View original postWhen I was a teenager, I worked in a Burger King. The entire workforce was as white as the surrounding suburban area, and consisted of teenagers and college students. Almost none made fast food their career or had any intention of doing so.

View original postWhile I agree with the moral responsibility of an employer to pay employees a just and sufficient wage...children don't need living wages. Nor do students who are being otherwise subsidized. These people should not be undertaking extra responsibilities, or should get better jobs, if they want families and houses.

View original postA year or two after I left, my brother and foster sister started working at the same restaurant, and all their coworkers were Hispanic, which seems to be case now in almost all fast food restaurants in our area. I seem to have been at the tail end of something, where McDonalds and similar jobs were never intended to be careers or to provide a living for a family. While the employee demographics phased away from part-time workers, seeking supplementary income, to lower class workers, operating on a different scale, the point was not what the employees needed, but that it was a very simple, non-taxing job that almost everyone could be trained to do. I remember a commercial featuring a Downs Syndrome victim employed at McDonalds, which might have inspired that "Ding, fries are done" parody song in the 90s, that was supposed to impress people with McDonald's humanitarian ways, but in reality simply underscored the simplicity of the work.

View original postMcDonalds, and Walmart, don't pay their employees a lot, because they don't ask for a lot. The work is incredibly simple, requires zero skill, no technique, no experience and minimal training. The issue is not whether employees deserve a certain wage, the issue is whether or not a customer (which is what Burger King or Stop & Shop are in this case: customers buying labor) should be forced to pay higher prices for low quality goods. What if you went to the theater, or a sporting event or a concert, with tickets in the cheap seats, and upon trying to enter, were charged the price of a lower-level seat, on the assumption that you were somehow cheating the venue of its rightful remuneration, since you could still see and hear the performance? And then when you left rather than pay for something you didn't need or couldn't afford, venue employees came out to spit on you, shouting that you're taking food out of their kids' mouths? What if store owners came out to scream at you for not letting them make a living every time you turned away after seeing the prices in their windows, or brought in a coupon?

View original postWhat if the guy who delivered your pizza wanted to be paid $25 over and above the price of the food, for a ten minute trip? And when you told him you'd rather pick it up yourself, he pitched a fit and whined about his family, and talked about what a good driver he was, and all the effort he put into making sure your food got to your house as fast as humanly possible. You'd still tell him "Sorry buddy, but I'm just asking you to drive a pizza a mile or two. It is simply not a service I need at that cost." And then everyone went around calling you a greedy asshole and waving pictures of the delivery guy's children, blaming you for crushing their dreams and consigning them to welfare? That's the same thing as forcing employers to pay minimum wages.

View original postAnd sidebar analogy:

View original postWhat if 7-11 and Quick Chek and Wawa and the supermarkets all got together and formed a Milk Seller's Union and said they were not going to sell a gallon of milk for less than $6? That would be called collusion, and they would be treated like terrorists. Especially if the stores' personnel harassed their customers, demonstrated outside their customers' homes, threatened any store who undersold their price, and went around screaming at them while they tried to conduct business? Because that is EXACTLY what a strike is. People selling labor form a cartel to set a higher price and agree not to undersell each other, and try to get their price met by harassing their customers and anyone who tries to provide the same commodity at a lower price.

View original postEvery transaction is made because the terms are agreeable to both parties. There is set of criteria which are acceptable to a buyer, and a set which are acceptable to a seller (primarily an amount of money within a certain range). When they overlap, we get a transaction. If the government steps in to demand that transactions meet their own standards, the transaction is much less likely to happen, because now it has to fall into the overlap of three sets of criteria. Transactions happen, because people want or need things. Transactions being retarded means their wants and needs are not getting met, and no one is happy, aside from the people who thought they know better than everyone else, and have the right to tell strangers how to conduct their business.

View original postYou can't put unnatural strictures on transactions, because they are just going to get done anyway, but in unforeseen and unpredictable ways, and the laws of economics are not arbitrary legislation, they are observed phenomena, like the law of gravity. Politicians and activists can insist on trying to throw as many things as they can into the air, but everything has to come down eventually, and demanding that businesses and customers learn to juggle halfway through the process isn't a viable way to prevent the ensuing crashes. Demanding that every employment transaction meet an absurd standard, when the services rendered are not commensurate with that standard, isn't viable either.