Interesting Links for 21-06-2013

[andrewducker]

• Offensive, iconoclastic internet trolls will NOT be prosecuted, says DPP
  (tags: freespeech law uk epicwin )
• The Gov.uk website's design principles
  (tags: uk web government design )
• Naked rambler Stephen Gough jailed for flouting Asbo
  (tags: law uk nudity )
• Violent men won't change until they accept they are the problem
  (tags: violence )
• On “Geek”

Comments

Minimum wage

[gwendally]

Services are not necessarily worth $45/hour to the purchaser.

What the employee gets is roughly 1/3 of what the customer gets charged. The other 2/3 go to cover the overhead (facilities, tool) and management costs for indirect billers.

I am struggling with this now. I have a bookkeeper that I want to keep year 'round, and she currently makes 13.50 an hour. I would like to give her a raise. But I am getting pushback from clients - they just decide to do the service themselves when I charge $45 an hour.

The same thing happened with my yard service. They are really good citizens and pay their workers on the table a living wage. But they charge $600 to trim my extensive hedges. I would prefer to have ugly hedges for this amount of money. (I would prefer to have them do it for, say, $300, though.)

Re: Minimum wage

[andrewducker]

I'm actually in agreement there.

Which is why my ideal welfare system is a Citizen's Income. You hand everyone £x, where x is enough to not starve to death/be homeless. And then you tax everyone on everything they make after that. Which means that people can work for peanuts if it's worth it for them to do so, we get rid of a big tranche of bureaucracy, and it disturbs the Natural Economic Order the smallest amount possible.

Re: Minimum wage

[gwendally]

I've really thought a lot about this concept and it's worth its own post. In fact, I've blogged about it a few times now. I agree that it's where we're headed, but there are some pretty significant problems when you give people a low basic guaranteed income. I won't bother you with this in your blog, but I may go blog more about it myself. (Or you could follow my "economics" tags to see where I've talked about it before. They'll be under flock.)

Re: Minimum wage

[del_c]

I don't think you're identifying a problem with the Bloomberg article, so much as restating it in other terms. The situation you describe, with customers cancelling their order if you pay your workers, is how the death spiral they're describing happens.

If paying more is bad, paying less should be good, but it's a race to the bottom. Eventually you're sitting there wondering why no-one is ordering, when it's because they're not paid enough to be able to afford it. (pitching your service to a privileged minority class doesn't fix the problem; it's turtles all the way down)

You can see the death spiral happen in real time, it's called a recession. You can also see people thinking you can fix the recession if you give the oiks less money, it's called austerity.

Re: Minimum wage

[gwendally]

At issue is how much each individual purchaser values the services. You can't declare that someone values nice hedges $600 worth. If that's the price and they don't wish to pay it, they will go without nice hedges.

You can't DECLARE that people must hire someone to trim their hedges or do bookkkeeping duties. They will if they find the price palatable. If they don't, they simply won't engage to purchase the service.

You can DECLARE that every Starbucks Barista will make $30,000, but just see how business falls off when coffee costs $8 a cup.

Re: Minimum wage

[del_c]

Yes, you can, it's called socialism, and it's the only reason capitalism has survived its own suicidal tendencies so long. Thousands of years ago, kings regularly declared that nobody owed their debts anymore; they had to, because debt was destroying the system.

I'm re-reading Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about urban sewage collection and the London cholera of the 1840s, and the system they had for collecting dog shit off the streets was to pay children to pick it up with their fingers and deliver it to tanners for cleaning leather. But the tanners didn't pay much, because who wants dog shit that badly? You cannae change the laws of economics

[gwendally]

Ah, now you are bringing another issue into the mix. Socialism certainly is a creditable answer to the tragedy of the commons, or any service, really, where my lack of valuing it sufficiently causes my neighbor to die. Compelling me to pay for a water sewer treatment plant is morally appropriate

[del_c]

No, I'm not bringing another issue into the mix, I'm still on the same issue: capitalism spirals into depression and poverty on its own, it straightens out and flies right when you add socialism. That's the capitalist case for socialism. I understand you might want to change the subject and talk about how taxes are immoral instead.

[gwendally]

Also, it most certainly is NOT rich people paying for the sewage treatment plant. Perhaps that was how it was originally spun, but it is every homeowner paying it, and they factor it into the rent they require to make it worth (extensive) bother of owning residential rental units instead of bonds. In my city the average senior citizen lives in a paid for home on $14000 year income. From this income they must pay the municipal real property tax bill - it is based on the assessed value of the residence, not their income. When the good people of the town get together and declare that our civilized duty is to provide X service, you have to be completely aware that you are compelling poor people to pay for increased taxes.

Taxes are compulsion. Try really hard to weigh that in the moral balance.