Except for just a few things: 1. They're only looking at one industry. It may just happen that the jobs in that industry are worth more than the minimum wage. 2. They don't take into account inflation. 3.
This is much more complete.
Wikipedia doesn't seem an especially supportive source for you to cite, considering this section:
Several researchers have conducted statistical meta-analyses of the employment effects of the minimum wage. Card and Krueger analyzed 14 earlier time-series studies and concluded that there was clear evidence of publication bias because the later studies, which had more data and lower standard errors, did not show the expected increase in t-statistic (almost all the studies had a t of about two, just above the level of statistical significance at the .05 level).[56] Though a serious methodological indictment, opponents of the minimum wage virtually ignored this issue; as Thomas C. Leonard noted, "The silence is fairly deafening."[57] More recently, T.D. Stanley has criticized their methodology, suggesting that their results could signify either publication bias or the absence of an effect. Using a different methodology, however, he concludes that there is statistically significant evidence of publication bias and that correction of this bias shows no relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment.[58] In 2008, Hristos Doucouliagos and T.D. Stanley conduct a similar meta-analysis of 64 U.S. studies on disemployment effects and concluded that Card and Krueger's initial claim of publication bias is still correct. Moreover, they concluded, "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains."
Aside from that, what you don't seem to understand is that
even if the research that indicates that higher minimum wages cause a greater degree of unemployment in some contexts is sound, that would not invalidate my arguments that there are oligopsonistic conditions in labor markets that could cause the minimum wage to have no effect on employment whatsoever or to cause an increase in employment. The very nature of such deficiencies as monopsony power renders labor markets heterogenous in nature. However, there is no satisfactory explanation for increases in employment in correlation with increases in the minimum wage that can be derived from the textbook model of the labor market.
Quit trying to prove your points via verbosity. You're basically trying to say that there is no competition in the markets which is complete nonsense.
I’d never claim that there was
no competition. I'm merely saying that monopsonistic and oligopsonistic conditions exist in labor markets in that firms are faced not by infinitely elastic labor supply curves but by upward sloping labor supply curves. If they were faced by infinite elasticity, then the entire workforce would quit when wages were reduced by a cent, which is clearly nonsensical. I certainly belief that market competition in the capitalist economy is far more restricted than it would be in the socialist economy due to factors of concentration, but that isn't pertinent to my point about monopsony power.
Capitalism has never truly existed, but we were close before anti-trust laws came about.
Then you'll agree that the rightists who usually attribute the economic success of the West to capitalism and free market principles are incorrect? Personally, it seems to me absurd to claim that capitalism "has never truly existed," given that that claim is necessarily dependent upon a "pure" conception of capitalism that doesn't exist outside of the economic spectrum of the textbook, and practical reality necessitates consideration of actual conditions and the applicability of appropriate labels to those actual conditions. And I'd say that an economy that involves the private ownership of the means of production, the usage of markets as the primary means of resource allocation, and the institution of wage labor is capitalist in nature.
I do. But if you hadn’t posted the Murray Rothbard link, I wouldn’t have had to. :shrug:
And the boss of the person who is doing the interviewing would fire him for doing a bad job. The analogy does not work.
Actually, it serves its purpose, and the response you offer is desperately utopian and assumes perfect information and monitoring in the capitalist firm, conditions that do not exist outside of the textbook.
Firstly, we have to focus on the inadvertent consequences of market concentration, in that the existence of more established orthodox capitalist firms, along with their access to an exceedingly greater amount of capital and resources, plays a role in preventing the development of firms with more productive organizational methods (i.e. worker-owned enterprises and labor cooperatives), regardless of the ability of the latter to utilize their own resources more efficiently (and effectively), than the orthodox capitalist firm. The role of inequivalent access to productive resources and financial capital prevents the worker-owned enterprises from engaging in fair competition with capitalist firms. As noted by socialist economist Jaroslav Vanek in an interview:
If you go to a bank and ask for a loan to start a co-op, they will throw you out. Co-ops in the West are a bit like sea water fish in a freshwater pond. The capitalist world in the last 200 years has evolved its own institutions, instruments, political frameworks etc. There is no guarantee that another species could function if it had to depend on the same institutions. In capitalism, the power is embedded in the shares of common stock, a voting share. This has no meaning in economic democracy. Economic democracy needs its own institutions for one simple reason. Workers are not rich. Let's face it, most working people in the world today are either poor or unemployed. They do not have the necessary capital to finance democratic enterprises.
Beyond the stage of the new entries into the labor market simply being naturally overwhelmed is the stage of established firms engaging in unfair business practices such as underselling, which constitutes an exploitation of inequitable and unbalanced conditions of entry that any libertarian should oppose. For instance, this letter of John Stuart Mill makes the point well:
Sir, I beg to enclose a subscription of [10 pounds] to aid, as far as such a sum can do it, in the struggle which the Co-operative Plate-Lock Makers of Wolverhampton are maintaining against unfair competition on the part of the masters in the trade. Against fair competition I have no desire to shield them. Co-operative production carried on by persons whose hearts are in the cause, and who are capable of the energy and self-denial always necessary in its early stages, ought to be able to hold its ground against private establishments and persons who have not those qualities had better not attempt it.
But to carry on business at a loss in order to ruin competitors is not fair competition. In such a contest, if prolonged, the competitors who have the smallest means, though they may have every other element of success, must necessarily be crushed through no fault of their own. Having the strongest sympathy with your vigorous attempt to make head against what in such a case may justly be called the tyranny of capital, I beg you to send me a dozen copies of your printed appeal, to assist me in making the case known to such persons as it may interest in your favour.
Even more than that, any consistent proponent of legitimately competitive market exchange should oppose the conditions of the capitalist economy. As noted by Vanek,
"[t]he capitalist economy is not a true market economy because in western capitalism, as in Soviet state capitalism, there is a tendency towards monopoly. Economic democracy tends toward a competitive market." Since market socialism, for example, is characterized by small, worker-owned and managed enterprises and labor cooperatives, effective market competition can be coordinated while granting effective equality of opportunity to participants.
So we're confronted with the "sea water fish in the freshwater pond" problem noted by Vanek in that varieties of negative discrimination may occur as a result of the aforementioned market concentration. We've noted that the competitors of the cooperative may well engage in underselling, as evidenced by no less a libertarian figure than John Stuart Mill. And we'd have to note the existence of negative externalities generated by surrounding capitalist firms, and a variety of other negative conditions that are generally traced back to the fundamental reality that
it is not in the interests of the financial and coordinator classes for workers' ownership and management to succeed. We can thus directly observe the profit motives of the financial and coordinator classes a whole causing them to resist the implementation of more productive organization schemes, since it would render them marginal or utterly useless, a reality well summarized by Herbert Gintis:
[G]iven that profits depend on the integrity of the labor exchange, a strongly centralized structure of control not only serves the interests of the employer, but dictates a minute division of labor irrespective of considerations of productivity. For this reason, the evidence for the superior productivity of 'workers control' represents the most dramatic of anomalies to the neo-classical theory of the firm: worker control increases the effective amount of work elicited from each worker and improves the coordination of work activities, while increasing the solidarity and delegitimizing the hierarchical structure of ultimate authority at its root; hence it threatens to increase the power of workers in the struggle over the share of total value.
The fundamental conflict between profit and productivity maximization, and more broadly, between labor and capital, that is bound to exist and flourish in a capitalist economy is again revealed. David Schweickart has of course noted the uselessness of maintaining a financial class whose only purpose it is to hoard and lend capital, and he's also noted that
"[f]or middle managers, the incentive to resist participatory schemes is even greater, because such changes often show many middle managers to be redundant. The resistance of middle management to participatory experiments, often bordering on sabotage, is well known and widely documented." We thus observe the lengths to which both powerful classes are willing to go in order to maintain their hegemony.
