On last week's Left, Right, and Center, (at about 23:30) left-leaning host Matt Miller asked the question, "What is a decent minimum reward for work?" His assertion is that no matter who you are, if you are employed, meaning you provide a service for money, you deserve a certain amount of money. I was dumbstruck when I heard this. If this is what the Left believes, there's no way we can ever win this argument. This opinion is not based in reason, it is an emotional appeal.
Why should a person, no matter what he does, what he contributes, who he is make a minimum amount of money? A person should earn what someone else is willing to pay and they're willing to accept. They should earn an agreed upon wage, not a wage that some third person declares arbitrarily.
It is an indisputable fact that for any service you're willing to render, an employer would be willing to pay only so much. To assert a wage that everyone should be paid regardless of that price has no basis in science or research only in grandstanding.
If you want to argue that morality and humanity require us to provide more for the indigent, fine, we can have that discussion; I welcome it. But to just assert that everybody deserves a certain minimum wage because they're human beings, regardless of what they're actually contributing, sidesteps that issue with an opinion that can't be challenged and those kinds of assertions should not be part of a reasoned debate.
No comments:
Post a Comment