Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently Part 2

One thing I've learned about recently is the minimum wage and how destructive that is.  I myself was grateful for it at one time during my middle/high school days because I knew that if I got a job I'd at least be able to make $6.50 per hour, which I think was my first paying job wage.  What is unfortunate about the minimum wage is that it puts a floor on who you can hire.  If you wanted to hire people to say um pump your gas for you or bag your groceries or help you do you laundry you wouldn’t dare pay $6.50 per hour, but maybe you’d pay that person $3.00 per hour.

One thing I learned about the minimum wage is that it was instituted to keep blacks out of the work force.  People/employers/politicians know that you’re paid, typically, what you are worth.  Well if you have no skills then you won’t get hired.  If entry-level jobs and pay are always above your skill level then you can never get started and land that first job.  That is pretty disgusting that that is why they instituted the minimum wage. 

This becomes more apparent of a concept if you raise the minimum wage to say $50 or $100 per hour.  All things the same, i.e. $50 or $100 still buys the same amount right now as it does once the minimum wage gets raised, anything/job below those amounts will disappear and move elsewhere to get accomplished as they still need to get done.  When you consider that $50/hr is a 100k/year job and $100/hr is a 200k/year job that’d pretty well wipe out all lower/middle class jobs, which of course make up most of our economy here in the US.

What is interesting, totally disgusting, and another notch for why I want to home school my kids when it comes to minimum wage is that after 12 YEARS……120 months…TWEEEELVE YEARS of public schooling, i.e. high school graduate, how much are you worth in the economy?  Honestly you’re worth whatever the minimum wage is when you graduate.  You know that.  I know that/lived that.  The public system teaches you NOTHING economically pertinent that increases your abilities.  I was listening to a Warren Buffet thing the other day and he invested with this lady who was running a furniture store and she didn’t even know how to read or write lol.  He invested millions with her and she ran the thing.

12 years…sheesh…..you can go from not knowing where your hippocampus is to a brain surgeon in 12 years.  I crap you not.  You can go from knowing NOTHING about biology to commanding 6 figure plus income as a medical specialist.  If that isn’t a slap in the face for how colossal of a waste of time, energy, human spirit, growth, creativity, then I don’t know what is.  And yet currently we settle for 12 years of that shit and accept minimum wage as just something that makes sense and people do for their first job, even if it is just a short stepping stone to another opportunity where they’re making more than minimum wage.

One last point on minimum wage I learned the other day as it pertains to sound money.  Back in the day they paid workers minimum wage, but because of the silver metal content in the money, i.e. dimes and quarters, a minimum wage worker of today would have to make at LEAST $20/hour to equal what somebody was paid in the 1960’s.  How stupid is that?