Progressives seem to love the minimum wage, ostensibly as a policy to assist the poor by increasing their wages. However, there are many good and progressive reasons to oppose a minimum wage, and moreover there are other policies that better achieve the same ends.
The trade off with the minimum wage is that it does not guarantee that people keep their jobs, and it does not guarantee that people without jobs get hired. This criticism of the minimum wage is often overstated. Unemployment as a whole doesn’t actually increase significantly as a result of the minimum wage, because though the wage may be raised to be more than the value of individual’s labor, in many cases the minimum wage will fall in the gap between what an individual’s labor is worth and what their employer is paying them. The minimum wage increases the value of labor, by increasing spending as a result of redistribution. In fact, the net effect of minimum wage is basically zero. It’s a lot of regulation for no improvement in employment or quality of life on average.
However, to say that the net effect on unemployment is insignificant is not to say that there is no negative employment effect for some groups. In particular, the least-skilled workers, who are already generally the poorest and most vulnerable, will tend to be those whose labor is never worth more than the minimum wage. It also tends to hurt women, racial and ethnic minorities, and any group against which there is already a bias. A minimum wage does make the labor market tighter, and makes employers pickier, exaggerating the effect of these biases. While we can agree that the market solution, to pay members of these groups less, is not ideal, the result of a minimum wage is to instead increase unemployment in these groups.
And, by tightening the labor market for vulnerable employees, the minimum wage gives employers much more power over their employees. The increased competition means that vulnerable employees are less able to take the risks necessary to find better work. Instead, employees are stuck with more attachment to the job they have, and so less incentive for employers to treat them well.
In terms of its redistributive effects, the minimum wage is a transfer from the top and the bottom of the wealth distribution to the middle. That is not a progressive outcome. The minimum wage is costly, it’s inefficient, it’s ineffective, and at it’s worst it hurts those who most need social support. It’s anti-progressive, and progressives should oppose it.
MW gives a more accurate picture of society. These are the people (omployers) we can have humane contracts with. This is the economy. Lots of unemoployed, that’s the way things are so we need to do something, perhaps something other than GATT, Nafta, and breaking down any country’s right to control its own markets.
It also sets out a minimum for what a moral contract is. Contracts are defended by law and the courts. They are taken seriously there. BElow some mimimum - not just wage - the state cannot honor them, in either direction. Yes, you, worker broke that contract and your employer can sue for damages. WEll, for the court to do that the contract has be something like fair.
The affects of this are not easy to track. They affect how workers view themselves and their rights. They affect notions of fairness and abuse.
If the state takes disgusting (yes, manipulative word use) contracts seriously, the will, no doubt, be implicit PR for those contracts. The entire job market will move downward.
We used to have tribal relations. So shitty bargaining meant that your sister got shit from that guys mother because they bathe in the same swim hole and you cheated him last time. AFter the move from tribal relations, employers seem to think they are givers and workers are takers who can make up for this by breaking even via work. The state comes in and enforces, to some degree, what the tribe managed through human means.
Utilitarians often think the idea is to track effects, as if ecosystems like societies are newtonian. Yes, we can track all the effects.
When you make a contract, stamp it metaphorically as legal and sound and it is abuse, the effects ripple out in ways that are hard to track. Deontologists, at least some of them, intuitively grasp this. Some stuff is bad and it is not easy to demonstrate, always, exactly what the effects are. Of course deontologists have been abusive in instances, but analyses like the one in the OP, which is consequentialist or utilitarian, should not be presented, as they nearly always are, as if
Hey lets look at all the effects here are the ones I can see, demonstrate negative effects in a nice causal chain or we should get rid of MW.
No, it is not that simple.
Of course solutions are very tough here. But the same forces that fight against minimum wage, in general, are the very ones who want ‘free’ markets, which in turn lead to problems for more marginalized people in the original society. Right now they are making the third world within the West. No nation will have workers, anymore, with the kinds of confidence, in general of 30 to 60 years ago. (and having everyone on the planet scared in relation to corporations has effects that are also hard to track) The same mercenary thinking has led to a system that makes arguments like the one in the OP more plausible sounding. (not that I think Carleas is one of these people, not at all, but the problem with utilitarian approaches is that they so easily glide into the hand of those people setting up the situation to suit their needs and not society as a whole).
Other categories of employee employer interaction might make this clearer. If we allowed employers to run sweat shops, this benefits the extremely marginalized people. People without residency permits. People with bad work histories or terrible English. 16 hour workdays, small bunker like rooms that the workers pay for out of their wages etc. The sweat shop employer can argue that his workers want the jobs, it benefits them, no one else will hire them and making it illegal, again say, would put these poor poeple out of work.
But we, at least some of we, and the supposedly representing we, have decided that it is better for a society to not allow such contracts - spoken if not written included. This can be simply for deontological reasons. It is shitty to do that and we will not allow it. Or it is shitty to do that so we will not honor it as a contract or as a business - most businesses having been granted priviledges by the state to do certain things ESPECIALLY CORPORATIONS. Or it could be the intuitive utilitarian who thinks that the deontologists are right in that one cannot always do good via math and adds that one cannot always do the math
and more
one of the most pernicious ideas is that we can track the effects.
Of course trying to track effects is not wrong or silly, but they are often presented, as in the OP, as if a rational discussion will suss them out. It won’t.
This was an unexpected response, and very much appreciated.
I worry though, isn’t this question-begging? If I understand your point, it is that we shouldn’t always look at the practical consequences, sometimes the right thing to do is in spite of the consequences, “for deontological reasons”. But that just seems to bake in the conclusion that we have a duty to support a minimum wage. If I reject that as a premise, how does deontology move us forward?
In particular, it seems like many more fundamental deontological motivators (such as a duty to be fair, to not exploit people, to create a fair society, etc.) actually end up returning to utilitarian, or at least consequentialist concerns: removing the minimum wage is fairer, it does more to prevent exploitation and a fair society. Unless we start with minimum wage itself as something we are duty-bound to support, it doesn’t seem that the fact that my argument is utilitarian is a strike against my argument.
I think a similar point works against the argument from tribal relations and the argument from fair contracts: Tribal contexts did not have a minimum wage, and a minimum wage doesn’t reflect the social safety net that was built into those contexts; and if my labor is actually not worth the minimum wage, it does not seem at all unfair for the state to honor a contract to sell it for its fair value.
I fear Carleas, you are wasting your time. Ultimately the progressive ideology comes down to what feels good. Minimum wage does not, currently, feel good. You might luck out, when minimum wage no longer feels good they won’t appose it’s destruction… I fear what will feel good at that point however.
I was surprised to see any progressive admit it though. Thank you Moreno.
People voting for minimum wage are kind of ignorant. If it goes up, prices of products and services have to go up also, which nulls the minimum wage and now there is just an illusion of being paid more when you still have to pay the same ratio to live.
If they wanna fix the economy then they should start by, A. Fixing the taxing because they’re lucky we let them at all. B. Create a pricing ratio for products/services.
Poor reading skills on your part. (and progressives are the most consequentialist/utilitarian creatures on earth, part of my problem with them. And note: a consequentialist need not be good at figuring out consequences, it is just that the mode of that reasoning or rationalizing.) (( and then there are all the pleasurable qualia the neocons base their politics on. If you can only see things in some simple binary way, your posts are like votes. See if you can actually think.)) Who I am or who progressives are in your little opinion adds just a little tiny poop stain to a thread. If you want to be known for loose bowels, well so be it. You could on the other hand respond to specific points, make ones of your own, you know add.
That’s not what I mean. I am not saying do not look at consequences. I am saying 1) there has to be much more humility when doing this. 2) When the list of deduced and guessed at consequences is arrived at, the another list must be made - what are the effects that are possible, likely, sure to happen, that are incredibly hard to track. 3) then a look at what possible deontological positions might inform us there. And I do not think this then necessarily leads to clear answers. But to act, as I think pretty much all sides do, as if we can work out the consequences and weight them and also that stuff that is not easy to track therefore has no effects…is very problematic. I also think it ends up supporting dominant players.
I am also saying that you have to take seriously people’s deontological reactions. I know it would be nice to add in a formula but I do not think there is one.
Erik accused me of basing this on wanting to feel good. Like I am suggesting policy be decided by qualia. At root every single policy will have feel good and feels bad qualia lurking in the axioms. It will also be reacted to along qualia lines. So I know as well as anyone that deontology will lead to opposed reactions - but then if we look at the debates today, everyone acts like a consequentialist except for fundamentalists, thought they often do also. So consequentialism is not closing off these issues.
I have no magic bullet. I am critiquing the large absence of the elephant in the room of consequentialist arguments. The elephant of effects that are hard to track, but that often registers as a gut feeling that it smells like some huge pachyderm nearby - that is to the deontologist.
Consequentialists are often smug in relation to deontologists, because the latter seem to function without evidence. I would say that a lot deontological positions are arrived at via intuition, a faculty that is not random and one we have depended on always. We need it when stuff is hard to track.
We can’t be running in the outfield with a sextant and a calculator trying to figure out where to stand to catch the ball.
And that is a VERY SIMPLE SITUATION compared to drug policies or minimum wage. Think of the lines of easy and hard and impossible to track variables gliding away from that policy and compare that to a parabola.
Add then in time - what does a decade lead to? four decades?
Then also - why do we look at the minimum wage in isolation? Perhaps the analogy is some big guy is hitting me with a two by four and while he was hitting me I called him a motherfucker. Now that is not OK. His mother is innocent, he is the bad guy.
But the guy is hitting me with a two by four and we are focusing on my language?
What seems like a cog to change in a situation may not seem like it if a broader set of causes and effects is looked at.
(and note, I mentioned this point very quickly here and a little bit in the previous post, but it is very important. It is part of the radical oversimplification I see in consequentialism about such issues)
No, not really. Think of it as a consequentialist noticing that effects that are not easy to track are left out of the debate or only forwarded by deontologists.
Classic example: drug testing of employees and students. Long time ago, when this was first becoming popular with employers and in certain circumstances schools, a NYTimes article - that is a liberal papers take - included only one possible bad effect. False positives. That’s it.
Now some ‘employee advocates’ did come at this with other negative consequences, but many people were forced to go deontological and talk about rights to privacy. Fine for them.
But what are the effects of saying Employers can demand your body fluids and you cannot demand theirs, even though a CEO doing coke or Board member doing the same could make it a poor choice as workplace? What are the effects on children when stranger adults are given certain powers over them?
Hard to track, we do not even have to consider these issues. How people come to concieve of themselves - both those who get the extra power and those who must allow this - has no effects?
How do the assumptions about what we have the right to know about someone (regardless of their work or school performance and indenpendent of it,e ven if in specific cases, performance might have been part of the reason for demanding the urine) mean nothing.
I notice that in debates the less tangible, less easy to track is simply left out. Who knows? perhaps these less tangible things have the greater effects especially long term.
Good question see above.
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No, they had something even stronger. They had citizen salaries (food shelter healthcare) not dependent on work. You likely pissed people off, but you got sick, you were lazier, you were not that skilled, you were developmentally disabled or injuredin warfare, they shared with you. All their work was also meaningful, though I am not suggesting we try to enforce that as a rule for businesses today.
Further: what’s your take on my sweat shop defense which was based on your arguments against MW?
Or let’s take another kind of consequentialist argument The Organ Lottery.
We take one healthy person and harvest them for organs to save four or five people. In those instances where we can do this and expect those other four or five to thrive. Here the consequentialist can follow the easier things to track, five people saved one dead, and determine it is a good policy. But in this example the less tangible effects come forward fast and hard in time.
Then we can make it potentially a bit more palatable: 1 criminal with no wife or children, four or five citizens in good standing.
Here the deontologist rushes in right now with an answer. At least most of them even have the same one.
Consequentialists will work hard, in this instance, at least many of them, to find and reify those less intangible effects.
That would be because the results are what matter, this comes in two parts, one, that they require explaining reasons for actions to others. You may stand on a hill feeling good for defending it, but it’ll mean nothing to anyone except yourself… (I can’t believe I’m defending progressives)
I’m not a neocon… To progressive for me…
I am a binary kinda guy. This doesn’t bother me as much as you might think.
Bite me bitch.
Fair enough… I didn’t really add…
No, it doesn’t it is an arbitrary value set by people that do not pay the direct cost. It allows bigots to pay no cost for their bigotry. It creates a hedonistic treadmill of expectations, which only lead to victimization. The only way you could call it a picture of society is if you consider it a perfect example of the failure of education and the feeling based society the progressives have worked hard to create.
(I’m assuming that’s a typo, a search come back with no explanation for omployers) These are humans, we, humans, have agreements with, yes.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen that right written down, I’ve never agreed to it on any bill, nor has really anyone else, further, it make the assumption that a country CAN control its own market instead of just acting like a giant wet blanket.
Provided the contracts are entered into willingly and not forced on joiners by a third party… Which is the definition of minimum wage.
Not fair, but according to the law. (At this point you start using this word “fair” it is never defined by anyone in a consistent manner, other than, its what ever I FEEL is right. So, every time you say this, this is what it means.)
Well, that and education, culture, geography, and a hundred thousand other things that have more of an effect than contract enforcement.
(There’s that word again, though now its joined by another one, that means the same thing but is more provocative.)
I actually agree with you, here, the state that is all powerful is all political. Contracts that steal from one and give to another cause distrust of that government when they enforce them… Which is what Minimum wage is…
And here you lost me… The noble savage never existed, people have been beating the shit out of each other for as long as they could. At one point, yes, we formed tight nit tribes to protect ourselves, but most often it was from other tribes as much as for anything else. Further, cites are quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. We live better than those tribal relations on every single value, even “fairness.”
And here is the Marxist non-sense that marks you as the progressive that I called you.
Tribal may also have meant that you kick the shit out of anyone that disagreed (Most of the skeletons we find in holes of our tribal ancestors have had their heads crushed in by our ancestors). After the move from it, employers paid workers what the two agreed to, a contract. Money acts as a reduction in transaction costs. That employers would take advantage of information asymmetry just hearkens back to the nature of man, minimum wage does not fix the asymmetry, instead it acts as a barrier to those on the bad side of the asymmetry. The state is simply the expanded human means of interaction, meaning attempting to make more than a couple of people get along with each other. As there are more people on the earth, cites are one of the best things we have done, we create bigger management for enforcing the contracts that individuals make with each other, in an attempt to force people to get along. The only way at this point to go back, is to kill quite a few people…
The tracking is an attmept to understand, otherwise it’s just a cluster fuck of feelings. (Again, this is the part where you enforce my opionion that you are nothing more than a progressive that cares about nothing more than his feelings when making decisions.) The actions of societies are incredibly hard to track, but, in the words of one of my teachers, “Actions expose preferences far more than words.” So, we can look at the actions of people, which is something that can be tracked… Is it easy, hell no, but it’s a lot more valuable than your feelings for making decisions.
Again, I agree with you… Which is what we have a government for, why we have laws accepting what a contract can include. We, ideally, enforce them equally across all things, so that expectations are set.
Everyone grasps this.
Except with minimum wage, it really sort of is… Ironically, the argument against the unemployment causing aspects of minimum wage is that it is hard to track, as long as you don’t look where you don’t want to look…
But, it is often quite easy to see the consequences of bad law, and bad contracts reflected in easily measurable values. Every time a parent, that is a CEO of a company loses a child, the company does poorly. This is a measurable unit on the significance of loosing a child. Want the price of anything, at that moment in time, ask someone what they would pay for it… For that person, at that moment, based on how much they currently have, that is the value of that thing. That this changes from person to person, moment to moment does not mean it is not measurable, only that we do not have the ability to measure it… Its like all the “mysteries of science,” those things that we don’t understand (like what the bottom of the ocean looks like, you know the deep parts). It is only that we cannot currently measure it, it is not that it cannot be measured.
No, no it doesn’t… And I’ve officially presented as much evidence as you… But hey, I guess you don’t need to measure it, to show proof, its just what feels right, so then it must be true…
At the start of being human we are poor, ignorant and reliant on feelings more than reason. Growing up is the process of putting an end to these things. Human kind, as a whole, follows the exact same path, we started out poor, ignorant and more reliant on feelings than reason. That you put a value on these things simply marks you as a progressive, not an individual that thinks for himself…
Yet, what has been the leading ideology off the last 30-60 years… Progressive ideology. you want the cause of the lack of confidence, it is things like minimum wage (something first conceived of by racists, but then picked up, by racists but hidden under the precepts of “doing what is right!”
And now free markets are mercenary, fair enough, but then what are closed markets, they are the arbitrary will of those that pay no direct cost, on two other parties. If I’m not being clear, I am saying you are a totalitarian with this thinking… Which again, brings me back to progressives, it is a totalitarian ideology, as is what is good is only what they feel at that moment it is a mercurial totalitarian ideology. It is the mob screaming to kill the nigger.
The “employers” are correct and again, actions show preferences better than some silly words. The question should always be, as opposed to what? If these people you are putting out of work based on your feelings of right and wrong, only have the option of working in dumps collecting refuse? Do we then do our best to allow them to make their own fucking decisions? No, we treat them like children?.. I’ll have to disagree with you.
Some is the key.
Now you just have to show that in following the duty to fix these peoples problems that you actually have fixed these peoples problems, instead of making it worse.
Again, feelings based.
Corporations, particularly the big ones, employ many people, do we say fuck them in the name of helping far less? Especially as we are not allowed to measure the good that comes from a corporation.
Math can be hard to do, finding the right variables, finding what information matters, makes it hard. Doesn’t mean that you ignore what math we can do in the name of your feelings.
We can track the effects, that you discount them because they do not fit how you feel, does not make them invalid.
Actions expose preferences more than words. (Which I supposed is a agreement, in a form, of what you just worded out.)
Minimum wage is a non-issue as it is another distraction from the much larger structural problems.
The United States economy is fucked and there isn’t enough social, political, or economic reforms in the world that is going to save it. It doesn’t really matter who the next president is going to be in charge of this global or national shit show. We’re sinking on the U.S.S.A Titanic currently. See that giant iceberg we crashed into? Massive unfunded liabilities.
Basically concerning minimum wage we have the perfect catch 22 at hand here. In this case if they raise minimum wage a lot of companies are going to go out of business along with drastic falling profits for corporations or businesses nationwide. More than likely an increase in unemployment concerning massive layoffs. On the other hand if they don’t raise minimum wage that will also hurt the economy because nobody can afford consumerism or even paying taxes as national falling tax revenues suggests. Basically a majority can’t afford to live in the United States anymore with economic hyperinflation mixed with deflation as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t already figured it out yet this how entire nations or civilizations collapse.
Welcome to the future of the United States and indeed most of the world, prepare accordingly.
I think Moreno is right to criticize Carleas’ arguments on deontological grounds, if only because Carleas claimed that this was a description of progressive opposition to Minimum Wage. If the ‘p’ word was dropped from the subject title, it would be a perfectly good libertarian argument. But progressivism is built on a core of social justice, which means ultimately that rich people should have things taken away from them and given to poor people out of a moral obligation to take things away from rich people, irrespective of if it helps the economy in general, or poor people in particular. At the end of the day, Margaret Thatcher was correct that the progressive left would rather see the poor poorer as long as their moral obligation to take the rich down a peg is fulfilled.
To the question at hand; minimum wage was originally a racist policy in the first place. Blacks entering the work force were willing to do so for wages considered to be below what a respectable white person would work for. Progress against black/white income inequality was set back at least a generation by minimum wage laws, it seems to me. But that’s an easy demographic to look at. If we consider the poor in general and the rich in general, I don’t see why the same rule wouldn’t apply - minimum wage laws hinder the advancement of people who would otherwise get ahead by being willing to work for less than others.
About the only justification I can see for a minimum wage law is that if an adult is working full time hours, they obviously don’t have the time left in the day to support themselves in any other way. It seems fair to me that if a person is putting in the vast majority of their waking hours into some kind of labor, they ought to be able to sustain themselves on the income that derives from that. But there’s no reason that part time work or student work ought to be subject to that same restriction, and of course if you say “Minimum wage only applies to full time work”, then employers are only going to hire part time people- as we see with health insurance now.
Hello Carleas
If I remember correctly you have a good understanding of human resources, so I take what you wrote very seriously though I disagree with your overall conclusion.
Nothing guarantees demands and that is the bottom line. Raising the minimum wage can have an effect, but this has to do with a lot of other factors, such as the price sensitivity of the customers. Labor costs tend to rise as well as people’s wages. I remember when I was making 3.60/hr. The thing that bothers me is that making more money could lead to an increase in the cost of goods, thereby reducing any gains a higher min. wage might have had on the purchasing power of individuals at the lower payscales, so I agree, the net effect is near zero. I have heard said that having a higher minimum wage in some states like CA and NY makes a lot of sense, but if you have the overpopulation of a city like NY, NY, then there is not a real economic reason to increase the min. wage. Is there a moral reason? Maybe, but I don’t believe that paying more will improve the lives of many more than people taking action by themselves to seek better jobs in better states where their purchasing power is raised simply by the tax code, and living conditions of the new state. You can use me as an example. I was working in NY paying 2,000/month for rent in a typical NY small apartment, higher insurance, higher taxes. Even making good money, I was unable to make ends meet. Decided to transfer to Dallas. Lot of money, but it improved my economic situation, a virtual raise overnight. Now, if there was such an exodus on a massive scale then NY might change because there would be owners with empty apartments trying to get someone in, less people on the road, thus less insurance claims, blah, blah, you get the idea. In short, I don’t believe that raising the min. wage would be effective in the places that need it the most and might in fact prevent actual change (in living conditions) from happening.
I disagree with you here. How does a higher min. wage tighten the labor market? How does it make employers pickier? You take it for granted that a higher min. wage will cause a reduction in labor, but why not simply a rise in the costs of products. Employers are always picky and with Lean and other technological advances the labor market is as tight as it can get. Unless customers stop buying 10 dollar cappucinos, but I don’t see that happening because people will have a bit more money in their pockets who will replace lost customers. Unemployment is not the likely result of a higher minimum wage. Wages are raised often in our economy without accompanying firings. What happens is that if the cost of higher labor cannot be passed on to customers then the margin of profit is reduced which makes employers more likely to consider reductions in capacity. At the next down cycle employers would can positions quicker because reducing labor cost might really increase their chances of survival.
Disagree with you again. It depends. Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts will absorb the hike just fine. It will kill some small business owners who will not be able to compete, which will throw a few more workers to compete for the lowest level paying jobs. That said, in the long run, less competition means increased opportunity for growth for these remaining food giants. Let me use an example: In the last decade we have seen merger after merger, bringing the number of airlines to just a handful. That doesn’t mean that the commercial air travel industry has shrinked, quite the contrary, bringing or sustaining the jobs that were determined, in the end, by demand. Treating employees well is a good policy regardless of wages. Starbucks brings in better people to their POS than a McDonalds, in my opinion, by their employee-friendly higher labor cost. That can justify the extra expense. We live in a world where customer service, sometimes, just sometimes, is valued more than price, so, I don’t believe that a hike to the min. wage will cause what you say it will…not across the spectrum.
Costs depend on whether you can pass on the costs to the customer. Some small owners will not survive, but it is not the death sentence for workers because as long as the demand exists, the supply will remain steady, meaning you might have to wear a Papa John’s uniform rather than Sal’s Pizza.
I disagree with your conclusion because social support should not be equal to accepting working poor individuals specially when we see see CEO making 9,000/hr. We can agree, I think that this salaries are getting out of control and show a deterioration in the respect we used to have for average workers (Remember “My Man Godfrey”?). Maybe the costs of higher wages are simply passed to higher product prices for the consumers, in short inflation, but maybe we will see companies reconsider their costs structure (reducing CEO and other suits’ wages to accommodate increased labor costs) with a little nudge from the government. That is progressive in my opinion.
I oppose all wages. Trading well crafted goods needs to be re-established. Craft one for yourself and one for another. Come on guys. You look like a crafty group!
Moreno, I think the point still stands: bake in all the humility in the world, and you still ultimately have to decide on the correct policy in the face of uncertainty. OK, I’m humble, there’s a lot we don’t know and we may be wrong, but nonetheless the best evidence we have still says we should not impose a minimum wage. How does deontology do anything to weaken that position?
The proper response, it seems, to people’s “deontological reactions” is to inform them of what we know. A person may believe that a minimum wage helps the poor, but we have good reason to think that isn’t true. More importantly to your point, we have better reason to think it isn’t true than to think that it is true. And I don’t think it’s sufficient to say, ‘well, deontology relies on intuition, and that’s better with complex systems.’ First of all, that’s an objective claim, it’s a testable hypothesis, we can evaluate it objectively. And second, all the evidence we do have seems to indicate the opposite: our intuition is born of an evolutionary circumstance that is no longer applicable, we side towards tribalism, we judge poor people for being poor, we fail to intuitively comprehend the way large chaotic systems like the economy behave. Our intuition misleads us, demonstrably.
Our intuitions are great for catching a ball, but that metaphor doesn’t scale: it’s exactly when we deal with more complex situations that weren’t evolved to intuit that our intuitions fail and we need rigor and measurement and consequentialist evaluation to see what the outcomes really are.
As for who benefits, I agree that the dominant players tend to get the best out of policies. But we currently have a federal minimum wage, does that mean that the dominant players favor a minimum wage? If we increase it, is it because the dominant players prefer it so? If we repeal it? To say that the dominant players will tend to get policies that benefit them is a condemnation of every policy we enact, it doesn’t condemn any policy in the outset. After all, ostensibly progressive policies can be about benefiting the dominant players as well; as both Erik and Uccisore have pointed out, the minimum wage started as an expressly racist policy to prevent blacks from out-competing whites.
So what does deontology add? We sift the data, identify what effects we should expect from what actions, the deontologist says, “what about those effects that aren’t easy to track?”; the proper response seems to be, “yes, those exist, but their existence does not count as evidence that they weigh in one direction or the other. They are, by definition, unknowns, and everything we do know says we should do XYZ.”
Take drug tests: We can measure performance before and after implementing it. Does productivity improve? Retention? Accidents on the job? Do drug tests tend to weed out good workers or bad workers (or just whoever the boss doesn’t like)? Those are all measurable, and it’s only by appeal to those measurable outcomes that we can decide against drug tests. We might be able to predict in advance that productivity falls and that turnover increases because we know people don’t like to be subject to drug testing, and drug use isn’t strongly correlated with problems on the job. Again, those predictions are based on reasoning about measurable facts. It doesn’t require a resort to deontology to find that.
I generally think it’s worse to ban sweat shops than it is to allow them. Much of Asia has developed into modern, diverse economies because of sweatshop labor. I think sweatshops are a symptom of something bad, e.g. severe wealth inequality, but in this case targeting the symptom makes the disease worse.
This is a clear case of our intuitions leading us astray: we think, “My god, I’d hate to live like that, we have to prevent it!” But relative to the options sweat shop laborers have in life, working in a sweatshop may actually be an improvement for them, and the evidence we have backs that up. And again, many of the ‘progressives’ who oppose sweatshops are actually dominant players who would prefer to e.g. stifle competition against wealthy-country union workers.
And to be clear, I don’t include actually chattel slavery or other forms of coercion-by-force in sweatshop labor, I think that is a different case, though also for consequentialist reasons. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we can take people at their choices, so we know that sweatshops are the best option when people choose them. Moreover, I think you’re right that there are certain signaling aspects that we can’t ignore; killing people at random for their organs, even if it does produce a net increase of productive humans, will tend to erode trust in government (though, as I write that, it feels ad hoc; I will give it some more thought).
National taxes aren’t falling. They fell during the recession, they have since risen.
The opposition is ‘progressive’ in the sense that it is supported by appeal to the minimum wage’s negative effects on inequality and the most vulnerable members of society, i.e. the ‘core of social justice’. Hurting the rich isn’t a goal, it’s just a lucky accident that progressive policies tend to hurt the rich! (Though, as in the case of minimum wage, I think a lot of ostensibly progressive policies actually benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.)
Why? I don’t disagree with the claim that we should not just let a person die when he is doing the highest paying job available and still not able to sustain himself. But I’m a lefty and I think we should have an unconditional universal income, I’d pay people who are choosing not to work. Why do you think that someone who is by hypothesis more costly to keep alive than the value that he could possibly produce for society, is nonetheless entitled to a subsistence level income? And isn’t that just a little bit progressive of you?
