Anonymous asked:
oktavia-von-gwwcendorff answered:
(telling workers “YOU ARE SELFISH RACIST SCUM” doesn’t count as an argument)
Additionally, by trying to refocus their campaigning for lower taxes and reduction of artificial costs of living by showing them the calculations on how much even minimum-wage workers can end up paying (an awful lot, possibly even more than some millionaire investors) and how the state wastes most of the money it takes instead of spending it in any useful way, and how much of the price in the things they would want to spend those minimum wages on is artificially created through dysfunctional regulation.
It’s also worth noting that they’re probably the worst demographic to campaign with. Not to say it can’t be done, but it’s playing on Very Hard.
Protectionism is genuinely beneficial to the people protected (that being the whole point). It’s inefficient, it’s bad overall, and everybody loses when many groups are protected (as now), but it ‘works’ locally. Licensed cosmetologists are going to be hard to sell on “cosmetology doesn’t need a license, abolish that rule”. Opening up more competition to drive down wages is an easy sell for the new competitors, but damned hard with the established people. (Hence “some of you will get fired” being one of the only arguments that plays with people getting the raise.)
So if I had to push for this one, I think I’d try to redirect or sell people on a larger reform package. $15/hour isn’t nearly as good as “actually not having lots of protectionism". Maybe package it with slashing zoning laws to allow new development and lower rent, and tax cuts or a redirection from government spending to mere transfers like EITC?
Kool-Aid Man hot take nobody asked for, because I’ve been meaning to talk about the Fight for 15 for a while:
You’re definitely not going to convince anybody with “economists agree, look at these papers!” @thefutureoneandall has a good point that this is a case where one person’s benefit tends to come at another’s expense, but the problem here is that the people benefitting from minimum wage increases (which includes people who make above, but in the vicinity of, minimum wage) are a very large group who are generally much worse off than other groups. These people are mad and will not be impressed by arguments that amount to giving employers more leverage over them in the short term.
There are, of course, tacks you could pursue, but you need to look like you’re going to bat for workers and not going to bat for employers but actually it’s good for workers too! One thing I think hasn’t been looked at seriously is reform and enforcement of employment laws. Like, I’m certainly not in favour of reducing the minimum wage under current circumstances, but I also think that increasing it is kind of dumb right now, because companies – especially big companies – have become incredibly sophisticated at pushing unbooked costs onto workers and will simply respond by doing more of that. But you need to have a counterproposal that puts you clearly in the workers’ corner, and that largely rules out economic arguments, since a lot of people have a (not unfounded!) suspicion that the economic consensus is mostly just a lot of handwaving used to justify screwing them.
First of all, whatever the minimum wage is going to be, you need peg it to inflation with the as much legislative force as you can muster in order to have any sort of credibility. It’s insane that that even needs to be discussed – virtually every statute built around a fixed dollar value should be pegged to inflation (probably with some lag or infrequent updates for stability, like a four-year average updated every four years) by default.
But the big thing is that the government needs to aggressively enforce existing labour laws. Some might need to be repealed if the only alternative were to take them seriously, but for the most part the laws regarding hiring, scheduling, overtime, sick leave and such are sensible laws that are near-universally flouted simply because the government is eager to look the other way. A serious, systematic crackdown on wage theft and illegal employment practices would take a lot of the pressure off the working class even at the current wage rate, would look good to workers, and would be harder for opponents to object to since it’s a rule-of-law initiative. Of course, this won’t be a satisfying answer to libertarians, but I should think even a libertarian ought to be able to get behind “a wage labourer should be paid wages for all the time they’re actually working or otherwise unable to go about their lives freely due to job-related responsibilities.”
Also continuing the theme of “answers libertarians won’t like”, you can also go a long way to winning people over with more aggressive state-level wealth redistribution. The reason people are suspicious of economic liberalization is because they observe that the wealthy are hyperefficient at absorbing as much as possible of the benefits it creates. If you take large-scale measures to explicitly redistribute wealth toward the bottom (which paradoxically will still benefit the wealthy more than anyone else, but potentially to a lesser degree), it’s a lot easier to push for economic liberalization on the side as an everybody-gets-something approach.
Finally, note people are suspicious of big moves in general, and the best argument for something is seeing other people doing it with good results. Skeptics of a reduced minimum wage are probably going to need to see a case where you lower the minimum wage in a specific city, county, or state, and the good effects you say this will create happen in a way that’s obvious to the workers who live there. (If you need a comparative analysis to demonstrate cause-and-effect, it’s not obvious enough for this to work.)
Wage subsidies, man. Break the welfare trap and the poor enforcement of employment laws simultaneously. It’s known that, according to economic models by the same sorts of people who ignore the effect desperation to survive might have on negotiating wages at the low end (like some Libertarians), a lower minimum wage creates more potential jobs for employment. However, many of those jobs won’t create enough money to live on. If we introduce an hourly, declining wage subsidy direct to employees, we can hit the point of making wages more livable while simultaneously reducing the minimum wage. The increase in available jobs will help blunt the effects of automation and increase the ability of workers to walk away from “work in unsafe conditions or we fire you lolo”. I’d type more but I’m on mobile. Also it multiplies the spending with private money so it should be more cost effective than welfare, and even perhaps rich people won’t whine about it as much because you actually have to work to get it and businesses will have lower costs of labor and fewer unions.
