Why is there a minimum wage?
What are the real root causes?
Lack of competition in the job market.
Not enough vacancies, too many people looking for work. The employers have a greater say over wages than the people looking for work.
And who created this negative jobs environment?
The answer to this question depends on if you believe taxes and regulations make it easier to do business or not.
Do you believe higher taxes and more regulations make a countries products and services more or less competitive with a country with lower taxes and regulations.
If you believe more taxes and regulation hinder business then you have to say that governments are respsonsible for creating an anti job business environment.
To restore the power of workers more jobs have to be created to force companies to compete with each other on a salary and condition basis.
This happens already for workers with sought after or rare skills. There are more jobs available than people to fill them. Businesses have to compete with each other to get the best staff.
The highly skilled jobs are valuable enough to overcome the hurdles that government put in the way like regulations and taxes.
The real people who lose out by government intervention are the unskilled workers. Those jobs which are not valuable enough to pay the taxes and are not valuable enough to allow the employer to pay th expenses top comply with regulations.
A minimum wage is a tool of governments who have failed and who then pass on the costs of their mistakes to the private sector.
The minimum wage is not something that can be used to coerce evil employers into paying their workers a “fair” wage.
Employers will pay the minimum they have to. This is not evil, it is simply good business.
If businesses have to pay more to keep people they will. If people cannot find work employers do not have to pay so much.
Is it the fault of individual employers that there are insufficient jobs in an economy?
Ultimately the minimum wage destroys many ground floor jobs which means young people find it hard to get work which means in the future you will have an entire generation without job experience because the minimum wage paid to much to make it possible for people to get experience.
If a government was really interested in increasing the wages of the population it would reduce taxes and regulations.
That is the only way to increase wages.
Government cannot increase the value of a job just because it says it says so.
“the minimum wage cannot be used to coerse evil employers into paying more” correct and some jobs just no longer exist. Mind you I would not blame everything on minimum wage – petrol pump attendants dis-appeared long before the MW. Do you think self service checkouts at the supermarket come from competition between supermarkets or do you think they are from the minimum wage.
self service checkouts? something to do with minimum wage, something to do with saving money maybe something to do with competition