🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <CyG94D.E7o@metronet.com>, jhuber@metronet.com (Joseph Huber) writes:
|> Our country and our economic success depends significantly on the service
|> industry. By the service industry I mean those jobs that we so flippantly call
|> "dead end" and "menial": burger flippers, maids, physical laborers, janitors,
|> maintenance people, delivery truck drivers, etc., etc., etc. 

These are low skill jobs.  This is not to impugn them at all -- these services
are necessary -- just that a lot more people are qualified to do them.  The
supply of candidates keeps the wages low.

|> What do these people get paid?  Minimum wage, maybe a little more if they
|> are lucky. 

|> Are the wages enough to live on?  No. 

And WHY are they not not enough to live on?  Because the government interferes
with the free market.  They price fix food with agriculture subsidies.  They
price fix housing with free public housing and beaureaucratic regulations
of buildings.  They price fix health care via Medicaid and Medicare.  They
price fix education by forcing everybody to go to school for 12 years.  They
get in the way and make sure that people can't succeed, and then they eliminate
more jobs by raising the minimum wage and naively hoping that businesses will
forever absorb the cost of government mandates.

|> I'd love to see minimum wages raised so people in the above mentioned jobs
|> could get off welfare, but business would just pass that on to consumers. 

No.  Consumers are not idiots.  They won't absorb the cost of government
mandates either.  They either won't buy at all, or won't buy American.

--
John Iacoletti     IBM RISC System/6000 Division     johniac@austin.ibm.com
        My opinions do not reflect the views of the IBM Corporation
                "Practice random acts of senselessness"