Repeal Minimum Wage?

tony

Copying from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/libertarian/faq ....

What position do libertarians take on minimum wage laws?

Skilled, experienced workers make high wages because employers compete
to hire them. Poorly educated, inexperienced young people can't get
work because minimum wage laws make them too expensive to hire as
trainees. Repeal of the minimum wage would allow many young, minority
and poor people to work.

It must be asked, if the minimum wage is such a good idea, why not
raise it to $200 an hour? Even the most die-hard minimum wage advocate
can see there's something wrong with that proposal.

The only "fair" or "correct" wage is what an employer and employee
voluntarily agree upon. We should repeal minimum wage now. [3]

I have always been a big proponent of minimum wage. now, after reading this, I am really starting to think minimum wage is bad. what do others think?

MaxStirner

As a social libertarian I would of course agree that minimum wages have no place in a laisse faire economic system. Having said that, it is important to remember that such a repeal is not a stand-alone decision; if one wants to implement a truly free-market economy a la Murray Rothbard (Man, Economy and State) then there is a lot to be done and picking and choosing just a few items that seem opportune will not be helpful and might very well tip the scales even farther in the wrong direction.
Here in Germany, one of the last West-European nations that does not have a minimum wage, the battle is on and this will probably be a major item in the 2009 elections. At the moment all employees/workers who do not earn enough to reach a minimum income (a bit below 1.000€ net) are subsidized by the state. This has become rather expensive as wages have stagnated or even diminished while cost of living rises, so many politicians here argue that even a moderate rise in unemployment might be better that indirectly subsidizing companies in order to keep the jobs from moving to eastern Europe or Asia (although it is obvious that unskilled labor will move anyway since even subsidies cannot compete with low labor costs elsewhere.).
So my answer in an imperfect world would be: establish a minimum wage which allows the person an income one can exist on, rather than attempting to keep jobs in the country which will migrate east anyway. If nothing else, it would at least help prevent social unrest, something quite few people here see as almost unavoidable.

kerryworkman

MaxStirner

deStructuralized

All I have to say is that what Max has written here is one of the most detailed, well-reasoned, and balanced analyses of minimum wage as it relates to Libertarianism I've ever read.

I've found that members of my generation (Y) tend to lean Libertarian, and when you couple that with the human propensity to latch onto a buzz-phrase or ideology and take it to an extreme without truly understanding the factors at play, you get a lotttt of people saying to "just get rid of it, 100% of the time."

I'm not well read enough on this particular subject to speak any further on it, but, I tip my hat to you.

MaxStirner

(->deStructuralized)
Tyvm for your kind praise Embarassed

, I'm sure not to deserve it. Growing up in the 60ies, first reading Ayn Rand, later the rest of the libertarian / objectivist fiction and non.fiction, I was probably as radical and intransigent as all libertarians at that age tend to be. Perhaps it was age or the fact of spending most of my life in third world countries, that has led me to put more emphasis on the first word in "social libertarian".