Minimum wage is an arbitrary price control, a wage is just a price on labour. Setting minimum wage to an arbitrary number and then declaring that no business that can make a profit hiring people at a price lower than that number should exist is an interesting statement from point of view of some sort of central planner maybe, but from point of view of a real economy that's quite egregious. If somebody is willing to buy a service at 5 bucks but not at 10 for example, then your statement reads like so: because of politics you should have to pay 10 bucks for the service and if you cannot afford it - tough.

When you put it into those terms, then how can you justify such a position if on the other hand you declare that you are somehow pro-people?

- yeah, professional economists don't hire people and don't run businesses, their job is to feed you the pro-state propaganda, but hey, you are only talking to a guy who actually hires people and writes checks, but don't let the reality stand in the way of your fiction.

- no, but I do build and sell retail management systems, supply chain management, customer relation management, business intelligence, logistics and shipping and handling integration and management systems. My own design, the main systems were my own implementation and now I have people working for me building more on top of what I built in the beginning.

What is wrong is your idea of 2% raise. The current minimum wage hikes that are about to hit are not 2%, they are closer to 40% (for example from 7.25 to 10.10 that's a 39% increase) in just NOMINAL wage. Of-course actually hiring somebody means that your total cost of labour is about 2x that much. To buy labour at 7.25 really means to pay around 13 bucks or so for that labour, so at 10.10 that's closer to 18-20 dollars, depends on how the tax scale goes as well, could be even worse.

Why don't you start a business and hire some people and then talk?

But you will get all the claims that minimum wage laws, labour laws, inflation (money printing) and basically rising prices somehow increase economic activity rather than putting more pressure on business to automate (use capital where labour was used initially).

Maiming small children actually seems to be the business model that modern governments are in today, with all the wars, drones, bombings, wars on 'terrorism', etc. Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, governments on the other hand force you to participate, if you do not like it, you can always opt out to go to jail for tax evasion.

Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.

You are getting the opposite effect, not a 'feel good' effect when you use government violence to impose your wrong-headed moral ideas.

Whether a job is a 'liability' or not is also a question to the laws, many of which are also designed to destroy competition to the larger players in the field, those who donate money to the politicians. However checking oil and tire pressure and wiping your windshield and pumping your gas is a courtesy that can no longer be provided to you by the gas station, not because of liability, but because of the all the labour laws and inflation and government is the responsible party for all of it.

- you obviously are not running a gas station or any business for that matter, so you should really abstain from making ridiculous statements about what a cost is to hire somebody. The cost to hire somebody today in USA is much more than just the wage itself, an employee cost to business is easily twice their wage if not more given the laws and taxes and liability for all the nonsensical government discrimination laws, etc.

The benefit to the business has to be tangible, it has to cover the cost of having that employee working there and it has to provide something on top, the profit has to be material. If you get more customers than your competition by providing better service that is a material benefit as long as you can measure it. On the other hand given the tiny margins that gas stations live on, it is clearly impossible to hire attendants to check your tire pressure and oil and wipe the windshield and pump your gas, in fact most if not all gas stations are now manned by one person.

One person where it wasn't uncommon to have 4-5 people before all the laws and inflation destroyed all those opportunities and automation was increased and customers were switched to the self-serve model.

Given the higher minimum wage laws (most of which didn't kick in yet, by the way, so the effects are not there yet), there will be more automation done in places where people used to provide the service. You will not have a waiter, you will have fewer clerks, you will not have somebody answering phones.

You'll bring your own food to the table, you'll use a self serve cash register, you'll talk to an answering machine (well, at least off-shore call centres mitigate this problem somewhat, people like talking to people on the phones, not to machines.)

You install self check out machines, that's what you do when prices for labour go up. Labour prices and capital are in competition. The more expensive is labour price the more reasons there are to invest capital to automate.

- which was always the case, people always bought "the cheapest gas they could". Of-course you can thank government created inflation for the cheapest gas of today being many times more expensive than most expensive gas at the time when there still were gas station attendants who checked your tire pressure, oil, wiped your windshield, pumped gas for you. That was quality service, today you can't get that and that was still being paid from revenue derived from selling "cheapest gas they could" buy.

The difference of-course is minimum wage and of-course inflation (expansion of the money supply by the government printing presses, yes, I consider Fed to be government regardless of the mistaken belief that they are an independent bank, which they are not, they are a political beast that is playing for whatever is the current administration) didn't help at all.

Technology is capital being used to compete with the price for labour and as government makes labour more and more expensive by all means, including inflation, labour laws, discrimination laws, price controls, etc.etc., capital becomes a more viable alternative to the labour.

The modern "mainstream economists" are there to confuse the issue for you on behalf of the government, they are quite successful at confusing the shit out of the masses, given the responses on /.

Wrong on all accounts, but typing on the phone is tedious, i will only talk about your last incorrect point. Business model is not broken only due to artificial govt laws that do not operate in the free market but are there f9r political purposes. Case in point, gas stations used to employ yonge ppl in usa to wipe your windshield, check tire pressure, oil level and of course pump gas for you. With the govt created inflation and its political game to make it look like it cares and thus raising minimum wage over time these jobs disappeared. So did many others. Was the business model broken before the laws kicked in? No. It worked j7st fine. Were those jobs paying enough for somebody to live on? No. But people took them because it wasnt a problem. Not everybody that needs a job has enough ability and skill and experience to command higher wages. However many need to start somewhere, those jobs provided the first run of the economi ladder. The govt pulled that run from under the people that needed it . Of course the govt also stole money from those, making more to create a welfare state for those that could no longer get onto that first run.

Minimum wage is minimum ability and it is a barrier to entry into the job market. Plenty jobs would exist just fine without minimum wage and would provide value to the customers and some profit to businesses. If minimum wage was set tomorrow to 100 usd per hour by your logic it would mean that every business is broken, because near nobody can afford those labour prices.

It is true that the entire field of "mainstream economics" is exactly what you joke it is. If you repeat lies and propaganda long enough, people will no longer understand the truth, many will lose the ability to differentiate the reality from fiction. Government needs these "economists" to turn the population into economic illiterates. The waters are muddied enough that even logic is no longer understood or followed. Simple logic: rising prices reduce demand, wages are also prices, price controls do not provide feel good results, if you are in debt spending more does not get you out of it, rising prices are not a result of growing economy, in a growing competitive economy prices fall not rise over time, inflation is expansion of the money supply, inflation causes prices to rise or prevents them from falling, government induced spending is fake economy, it is not self sustaining and it is done at the expense of a real economy because that is where the capital is taken from, etc.

In that world 2+2 is whatever government says it is and logic is against the policy and will be ridiculed and laughed at. In that world people will be confused enough to stop thinking rationally. In that world the real economy will be destroyed without doubt.

Nonsense and propaganda. You cannot state anything until those increases actually kick in and are in effect for some time. About 5% of workers are on minimum wage in the first place, out of those 5%, some will not be rehired, and once the wage is in effect fewer new businesses will be created. The money will come from somewhere, higher consumer prices and fewer minimum wage jobs. Fewer minimum wage jobs does not mean "people will have more money to spend" but it will slow down growth of new positions.

Minimum wage is actually minimum ability. It cannot extract non-existing money from small business, but it can prevent people with abilities that are below minimum wage from finding jobs. Large business will transfer costs to the consumers, higher prices will leave you with less money to spend, not more. Small business will cut employment, will hire fewer people. Government stats are manipulated in every category, this is not an exception, best case scenario this is premature.

a group of criminals that are the political class within a system, regardless of how the political class is created in the first place. This group of criminals usurps power over the individuals, which includes power to dictate what money is, what the taxes are, what the laws are and it gives itself 'legal' power to steal from the individuals and murder them. A democratic government is one, where the criminal political group is difficult to get rid of since there is no one easily identifiable target, it is a criminal hydra.

As always, doesn't even matter which government it is, but it is a government weapon that killed near 300 people by shooting down a civilian passenger plane.
These horrific crimes are perpetrated by government criminals will never stop as long as there are governments.

You still missed it. Men are not designated as a specially protected class of people, who are owed entitlements of this type.

If a man is sexually harassed by another man, this is not going to be a special situation that employer can be liable for in the same way than if a woman is harassed. Women are given special entitlements by government and obligations are imposed upon employers for completely bullshit reasons. An employer is not running a kindergarten, it's a job, employers are not there to babysit anybody. If an employer harasses a woman then it is the employer that is liable but in exactly the same way that anybody else would be. However if it is between 2 people that are working in the same place, being employed there, somehow the employer can be additionally liable for

.

Well, it should be obvious to any thinking person that if a person comes with a higher than otherwise probability of filing a lawsuit against you, whatever the reason, this will be a very serious consideration during the hiring process, which is why government shouldn't be in between employers and employees if the goal is to get an efficiently functioning economy and society.

It is strange that you think it is a 'troll', when in reality these are the precise, exact considerations when hiring anybody. How much will they cost? Does hiring a person mean increasing liability because this type of person has special protections designated by government and can much easier sue the employer than another type of a person?

Governments forces employers to discriminate based on the same exact criteria that government uses to provide 'protections'. Remember, whatever government says it does, the effect is pretty much always the exact opposite one. Labour discrimination laws create discrimination, they don't eliminate it.