N.Y. Gov. Cuomo Enacts $15 Hourly Fast Food Minimum Wage

[erowe1]

We don't live in a free market and we (us, you and me) never have.

You can't use free market rules and apply them to oligopolies.

This - "Those whose pay will go up to $15/hr. would have been able to get that pay rate without this law." is wrong.

You have to know that it's wrong.

You have to know that McDonalds is still here. There have been many, many minimum wage hikes, and yet, McDonalds is still there.

McDonalds will pay the minimum wage, unless there's a shortage of labor. And there typically isn't. If you miss the first day of Econ 101 where they tell you that the rules that they're going to be using for the next 4 years haven't applied to the real world in at least 100 years, you'll end up saying things that you really should know aren't true.

What you're saying might be solid economics, but it isn't true today. These aren't the days of Adam Smith and John Marshall and free markets. McDonalds charges whatever it wants, not what it costs to make. In classical economics, the price of a good is the cost to make the good. And we all know that's not true in the real world of 2015, and it's never been true in our lifetimes. It might be true for wheat farmers, but it really isn't true for anyone else.

I'll agree that a hike in the minimum wage will tend to decrease employment. I don't agree that more money in the hands of the fast food workers is a negative impact.

We live in a fkd up world right now. What appears as total garbage is somehow modified in ways to make things worse. The government takes 1/3d of the money. That completely destroys any invisible hand that would be working. People don't have money to give to other people. Government took it. If everybody gets to keep their money, the invisible hand works, people pass the money around, and everything works out ok. When government takes so much, all the locals don't have the money to make that system work. So, the government steps in with minimum wage and welfare.

You misunderstand economic laws. Obviously, the whole point of my post was to describe what happens when the market is not free. The fact that the market isn't free doesn't mean these laws don't work. It means that we are seeing the effects of them constantly.

What I said about the person who is capable of commanding a wage of $15/hr. is true. If that is their productivity, then they can command up to that rate from their employer, lest they quit and their employer lose money because of that loss of productivity. Having a labor shortage makes this all the more true.

On the other hand, if someone's productivity is less than that, then raising the minimum wage only means that they are unemployable. The government will have banned their job by increasing the amount of its intervention in the marketplace by raising the MW.