Got a bunch of baseball cards in the attic? Beanie Babies maybe? How about some old CD’s?
Now, say ya wanna sell ’em. Everyone knows that if you start the bidding to high you won’t get any takers. Bring the price down and you can sell almost anything.
Simple: More expensive, fewer people buy. Less expensive, more people buy.
Which makes this so mind boggling:
Eight states will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under state laws that require wage floors to keep apace with inflation. San Francisco, one of the few cities that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising wages for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first big city in the country to require companies to pay their workers more than $10 an hour.
The minimum wage increases in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington will be 28 cents to 37 cents an hour, according to the National Employment Law Project. That is an extra $582 to $770 a year for a full-time minimum wage worker, and resets these states’ minimum wages to $7.64 to $9.04 an hour.
At that higher end is Washington State, which will become the first state in the nation to set its minimum wage above $9 an hour. For reference, the federal wage floor for most workers is $7.25 an hour.
I get it, I do. No one’s time should be worth so little. However, by forcing businesses to pay more for labor than they otherwise should, they will buy less labor. And lastly, should an individual be free to bargain for the value of his time?