The biggest flaw with the idea of national divorce is that red states are not ideologically monolithic.
And you think the blue states are?
I suppose if you're conservative, all the liberals look alike; over here on this side of the aisle, we have to really squint hard to discern differences among those sporting elephant pins. "No, we're different here in Inner Pennsyltucky! We only want to criminalize abortions after eleven weeks. Super-reasonable here compared to those six-weekers next door in Outer Pennsyltucky. Totally different ideologies at work here."
But it's human nature, I suppose, to see those with whom you mostly disagree in a more monolithic way than those with whom you mostly agree. Although the truth is I suspect we all really agree a lot more than we disagree -- we just spend a lot more energy thinking about those issues upon which we do disagree.
And I can be persuaded that most of those differences are driven by cultural identity rather than fundamental moral differences or even more powerful, economic imperatives. Still thinking about this one, but I want it to be true. And if it is, "national divorce" is not just a bad idea that will work out well for no one, it's insanity.
CalExit was a thing briefly in 2017, it is true. But while it snookered a lot of California liberals into exploring the idea, the political effort yo move the state in that direction "...was founded in 2015 by Louis J. Marinelli, a right-wing political activist, and its efforts have been supported by the Russian government."
National divorce is loser talk. It only comes out when Republicans lose elections. If Republicans win the presidency, talk of national divorce will disappear.
I can see "if I'd waited to ask for the merit wage until after the legal minimum took effect, I'd be making even more!" as a lost-opportunity sort of resentment, and then transferring that resentment from oneself to an externality (here, the government). That's pretty ordinary human behavior. Irrational, but contrary to humans as units within the world models of economists, we real-world humans are not always rational actors.
My phone chirped loudly at me at three o'clock this morning. This is unusual, and it had the added benefit of waking me up since I was sleeping poorly anyway as per usual. So I rolled my groggy-but-no-longer-asleep self out of bed to see what was so damn important. There was exactly one (1) notification for me:
President Biden announces bid for re-election.
Really? Really??? For this you wake me up at three in the damn morning? Is this supposed to some surprise me? It'd be news if he didn't do this. Ugh.
Took me twenty minutes to fall asleep again. Need to change the setting on this silly thing...
Upon further thought, I think there's more insight here than meets the eye. Other business inputs are sometimes significantly price-regulated (insurance) and sometimes not (rent or mortgages) but there's no input that's not at least nudged a little bit by the government. Rent, for instance, is purportedly determined by the market, but property taxes are a) based on a public officer's assessment of the market value of the property which is almost certainly inaccurate and then b) baked into the amount of money demanded by the landowner, if not passed through directly as in a triple-net lease.
But somehow the cost of labor raises ideological hackles. (All around, let's be fair.) When proposals to increase wages arise, we are inevitably confronted with the image of a close-to-the-bone mom-and-pop burgers-and-fries independent small business, and told that THIS increase in input costs will perversely enslave the proprietor to his workers, who will now be making less per hour than the teenagers he hired to flip the burgers, else he will simply close shop and all those jobs will vanish, crushed out of existence by the heavy, ill-advised hand of a stupidly oppressive government.
When it's insurance costs, we sort of shrug. I've had lots of clients (contractors, mostly) do and say a lot of things that exhibit irrational fear of rising insurance costs. They don't get it when others look at them strangely. These same class of people don't much worry about the cost of their labor -- they accept that if you want a carpenter or an electrician who knows what they're doing, you have to pay them a certain amount and they don't mind doing that at all. Perhaps that's because on a T&M contract it's easy to see how tonpay your worker and make a profit, but baking insurance premiums into that equation is hard so they skip that step? I don't pretend to know, that last sentence is speculation.
But there's something about labor costs and it isn't that labor costs are a large input that can easily affect the bottom line compared with other inputs like electricity or professional services. I think it may be that We Are All Marxists Now, at least insofar as we have all come to accept Marx's postulate that wages paid to workers by capitalists are the principal mechanism by which wealth is distributed to society, and ideology informs our varied visions of what that result ought to look like.
I get that you enjoy being a smarmy liberal shithead but you sell yourself as a smart guy, and I’m surprised to see a smart guy calling for concentration of capital even as a joke.
You can dodge bad news for conservatives by complaining about the sex habits of pandas.
You can make a mockery of the network by complaining about losing your sexual attraction to candy.
You can cultivate an online personality of white supremacism admixed with a blank, open-mouthed stare reminiscent of cattle watching trains pass in the night whenever someone says something you disagree with in the slightest.
You can foment an insurrection against the U.S. government, as long as the insurrection is in favor of the right person.
You can go on the air and knowingly lie about things. Big, important things. You can even knowingly lie about things that cost the company $787,000,000.
Similar things going on in the Willamette Valley, although the prices demanded are not quite so dramatic as I'd expect at, say, Opus One. A tasting flight here is still going to be $25 on average and you need a reservation. However, a decent number of wineries are on OpenTable.
What this does is take wine tasting as a weekend hobby off the table. In my 20's, I could drive up from L.A. to the Santa Ynez Valley or out to Temecula in about 90 minutes or so, spend a couple hours tasting, and credibly be home by bedtime, for pretty much the cost of gas and a decent dinner. Made for a great date, or if not a date, a fun thing to do with a friend. It was sort of democratized -- if you were interested in it, you could do it, and cost was not a significant barrier to learning how to taste and appreciate wine.
Assembling a decent library of wine was also not completely out of reach for the young or starter wine drinker, when a good bottle of something you liked could be bought direct from the winery's tasting room for a price point around $20. I can accept that the price point for that wine would rise over time to $30, just as at the low end, Two-Buck-Chuck became Three-Buck-Chuck because Two-Buck-Chuck was often good enough for people who didn't drink wine that often, but as I've written elsewhere today, inputs to production inevitably rise over time.
But the wine that twenty years ago cost $20 today costs $50, and that too puts it out of reach for the middle-class consumer as anything but an occasionally indulgence. And the experience of a pleasant day in the countryside with stops at two or three tasting rooms is now a downright elite experience.
Wine itself is more barricaded by money than it needed to be. It didn't have to be this way, but the industry's leaders chose this path. Presumably it maximizes their profits?
I'm seeing reports that it was (seriously) Tucker talking shit about upper management behind their backs, which was only revealed (or perhaps more accurately, "noticed") in Dominion's pretrial exhibits.
The only one who looks good out of all of this is Dylan Mulvaney. She just did what she does. (Before this whole "woke Bud" fracas, I had no earthly idea who Dylan Mulvaney was.)
I'm not rejoicing at this news. OANN is. They can probably afford Carlson, and Carlson would be fantastic for their market share. And they will do less than FOX News did to restrain Carlson's, shall we say, less savory impulses.
Who's taking over the prime time spot on FOX's evening parade of bloviation? Carlson's show was the #1 rated program on all of cable news. Right now it's just a rotating panel, but someone will come out on top. It's got to be either Hannity in that time slot again, or Laura effing Ingraham, right? It's not like someone's going to say, "Hey, how about we give that plum time slot to Jesse Watters!" And it's not going to become "Tyrus Time!" or "The Dooce! With Steve Doocy." It's going to be either Hannity or Ingraham.
And yeah, this is definitely not Dark Brandon playing fifth-dimensional chess. Groff's attorneys are from the First Liberty Institute, the Independence Law Center, and the Church State Council. You can look them up yourself, or you can take my word for it that these entities all self-identify as conservative Christian organizations.
And at the risk of being thought a snarky liberal, I'm pretty clear that when someone or something identifies as "conservative Christian," the first of those two adjectives is of eclipsingly greater importance.
Yup. In the case of the OP, we're asked to consider a fast food burgers-and-fries restaurant.
I wrote below that experience suggests that prices didn't rise when wages did, based largely on what I've seen from such businesses here in the Portland Metro area where minimum wages are all already at, or exceeding, the $15.00/hr level we're discussing here. Minimum wage in the Portland Metro is $14.75/hr, and most employers need to go above that to attract any workers at all, even at burgers-and-fries kinds of places. My own lived experience going to places like these is that one person's lunch still costs around $10-$12, which is what it cost before the pandemic and the following upward market pressure on wages.
But that was insufficiently accurate. It'd be more accurate to say, the way an economist would, that prices are less elastic than wages. There will be a point at which a proprietor is going to say "I can't take a profit margin this low anymore," and will bite the bullet and raise prices. And their competitors will all probably breathe a sigh of relief and follow suit fairly quickly, and I wouldn't even say that was collusion so much as the market at work.
But my question below remains, and is poignant in response to this exchange. Market conditions are in constant flux. Any business has a wide variety of inputs, whose prices change, and by "change" I mean "almost always rise." It's pretty rare when your insurance rates go down. Landlords are not known for reducing the rent. Utilities don't tend to decrease their rates. And the cost of labor doesn't become lower over time.
And I still don't know why I should behold a business whose owner failed to budget, plan, or price for these kinds of changes in input costs and feel more pity for it than I do for the workers at that and many other businesses who earn the minimum wage. Built into their earning minimum wage is that their employers would pay them less than the minimum if they could. Minimum wage nationally and in not quite half of states is $7.25 an hour, which for full-time work of 2,000 hours a week works out to just a smidge less than the Federal poverty level. ($14,500 < $14,580.)
So I'm sorry if I seem callous, but if an employer cannot afford to operate on terms other than paying his workers literal poverty wages, and raising the minimum wage will force that owner to lay people off, then inevitable increases in prices of all of the other inputs needed to make that business operable are going to do increase too, whether the government changes its policies or not. What we're talking about here is a business that is already teetering on the brink of failure.
Which is sad for those involved, but which is also part of how capitalism works. Adapt to changing conditions and survive; fail to adapt and get overtaken. That's no less true an observation than observing that death is part of how biology works.
The big deal, I think, is whether the cost of labor would be affected by a hike in the minimum wage. This doesn't just mean businesses that pay the minimum wage right now, of course: many businesses enter the market for labor at "minimum wage plus a dollar" or "115% of minimum wage" or something like that so they can attract enough labor to stay fully staffed. There are almost certainly other categories of employers who are affected by changes in the minimum wage even if they don't actually employ anyone at the minimum.
TL/DR:
1. To the capitalist, nothing has an inherent or objective monetary value. There is only the always-fluctuating price upon which a willing buyer and willing seller can agree.
2. To the capitalist, certain things are inputs. Labor is but one of many of these.
3. The capitalist ultimately does not care from whence an increase in the price of an input originates. She cares about the quantum of that increase.
4. If the capitalist runs her business such that she cannot withstand an increase in the price of an input (such as labor but not necessarily that) wouldn't we say that she has made a mistake and, thus unsympathetic, give a "that's-the-free-market-at-work" shrug at the closure of her business?
Is the OP congruent with the lived experience of job seekers and labor-seeking employers? I see "help wanted" signs all over town. Market forces seem to be pushing wages up. And both employers and employees are becoming more picky about one another, as evidenced by jncreasing turnover rates. The net advantage seems to still rest with those offering labor. Now, bear in mind that this state of affairs will necessatily change over time.
But at least for now, the best argument a conservative could make against raising minimum wages is "The government doesn't need to do thus, the market is doing it all on its own." After all, in a free capitalist system, there is no inherent value to labor or to any other market input of any sort. The OP, like the meme it criticizes, comes close to making the mistake of assuming inherent values to different kinds of labor, particularly that labor which previously was paid less than $15 an hour. The OP says such workers' jobs are at risk be abuse they do not add sufficient value to justify the higher wage, and consumers will reject the new, increased prices that necessarily result from increasing the price of this input (to wit, unskilled labor).
Recent economic experience suggests that both components of this proposition are not true. First, employer demand for labor does not seem to diminish as a direct result of statutory minimum wage increases. Employers need X amount of labor, at whatever price, to do anything at all. Employers already had substantial pressure to get the tasks done with as little labor as possible, and to pay those laborers as little as they could. But recent experience makes clear that whether it's the government or market forces pushing wages upwards, employers must, will, and do compete with compensation to attract at least the threshold-of-functionality level of labor, and figure out profit margins and prices to customers from there.
Recent experience also assures us that prices to customers do not necessarily rise in response to increased labor costs. Contrary to baleful predictions of $16.00 Big Macs, unionized fast food restaurants remain competitive with un-unionized counterparts the prices attached to their products, despite an increase in labor costs resulting from collective bargaining. If more money is going to labor, and presumably sales volume has not increased, where have receipts gone? Less to profits, of course.
This is the real question: is it still profitable to operate a business with increased labor costs? That's where the inquiry belongs. The OP gets to this point in its own way, although it's a lot more gloomy about this than I because it assumes that the business is already operating so close to the bone that the ownership is already earning "less than minimum wage" in profits, and thus any increase in any input cost would force layoffs, although for some reason (analytical convenience?) there seems to be an operational assumption that the only variable is cost of labor.
But if the status quo ante is that margins are already so thin they can't withstand an increase in labor costs, they also can't withstand an increase in COGS, or insurance, or rent, or any of the other inputs. And those are things that can, do, and currently are happening for reasons having nothing to do with statutory minimum wage increases.
Why ought we, as outside observers, think of such a business as anything other than a weak competitor, and why oughtn't we think of the failure of such a business as the ordinary, natural result of the market at work, weeding out inefficiency and inadaptability? Doesn't the vision of robust, unfettered capitalism tell us that this is, at the macro-level, a good thing producing, ultimately, a more robust and plentiful market?
As the reader considers this case, it may also be helpful to recall that there is precedent, dating back to 1977, addressing the degreetowhi h a business must accommodate individual employees' religious beliefs. Groff is almost exactly on point with Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, a case which dealt with a Seventh-Day Adventist (or similar) requesting Saturdays off his job as an aircraft mechanic. Hardison effectively set the bar for "undue burden" on the employer at de minimis. This creates a legal regime in which the federal statutory right against religious discrimination looks very weak on paper. (If you ignore another law called RFRA.)
In practice, as the OP points out,it can be somewhat different. It appears to me that Groff has already been given treatment which well exceeds what the law requires. I rather suspect it's because the people responding to his requests are sympathetic to him if not co-religionists who just weren't pushing their own rights as far as Groff.
Color this also with a lot of recent experience involving workers claiming religious exemptions to COVID vaccination mandates, and substantial sympathy for that position signaled in various ways from at least Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Were Barrett to join them, it'd be their shot to call, not the Chief's.
I would watch for a quiet modification to the de minimis standard of Hardison, one quiet enough that the majority opinion will call it a "clarification" or something similar. I think the majority will make the Title VII right to religious accommodation more robust. Likely not robust enough to help Mr. Groff, though.
If you were disappointed that Dominion settled with Fox and are looking for a law-geek-culture-and-politics fix, good news! The ACLU is defending Afroman. Once again, on the side of the righteous.
"Defund" is not the same word as "Abolish." There are people who advocate a position of "Abolish the Police." Feel free to criticize that policy if you want, but it's a different policy than what the "Defund" people were advocating.
Why did they use such a clumsy phrase if that wasn't what they meant? Because “Reallocate to Social Workers" is even worse.
On “What is a National Divorce?”
Hurrah! Congratulations!
"
And you think the blue states are?
I suppose if you're conservative, all the liberals look alike; over here on this side of the aisle, we have to really squint hard to discern differences among those sporting elephant pins. "No, we're different here in Inner Pennsyltucky! We only want to criminalize abortions after eleven weeks. Super-reasonable here compared to those six-weekers next door in Outer Pennsyltucky. Totally different ideologies at work here."
But it's human nature, I suppose, to see those with whom you mostly disagree in a more monolithic way than those with whom you mostly agree. Although the truth is I suspect we all really agree a lot more than we disagree -- we just spend a lot more energy thinking about those issues upon which we do disagree.
And I can be persuaded that most of those differences are driven by cultural identity rather than fundamental moral differences or even more powerful, economic imperatives. Still thinking about this one, but I want it to be true. And if it is, "national divorce" is not just a bad idea that will work out well for no one, it's insanity.
"
CalExit was a thing briefly in 2017, it is true. But while it snookered a lot of California liberals into exploring the idea, the political effort yo move the state in that direction "...was founded in 2015 by Louis J. Marinelli, a right-wing political activist, and its efforts have been supported by the Russian government."
"
Aaaaaaand SCENE!
On “Social Conservatives Understand Economics Poorly”
I can see "if I'd waited to ask for the merit wage until after the legal minimum took effect, I'd be making even more!" as a lost-opportunity sort of resentment, and then transferring that resentment from oneself to an externality (here, the government). That's pretty ordinary human behavior. Irrational, but contrary to humans as units within the world models of economists, we real-world humans are not always rational actors.
"
This notion of desert is surely part of what Chip meant by "ideology."
On “President Biden Announces 2024 Reelection Run, Pundits Hardest Hit”
Amen to that, sibling.
"
My phone chirped loudly at me at three o'clock this morning. This is unusual, and it had the added benefit of waking me up since I was sleeping poorly anyway as per usual. So I rolled my groggy-but-no-longer-asleep self out of bed to see what was so damn important. There was exactly one (1) notification for me:
Really? Really??? For this you wake me up at three in the damn morning? Is this supposed to some surprise me? It'd be news if he didn't do this. Ugh.
Took me twenty minutes to fall asleep again. Need to change the setting on this silly thing...
On “Social Conservatives Understand Economics Poorly”
Upon further thought, I think there's more insight here than meets the eye. Other business inputs are sometimes significantly price-regulated (insurance) and sometimes not (rent or mortgages) but there's no input that's not at least nudged a little bit by the government. Rent, for instance, is purportedly determined by the market, but property taxes are a) based on a public officer's assessment of the market value of the property which is almost certainly inaccurate and then b) baked into the amount of money demanded by the landowner, if not passed through directly as in a triple-net lease.
But somehow the cost of labor raises ideological hackles. (All around, let's be fair.) When proposals to increase wages arise, we are inevitably confronted with the image of a close-to-the-bone mom-and-pop burgers-and-fries independent small business, and told that THIS increase in input costs will perversely enslave the proprietor to his workers, who will now be making less per hour than the teenagers he hired to flip the burgers, else he will simply close shop and all those jobs will vanish, crushed out of existence by the heavy, ill-advised hand of a stupidly oppressive government.
When it's insurance costs, we sort of shrug. I've had lots of clients (contractors, mostly) do and say a lot of things that exhibit irrational fear of rising insurance costs. They don't get it when others look at them strangely. These same class of people don't much worry about the cost of their labor -- they accept that if you want a carpenter or an electrician who knows what they're doing, you have to pay them a certain amount and they don't mind doing that at all. Perhaps that's because on a T&M contract it's easy to see how tonpay your worker and make a profit, but baking insurance premiums into that equation is hard so they skip that step? I don't pretend to know, that last sentence is speculation.
But there's something about labor costs and it isn't that labor costs are a large input that can easily affect the bottom line compared with other inputs like electricity or professional services. I think it may be that We Are All Marxists Now, at least insofar as we have all come to accept Marx's postulate that wages paid to workers by capitalists are the principal mechanism by which wealth is distributed to society, and ideology informs our varied visions of what that result ought to look like.
"
And this is why I ignore you.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/24/2023”
You can dodge bad news for conservatives by complaining about the sex habits of pandas.
You can make a mockery of the network by complaining about losing your sexual attraction to candy.
You can cultivate an online personality of white supremacism admixed with a blank, open-mouthed stare reminiscent of cattle watching trains pass in the night whenever someone says something you disagree with in the slightest.
You can foment an insurrection against the U.S. government, as long as the insurrection is in favor of the right person.
You can go on the air and knowingly lie about things. Big, important things. You can even knowingly lie about things that cost the company $787,000,000.
Yes, you can do all of those things, as long as you bring in ratings numbers. But you'd better not talk shit about your boss buddy.
"
Not real fond of the idea myself, TBQH, but we have to live in reality.
"
Similar things going on in the Willamette Valley, although the prices demanded are not quite so dramatic as I'd expect at, say, Opus One. A tasting flight here is still going to be $25 on average and you need a reservation. However, a decent number of wineries are on OpenTable.
What this does is take wine tasting as a weekend hobby off the table. In my 20's, I could drive up from L.A. to the Santa Ynez Valley or out to Temecula in about 90 minutes or so, spend a couple hours tasting, and credibly be home by bedtime, for pretty much the cost of gas and a decent dinner. Made for a great date, or if not a date, a fun thing to do with a friend. It was sort of democratized -- if you were interested in it, you could do it, and cost was not a significant barrier to learning how to taste and appreciate wine.
Assembling a decent library of wine was also not completely out of reach for the young or starter wine drinker, when a good bottle of something you liked could be bought direct from the winery's tasting room for a price point around $20. I can accept that the price point for that wine would rise over time to $30, just as at the low end, Two-Buck-Chuck became Three-Buck-Chuck because Two-Buck-Chuck was often good enough for people who didn't drink wine that often, but as I've written elsewhere today, inputs to production inevitably rise over time.
But the wine that twenty years ago cost $20 today costs $50, and that too puts it out of reach for the middle-class consumer as anything but an occasionally indulgence. And the experience of a pleasant day in the countryside with stops at two or three tasting rooms is now a downright elite experience.
Wine itself is more barricaded by money than it needed to be. It didn't have to be this way, but the industry's leaders chose this path. Presumably it maximizes their profits?
"
I'm seeing reports that it was (seriously) Tucker talking shit about upper management behind their backs, which was only revealed (or perhaps more accurately, "noticed") in Dominion's pretrial exhibits.
"
The only one who looks good out of all of this is Dylan Mulvaney. She just did what she does. (Before this whole "woke Bud" fracas, I had no earthly idea who Dylan Mulvaney was.)
"
I'm not rejoicing at this news. OANN is. They can probably afford Carlson, and Carlson would be fantastic for their market share. And they will do less than FOX News did to restrain Carlson's, shall we say, less savory impulses.
Who's taking over the prime time spot on FOX's evening parade of bloviation? Carlson's show was the #1 rated program on all of cable news. Right now it's just a rotating panel, but someone will come out on top. It's got to be either Hannity in that time slot again, or Laura effing Ingraham, right? It's not like someone's going to say, "Hey, how about we give that plum time slot to Jesse Watters!" And it's not going to become "Tyrus Time!" or "The Dooce! With Steve Doocy." It's going to be either Hannity or Ingraham.
On “Religious Liberty Returns to the Supreme Court”
People who self-identify as Christian still constitute >70% of the country. Some of these good people are quite willing to accept that the other 30% get a seat at the table of governance too. Others not so much.
And yeah, this is definitely not Dark Brandon playing fifth-dimensional chess. Groff's attorneys are from the First Liberty Institute, the Independence Law Center, and the Church State Council. You can look them up yourself, or you can take my word for it that these entities all self-identify as conservative Christian organizations.
And at the risk of being thought a snarky liberal, I'm pretty clear that when someone or something identifies as "conservative Christian," the first of those two adjectives is of eclipsingly greater importance.
On “Social Conservatives Understand Economics Poorly”
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What stops these "overlords" from automating their labor costs down as close to zero as they can from doing so right now?
"
Yup. In the case of the OP, we're asked to consider a fast food burgers-and-fries restaurant.
I wrote below that experience suggests that prices didn't rise when wages did, based largely on what I've seen from such businesses here in the Portland Metro area where minimum wages are all already at, or exceeding, the $15.00/hr level we're discussing here. Minimum wage in the Portland Metro is $14.75/hr, and most employers need to go above that to attract any workers at all, even at burgers-and-fries kinds of places. My own lived experience going to places like these is that one person's lunch still costs around $10-$12, which is what it cost before the pandemic and the following upward market pressure on wages.
But that was insufficiently accurate. It'd be more accurate to say, the way an economist would, that prices are less elastic than wages. There will be a point at which a proprietor is going to say "I can't take a profit margin this low anymore," and will bite the bullet and raise prices. And their competitors will all probably breathe a sigh of relief and follow suit fairly quickly, and I wouldn't even say that was collusion so much as the market at work.
But my question below remains, and is poignant in response to this exchange. Market conditions are in constant flux. Any business has a wide variety of inputs, whose prices change, and by "change" I mean "almost always rise." It's pretty rare when your insurance rates go down. Landlords are not known for reducing the rent. Utilities don't tend to decrease their rates. And the cost of labor doesn't become lower over time.
And I still don't know why I should behold a business whose owner failed to budget, plan, or price for these kinds of changes in input costs and feel more pity for it than I do for the workers at that and many other businesses who earn the minimum wage. Built into their earning minimum wage is that their employers would pay them less than the minimum if they could. Minimum wage nationally and in not quite half of states is $7.25 an hour, which for full-time work of 2,000 hours a week works out to just a smidge less than the Federal poverty level. ($14,500 < $14,580.) So I'm sorry if I seem callous, but if an employer cannot afford to operate on terms other than paying his workers literal poverty wages, and raising the minimum wage will force that owner to lay people off, then inevitable increases in prices of all of the other inputs needed to make that business operable are going to do increase too, whether the government changes its policies or not. What we're talking about here is a business that is already teetering on the brink of failure. Which is sad for those involved, but which is also part of how capitalism works. Adapt to changing conditions and survive; fail to adapt and get overtaken. That's no less true an observation than observing that death is part of how biology works.
"
The big deal, I think, is whether the cost of labor would be affected by a hike in the minimum wage. This doesn't just mean businesses that pay the minimum wage right now, of course: many businesses enter the market for labor at "minimum wage plus a dollar" or "115% of minimum wage" or something like that so they can attract enough labor to stay fully staffed. There are almost certainly other categories of employers who are affected by changes in the minimum wage even if they don't actually employ anyone at the minimum.
"
TL/DR:
1. To the capitalist, nothing has an inherent or objective monetary value. There is only the always-fluctuating price upon which a willing buyer and willing seller can agree.
2. To the capitalist, certain things are inputs. Labor is but one of many of these.
3. The capitalist ultimately does not care from whence an increase in the price of an input originates. She cares about the quantum of that increase.
4. If the capitalist runs her business such that she cannot withstand an increase in the price of an input (such as labor but not necessarily that) wouldn't we say that she has made a mistake and, thus unsympathetic, give a "that's-the-free-market-at-work" shrug at the closure of her business?
"
Is the OP congruent with the lived experience of job seekers and labor-seeking employers? I see "help wanted" signs all over town. Market forces seem to be pushing wages up. And both employers and employees are becoming more picky about one another, as evidenced by jncreasing turnover rates. The net advantage seems to still rest with those offering labor. Now, bear in mind that this state of affairs will necessatily change over time.
But at least for now, the best argument a conservative could make against raising minimum wages is "The government doesn't need to do thus, the market is doing it all on its own." After all, in a free capitalist system, there is no inherent value to labor or to any other market input of any sort. The OP, like the meme it criticizes, comes close to making the mistake of assuming inherent values to different kinds of labor, particularly that labor which previously was paid less than $15 an hour. The OP says such workers' jobs are at risk be abuse they do not add sufficient value to justify the higher wage, and consumers will reject the new, increased prices that necessarily result from increasing the price of this input (to wit, unskilled labor).
Recent economic experience suggests that both components of this proposition are not true. First, employer demand for labor does not seem to diminish as a direct result of statutory minimum wage increases. Employers need X amount of labor, at whatever price, to do anything at all. Employers already had substantial pressure to get the tasks done with as little labor as possible, and to pay those laborers as little as they could. But recent experience makes clear that whether it's the government or market forces pushing wages upwards, employers must, will, and do compete with compensation to attract at least the threshold-of-functionality level of labor, and figure out profit margins and prices to customers from there.
Recent experience also assures us that prices to customers do not necessarily rise in response to increased labor costs. Contrary to baleful predictions of $16.00 Big Macs, unionized fast food restaurants remain competitive with un-unionized counterparts the prices attached to their products, despite an increase in labor costs resulting from collective bargaining. If more money is going to labor, and presumably sales volume has not increased, where have receipts gone? Less to profits, of course.
This is the real question: is it still profitable to operate a business with increased labor costs? That's where the inquiry belongs. The OP gets to this point in its own way, although it's a lot more gloomy about this than I because it assumes that the business is already operating so close to the bone that the ownership is already earning "less than minimum wage" in profits, and thus any increase in any input cost would force layoffs, although for some reason (analytical convenience?) there seems to be an operational assumption that the only variable is cost of labor.
But if the status quo ante is that margins are already so thin they can't withstand an increase in labor costs, they also can't withstand an increase in COGS, or insurance, or rent, or any of the other inputs. And those are things that can, do, and currently are happening for reasons having nothing to do with statutory minimum wage increases.
Why ought we, as outside observers, think of such a business as anything other than a weak competitor, and why oughtn't we think of the failure of such a business as the ordinary, natural result of the market at work, weeding out inefficiency and inadaptability? Doesn't the vision of robust, unfettered capitalism tell us that this is, at the macro-level, a good thing producing, ultimately, a more robust and plentiful market?
On “Religious Liberty Returns to the Supreme Court”
As the reader considers this case, it may also be helpful to recall that there is precedent, dating back to 1977, addressing the degreetowhi h a business must accommodate individual employees' religious beliefs. Groff is almost exactly on point with Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, a case which dealt with a Seventh-Day Adventist (or similar) requesting Saturdays off his job as an aircraft mechanic. Hardison effectively set the bar for "undue burden" on the employer at de minimis. This creates a legal regime in which the federal statutory right against religious discrimination looks very weak on paper. (If you ignore another law called RFRA.)
In practice, as the OP points out,it can be somewhat different. It appears to me that Groff has already been given treatment which well exceeds what the law requires. I rather suspect it's because the people responding to his requests are sympathetic to him if not co-religionists who just weren't pushing their own rights as far as Groff.
Color this also with a lot of recent experience involving workers claiming religious exemptions to COVID vaccination mandates, and substantial sympathy for that position signaled in various ways from at least Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Were Barrett to join them, it'd be their shot to call, not the Chief's.
I would watch for a quiet modification to the de minimis standard of Hardison, one quiet enough that the majority opinion will call it a "clarification" or something similar. I think the majority will make the Title VII right to religious accommodation more robust. Likely not robust enough to help Mr. Groff, though.
Key votes: Gorsuch and Barrett.
On “TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023”
If you were disappointed that Dominion settled with Fox and are looking for a law-geek-culture-and-politics fix, good news! The ACLU is defending Afroman. Once again, on the side of the righteous.
On “The Problem With Constitutional Carry”
"Defund" is not the same word as "Abolish." There are people who advocate a position of "Abolish the Police." Feel free to criticize that policy if you want, but it's a different policy than what the "Defund" people were advocating.
Why did they use such a clumsy phrase if that wasn't what they meant? Because “Reallocate to Social Workers" is even worse.