(04-29-2021, 09:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Lower minimum wage will kill entry-level jobs and economic growth
Yes.
There are people who can work, but their productivity is so low or difficulty of managing them is so great that they could never qualify for the minimum wage. This might be so with people with extreme physical or mental impairment. Maybe they are the sorts of people that the overall society can meet their needs (and they often have other problems related to mental or physical disabilities) while they pretend to do productive work. Such people may belong in sheltered workshops where they may be protected from hucksters and disreputable people. They are gullible and must often be kept away from people who would exploit them for criminal purposes, as in offering the "fun" of participation in a crime such as armed robbery.
Let's recall that the high-tech capitalists of their time -- when those were the likes of Rockefeller, Edison, Westinghouse, Ford, and Bell -- sought to offer what were then luxuries to a mass market for their wares. They needed a market for their fuels, electrical goodies, and vehicles. The found that the sorts of people making their products would have to be the people buying their products.
I know more about Henry Ford than about any of the others. He was not a nice person, and he was not generous toward workers out of charity or idealism. He offered a $5-a-day wage about 100 years ago for people to work on his assembly line to make his cheap cars. Those workers (the $5 a day is in fact higher in real terms than a recent starting wage at a Ford plant) of course were expected to work hard at difficult, often numbing work. They were doing better than such people as middle-class schoolteachers and clergy of the time. They were also expected to become full participants in the consumer society that $5 a day would then allow.
OK, work as Ford demanded of you, and you certainly did not deserve poverty. Working at a Ford plant meant that you could afford a Ford vehicle... and you were expected to own one. Had capitalism stuck to the norm of Marx' time in which industrial toil had destitution as a perquisite, then Ford would have had no market for his dreadful cars. And, yes, the Model T Ford really was an awful car.
Its engine was one of the least powerful on the market. It did not have safety glass. It originally had a carbide light that one had to stop the car to turn on. It infamously had no fuel pump, so people often had to drive in reverse to go up a hill. A car like this would not be street legal after about 1935, when highway speeds were close to those of today on all but rural superhighways... and the Model T could not meet those speeds. Just look at the car shown above and ask yourself whether even in a low-speed collision you had a satisfying chance of survival. It was basically the Trabant of its day.
But for many people the choice was between the Model T Ford and no car at all.
There always was a conflict between employers who sought to pay workers badly and those who saw the need to give workers strong incentives to their jobs well and at adequate pace.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.