Minimum Wage Laws and Full Service Stations

Does anyone remember full service stations? A generation or two ago, you were able to drive your car or truck to the service station and when you pulled in, a kid would come out and pump your gas, wash your windows, and maybe even check the fluids and tire pressure. Usually, these were kids with little to no skills that employers valued, so they earned little more than the experience that comes from working, rather like an internship. Jeffrey Tucker even says that we should work for free to gain skills, and I'm inclined to see the reason in the argument. If they earned any wages, they were minimal, but the skills gained helped them gain value over time to employers. These jobs were stepping-stones that those without the means to gain an expensive education could use to work their way to better paying jobs.

Minimum wage laws drove up costs to station operators, and full service stations faded into history. Politicians sought votes, and they promised that those at the low end of the pay scale, even those without skills valued in the market, would be able to "earn" higher wages through these interventionist price controls. Kids without marketable skills took jobs like these and learned basic skills that they could carry into better jobs in the future. They earned very low wages because they offered little skill, and these wage laws have a disproportionate effect of increasing youth unemployment at an even greater rate (are these laws discriminatory?). Minimum wage laws price basic jobs like this out of the market, effectively prohibiting employment below a subjective wage rate, leading to higher unemployment. Minimum wage laws can set minimum wage rates, but have no ability to guarantee employment at a higher, more competitive level where fewer jobs exist.

Today, states like Oregon and New Jersey force gas stations to hire pump attendants, believing that this will lower the unemployment rate. All this does is to reduce the number of these jobs available, since higher input costs lower the opportunity for this type of work. . The more expensive employees become, the fewer of them that employers demand, instead demanding higher productivity out of a smaller workforce. Minimum wage laws, as Murray Rothbard noted, lead to compulsory unemployment.

Wage Controls and Unemployment

Walter Block on wage controls from The Case for Discrimination:

"Further, any proposal that artificially raises the salaries of a given calling beyond its productivity level threatens it with unemployment. But equal pay enactments are always couched in terms of raising female incomes, never reducing those of males."

What this means is that when wages for a given service are artificially raised, the demand required for that increased input factor are absent, and the resulting decline in demand due to higher market costs will lead to, among other things, increased unemployment.

It is at times depressing, that so many downtrodden, or simply naively optimistic, still believe that such intervention can have sustainable benefits. The reality is that rent seeking efforts tend to have short shelf lives.

Political Ignorance

Politicians think we're idiots. There's not much more to it.

We know how to regulate ourselves for the most part, and we should never discourage that ability as our posterity relies on our ability to persevere through tomorrow. Public officials, government representatives. They say we need them. They say things are better with a ruling class, an oligarchy. Some of the sheeple believe this, thoroughly indoctrinated (cognitively intoxicated on the propaganda).

They think we need them, need to obey them. They make laws, tell us laws keep us from doing bad things. They start telling us everything is bad, that they must help us by regulating everything we do, for our own good, of course. Nevermind that government does not exist. These people have never shared a bed with reason.

If I spend too much relative to what I make, I know eventually it will catch up with me. Never fails. It is self-inflicted. When government does it, how is it any better? Collective ignorance is no less connected to individual ignorance. When government spending outstrips its revenues, coupled with a dollar near the end of it's inflated half-life,  leaves us watching and thinking why it hasn't collapsed already?