Tlaib's call for $20 hr. min. wage demonstrates economic incompetence

During a local gathering, 13th District Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, called for a government mandated $20 minimum wage.

On the surface, more money sounds great! However digging deeper into how setting an artificial bottom in the economy would affect the very people minimum wage laws seek to help is nothing short of disastrous!

A group of people whom have little knowledge of economics, a particular sector of labor or the type of business being adversely affected by raising the level of pay for the type of work being performed is a very one dimensional way of thinking. First, raising the minimum wage does not help everyone making the previous minimum wage—it only helps those the employer chooses to keep or hire.

Minimum wage doesn’t help the worker at the expense of the owner; it helps the more productive workers at the expense of the less productive workers. Worse, the more productive workers usually do not need the help-productive workers are valuable since they generate profit, and they are likely to receive raises or promotions or offerings from competitors.

Minimum wage has also been shown to adversely affect hiring of entry level work for high school workers; some college and low skill impoverished workers get hit the hardest.

Of course the real culprit of increased costs and living standards is not the amount of money being earned; it is the value of the money. Since the government prints the money out of nothing which decreases the value of money—people must work longer and harder to keep pace if at all.

Printing money out of the nothing as the Federal Reserve does only serves to wipe out the middle class and further entrench the poor. But even worse, it cripples small business and eventually destroys the economy as it is responsible for the “boom and bust cycle”—the booms get shorter and the busts grow longer and deeper.

The real solution is to restore an honest monetary system, end legal tender laws, eliminate direct taxes on wages, allow the free market to function free from government interference such as regulations (which only benefit corporations at the expense of small business), and to incentivize innovation while allowing the market to satisfy the needs to the people.

Anytime a politician seeks to control natural resources, productivity, wages, and our level of prosperity, liberty dies along with the economy and people’s happiness.

One more demonstration of Rashida Tlaib being unqualified to lead, and a danger to our success and personal prosperity.