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The issue imho has been misallocation of public resources. For example, why is so much healthcare spending on people who are at the end-of-life for example who have no hope of living much longer. Or so much education spending to bring laggards up to speed, who should go into the trades or drop out of school. Or too much credentialism. Many of these proposals seem like an expansion of the government or vague that will necessitate higher taxes or more deficit spending. The minimum wage is an example of 'labor rights', yet creates a barrier to work.
While your typical electrician or HVAC tech didn’t do well in school, this was because he either thought school was dumb or wasn’t willing to listen to his teachers. Guys that were genuinely not smart enough to handle the material usually aren’t smart enough to work in a regulated trade.
this is why the min. wage is harmful. there is a market for dumb workers; it's just not high enough to justify paying them
You would expect this to be true, but empirically it doesn't seem to be. The going rate for a sober, trustworthy worker with a 90 IQ and a good attitude is something like 2/3 of the going rate for a 100 IQ worker - in other words it is above any likely minimum wage. And the going rate for a 90 IQ worker who is drunken, lippy, violent or dishonest is comfortably negative.
The Problem of low wage work (and in today's society it is a capital-P problem - a lot of what tradcons hate about our society is downstream of it) is really a two-parter:
If you solved those problems then the going rate for 90 IQ male workers would be well above the sort of minimum wage levels that are within the Overton window, so the minimum wage would be largely irrelevant.
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