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RE: Bezos Bows To Pressure On $15/hr. Keep Pressuring Him. Keep Pressuring Them All.

in #amazon6 years ago

Scarcity of jobs is great for Bezos. It's terrible for people seeking employment. If businesses have to shut down because they can't afford to hire people, then Bezos consolidates marketshare. Of course, this also means that there are fewer opportunities. When there are more jobs than there are workers, wages rise as a consequence. When wages are artificially raised, this creates a barrier for entry for entry level work. This means that employment rates decrease, which means that the economy shrinks overall, since people have no money to buy things at all, thus further damaging the job market. What typically happens then, is that the government borrows vast amounts of money to fund benefit programs. This artificially stimulates the economy, but it doesn't make people more productive, and thus, the growth is fuelled by debt, while the unemployed remain unemployed and become gradually less employable, as they become less and less desirable as employees. What's worse, this creates inflation, which reduces the buying power of the dollar. So, ultimately, that raise you forced businesses to give to everyone now means nothing, because the value of the dollar has decreased. So now, there are fewer people working, and the people that are still working are not actually better off, and you've also blown up the national debt.

Let businesses offer the wages that they are willing to offer, and remove barriers to entry for entrepreneurship. That maximizes the potential for job growth. When you do that, wages rise, because now there are more jobs than there are workers.

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Minimum wage increases without fiat (that is, with a commodities backed currency) create consequences that are more immediate and pronounced, because the creation of welfare programs to compensate for the decrease in demand for labor is not possible without government debt instruments, and if the government devalues its currency, people demand the commodity over the currency, and the currency loses its backing and collapses. The same thing happens with fiat; it just takes a little longer, because it's a little more difficult (but certainly not impossible) to exchange the fiat for a stable form of value.

Demand for entry level jobs will always be there, but the higher the barrier for creating those jobs, the fewer there will be, which means that some people just won't be able to get jobs at all. This is not merely my opinion:

https://www.epionline.org/studies/r129/
http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/03/harvard-study-minimum-wage-hikes-cut-entry-level-jobs-harm-poor-minorities/

Those are the top two links on Google (which is a heavily left-leaning search engine).

There is another study I found in the top five that I can't share here, but it's a PDF that says the same thing. The other two links in the top five claim that minimum wage hikes don't have an effect on job growth, but, firstly, they are editorials, not scientific papers (which tend to supporty point), and they also fail to mention that, yes, it's true that minimum wages don't ALWAYS kill job growth - but only if they aren't OUTPACING job growth. But if the job market is growing relative to the pool of employment seekers, then wages will rise anyway. So minimum wage hikes don't cause overall wages to rise, and they certainly can cause job growth to stall - especially if they are raised dramatically (and a $15 minimum wage would be a dramatic increase).

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