Best of Gregger FB comments II

(see previous post)

And this one was in response to this comment: "Basic economics says that minimum wage increases both take jobs away from deserving job-seekers, and take business opportunities away from would-be employers, resulting in a net negative impact on the economy. (If I could operate e.g. a cost-effective bakery before with 10 bakers at $6/hour, it may not be cost-effective anymore at $15/hour, and so the bakery closes and the people lose their jobs). It also shifts jobs away to jurisdictions with no minimum wage regulation, and encourages a black-market economy. I haven't seen any rational, non-emotional argument for minimum wage."

To wit:

Virtually any labor regulation can be logically attacked as job-killing and business-destroying, because it increases the cost of employing people and doing business in a competitive environment: minimum wage, work week and overtime, workplace safety, even child labor laws (which were argued against by pro-business interests at the time). The problem is, absent these kinds of regulations, the result is not pretty. The most economically efficient approach to labor is to treat it as a commodity -- but if you do that, the result is really not pretty. And this is not abstract speculation, because we've seen a developed industrial economy like that: late 19th-century America. The horrible abuses and exploitation of that time (and others) are why we have these regulations in the first place. (It always amazes me that people act as if these laws and regulations were just dreamed up by bureaucrats sitting around with nothing better to do -- like, no one ever got injured at work or burned to death in a shirtwaist factory, everything was just peachy keen, and some pencil-pushers decided to invent OSHA just because). It seems to me the object of our laws and regulations should be to shape the best society, not the best economy -- and though there's a lot of overlap there, those outcomes, sadly, are not identical.