(BigGovernment.news) With great fanfare, California Democrats celebrated when Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a new measure requiring businesses to pay all employees a minimum of $15 an hour over the next six years. Rather than celebrating, every elected official who voted for it owes every business owner in the state an apology, though it isn’t likely they’ll get one anytime soon.
The passage of this law, once again, proves that Democratic Leftists are economic illiterates who are much more concerned about demagoguery than they are actually improving the lives of the our country’s working poor. Or the businesses that used to hire them.
“At its core, this proposal is about fairness,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said just before the vote. “This is historic, and today I am proud to be a Californian.”
Oh, it’s going to be “historic” all right; it’s the day the job market died in California for hundreds of thousands of low-wage, low-skilled workers. Prediction: Over the next half-dozen years, employment prospects for low-skilled workers will decrease in California and poverty will increase – right along with the state’s welfare costs.
The reasons why are simple. Call them “Economics 101.”
Fairness to a Democrat, when it comes to economic policy, is not like fairness to rational thinking beings. To a Democrat, in this sense fairness is little more than a political weapon utilized to obtain and retain power by preying on base emotions of jealousy, personal failure, and inability to attain a similar level of accomplishment; if it meant to them what it means to everyone else, Democrats would allow businesses, not pandering politicians, to determine a what to pay their employees based on a whole host of factors such as business income, skill level required to do the job, level of education and training, other overhead and so on.
By forcing businesses to pay employees several dollars more an hour than they are worth or that the business can afford will lead to these conclusions: The business will hire and retain fewer employees; the business will find labor costs prohibitive and close its doors; or, over time, both.
What is gained by this? For the Democratic Leftist, additional power; for the low-skilled worker, nothing is gained and, in fact, opportunities are taken from them.
And don’t expect the unions to step in and explain this loss of employment. Union wages in many jurisdictions throughout California and elsewhere are tied to minimum wages – when the minimum wage increases, so, too, do union wages. So minimum wage hikes don’t just hurt small businesses that can’t afford the increases, they hurt larger businesses that employ union labor as well (which will also eventually result in fewer employees and opportunities).
Then, too, consumers are hurt. Businesses forced by lawmakers to pay too much for labor will have to raise prices in order to compensate for the higher labor costs, or risk, as above, going out of business.
The firms that are able to relocate outside of California will relocate outside of California, which is obviously hostile to them via artificial wage hikes and the other regulatory burdens placed on them by nanny lawmakers who don’t have businesses to run.
But maybe the fault really lies with Californians who continue to vote these fools into office. It’s not like residents can blame political opponents in the state because there isn’t any real political opposition – it’s a one-party state and has been for decades.
And yet, when the economy continues to tank and the debt continues to rise, a majority of Californians habitually opt to double down on stupid and essentially seal their own fate. It’s the classic example of doing the same dumb thing over and over again but expecting a different result.
Jerry Brown and most of the Democrats who run the Socialist Republic of California will never feel the ill-effects of this idiocy because they don’t have payrolls to meet, overhead to pay and products to sell. But the most vulnerable residents among them will definitely feel the negative effects in the form of fewer job prospects and opportunities.
The only hope they have, however, is to pull a lever for someone else with new ideas and more business-friendly economic policies come election day. We’re not holding our breath.
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