I disagree. Here in Sweden, we actively discourage jobs that pay borderline-poverty wages. Taxi rides should not be cheap. You are buying someone else's time. That should be expensive for the middle-class.
So you're saying only rich people should get taxi rides? I thought Sweden supported the poor more.
Also, you're aware that when the minimum wage is too high, it just means there will be more unemployment, not that everyone gets a raise.
Now the debate is: are people happier with a job with a low wage or are they happier at home doing nothing? Studies show that people are more depressed at home when unemployed and have more chance to improve their condition and salary by starting at lower paid jobs doing something. But many of the supporters of high minimum wage would rather people stay at home than improve themselves starting with lower paid jobs not because it helps the poor but because it helps the high minimum wage supporters sleep better at night knowing that although more people have no jobs, at least no one is being underpaid... well... except for those not being paid at all.
I also wonder whether having these artificially low prices for things like Uber, reduces the incentive to improve more efficient modes of transportation like trains/buses.
I explained this part in my comment. Enforcing a higher minimum wage just put people out of jobs, it doesn't give everyone a raise. So you're not raising people's wage, you're actually taking away from them their whole wage bringing it down to zero.
Maybe increasing the amount taxi drivers are paid would drive up the cost of taxis and thus drive down demand for taxis. This seems reasonable to me. We're defining a minimum amount somebody's time is worth, which means the cost of things that use peoples time go up.
The root "problem" taxi drivers solve still exists - people still need to get around, but taxis aren't the only way to solve that problem. Train and bus services could be expanded or improved.
The other thing to consider is that the extra money the taxi drivers earn will most likely provide other economic opportunities.
Who's We? Shouldn't taxi drivers be free to define how much they want to sell their time? Why should you decide for them? Isn't that paternalistic and anti-freedom? Why do you know better than they do what's best for them? Why not let them be?
> Shouldn't taxi drivers be free to define how much they want to sell their time?
The problem with this is that, in my (perhaps naive) mind, the logical conclusion is a race to the bottom fuelled by greed (of the business) and desperation (of the employee) which helps nobody. In my view there should be a regulation to prevent how far this can go.
By the way, I don't think we'll agree on any of these points, but it's refreshing to have a discussion that doesn't descend into name-calling and personal criticism :)
If that were true, we would all be paid minimum wage, which is not true. As you gain experience, you bring more value and therefor employers are forced to pay you more, which is demonstrated by reality as I said, we're not all paid minimum wage for exactly that reason. Race to the bottom happens when the minimum wage gets so high that even qualified people get minimum wage and the rest are just unemployed and don't get anything at all.
About greed, are you're aware what greed is? Here's Milton's 3 minutes video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A&t=13s
I do agree with that, best if middle class people use public transport (or worse, their own car).
> I thought Sweden supported the poor more.
It has nothing to do with support of the poor. In India, taxis are incredibly cheap, and there is no shortage of poor people. Poor people can drive buses and trams, too, you know.
> Also, you're aware that when the minimum wage is too high, it just means there will be more unemployment
No, it doesn't. It was never empirically proven that there is a connection between minimum wage and unemployment. (You are simplifying the whole economy to the labor market, but there is also demand side.)
> No, it doesn't. It was never empirically proven that there is a connection between minimum wage and unemployment.
When it comes to low skill jobs, yes, increasing the minimum wage does create more unemployment as the middle class is not able to pay for them anymore, only the super rich. That's a well no fact, you can look it up.
Btw, when you say socialism pretends to help the poor, but helps the elite, that doesn't help your case. By all objective measures, the poor are better off in western european social democratic countries than in a free-for-all capitalist society, like the US. There are other models, like Singapore that also work well, FYI.
France, Belgium and Ireland all have a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment rates than the US. Clearly the unemployment rate is affected by multiple factors. The issue is whether a higher minimum wage increases unemployment, not whether you can counteract it with other policies -- applying the other policies without raising the minimum wage could result in even less unemployment.
> Btw, when you say socialism pretends to help the poor, but helps the elite, that doesn't help your case.
There are a huge number of nominally socialist policies in the US that really exist at the behest of large corporations. Mortgage interest tax deduction -- "help people own a home", really makes home ownership more expensive and transfers tax dollars to mortgage banks. Ditto student loan interest subsidies. Affordable housing subsidies -- placate political demand for lower housing costs without actually lowering market rate housing costs for low-middle income working people, transfers tax dollars to landlords, encourages low income people to rent rather than own. Social security -- no progressive rate structure, tax cutoff for millionaires, benefits based on lifespan and historical income which both disadvantage lower income people. Tax deductions for employer-provided health insurance -- implicit subsidy to large insurance companies. Affordable Care Act -- huge tax dollar subsidy to large insurance companies, effectively prohibits people from saving money with high deductible insurance plans that are less profitable to same insurance companies, and discourage overconsumption and overpayment to medical companies.
Skepticism is warranted.
The only countries that are going socialists are Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and friends and we know how they're doing.
No, what I am saying that taxi driver's job should be paid well enough. If you want a personal driver, it will cost you. The interpretation that taxi is better than public transport is yours only.. Many people in Europe don't need taxis, because we have excellent public transport, which, by the way, also employs people.
I am not sure how you can twist the logic to think that my position supports the elites more than poor. :-)
How about letting taxis decide how much they want to charge, crazy thought, huh? Turns out many of them are happy to drive for Uber. How about we let them be? Or do you know better than they do what's good for them?
> Many people in Europe don't need taxis, because we have excellent public transport
No we don't. Public transport are still dependent on where you live, unless you live close to a station, it's not that great cause you still need to drive to the station. Not to mention the strikes (I live in France), the delays etc. Having a personal private driver on demand is a way better experience than riding a public bus (gosh do I hate this every single time I have to use it).
> I am not sure how you can twist the logic to think that my position supports the elites more than poor. :-)
Well simply put, your policies make it unaffordable for the poor to get access to the best services and only the elites can. So, there you go :)
Nobody can prove something like that because it depends on dynamic characteristics of the economy. If everyone who makes minimum wage worked for the government and the government did nothing but pay them more money by taking on more public debt then the current-year employment rate obviously wouldn't go down, but our current economy doesn't look like that.
Only ~1% of workers in the US make minimum wage, and they represent an even smaller percentage of total consumption than that. Increasing their wages is not going to create a large increase in local consumption, especially when some of the money goes to things that don't create new local unskilled jobs, like increasing salaries for existing CEOs, or leaving the local economy and going to workers in China or India, or creating demand for skilled jobs that the newly unemployed minimum wage workers aren't qualified for.
And the entire wage increase comes out of the employer's pocket, which for middle class employers means that much less consumption by the employer -- the "increased demand" from higher minimum wage is the broken window fallacy. Meanwhile there are existing jobs that can justify the lower wage but not the higher wage, so those people become unemployed, which reduces local demand, not only due to the lost amount to the employee but also the profit that employee had previously generated for the employer and the surplus for the employer's customers and suppliers and so on.
does this statistic limit to literal minimum wage? so if someone is hired at +5 cents, do they not count?
Including minimum wage +5 cents is still ~1%.
FWIW the median wage is ~$16.
> does it include everything sub-living wage?
There are many people who work primarily for tips, but raising the minimum wage wouldn't change that.
Suppose you raise minimum wage by 10% and as a result 9 people get a 10% raise and one person loses their job. Well, you just got yourself 9 votes at the cost of one, even though the net result across those ten people is negative. And the net result across all people is even worse because now people have to pay higher prices for things, but those costs are too widely distributed to change anyone's vote.
So raising the minimum wage (or having one at all) will tend to have more political support than it can justify on the merits.
1. Could you cite one of these studies? This is the first I've hearing of such a phenomenon.
2. That seems insanely counter-intuitive, and even if it's true, it probably hits a wall at some point. To use an extreme example, I for one would rather sit at home collecting an unemployment check than work at a literal sweatshop. If studies are showing people are happier without a living income than with one, then perhaps that says something about society's attitude towards work and how work is glorified as not a means to an end but an end unto itself. I would say that should be pushed back against, and that we should continue enforcing a living wage, and simply giving people money if they can't find a job that pays one.
when regulations like this are realized, and unions protect a privileged set of existing members, the marginalized are in fact hardest hit.
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/11/think-the-sharing-economy-...
When you correct for demographics by comparing Swedish Americans to Swedes, it turns out that all income percentiles besides the bottom 10% are better off in the US. Even the bottom 10% are not very different.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nA4POT...
Note that countries populated by those other demographic groups also perform fairly badly. For example, Italy also tries to be "nice" or "responsible" (as you describe it), but Sicily is a very scenic (and tasty!) basket case. (I think it's not un-PC for me to talk about Sicily, since my ancestry is more Sicilian than anything else?)
It's always entertaining to watch people label a claim as "racist", but refuse to call them "false" or argue against them.
I made no normative claims (e.g. "screw the others"), only a positive one.
as "Swedish Americans" aren't exactly a properly random sample of people plucked out of Sweden and relocated, it's not clear that it's very useful to compare to "all Swedes in Sweden".
Back in the 1960s, if you look at the opposition to the proposition of Canadian Medicare, it was exactly who you'd expect: Medical associations, Pharma, Insurance Companies, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Who favored it? Trade Unions, Association of Social Workers, Farmer Associations, United Church of Canada... it also polled heavily well amongst the population
In a public commission (1961), Trade Unions advocated for medicare by revealing the limitations of private insurance, where they could point out that profit-driven insurance schemes that enrolled their members tended to severely restrict or deny coverage in many areas (rehab, preventative health, mental health) despite the fact that their plans had costly deductibles and co-insurance charges. They also point-by-point countered the arguments against Medicare made by the Canadian Medical Association. And they also pointed out a purely market-driven allocation of resources created huge inequalities in access to care, such as the lack of doctors in some provinces and lack of dentists outside of our two biggest cities.
Even if poor people in Sweden are better off than poor people in the US, it doesn't mean it's because of the collective bargaining, it may be caused by something else.
Unless you have a good reason to think otherwise, why not just believe him?