NBC Bay Area, March 29 brings us another example of the tyranny of good intentions:
Signs posted at Subway sandwich shops sadly inform San Francisco patrons -- we hear Willie Brown is a big fan -- that "all SUBWAY Restaurants in SF County DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN Subway National $5.00 Promotions," according to the newspaper.Apparently the economic concept is too difficult for the compassionate left to grasp: Raising the minimum wage also raises the cost of items sold at businesses that employ minimum-wage workers. As these workers go out and spend their raise, the extra income is consumed by the price increases, and the employees are not much better off than they were before.
[…] Apparently, the city's new minimum wage, raised to $10.24 as of Jan. 1, make $5 footlongs an impossible business model.
When employers are allowed to pay wages at a level where each employee’s labor is a net economic benefit to the business, prices remain stable (absent other upward pressures on costs, such as government regulations or taxes).
The best way for a low-wage employee to better his life is to make himself more valuable to his employer through merit, or to get some training and find a better job. When he does that, and the employer has the freedom to pay the employee what his labor is worth, everybody wins.
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.