The Democrats have been increasingly eager to a push higher minimum wage on the economy. Inevitably, this is attractive to anyone unwilling or unable to see behind the facade best described as the subjective value of money. The truth of the matter can be summed up in the lesson a father in our homeschooling group recently gave to his 8-year-old and ten-year-old.
Some things have inherent value, he explains, and other things have trust value.
This is an unusual way to phrase it, but it’s simple and true. Things with inherent value are useful. A knife is inherently valuable for hunting, crafting, cooking, and defense. Clothing is inherently valuable for shelter from heat and cold, protection, and for carrying other things. Money, conversely, is a symbolic tool we use to represent equivalents of inherent value.
Services can be divided up in this way too. If someone sings a song to you, you may value the event quite highly. If someone sings to you poorly, the event may have no value. In order for someone to sing to you for money, we would have to agree and trust that his song is worth a given amount.
There is only one force on Earth that can rightly determine what a thing is worth in a monetary exchange – the free market. The market is trust in action on a large scale. Anytime we arbitrarily impose rates of trust value on a given product or service, we reduce the value of the currency. But why?
The reason money loses its value when manipulated is because it erodes trust. Money is trust, or at least represents it. When we violate the trust of those who use it, we reduce the trust value of the currency. But that is just the beginning of the problems we can expect if a $15 minimum wage is set into law.
The initial cost of the minimum wage hike will be the loss of the jobs now held by those receiving minimum wage. Employers hire the help that they can afford. When the minimum wage is effectively doubled, most low-wage earners will simply lose their jobs. They will be replaced with teller robots just as they have been in Wal-Mart, fast food restaurants, and in many supermarkets, among many other examples.
The number of people who are unable to find gainful employment will rise by at least 25%. For those employers who manage to keep some of their low-wage employees, those who remain employed will have to work twice as hard to keep their jobs. The cost of food, products, and services everywhere employers depend on low-skill labor will go up by at least 30%.
You may have noticed that the cost of food is already rising, as is the price of gas. This is because President Joe Biden is going back to war, and because employers already anticipate the rise of the minimum wage. They are simply trying to get ahead of the crunch.
This is what Democrats do. This is all they do.
