| You can't call someone out for not looking at the big picture, and only look at the "slightly bigger picture" yourself. You can come up with a counterargument to almost anything that way; it doesn't mean it's a good one.
You say "a race to the bottom on wages", which implies an existing condition of overpayment that's about to go away. This doesn't usually happen but I can think of two cases where it would. One is the theoretical case of the abolition of minimum wages; the other is the very real historical cases of industrialization and automation. And in those cases, you'll find consistently that, yes, some unfortunate people lose their jobs or suffer great pay cuts, and some of them may not have the ability to recover. This is sad, but it's also why we have social structures like friends, family, and charities. Meanwhile, the average person becomes richer (sometimes very much so) as a result of the new efficiencies.
As far as I can see, removing a price control on labor would have a similar -- but much less powerful -- effect. Some people would suffer for it, but many would gain -- sometimes in unexpected places as every part of industry could find itself with more money to spend if it depends on "minimum wage services". Wages will always be at a point where someone thinks that it's worth the money to do the job acceptably -- or they wouldn't, and the wages would have to go up or else that job position simply disappear. And the "barrier to entry" argument doesn't fly so well; jobs requiring time-consuming or expensive training not provided by the employer invariably pay more than minimum wage anyway.
And then there's the simple fact that a company that's able to will find it in its interest to pay its employees well enough to make them reasonably happy...
And if you didn't guess from the first paragraph, and didn't grow suspicious by the third, why yes, it was Hazlitt who taught me to look for the real big picture... |
