Posted by
Conservatarian on Monday, January 22, 2007 1:28:52 PM
Illegal immigration
augments the supply of labor, and many Chicago school economists
concede that supply generates demand, i.e. illegal workers who work for
low wages indirectly create the low wage jobs they take. Low wages give
entrepreneurs incentives to expand their business, create jobs and
provide services at reduced costs. For that reason minimum wage is
killing America's native indigent - if unfettered the price of their
labor would drop to a natural level and they could compete economically
with illegals, who would then lose some incentive to come to this
country.
In
lieu of finding jobs in the labor sector (because of an artificially
high minimum wage) the poor either don't work at all (thanks to the
coddling effect of welfare) or they go to college (which they afford
through government subsidies). Like dollars, an expanded pool of
college diplomas naturally loses value at the individual unit level,
and matters are not at all helped by diminishing standards of
curriculum or the hundreds of thousands of athletic scholarships handed
out every year that produce slews of "student-athletes" not fit for
either the NFL or the work force.
The
jobs available to the average liberal arts graduate are usually either
private sector bureaucratic pencil pushing or lower tier service sector
positions (retail, administrative, etc.) Because of the deflated value
of the requisite skills and education for these positions, they become
lower paying, enticing some of these same graduates to pursue even more
education. Meanwhile, government is unintentionally willing to absorb
the remainder of college grads into its behemoth bureaucracy,
eliminating the incentive for individuals to pursue alternatives to
higher education and restricting market forces that would have shrunk
the labor pool for the private service sector and driven wages upwards.
Ultimately, the population remains as stratified into economic classes
as before, but now the lower middle class requires a college diploma to
remain so, and automatically incurs a serious debt before they even
start out in life.