Fast food jobs in NY evidently attract a lot of comedians.

Fixed. It can also possibly good for the economy as a whole. Imagine in the second scenario, where the business eats the loss, you now have a bunch of workers now making extra money, however they are now able to support themselves without government assistance programs.

Imagine those government assistance programs not existing and all the taxpayers' money returned to them.

If the purpose of raising the minimum wage is to get people off public assistance, then the government is effectively making private business pick up the tab for the welfare state. This is apt to backfire because low-skilled--but expensive!--labor is labor that is likely to be replaced by automation. The business may go from having having 10 employees working at $9/hour to 2 working at $15/hour with some new machines taking up the slack.

Turn that around Paladin, and welfare can be seen as a business subsidy.

Further fixed. We'd need to know where the profits are going. If they were going to fund the building of a new plant yeah, an argument could be made that it was a better investment. If instead it is just being sat on by corporations (as we see right now) or being spent on importing $20,000 bottles of campaign for a CEOs birthday (as was being done before the crash) then it is MOST DEFINITELY better for the economy for that money to go out to the people who will immediately spend it in the local economy boosting domestic demand and furthering a virtuous cycle.

In an era where corporate profits are some of the highest in history and the mega rich control more of the countries wealth than at any time since the 20s, saying they just need more money is laughable.

The welfare state is the government, meaning taxes, picking up the tab for private industry.

Again, why is this a bad thing?

You do realize that the history of manufacturing is the history of lowering labor inputs yes? This was going on centuries before a minimum wage was even an concept.

Paladin believes it is our job to subsidize profits in order to protect inefficient jobs. Dirty socialist!

Huh? How does that follow? Private industry gives jobs to people it can employ. Why does it automatically become responsible for those it can't?

Because (1) it is still likely to be more expensive than it ought have been and (2) capital is directed towards automating jobs that are artificially expensive.

Follow the logic:
1. Government mandate a $15/hour wage for a job worth $9/hour.
2. Market conditions force employer to seek other solutions
3. Firm expends capital in developing automation that is equivalent to $13/hour in labor
4. Employer fires employee, buys automation
5. Almost everyone LOST. Employee has no job, employer paying more than market rate to provide product/service, consumers paying more than market would have allowed, taxpayers probably picking up unemployment/welfare costs for displaced employee. The only one who came out ahead was the company that provided the automation, but, they provided no net benefit to the economy. And, if the price of labor had not been made arbitrarily high, that company could've applied automation to some other task.

Of course. But I thought this was about compassion for the employee. By pricing his labor higher, you're making it easier to undercut him with automation.

I don't see how the economy as a whole wins, no matter how it turns out. If everything stays the same, the business owner loses profits. If the market will support higher prices, consumers pay more. If the job is made too expensive, the worker winds up with NO income (because replaced by automation).

I'm not sure where I made any such claim. Unless you think NOT imposing a burden on a company is somehow subsidizing them. If so, you would do well in the protection racket.

Or maybe you could be a crime-fighter...

You usually seem smarter than this. Here's how the subsidy works:

• Company pays labor less than is required to live on
• Government picks up the difference through transfer payments

That's a subsidy that you and me and all the other taxpayers fund in order for the company to profit more by paying less to employees.

Firstly, there's a wide spectrum of ways people can live. A teenager living at home can get by just fine on $4/hour; he's only got the job so he can have his own spending money. Likewise, a married person who only wants to supplement the income of their partner. So, "enough to live on" is a highly situational concept. Do you mean with your own apartment and a car? Or do you mean with four roommates? Or do you mean living at home with mom and dad?

Second, the price of labor is rightly determined by how replaceable it is. Why should an employer be compelled to pay someone, say, $10/hour if he has plenty of takers for the job at $7/hour?

Third, if you choose to have government pick up the difference, that's your choice. There's nothing in the employer's paying the market wage for an employee that forced you to do that. The employer shouldn't have to bear the cost for your preferences.

No, I am most definitely NOT a "dirty socialist."

Absent government, all production is private, thus all goods are produced by private industry. A person not provided with goods from private industry, directly or indirectly, is a person without goods. Thus all goods provided by the welfare state are in fact provided by private enterprise, only indirectly. The "responsibility" is called taxation, and it flows from political power distributing responsibility and goods, with democratic legitimation in our case.

They're not artifically expensive. Workers have the power to negotiate en bloc, and to rise up and seize the capital they're working with. Laws that flow from the first and/or sublimate the second principle aren't artificial, but a direct result of the reality of labour markets.

More importantly, the economy prospering isn't a value in and of itself; human prosperity is, and the economy should only outweigh other concerns as long as it serves that prosperity. Shifting boring and stupid work unto machines increases general prosperity.

Why did you think that? To me, it is about a working marketplace. That will also ultimately very likely benefit the employees, or former employees, of that company, but if we're going to subsidize the workers in their better-automated jobs, let's do so by introducing the automation and alowing them to partake of the cheaper produced wealth, rather than subsidize uninsipiring and uneconomic jobs.

There are plenty of fast food companies and fast food jobs in Australia and they do have a $15 per hour minimum wage on top of universal health care. In fact, despite the claims that this would be bad for normal people your average Australian has five times more wealth accumulated than an American.

This is a major problem and companies like Walmart and McDonald's have it in their business plan to take advantage of this. Does anyone remember last week when McD's released their proposed budget for how workers could survive on minimum wage only to find out they couldn't?

If there's a welfare state, it exists to serve everyone. It does not exist to exact social justice by using government force to take from some merely to give to others. If it serves all--as it must--all can pay.

If all benefit from it, then it is wrong to burden a business the responsibility of paying someone above what the market allows in order to achieve its ends. If society chooses to "make up the difference," then all of society should pay. They will one way or another anyway, and, at least, this way the costs are evident.

If it ain't the free market price, it's artificial. I can't think of anything MORE artificially expensive than a minimum wage. Its existence comes from sheer fiat, not any natural balance of interests.

They can ask, but they should have no power to demand "negotiation en bloc."

The fuck they do, comrade. They don't own it. The guy who mows my lawn (I don't actually have a lawn, but still) doesn't get to steal my lawnmower when he decides he's unhappy working for the wage he's agreed to.

If the alternative is living off the productive, it's better for someone to do boring or stupid work. At least they earn their own way. There's no dignity in become dependent, unproductive welfare trash.

Even if that works out, all you've done is taken people out of "uninspiring" jobs and made them wards of the state, while simultaneously making everything more expensive (at least in the short term) for everyone else. Not a winning strategy in my book.

Good for them. I hope this starts a sea of change across the landscape. "Right To Work" goes both ways.

Also, while the prices may be the same everywhere on some items -- primarily the ones marketed mainly on price, which are probably loss leaders anyway -- the prices of other items DO vary by location.

I don't disagree with any of that.

In this block, you appear to have forgotten the meaning of the word "power", replacing it with "right" instead. I didn't say "right"; I said "power".

On automation:

Doing a job better done by a machine isn't being productive, it's just keeping busy while being unproductive. If you don't keep people artifically busy, they can come up with new products, businesses, and careers.

There is no rightful power without the right to it. One man may have the power to murder another, but he has no right to do so.

If you have the kind of job that can be replaced by a machine, you're probably not apt to come up with new products or businesses. Relieved of your boring job, it's far more likely you'll simply end up as another dependent person on welfare. If you think guys who've been operating the deep fryer at McDonald's for 10 years are potential neurosurgeons, architects, or concert pianists just waiting for their opportunity, you'll be wrong far, far, far more often than you will be right.

And I'm not objecting to automation taking the place of workers, only that which occurs because government fiat commands a worker's wage higher. Things being made cheaper is what drives material progress; it's why you and I have possessions, comforts, and opportunities that royalty couldn't have had a hundred years ago. But, as a rule, I don't favor replacing something with something more expensive. That's not progress.

ConfederateSon disagrees: There are two cashiers in that photo, dude.

That wasn't the point of the picture you blistering retarded gerbil fucker.

It was to show that there are McDonalds where you can order at a terminal and that if $15 became the wage you might possibly see no cashiers and all terminals.

Whether the wage is $15/h, $13/h, $9/h, or $7/h you WILL see no cashiers and all terminals. The only question is how much the remaining employees will make compared to how much goes to profits.

When I was in WA the first time self checkout was just starting up, when I moved to North Carolina (where wages were shit) they were installing them just as fast. Same goes for Alabama and Florida. That's just the nature of our economy.

In fact that's what me, gul and Packard have been trying to say. RIGHT NOW business is doing everything it can to cut costs. If they could raise prices and get away with it, they would. If they could cut costs, they would.

See my reply to Zombie. The jobs that can be replaced WILL be replaced. The only question is how the productivity gains get split.

And you don't see how a more efficient economy is better than a less efficient one. REALLY!?!?! Or are you just arguing to argue now.

Someone is a blistering retard here but you're it, my friend. Most customers won't go along with that and they'll still want someone to ask them if they want to super size that. The companies can try to automate, just like the supermarkets have, but the majority of the people will still want someone to banter with them while they check out so the companies are going to still need actual people working there just like not a single supermarket has been able to fire all their checkers or baggers. That's just the bottom line.

BTW you claimed there were no check out people in that photo, you were wrong, and you're not even man enough to admit it. Instead you went on a tirade calling people names because they caught you being wrong, as usual.

And I don't disagree.

What I think you're glossing over is that by raising the minimum wage so high, you may accelerate that trend while simultaneously making business less efficient, not more so. And if you fail to accelerate that trend? Then you've only made everything more expensive.

Perhaps you think that automation is in and of itself progress. It isn't. Automation is progress if it's CHEAPER than the cost (market price) of labor it replaces.

The only way I can illustrate is with an example.

Say that labor to do a particular job is worth $7/hour. Say that the minimum wage is bumped up to $15/hour. Because of that, some automation--itself productive at an equivalent of $12/hour--becomes viable. The owner invests in the tech, the employee is tossed. Progress, right?

No. The market valued that labor at $7/hour. That it's been replaced with a machine that is equivalent to $12/hour is a NET LOSS of $5/hour. The labor is still more expensive than the market would've set. That loss WILL come from somewhere: the consumer (if the owner can pass the cost along) or the owner (if he can't).

Now if you can find a machine that will do it for $6/hour, you're talking real progress. But the nature of technology is that it starts off more expensive and is only driven down over time as it matures. If there was already a $6/hour automation system in existence, chances are the owners would ALREADY have it, just like all the other pieces of labor-saving equipment on the premises.

I firmly believe that soldiers will eventually be replaced (at least for some things) by robots. Would you agree that's inevitable?

Then let's do it today.

Why can't we? Well, existing robots aren't really all that capable, they have lots of limitations, and they're very expensive. Maybe after some more development...

Nope. Let's do it today. Get out your checkbook. We're paying to have it done today because it's inevitable.

See what I mean?

Inevitable doesn't mean practical or economical RIGHT NOW. Inevitable may mean it happens tomorrow or it happens ten or twenty or fifty years from now. We shouldn't make any definite plans around it because we simply don't know.

Or to use an even more absurd example...

Let's add $100/hour to the cost of every job, so we can automation take over all the work and we can relax.

It doesn't work that way. Automation supplants labor when it can. It can't be commanded (or coerced) into existence by manipulating the market. You may raise the minimum wage at McDonald's to $15/hour and achieve nothing more than getting several stores to close.

I'm not sure you understand efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of output to input, what you get out for what you put in. In my example, a $7/hour employee is more efficient than a $12/hour machine. Even more so than appears if the employee is so unskilled that automation puts him out of the labor market completely; someone then has to pay to sustain him.

We know Albert isn't bright enough to use actual numbers and in fact he is irrationally afraid of actual numbers because they might force him to review some of his ideological positions, but, in an effort to help him and people like him...

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/whats-their-beef-striking-fast-food-workers-say-low-wages-6C10786787

That $0.05 increase on the price of a big mac would be if, and only if, 100% of the cost could be passed on which not a single economist in the country would say is the likely outcome. The reality is we've seen massive increases in productivity per worker in the last 20 years even as the wages of low paid workers has gone down. When you actually look at the real numbers the benefits of wage increases for low wage workers vastly, vastly, vastly outweights the piddly max possible $0.05 increase on a $3 hamburger.

If $10.50 is high enough that workers at Walmart and McDonalds no longer have to be on food stamps then I can see value in that even if I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of a minimum wage. Remember that McD's proposed budget for minimum wage workers (which is most of their employees) was so retarded they didn't even include any money at all for basic items like food.

Actually, the trend is supermarkets removing those self-checkout terminals. Overall, they haven't gone over very well.

How does that happen, exactly? There's already a minimum wage, so how are the wages of minimum-wage earners going down?

Here's one way: minimum-wage earners are displaced by those who aren't paid a legal wage. That's one of the "workarounds" businesses are employing.

And that's why continuously raising the minimum wage is bad for American labor.

Thank you for that. Now will you go back to my pont about power, which is not a point about rights, and respond to it?

This is probably the heart of the matter. You naturalize economic situations: If a person spends his days in an unimaginative job and shows little imagination, you assume that that person is by nature unimaginative. I don't believe that there is anything fundamentally natural about our current economic situations. I say we don't know until we get him out of there and allow his imagination some space.

This really showcases the technical problem of your simplified market concept. If at any point the busines can sustain a price of $12/hour for this labour to be done, then $12/hour is what that labour is worth at that point.

Which is also why your claims about "everything getting more expensive" are false. Only jobs below the new minimum wage would get more expensive. People working in those jobs would earn more. So what we're talking about is making one set of jobs and products more expensive, and one set of producers more prosperous.

Now rephrase that by replacing 'expensive' with 'valuable'. If you'd truly believe that the only measure of value is what the market will be prepared to set as a price. it shouldn't change the meaning. But clearly, it does.

I recall people saying the same thing about ATMs. When was the last time you or anybody you know made a withdrawal from a human teller? Personally, I'd much rather order fast food through a kiosk.

That's perhaps the most retarded thing you've ever posted. Do yourself a favor, and google inflation adjusted wages.