freebroccoli asked: Re: Seattle Minimum wage study; I wonder whether some people subconsciously believe that studies create reality. The first study found that MW hurt the poor, so they needed to create a study which found the opposite so that it will be true in reality.
I think they want the minimum wage for reasons other than helping poor workers - they want a minimum wage to prevent wage competition with union labor, to make it literally illegal to undercut union scale. They know it’s going to reduce employment among low-wage workers: that’s why they’re doing it. They obviously can’t come out and say this, though, so they’ve got to produce cherrypicked studies to argue that basic economic theory doesn’t hold in this one specific instance, to keep their mass of useful idiots in line.
Historically, that has pretty much been the point of minimum wages, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
basic economic theory: you see where this line meets the other line? this is the subhumans cutoff
Ironically that’s very much what the original point of the minimum wage was, being a subhumans cutoff - the problem according to early 20th century progressive social reformers was that people they considered subhuman (particularly blacks and immigrants) were nonetheless able to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families with unskilled labor because of the increased productivity of industrial capitalism, and they were going to breed out of control and cause a Malthusian catastrophe
The minimum wage was their solution - the law would prevent the poorest from finding legal employment to cut off their support and the hope was that they would go back to simply dying in the gutter as they always had before, thus saving the nation’s gene pool
It’s only in the past few decades that the useful idiots I mentioned have become deluded into thinking that making it illegal to employ workers at a low wage is somehow doing unskilled workers a favor, and that unions have nothing but humane motives and the best interests of unskilled workers at heart when in any other context they call them filthy subhuman scabs and physically assault them