No, they value the fact that you just can't stay in business when your out of pocket cost is $28/hour for a $10/hour job that earns the business maybe $15/hour in billable labor (and remember, there's also overhead to pay before you can even think about profit).

The business owners I've talked to would rather NOT hire illegals, because there's also an unreliability factor (90% can't be counted on to show up every day) and a quality control factor (most are less qualified than you'd really want), but when it's hire the illegal or go out of business thanks to the mandated costs of legal labor... well, I don't like it either, but I understand why it happens.

>You know what's not a science but uses a lot of math? Economics, which is 3 parts ideology and 1 part math.

It sounds to me like you're running on three parts ideology and one part math.

Economics is actually very much a science! They make empirical studies of the world, and test them to see if they hold up.

Math is very much not a science.

"But if they bettered themselves, they would not be picking produce for sub-subsistence wages, now would they? So those poor farmers would still have to ship in exploitable people..."

Uh, no. Used to be every generation of our own as-yet-unskilled kids did this work. We'll never run out of a next generation of kids.

And I suspect those "exploited" people would tell you it's a better living than they made in the old country -- otherwise, why come here in the first place?

That's an interesting insight (I hadn't thought of that, thanks!), and I think you're right about welfare making it just as easy, and about as profitable, to not work at all... but the work still has to be done, so...

I've sometimes thought that if we had "national service", it should involve working these types of seasonal jobs, as a means of getting the work back into American hands.

I think you'll find the correlation is not with a higher minimum wage, but with the total cost per employee as imposed by the state. Frex, in California, wages are only about 30% of the mandated cost of each employee. The other 70% is payroll taxes, workman's comp, insurance, and the like.

That 70% is what an illegal labor force saves you, a cost far more significant than any minimum wage increase.

In fact, in some areas illegal laborers make more than minimum wage, because having ducked out of that 70%, the employer can afford to pay more than they would otherwise, and do so to attract a better grade of illegal worker. The illegal worker thereby earns significantly more take-home pay than he could earn as a "legal" worker. (This is common in the construction trade, for instance.) Not only that, but the illegal worker takes home his entire paycheck, minus no deductions or taxes.

Per the last stats I saw, hardly anyone earning minimum wage is "supporting a family". 80-90% of minimum wage jobs are held by supplemental earners (second job or teenager in the same household as a primary wage-earner who gets more than minimum wage). So the notion that we're starving families via the current minimum wage is bogus. Nor have min.wage increases in the past made any difference, for the same reason.

And before you accuse me of being one of those fat cats who just don't give a shit -- as a small business owner, my income rarely exceeds the minimum wage. Hey, let's legislate =me= a better income while you're at it!

"The presumption in the post is that the causality is that increasing the minimum wage causes employment increases. What if the causality goes the other way?"

I had the exact same question. I'd guess those states where the causality is as per TFA may be driven by regional costs, like basic living in the SF Bay and Puget Sound areas -- where if you're going to have entry-level or service workers at all, they have to make an increased minimum wage or they simply can't afford to live there, not even 3 families to a hut. And those regions are such a majority of the state's population as to completely skew the results. Maybe things get better in S.F. and meanwhile the whole Central Valley starves... observationally, this seems to be the case; small businesses are folding all through the minor population areas of California.

But otherwise, I'd expect prosperity and profit opportunity comes first, followed by competitive and rising wages (for a sterling example, see the North Dakota oil patch).

They may have more money, but do they have more spending power? Probably not, since in my observation, prices as driven by business costs, being cumulative of all costs, tend to increase faster than wages. And either a business raises prices to cover expenses, or they go out of business (which of course puts some people out of work).

More interesting would be minimum wage vs cost of living. Every time I've priced anything from Australia, I've been shocked at how much more expensive everything is (typically 2-3x the same item in the U.S.)

Labor isn't worth an arbitrary value. It is worth some fraction less than the value it brings the employer (no one is going to hire workers at a loss; the whole reason you hire workers is to produce sufficient value to generate profit). It's amazing how the same people who don't grok this are all over the Big Media industry for pricing their goods above their demonstrable value, leading to the "Pirate Bay Economy".

Or maybe not. Linked from TFA:

http://www.cato.org/publicatio...

Chapman's apple-planting was never about the fruit (nor did TFA go into it). What it was really about was CIDER -- hard cider in areas that didn't yet raise enough barley for beer, or lacked the quality of soil for grain crops, frex in rocky areas like the Appalachians. Beer (which then meant thick stuff with a lot of nutritional value) and cider are how you preserve grain and fruit when you don't have secure dry storage or refrigeration (not that fruit keeps very well at its best). That the end product contains alcohol, well, that was a side benefit.

>Maths is a science

Um, no. There's a reason why you get a BA in Math, not a BS.

Math is an exemplar of a priori thinking. You can literally do math in your head by just picking some starting axioms and deriving from there, with no reference to the outside world.

Science is an exemplar of a posteriori thinking. You make empirical observations about the world, generate hypotheses, and see if the evidence matches the model.

The IRS is working diligently to strip us of our possessions, and as you're probably aware there is a move afoot to confine us all to urban reservations...

This topic recently came up on a writers' forum, and someone coughed up some astonishing hard numbers:

Only about 1/2 of 1 percent of American adults read for entertainment. This is probably a fair representation of the literate world at large.

Point being -- print fiction has been a niche market for a long time, with relatively few people interested in it in the first place. That half a percent of a lot of people is still profitable -- well, goes to show the value of niche markets. But expecting it to do more than hang on against today's competition for your entertainment dollars, let alone expand significantly, is a fantasy.

Yeah, I was trying to think of some way that would get rid of the intolerable bits but not be too revolting. Goo doesn't sound wonderful... tho I love custard (and pudding), and the appeal is more the silky texture than the flavor. Maybe adaptations of stuff you already like, that sort of thing...

But so long as you don't veer off into some radical deficiency (eg. vegan or fruitarian or some such nonsense), the fact is our bodies are very flexible about nutrients and nutrient sources. People can do fine on a low-variety diet for a very long time if it just hits the high points for basic requirements.

Too much soda can be a contributor toward too much weight, yeah, mostly it's a helluva lot of sugar calories, or if sugar-free, aspartame is a thyroid inhibitor and may do more harm than the sugar would. Not something I drink either way... don't really care for it, most of the time.

But fatty food generally is not an issue unless you consume to serious excess, or too many carbs alongwith (fat-fried carbs are still carbs). My own rule is "If you can still see the food, there's not enough butter!" :)