The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls

What is a job?
A job is a contract between two parties, in which one party agrees to provide certain services on a certain schedule in exchange for payment from the other party. By definition, an employee agrees to do job for a particular wage by his own voluntary consent. This is opposed to slavery, in which a slave is forced to work without his consent or compensation.

What determines wages? Can employers pay workers whatever they want?

A wage is the price an employer pays for the services his employee. While the two may negotiate any wage they come to mutual agreement on, the mutual self-interest of both and market forces intersect at a market-set price that represents the intersection of their interests. Disregarding non-economic factors, an employer wishes to pay his employee as little as possible. The maximum amount he will pay however is the value of the marginal productivity a given worker provides. (The marginal productivity is the value per unit of time the worker provides to the employer.) If the worker refuses to work at or below his marginal productivity, then the employer will not hire him, since doing so will incur a loss. Conversely, disregarding non-economic factors, the employee wishes to be paid an infinite amount. The minimum wage he will actually accept is the marginal value of his labor. This can be measured in terms of the next-most useful value-producing activity the workers may engage in.

For example, suppose that my marginal productivity as a programmer is $30 per hour. I will accept any job paying above $30 an hour, but no job below it, since I can find an employer paying that much in another computer or tech-related industry. A fast-food worker might have a marginal productivity of say, $6 an hour – the value per hour that his labor creates for the business. From the employer’s perspective, I create $40/hour of value, and the fast food workers creates $7 of value, so he will be willing to hire us. (Assuming that no one is willing to provide the same value for a lower wage.) However, if I only provide $20 of value, the employer will not hire me, because he would incur an hourly loss of $10 in doing so. Similarly, if the fast food worker only provides $5 of value, he would not be hired either because he would cause a loss of $1 for each hour he works.

Can the government increase wages when employers don’t pay enough?

Suppose that the government imposed a minimum wage of $8. Would the fast food worker who provides a value of $7 per hour now be paid $8? No, he would lose his job – because keeping him would mean a $1 loss for each hour he works to his employer. All minimum wage laws have a similar effect – they cause everyone with a marginal productivity below the minimum wage to lose their jobs – most often teenagers and the very poor. Wage caps (including progressive income taxes) have a similar effect – they lead the most productive individuals of our society to retire early or forgo new opportunities — resulting in a lost opportunity for them, and for everyone who might have benefited from their ideas.

What if the government creates a job by paying an unemployed worker to do make-work such as digging holes in the ground?

Where would the money to pay for his wage come from? It would have to be taken by force from the remaining employed fast food workers and computer programmers. Everyone will be paid less to pay for the government workers, but has a job been created? No – now the fast-food employer has $1 less to pay to his other $8 employees, so he must fire some of them or go out of business. Each new $7 government worker costs at least one $7 privately employed worker. This is always a social loss because by definition, the government worker is less productive. If he were not, then the private business would voluntarily employ workers to perform his job.  While a minimum wage causes everyone who produces less than the marginal productivity of the minimum to lose his job, each new government job causes at least one more productive worker to lose his job.

If the government cannot raise wages, can it lower prices?

Prices are determined by the marginal value of a given good, just as a wage is determined by the marginal productivity of an employee. Attempts to regulate the cost of goods have the same effect as wage controls: if the price is set below the cost of a good, producers will be unable to make any.   Since different producers have different costs, lowering the prices of a good will decrease the percentage of producers able to supply them, until they can make none at all.

So how can prices be lowered?

The only way for prices to go down is to increase the productivity of workers.  Productivity in the production of a good comes from the application of mental effort to the production of values. A profit (the difference between the value of a good to a consumer and the cost to produce it) is the reward of an entrepreneur for bringing about the new wealth he’s created. In the absence of government coercion, profits can exist only as long as men continue to create new values ,or improving on existing ones.  The only to make goods cheaper is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to invest in improvements in the capital and labor methods used in production

Doesn’t a more efficient product result in lost jobs for those who were replaced by automation or better processes?

When oil lamps replaced candles, the cost of producing affordable lighting greatly decreased. In the absence of a government monopoly, competing lamp-makers quickly started making their own lamps, which brought the price decrease to the consumer. In the process of transitioning from candles to laps, many thousands of candle-makers lost their jobs.  However, oil lamps did created a new industry of their own and increased the prosperity of society as a whole, just as electric lighting did in the 20th century.  Since consumers could buy cheaper lamps, they now had more money to spend on other things, ,creating new industries, and raising their overall standard of living.

Technological progress and capital accumulation has both created new careers made us enormously more productive – we not only have a wider range of vocations to choose from but work far fewer hours.

Can government “soften the blow” when all these candle-makers lose their jobs?

In today’s world, the government would probably try to subsidize the candle or lamp-makers when their chief product became outdated. What would that subsidy accomplish? It would save the candle-makers jobs – but it would cost the jobs of everyone who stood to benefit from the increase wealth that came from cheaper lights. In the short term, the candle-makers might benefit – but in the long term, they would lose too, since they would lose the new, higher paying jobs the could have making electric lights and the new products the cheaper lights would allow consumers to afford. Meanwhile, the Thomas Edison’s, Graham Bells, Thomas Moore’s, and Bill Gates’ would be too busy working to pay off taxes to have the time or money for research.

Of course, we know that these inventors and entrepreneurs succeeded. But how many didn’t because they never got their first break in the field because of a minimum wage, or gave up before they tried because the red tape was too much, or the taxes too high, or they knew that the old, outdated industries would use the government to tax and regulate them out of existence? The real tragedy is that we will never know.

10 Comments

Filed under Economics, Politics

10 Responses to The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls

  1. Jeoff Carney

    Antihuman, sexist horseshit. Even the American government, the economic advisors of the entire world and everyone else are further to the left than you. Free market ideology is dead! Wake up and smell the fucking global financial crisis!

  2. W

    @Jeoff Carney

    I love it when people dismiss rational economic arguments as free market ideology, and then proceed to just yell opinionated nonsense. Sure makes your position sound reasonable.

  3. Daniel Arcand

    As rude as he is, he’s still right. The actual effect of raising minimum wages is that employers raise the prices of goods to compensate. This causes a redistribution of wealth from higher income brackets (those who are able to spend larger amounts of money on luxuries such as fast food, movie tickets, and bar tabs) to lower income brackets (the citizens who spend the majority of their earnings on rent, car insurance, and tuition)

  4. HeroicLife

    @Daniel Arcand
    As a business owner, why would I raise the prices of goods when the minimum wage goes up?

    If my profit is maximized by selling goods at a certain price level, then it would not make sense to lose money by raising my prices. Rather, I will reduce the portion of my output which becomes unproductive – by firing my least productive (poorest) workers.

    Furthermore, even if I did raise prices, a higher minimum wage would still increase my costs – which means that less money will be available to pay employee salaries, still forcing me to fire my least productive employees.

  5. Daniel Arcand

    You’re opperating under three false assumptions.
    The first is the assumption that you are employing four workers when you could get by with three. Buisnesses only staff to the requirements of the task. By keeping that 7 now 8$/hour worker you might be losing 1$/ hour in salary, but to fire him is to lose 8$/hour in buissness.

    The second missconception is that you are functioning at cost. You aren’t, you are functoning at profit. You, as a wise owner, know that by taking a slight hit to profits now you will infact be causing more currency to circulate through the economy( your employees spend their money at your customer’s buisnesses, and your customers will then return to spend that same money at your’s) the extra money you pay out returns to you.

    Thirdly of course is that you are most likely a luxury supplier, (as these are the over whelming majority of bottom income jobs) which means that for you cost (in near all luxuries cost of service far exceeds the price at which a customer could provide the product to themselves) is not as determining a factor as location.

    I used to go to Jack in the Box at least once a week. (Tacos!!) A month ago they tore the one by my house down. Despite the fact that the next nearest JitB is only four miles away On The Same Road, I now settle for a product I like less, at a higher cost because of the closer locations.

  6. Christopher Mills

    my sister is a computer programmer and she earns lots of buxx from it.*:

  7. Formica Sheets 

    my father is a computer programmer for Alwill Software and it is a high paying job’*.

  8. Metal Brake :

    government jobs are still the best when it comes to job security *’`

  9. Roof Helmet ·

    my job as a computer programmer is a very satisfying job `

  10. Pingback: The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls - David Veksler - Liberty.me

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