My old friend Ward Rubrecht responds to an article by Matt Walsh (with a h/t to Anthony Strafaccia) on The Blaze’s Contribution Channel concerning pay for no-skill work such as burger flipping. First, Matt:
Dear fast food workers,
It’s come to my attention that many of you, supposedly in 230 cities across the country, are walking out of your jobs today and protesting for $15 an hour. You earnestly believe — indeed, you’ve been led to this conclusion by pandering politicians and liberal pundits who possess neither the slightest grasp of the basic rules of economics nor even the faintest hint of integrity — that your entry level gig pushing buttons on a cash register at Taco Bell ought to earn you double the current federal minimum wage. …
You think the jobs I had when I was 16 should have provided me with the comfortable living I just established in my late 20′s? Frankly, I think you’re delusional.
To understand how delusional, consider that a $15 an hour full time salary would put you in the same ball park as biologists, auto mechanics, biochemists, teachers, geologists, roofers, and bank tellers.
You’d be making more than some police officers.
You’d easily out earn many firefighters.
He continues on in a vein related to the viewpoint of the fast food worker. I share Matt’s belief that no-skill workers should not necessarily be able to make a comfortable living, but I’ll approach it from a societal viewpoint. I think society does not benefit from making it possible to have a comfortable living working a zero-skill job. Our society has always been predicated on the skills and ambitions of the individual being improved so that they can become wealthier; the flip side is that society then gets the benefits of those skills. The motivations are several, but most common is an inability to make a living at that job, and thus the scrabble of acquiring skills, whether it be a college education or a trade school.
But make it easy to make a living at entry level jobs may bring about an even greater social inequity – there will be those who will willingly stay in these entry level jobs, and progress no further, flipping burgers from 16 to 76, and not doing any better until their political superiors determine they should do better, and then those who have the ambition to go out and improve themselves – who will be able to earn more without begging for it from the political class, improve themselves further, or do whatever it is they want to do.
Additionally, if the entry level jobs pay is improved, now we’ll have a class of people who will permanently occupy these jobs, to the detriment of the teenagers seeking jobs for the first time. The teenagers need some way to get their employment underway, and if there’s a class of folks occupying that tier of jobs ordinarily available to them, and a political understanding that all jobs should result in a comfortable living, then I don’t see any hope for them to scratch a living unless it’s under the table.
Ward offers the observation that pay has not kept up with need, the need being the cost of education (but not quite the same as saying you should be able to make a living). I think this is looking at the wrong end of things; why is the cost of education so high? Wikipedia covers this topic, including an out of date graph and this section:
Another proposed cause of increased tuition is U.S. Congress’ occasional raising of the ‘loan limits’ of student loans, in which the increased availability of students to take out deeper loans sends a message to colleges and universities that students can ‘afford more,’ and then, in response, institutions of higher education raise tuition to match, leaving the student back where he began, but deeper in debt. Therefore, if the students are able to afford a much higher amount than the free market would otherwise support for students without the ability to take out a loan, then the tuition is ‘bid up’ to the new, higher, level that the student can now afford with loan subsidies.[15] One rebuttal to that theory is the fact that even in years when loan limits have not risen, tuition has still continued to climb.[16][17] Keeping tuition increases at the rate of inflation would require the state kick in $128 million more tax dollars between now and 2015.[18] Public college tuition has jumped 33 percent nationwide since 2000.[19] College students are facing a roughly $20 billion increase in the cost of their federal loans.[20]
I have a related, simple (and no doubt simplistic) view – it’s all simple economics. The seats available are the goods to be bought; the dollars students can bring to bear is the money. It’s well known that printing more money results in inflation, which is the increase in price of the goods. In the college scenario, the Federal aid is the equivalent of printing money, as now the students can bring more money to bear on buying access to education. The institutes notice that the market will bear a price increase, and so boost prices; after all, alumni and governments are currently dicey sources of revenue, and those hard science majors need expensive gear.
Who’s screwed? Anyone who can’t get a grant or a loan. Which means buying access means dancing to the tune of the grant and loan providers; the alternative is, what? I’m not sure about the cost of trade schools these days …
The logical course, then, is to turn off the firehose: a harsh choice if you’re currently dependent. My suspicion is that prices would start dropping after two – four years of pathetic begging from institutions, warnings of doom and gloom, and that sort of rot. If government wants to subsidize education, then return to funding the institutions directly.
But right now it’s awfully harsh to be a student, regardless of loans or no loans.
I do not advocate free education, but crippling students and their families for a lifetime is obviously a poor choice. So keep in mind what Stanford recently did:
Zero Parent Contribution for Parents with Income Below $65,000
