Aaarrrggghhhh...I had a fairly long reply, but it got deleted by accident. My much abbreviated precis of that follows.
--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Why? Why wouldn't whatever stores sold stuff > instead of WalMart hire > workers? Even if Target and K-mart had not been as > good as WalMart at > cutting costs; that would not have meant that they > would not have hired > almost as many workers if they filled that niche. First, because htey wouldn't have hired as many. Second because their goods would be more expensive, so the vast majority of workers would have less income to spend on other things, etc. Third because it's not as if their workers would have been sitting pretty either. It's like technological change. If I invented a widget that a) made cars half as expensive as they are today and b) put GM, Ford, and Chrysler out of business, would you say that it's on balance a good or a bad thing? I don't think there's any doubt that _for the economy as a whole_ it would be a good thing, however painful it would be for the employees of those companies. Basically that's what WalMart has done - only their gadget is phenomenal statistical process control and inventory management. > This requires governmental intervention of some sort > or other because the > natural tendency of the market is for wages to keep > falling until a bottom > is found. Since people are willing to do whatever > it takes to feed their > families, when push comes to shove, I don't see > how...outside of > legislation facilitating unions or minimum wage, > that a floor can be kept > under retail wages. Well, first, I strongly disagree with you about the way a market acts. A market's natural tendency is to move wages to the point where the cost to hire another worker is equal to the marginal product of that worker's work. So when productivity goes up, so do wages and the number of people hired. When the labor supply increases, the cost to hire workers goes down. Second, where did I say anything about unions? As you may recall, I'm a pretty big supporter of unions myself. I'm not sure about closed shops - Clarence Darrow opposed the closed shop because he thought it was an infringement on freedom to associate, and I think that's where I come down on it too (although I could certainly be persuaded otherwise). I disagree with you about Reagan because I think that firing the ATCs was a critical part of breaking the inflationary spiral of the 1970s and early 1980s, and because there truly is no right to strike against the public safety. But in terms of government policy to support low wages, absolutely, I'm all in favor of it. I can even tell you the policy that would do the most to do exactly that. Let's be serious about preventing illegal immigration and curbing low-skilled legal immigration. That would shrink the low-skilled labor supply and drive up the wages for low-skilled workers. As is quite common, those lower and lower-middle class Americans know what's good for them far better than the self-appointed elites who claim to act on their behalf. They (opinion polls all suggest) strongly support curbing immigration, and they do so because they _correctly_ realize that our current immigration policy is an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in this country. The upper middle class and the wealthy get cheaper personal services provided by those immigrants, while the poor have their wages depressed by the increased labor competition in their market niche. As for the minimum wage. Whatever economic theory suggests, the empirics (last time I looked at them) seem to say: 1) Increasing the minimum wage actually does not increase unemployment 2) It doesn't actually help the poor that much, because most minimum wage workers are teenagers, etc. Which are, of course, two points that argue against each other. Where do I come down? I'm not a labor economist, so I'm certainly open to being convinced either way. But it seems to me that it probably should be raised - the benefits of having even entry-level jobs providing a decent standard of living overcome whatever small economic harms might (or might not) be produced by raising it. > How would retooling labor laws to take out the > anti-union bent put in > during the 80s hurt the poor? I realize that other > things may be discussed, > and I'm not sure that labor laws are the best place > to adress this > problem....but it isn't an inherently anti-poor > option. See above. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
