United Liberty

It’s pretty hard to kill oneself when you’re already dead. I suppose some vampires have tried it, to end their miserable existence, but I don’t recall any zombies doing so. New York state may be the first to try, however.

The reason being is that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (the Assembly being New York’s equivalent of a “House of Representatives”) has introduced a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.50 an hour to $8.25 an hour:

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, joined by dozens of colleagues from his chamber controlled by Democrats, said census data show nearly half of the U.S. population has fallen into poverty or joined the ranks of the working poor. He said New York’s minimum wage has risen 10 cents in the last six years, it is lower here than in 18 other states, and increasing it is “a matter of human dignity.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has supported previous proposals to raise the minimum and his office will review this one through the legislative session, spokesman Matthew Wing said Monday

Scott Reif, spokesman for Republicans who control the Senate, said the Senate GOP would “continue to promote policies that encourage job growth and make New York a more business-friendly state, just as we did last year partnering with Governor Cuomo.”

The New York Farm Bureau and the state Business Council said raising the minimum wage would hurt small businesses, farms and nonprofits that are struggling to meet payrolls now. Farm Bureau President Dean Norton called it “a stealth tax.”

The Fiscal Policy Institute, a research nonprofit whose aim is “a strong economy in which prosperity is broadly shared,” said raising the minimum wage would help 1.6 million workers, mainly in retailing, food services and local service businesses, that don’t compete with businesses in other states. The institute said it would actually create 25,000 jobs since the money would be quickly spent and pumped back into local economies.

The people arguing the last paragraph are brain dead. Anyone who takes proposals or policy analyses from the “Fiscal Policy Institute” seriously are fools being taken for a ride.

I originally come from upstate New York, in the Utica-Rome area. I left that region and came down to DC to look for jobs, because there are no jobs available in upstate. There are simply none. I was barely able to get a summer job working at a gas station down the road from me, even though they said “Help wanted.” It is simply too expensive to pay high school and college students and graduates any wage, not only because they have virtually no usable skills, but even if they did, the hoops that one is required to jump through preclude any sort of employment.

Hiking the minimum wage and making it even more expensive to employ people will only raise unemployment. A union president arguing for this hike said in the New York Daily News that “When you have little and have great need you are going to spend every penny and that money is going back into the economy.” This is essentially the argument being made by the “Fiscal Policy Insitute” above.

Now let me ask a question of the Institute and Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) that lobbied for this minimum wage hike. Say you’re an employer, with a daily budget for $100 for labor. You pay your employees the old minimum wage, $7.25. They work four and a half hour shifts, so each gets or “costs” about $33 a day. This assumes you have three workers. Now let’s say the wage is increased to $8.50, as you propose. Now each employee—remember, you have three of them—costs $39 a day. But there’s a problem: now your labor costs are $117. Either you’re going to reduce their hours, or you’re going to lay off a worker. More than likely, the latter.

So you’re this laid off worker. You might have cheered for the hike, but instead of your income going from $7.25 an hour to $8.50 an hour, it went from $7.25 to $0.00 an hour. That’s right, zero. Now tell me, Mr. Appelbaum, and the so-called “Fiscal Policy Institute,” how are people going to pump money into the economy that they don’t have because you got them laid off?

I really want to see them try and explain that. Go ahead. Take your time. I’ll be waiting.

Advocates for higher minimum wages are dangerous fools. They claim to be looking out for the little guy who is starving, but in reality, they are only increasing the chance that said person does starve. The real goal behind these increases, of course, is not philanthropy whatsoever: instead, it is a subtle and slick attempt to get more people onto the public welfare rolls, who will then turn around and be good little Democratic voters, utterly dependent on their supposedly beneficent masters in their ivory palaces.

I’m not sure that strategy will necessarily work this time around.

There’s simply no money left for public welfare, meaning its going to get cut one way or another. There goes the voters. Another thing is mobility; New York has been hemorraghing residents and Congressional seats for decades. People aren’t necessarily going to sit around and wait for welfare checks; they’re likely to take the chance and move to a place where there are jobs, like Texas, and just leave the state entirely.

Of course, the real solution to all of this is to end the Federal Reserve, restore a sound money policy, and strengthen the value of the dollar bill in the poor person’s wallet. That is a sound poverty strategy that will help them more than any minimum wage hike. Unfortunately, libertarians don’t seem to be getting this message across, and we really need to do so. Restoring a sound currency will not necessarily cure everything, but it will go a long long way towards curing most of the economic ills befalling our country.

Hiking the minimum wage? It will only exacerbate the problems we face.

And one of those problems is that millions of Americans don’t have jobs. Silver, Appelbaum, and the “Fiscal Policy Institute” don’t want New Yorkers to have jobs. They want New Yorkers to go from $7.25 an hour to $0.00. That’s how it is.