Living wage

I have a several considerations for you that was not mentioned in your article.First, consumerism. I think that as soon as the consumer, who is compelled by self-interest, expects to pay the real value of a product then business owners who are trying to stay in business, by meeting consumer demands for the lowest cost product, can be legitimately excoriated for their greedy and compassion-less business practices.  Second, what happens when a minimum cost of doing business is dictated? The minimum cost of the products are raised or lowered to meet that artificial number. In that case the living wage only causes the cost of living to raise for the poor and subsidizes everyone else. In a free market employment forces would negotiate the actual wage and the cost of everything would reflect the real cost of labor but because the government dictates a minimum wage business can factor that into their prices and artificially lower the labor cost of its minimum priced product and leverage that labor saving into their higher end products. The poor end up paying more for the artificially priced things while everyone else pay less for the super sized things.

Third, I think the real issue about illegals is that they would not willingly work for less or do the less desirable jobs if they were not confronted with the task of trying to stay alive and having to run the risk of getting caught violating the laws of the land. Conversely, it is only worth taking the risk for the farmer, contractor, or manufacturer to employee illegals because they can not stay in business if their products and services aren't the lowest priced. As a result government, unknowingly, has a contrived a situation which attracts people to enter the country illegally as a means of satisfying the need for low cost labor to meet the demand for low prices exacerbated by artificially minimizing wages.



Response to Desert Newspaper article by Eric Schulzke 6.10.12