Kerry Thomas Opinion & Commentary

Answering Criticism

by Kerry Thomas

April 7, 2005

I recently read two letters critical of my views on the world, regarding minimum wages and capitalism. Now, normally I wouldn’t give these letters the time of day. When you write opinion pieces, you get criticism. It’ part of the job. It’s part of the exercise of freedom of speech.

But there was just something so irking about these two letters that just made me wonder, wonder if the authors had a simple clue about the underlying concepts I had tried to express in the first place. I have been criticized for writing in a too-simple style, writing in a manner so as to explain my philosophies in a very simplistic format, in a way that makes complex concepts more personal, such that the average person can identify with the whole idea. And yet, somehow, these two critics still could not wrap their minds around the larger notions I presented.

Regarding the minimum wage in a capitalistic republic. Let me make it perfectly clear here. I am against any artificial government-dictated wage and price controls, especially when such dictates cannot be found among the enumerated powers granted to Congress by the Constitution.

I am a firm believer in a capitalist economy. Simple human nature tells me that if a product is priced too high, no one will buy it, and the produce will either come down in price, or it will disappear because no one can buy it. Conversely, if a product is priced too low, the business selling that produce cannot make a profit, and will go out of business because it cannot afford to stay in business.

Human labor is a product. Like any product, the more useful it is, the more it will be valued.

From an employee’s perspective, if an employer doesn’t compensate an employee adequately, that employee will seek employment commensurate with said employee’s job skills. But if his compensation requirements aren’t in line with his job skills, he will never get hired to do any job.

This simple scenario works whether you’re talking about hiring a CEO to run a multi-billion dollar corporation, or hiring the neighborhood kid to cut your grass. To keep things simple, let’s explore the grass-cutting scenario.

If you have a job to do, say, cutting your lawn, you have a couple options. You can either do the job yourself, or you can hire someone to do the job for you. Because you’re so good at cutting your own grass, because you’ve been doing it for years, you can get the job done in an hour. But maybe you have something else you’d prefer to do for that hour. Maybe it’s teach your kid to throw a football, maybe it’s washing a load of laundry, maybe it’s just laying out in the hot afternoon sun. Whatever, you’d just prefer to hire someone to do it for you.

So the neighbor’s kid comes over, and says he’ll do the job for $20. He needs the $20 for the latest video game, or gas money, or something like that. So there are your options. You can either cut your own grass in an hour, or pay the kid $20 to do it for you. You go with the kid.

So the kid gets to work. Now, never having cut your grass before, it takes the kid four and a half hours to do the job. And he doesn’t do a very good job of it, either. Adequate, but nothing spectacular. You pay the kid the $20, as agreed. But then your nosey neighborhood morality squad steps in, and tells you that you have to pay the kid another $3.18 on top of the $20, because he worked 4.5 hours, and the minimum wage is $5.15/hour. The kid is happy to get his $20, and doesn’t want the additional $3.18. But the morality squad is insistent, and even calls in the local police to enforce the payment of the additional $3.18.

So let’s recap here. The kid did the job. You paid him the agreed price for doing the job. You’re both satisfied. Then along comes a third party, someone who had nothing to do with either the negotiations over price, or performance of the job, telling you both that you’re in the wrong. What business is it of theirs what business you and the kid agreed to?

The same is true for government-dictated wage and price controls. They’re arbitrary numbers, no matter what the numbers are. I will repeat an assertion I made in an earlier column. Why is it that paying a low-skilled employee $5.15 an hour is unjust and unfair, yet paying them $6.50 an hour is perfectly fair and reasonable? Who determines just what a “fair” wage is? Earning $20/hour in an urban setting is barely making ends meet, but allows someone to live pretty well in most rural settings. Does one size really fit all?

One of my critics kept talking about a “fair” wage or a “living” wage. Such undefined terms are subjective. While you might be able to live well on $30k/year, your cousin in New York City might need 2-3 times that much. Who decides where that magical standard should be?

My minimum wage critic also asserts that there is no relationship between an increase in mandated wages and business failures or any loss of minimum wage jobs. He claims that such illustrations are never proven, and always turn out to be wrong. Tell that to the textile workers in the South. Or the Midwest customer service reps whose telephone jobs are moving to India.

When the cost of doing business becomes prohibitively expensive, usually because of taxes, or a government-imposed rule or regulation, the companies with those jobs to fill will seek to fill them at a lower cost. And no matter what the cost of doing business, all those costs are passed along to the consumer. The idea that a business is punished when higher costs are imposed upon it, it simply not the case.

All costs of doing business are borne by the consumer. Take a basic business economics course sometime, if you can find a professor who actually understands how business works, and hasn’t just learned about it from a book his unemployable colleague wrote. Or better yet, ask your local loan officer at your local bank to finance your new business venture if you tell them your business will make no profit.

Several of my critics speak about “social justice.” They go on trying to explain the concept, that businesses have some unrevealed and undefined obligation to their communities. But businesses aren’t people. Communities are simple collections of individual people. It comes down to the individual level here.

“Businesses” don’t have any obligations to any “community.” But, each of us, as individuals in a free society, have a moral obligation to do what we can to help those less fortunate than ourselves. But such help must come from the heart, given freely, not under threat of force. Who is so omnipotent so as to dictate to another the obligations one has to another? Is it your responsibility to care for a complete stranger, whom you have never met, and who has complete disdain for your beliefs?

I will repeat something I wrote previously. The term “social justice” implies a threat of force, as in retribution for wrongdoing. Since when is it wrong to succeed in life, to achieve a level of accomplishment in one’s chosen field of endeavor?

Social justice is a term used by those who would seek to punish achievement in America, out of a sense of jealousy or simple hatred of those who have achieved success in life. How moral is it to show such disdain for someone who has been able to do that which you have not?

I was also criticized for illustrating my point by using the Chinese proverb “If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime.” First, it is a proverb of Chinese origin, pre-dating Jesus by more than a thousand years. My critic tried to use another phrase attributed to Jesus, that “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” All fine and well, if you perceive yourself to be Last. But what if you’re the First? Does being First automatically make you a bad person?

For many years now Bill Gates has been called the richest person in America. Does this make him a bad person? How many people have benefitt4ed from the things Bill Gates has done? Haven’t his products helped to make people more productive? How many people have become successful because they used some of Gates’ products? How many untold millions has he donated to worthwhile causes?

Even the man who wrote the DOS software program that Bill Gates used to create his software empire says the $50k he was paid for his little program was far more than he thought it was worth at the time. Yes, he says, he could have probably sold his program to Gates for more, but at the time he didn’t think it was worth even the $50k Gates paid him. He was happy to get the $50k.

The point I was trying to allude to with the Fish analogy is the same one the original author of the proverb was illustrating. Some people today think that the government solution of throwing money at a problem works just fine. We’ve spent in excess of $5 Trillion on the American War on Poverty. Guess what? We’re losing that war. We have more people in poverty today than we did when the war first began in the 1960’s.

So what do we do? We keep throwing money at the problem, hoping somehow it will get better. The few people who have benefited from all that money (besides the bureaucrats who run the programs) have been the people who used the money to improve their job skills, and learned how to earn an independent living for themselves. The people who have benefited have learned how to fish. Many have even gone on to teach others how to fish for themselves, too. Maybe you’ve even heard that God helps those who help themselves?

I am reminded of another admonishment attributable to Jesus. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” It goes along with the “Whatever you do unto the least of your brethren, you do unto Me.”

I don’t seek to have my will imposed on others through the force of government. What I try to do is convince people that my thoughts are reasonable, practical, and fair. Exercise your brain, and see if what I espouse makes sense, or if I am full of it. But also apply the same standard to your own life, too. I have learned that it is a foolish endeavor to simply be critical of an idea, without being able to offer an alternative notion. I ask only that my thoughts be considered, and, if practical, be applied on a personal level.

I don’t pretend to aspire to change the world to fit me. I only hope to convince one person at a time of my beliefs. I would not ask the world to bow at my feet unless I first bow at the feet of the world. Not that I bow to any man’s feet.

I am a simple man, on life’s journey through this world. And if I can make someone else’s journey just a little less arduous, so much the better.