The Minimum Wage Hoax Part Deux

I’d like to congratulate the economically challenged crowd for making me look smart, which is no small task, i might add. 

A short while ago I went on a rant about the ludicrousness of setting mandated minimum wages and how it has negative impacts on the low skilled job seeker. Well, today I read an article about the very ills I spoke of.

Here is a quote from the article:

"We're going to eliminate boring, repetitive, dangerous jobs, and we're going to free up people to do things that are higher value," said co-founder Alex Garden, a former Microsoft manager and president of mobile game maker Zynga Studios.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-hungry-startup-robots-slice-pizza.html#jCp

Now the article itself is written to show how this is such a good thing and how it is going to free up people for higher value activities. The problem being, if you are the low skill individual who’s only value to the enterprise is to evenly place pepperonis over the surface of the pizza, you and your associated cost to the company, have just been replaced by a one time cost of purchasing a robot. 

The company will not have to pay for the robot’s health insurance (other than a maintenance contract that I’m certain is less than an employee’s health insurance). Nor will it have to staff sufficiently to account for “no shows” or provide maternity leave, vacation, uniform allowance, etc., etc. 

The high cost of purchasing a robot became much more of a reasonable cost benefit to the company when the $15 an hour minimum wage crowd started gaining traction. Which I believe I predicted in the August 19th rant about “The Minimum Wage Hoax”.

I wonder if Bernie and Hillary will jump up and take credit for this unintended, but easily predictable, consequence?

No, I’d bet they will spin the yarn to talk about greedy business owners who are choosing machines over people so they don’t have to pay them a “living wage”. This of course being the incentive for the development of the robot that takes the job in the first place. 

The advent of the robot is merely the logical extension of increasing the cost of doing business through government regulation. For the businesses that can’t move their manufacturing to a country where costs are lower, the answer to unwarranted cost increases caused by government mandates is mechanization. 

Replace the low skilled individual who’s on going cost of employment has doubled or tripled with the one time cost of a machine. And if the business has more than one shift, this machine can replace 2 or 3 employees per day. If the business is a 7 day a week business, then even more employees are replaced and the cost of ownership has gone down even further. I doesn’t take a genius to see the cost benefit in this equation goes to the machines and the minimally skilled job seeker faces an even bleaker future.

So, once again, thank you “living wage” advocates for making me seem prescient.

Or so it would seem to an old farm boy.

How The Left Sells Socialism

As I watch the world in general fall victim to weirdness at every turn I ask myself, 'what in the hell is going on?'

We see notable (not necessarily great) athletes refusing to stand and show respect for the flag because they say the country is suppressing people of color. Now they are doing this in a country where they are being paid millions of dollars to play a game they love to play, and would play in a vacant lot or a park for free if nobody paid them. This country has a President who is black as well as the last two Attorney Generals, the top law enforcement people in the nation. Many, many city mayors are black. Two sitting Supreme Court Justices are of color. I'm not seeing the country, and thus the flag, holding people of color down.

One could easily make the case that it is the minority communities these folks live in that are holding them back. I believe it was Charles Barkley who recently made this point. He called out the folks who deride black kids who work hard in school and do well. Telling these kids they aren't black enough and they are trying to be white if they try to learn and improve themselves.

I find it hard to hold much sympathy for folks who do not take advantage of opportunities placed before them and then cry because they don't have the things that others have. It isn't the system that holds them back, it's their circle they hang with.

Dr. Carson, Thomas Sowell, Ph. D., and Sheriff David Clarke are all men of color who took advantage of the opportunities that the nation offers to ALL of its citizens and rose to positions of power and influence. If they grew up in areas where the schools may not have had the best facilities or the best teachers, they still made the most of their opportunities, and look how the nation has rewarded their efforts.

They were not rewarded because of their color, just like Colin Kaepernick was not given a $100M contract because he was black. They were rewarded based on their proven abilities.

This country was developed as a meritocracy. That means you are rewarded on merit. What you do, not where you come from or who your parents were or weren't.

It is that meritocracy that allowed this country to develop and become the most wonderful country that history has ever recorded.

Have there been cases where this hasn't worked out perfectly? Of course there are. Certainly some individuals have started out a rung or two higher on the ladder than the rest of us, but merit will still be rewarded in the end. Our history is littered with people who were born to wealth but lost it all because they didn't continue to strive and develop. The same can be said for companies. When was the last time you saw a Studebaker or an AMC driving down the road?

So where do these ideas come from that cause folks to think that they are not being treated fairly and that they need to fight for "social justice"?

My hypothesis is that it comes from our educational system.

As my friend Mary Ruth says, this started many decades ago. Academics developed visions of utopian societies where everyone had everything they needed and then proceeded to dream up systems where by this could take place. Marks and Engles being two of the more influential in this category.

In their utopia, it was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". In this system everybody produced and their product went into a central repository that all would draw upon to meet their needs. The problem being, this didn't account for human nature and the basic laws of behavioralism. People don't like to see their labor be taken without recompense and what is rewarded is repeated. Which is why these systems are always doomed to failure

This fact has never altered an academics views, and they have pushed these ideas, which are an easy sell to those who have less and want more, but are unwilling or unable to develop skills and abilities that would allow them to earn more in a meritocracy. It is these folks that the leftist academics have found as fertile ground from which they can develop their Social Justice Warriors. The Occupy crowd and the BLM folks who want to "redistribute" the wealth. Believing if they just had the wealth all would be fine, without the understanding of what it took to create the wealth. And yes I said create, it was not stolen from the poor, it was created. Low skilled individuals may have participated in the creation but they were paid for their efforts based on the market value of the skills they brought to the job. The higher the skill the higher the recompense.

It seems to me that it is only those who are unwilling to develop marketable skills or put in the requisite effort who are drawn to the social justice sales pitch. The person who goes to school and earns a degree in Graphic Novel Literature or Women's Studies will be easy pickings for SJW recruitment as they have NO marketable skills or knowledge, yet they feel the system OWES them because they fell victim to some professors sales pitch to study this worthless field of endeavor. In reality, the professor just needs to bilk them into studying this field to justify to the administration that they are needed on staff to meet the need to teach this crap. Which, by the way, seems to me to be a tacit recognition of the value of meritocracy. The leftist professor sells his value to the administration by saying look at all the people who want what I'm providing.

Or so it would seem to an old farm boy.