People are NOT commodities that can be parked in a warehouse nor idled like a piece of machinery when the market lags in demand. People are a constant and changes in the "production" of people take decades, not months.
:lol: I like how you answer with moral outrage, but fail to answer the point. Labor
does exist on a Supply/Demand curve and policies that
ignore that truth
will fail and the result will be harm to workers.
But hey, feel free to come explain your position on the thread devoted to just this exact topic. You will note that so far the vote is 26-1
against your position.
It's called Public Assistance (aka Welfare) when it continues past 6 months - or when the Republicans can be pushed into accepting a longer time-frame.
:shrug: you can call it whatever you like, the fact remains that we
do shift labor around between multiple uses, and occasionally it isn't employed.
Then we as a people are destined to paying welfare for the long-term unemployed OR shipping people out of the country OR letting them die in the streets.
On the contrary, we don't need to do any of these things, nor are they doomed. Labor is wonderful because we as people are not insects - we can learn new trades, do new things. Entire industries can get thrown out of work through advancement in the economy and be reabsorbed so long as we don't muck up the process of that reallocation through misguided efforts built on silly notions like "labor is not effected by supply and demand". The Horse and Buggy industry was pretty much
destroyed by the automobile, and yet we didn't see a generation of unemployed leatherworkers, farriers, and carriage-builders; they went to work elsewhere, doing other things.
Of course, "the People", at least the majority of them, have absolutely no control over the labor market so - as usual
On the contrary, the majority of the people
is what controls the market. Which, after all, is really just a handy term for "the aggregate economic decisions of all people".
We as a People are subject to the whims of business.
How silly. No we aren't. Firstly, there is no such thing as a single entity known as "business". There are individual
businesses, who compete among each other over
people. Secondly, people are not tied by law to the particular businesses at which they work or from whom they purchase. If McDonalds decides to change the recipe in the Secret Sauce, I am free to start going to Burger King. If my employer does not pay me what my labor is worth, then I am free to go work for a competitor. Businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out what
we want because they are subject to
our whims (if they want to survive), not the other way 'round.
A) Only from a business perspective does labor obey supply/demand. From a societal standpoint it can't - unless you're willing to let people die from poverty.
On the contrary, as discussed, people are not cogs that can only fit at certain points in certain machines.
B) Workers almost always have the option to seek better compensation, the question is How many workers will actually get better compensation?
Well, I, for example, will probably be doubling my pay in the next year and a half, because I will be leaving one employer to work for another. From there I expect to leave
that employer for a later increase in compensation, and so on and so forth. How many workers? Most of them. In fact, the vast majority of them.
We tend to only spend about 3-4 years at a job, and
the older you get, the more money you tend to make. Ergo, when we change jobs, we are usually changing it for higher pay.
Heck
fully 33% of US Workers plan to change jobs THIS YEAR, with increasing compensation driving
three fourths of that change.
People can't live on $3/hr. regardless of how much you or the business community would like them to.
Really? Which is better for them - $3 an hour, or $0 an hour? Because when you put an artificial price floor on labor, you are
creating unemployment. Which, after all, was the
point of minimum wage laws in the first place.
When the $$$/hr of labor falls below a certain point society, not business, starts paying to keep those people idled or underpaid - again, unless you're willing to let people die from poverty.
I would agree that our society starts subsidizing people when their income falls below certain levels. But we already do this for the low income - there is no reason why we would not do so for the
lower income. Indeed, since we will be moving those people from
zero income to
low income, this would
reduce the cost to the state, as they would require less subsidy.
The race to the bottom has already happened with the Crash of 2008. PhD's now working as hotel clerks, hotel clerks now working as janitors, and janitors now living off the tax-payers
We certainly have alot of misallocation of human capital. That's not a little bit thanks to our "everyone needs to go to college!" mantra that we shove down the throats of high school students. The world does not need that many professional interpreters of Chaucer.
And they never hit bottom because of "government interference", as you call it.
Well, no. We bottomed out. We simply haven't
recovered terribly well thanks to government interference.
Just like the last time we tried that.
Since there is simply no consumer demand to drive the economy (except it's slow acceleration after slamming on the brakes of a freight train!) it wouldn't matter if people were getting paid $3/hr - there still wouldn't be any jobs. Not only that, the people that had those $3/hr jobs wouldn't be buying anything but bad food and more cardboard for their "house".
On the contrary, since labor is effected by supply and demand, at lower prices, there is greater demand. Nor, (as you point out above) would those people who made lower wages be homeless and starving - they would either be subsidized or (more likely) be part of a household.
The Bottom Line of this discussion is simple - idle workers still need money to live.
And furthermore, they need
more money to help increase their standard of living. That is why economic growth and policies designed to have the most efficient labor market possible are so vital. Labor laws which artificially jack up the price of labor don't hurt the rich that much - the rich can adjust. It hurts
labor, which is priced out of the market.