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From: mjk@tty3b.UUCP (Mike Kelly)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Unemployment & the minimum wage
Message-ID: <463@tty3b.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Aug-84 13:03:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: tty3b.463
Posted: Tue Aug 14 13:03:22 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Aug-84 01:41:42 EDT
References: <1665@inmet.UUCP> <451@tty3b.UUCP>, <388@pucc-i> <461@tty3b.UUCP>, <393@pucc-i>
Organization: Teletype Corp., Skokie, Ill
Lines: 27

Response to afo@pucc-h (sefton) and ags@pucc-i (Seaman):


Seaman: "Of course working people are not mobilizing to oppose minimum 
wage laws; working people are precisely the ones who have a vested
interest in preserving the status quo."

I used "working people" as a general term.  As we all know, about 8 
million working people aren't.  My real point here was that there is
no clamoring for elimination of the minimum wage from below; it comes
from above, which says a lot about who is going to benefit from its
elimination.  There is not, for example, much support among blacks for
elimination of the minimum wage.  I find this "it's for their own good"
argument coming from people who have never shown any concern for anything
other than their own profit margins pretty laughable.

Laurie Sefton did a good job of sketching "a 'worst-case-scenario'" based
on "an extrapolation upon the effects of removing minimum wages."  What
Laurie probably realizes, but left unsaid in her article, is that her
"worst-case scenario" is a pretty good history lesson for those who forget
what life was like back in the good old days before the big, bad unions and
minimum wages came along.  The advocates of abolishing the minimum wage have
no answer to her argument, other than to say that it's OK for people to be
starving if that's what the market produces.  Their position was rejected 50
years ago and is about to be rejected in its more recent incarnation.

Mike Kelly