinking.
Communism is the ultimate elitist society. Under communism, there is the ruling class and the proletariat. Everyone in the proletariat is the same. It isn’t simplistic thinking, it is a long-term communist plan. Increasing the minimum wage eliminates upward mobility, eliminates any middle class, and drives up inflation to wipe out the wealth of all but the upper class (ruling class). Then, all you need to do is crush the people under high taxes, high crime, and poor services and the transformation is complete. All that is left is to ‘clean up’ society by eliminating the excess workers. Under communism, unemployment is eliminated with 2 simple rules. The first rule is “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”. The second rule is “If you give food to someone who doesn’t work, you don’t eat either”. Unemployment is eliminated in mere months.
“When the minimum wage gets increased, the skilled people suffer.”
It’s not a good policy, and it effects a lot of people negatively, but I think it’s most felt on the opposite pole: When the minimum wage increases, UNskilled people suffer. Democrats like to pretend that job creation is a foregone conclusion, that it doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is because the job that makes it isn’t going anywhere, and they’ll point to areas where the minimum wage has gone up and the market created more jobs as proof of that.
The problem is that they’re still employing toddler logic. Markets are complicated, there’s more to what goes into job creation than just the minimum wage. If the market was on track to add 10,000 jobs on current trajectories, but minimum wage increased and it only added 9,000, then even though the number of jobs went up, the minimum wage increase cost the market 1,000 jobs. This is hard to measure, but it’s obvious: If you increase the price of something, people don’t buy more of it.
And they understand that, when it suits them, it’s the entire cause du vivre when it comes to carbon pricing. They understand that if you increase the cost of carbon, people will try to burn less gas. And I’d argue that it’s significantly easier for the average business to try to trim some labor than it is for the average family to try to figure out how to drive less.
Always remember that the minimum wage wasn’t brought in under the auspices of an organized labor movement: The minimum wage was invented by Democrats at a time that they commonly wore white hoods, with the explicit goal of disenfranchising minority workers. Their thought was that if there was a minimum standard to what people could be paid, that employers would start to expect that employees would come equipped with certain skills, and the people who would tend to have those skills would be educated white people.
And nothing has changed: This is the story of the minimum wage from time immemorial: The people who tend to be the most negatively effected by job losses are the people who tend to be uneducated and/or unskilled, and those people disproportionately tend to be minorities.
They know that it costs jobs. They know who’s going to lose them.