Joe Rogan & Peter Schiff on Minimum Wage

Hello, freak bitches. So you don't think there should be any minimum wage at all? No, no. No, none. So someone working for a dollar an hour doesn't bother you? Well, I mean, it's better than working for zero. I mean, people think that they want to impose their morals and say, well, it's not right for somebody to work for a dollar an hour. Well, people make rational decisions, right? And so if somebody is accepting a dollar an hour, and that must mean that nobody offered them $1.50, nobody offered them $2. I mean, this is a competitive market. I mean, I know you have an employee over here. I mean, could you pay this guy a dollar an hour? Would he work for you? I don't think so. Yeah, because he could get more. Right, but he's educated and skilled, and he's an actual audio engineer. Of course. Right, but it's very difficult for people to get that sort of an education, particularly in...is Puerto Rico thought of as a third world environment? No, it's not. It's not third world, but let's say some kid came in here that had no experience whatsoever, but he wanted to learn. He wanted to just get you coffee and just sit around and be around you. He's not that productive. Yeah, they use interns, right? A lot of radio stations do that, and they don't pay them anything. I know, that's zero dollars an hour. But I don't believe I can't do that. Well, then, yeah, but maybe you pay them $5 now, whatever it is, but people are going to accept a job that's the best one they can get. And so if somebody is working for $1 an hour or $2 an hour, by default, I know that they couldn't find a higher job than that. And the reason is because they don't have a lot of skills. But if you don't have a lot of skills, the best thing you can do is get a job so you can get some skills. That's where you learn skills. You get more skills. There are people that pay to get skills, right? If you go to school, you actually have to pay tuition. If I'm getting paid $1 an hour while I learn something that has value, that's better. You have people now borrowing money to learn a skill. People graduate college and they're in debt. That's a weird argument, right? Because you're assuming that they're going to get a skill. I mean, they might just be handling packages and picking them up and moving to another location and digging a hole. Well even that's like show up on time, be responsible. So discipline, show that you can work. There's a lot of stuff that you learn when you have a job. But the problem with the minimum wage is that the minimum wage basically hurts the very people that it's intended to help. Because the minimum wage basically says if you are a worker, if you cannot convince an employer to pay you $7.25 or $10 an hour, whatever the minimum wage is, then you cannot accept that job. See, it doesn't hurt the employer. It hurts the employee because it limits his options. It limits his ability to sell his labor for the highest price that he can get. It limits his access to the job market. You can't get on that ladder. You remove the lower rungs. So I can't climb up because of this arbitrary minimum wage. Because when you pass a minimum wage, you're not going to force an employer. If I'm an employer and there's a minimum wage of $10 an hour and somebody comes to me and they can deliver $5 an hour worth of productivity, meaning if I hire that person that will benefit me by $5 an hour, I'm not going to pay them $10 an hour because then I lose $5 an hour. The only way I'm going to hire somebody who's going to give me $5 an hour worth of productivity is if I can hire them for less than $5 an hour so I can make a profit. So it's just like a floor. If you cannot deliver enough productivity of whatever that minimum wage is, then you can't get a job. So it's basically making it illegal for people to work. It is the stupidest law that anybody has ever conceived. It should be obliterated. I mean, there are some countries like Singapore does not have a minimum wage. The average income in Singapore is higher than it is here per capita. There's a lot more millionaires there. People have no problem. We didn't always have a minimum wage in the United States. This is a creation of government. But the initial minimum wages, if you want to actually go to the origins of minimum wage in the United States, it was about trying to prevent employers from hiring the Chinese or hiring blacks. They were trying to force the minimum wage as a way to create unemployment. There wasn't a good motivation. But yes, when they try to sell it to the voters, oh, this is all about we don't want people to be exploited. But it's not exploitation. If people voluntarily accept a job because it's the best job they can find, the person who's offering the best job is not exploiting them. They're giving them an opportunity. And if you're denied an opportunity, I mean, there are a lot of people, oh, great, they're going to get the minimum wage up to $15 an hour. Well, what good is it being unemployed at $15 an hour? It's better to be employed at $5 an hour than unemployed at $15 because being unemployed means you make nothing. Red Devils Advocate would be that if you can't afford to pay someone $15 an hour, then you probably shouldn't have employees in the first place. Your business doesn't function that well. No, there are plenty ... Does that make sense? No, because there are plenty of jobs where you have entry level positions. I mean, if you think that there should be no entry level jobs, I mean, you go back to the days of full service gas stations. Back in the day when you didn't have to pump your own gas. Still the case in New Jersey and a few other states. Yeah, New Jersey, they mandated it, but you still don't get the level of service. I mean, if you pulled into a gas station 40 years ago, not only did they pump your gas, but they checked under your hood, they checked your tires, they watched your windows. They did all sorts of things with your car. They didn't make very much money. They lived off of tips by and large. It was the minimum wage that eliminated almost all those jobs. It's the minimum wage that is the reason that we have people so much self-serve. What happened, a lot of these people, these kids that worked in filling stations became mechanics because all these filling stations had a mechanic there. They learned auto mechanics and a lot of them went on to own their own gas stations. Of course, a lot of them, this was their work experience that formed the basis for the rest of their life. Kids had these jobs, summer jobs. There's nothing wrong with entry-level employment. There's nothing wrong with people learning the responsibility of having a job, of showing up, of customer service, of sales. My first jobs were all sales. I was selling subscriptions door to door. I was telephone sales at the Z channel in California. I sold. I was knocking on doors selling cable television. I worked in a shoe store selling shoes. You're a hustler. You were talking about you as a young man. Yes, as a kid. A lot of people think of the minimum wage as applied to adults, adults that have to take care of children, that have to put a roof over their head and food on the table. You're saying that they shouldn't be having those jobs. By the time you are an adult with kids, you should have accumulated the skills to earn a lot more than a minimum wage. That's the argument when people say, hey, you can't afford a family. You can't support a family on the minimum wage. Of course, you shouldn't even be trying to support a family. If you can only earn the minimum wage, you shouldn't have a family. You should realize, hey, I can't afford a family yet. Let me acquire the skills. Before I start fathering children and getting married, let me make sure I can support myself. I mean, a lot of people who are having the minimum wage, they're living at home. They don't need to pay the rent. They're living rent free. What they need is a job. They need maybe gas money, get some money so I can take a girl out on a date. But I got to get some work experience. I got to get out there. What's it like to work? I got to see, I got to live in the real world. That's what used to happen. You don't have all these summer jobs anymore. Kids don't have the opportunity because the minimum wage has already priced them out. A lot of older people now are taking those jobs. The employment opportunities aren't there. When you just raise the minimum wage, all you're doing is raising the bar where you can get your job. You're not helping people. Now, there's always going to be some people that, yeah, there's going to be somebody who will make a little bit more because of the minimum wage. There's going to be those people. There's going to be some winners. But you're going to have lots of people that make nothing because of the minimum wage. And then, of course, because you're driving up the cost of labor, prices are going up. And so who is affected the most by higher prices? Poor people, people who are working on the minimum wage. And not only that, you end up with less quality. I mean, I hate it when I call up a company and I'm just in voicemail hell and I'm going from when ... I would like a real person to deal with. With the minimum wage, those jobs don't exist. There's so many jobs that have been automated out of existence because- Or have not automated shipped overseas where there isn't any minimum wage restriction. That too. I mean, that too. Yeah, you end up ... If you actually get a real person, they're in India. Right. But we have all these people in America who aren't working. Why can't they do those jobs? Yes, you're not going to be able to support a family on those jobs. But before you even get a family, you can have that job. And then maybe five or 10 years later, you'll work your way up the ladder. You'll get a skill, and then you can support a family. But nobody is supposed to be able to support a family. And if you try to tell an employer, hey, you got to pay your fry cook enough money to support a family, you can't do that. There's not enough productivity cooking french fries. You can't support a family if all you can do is cook a french fry. You need to learn how to do something else before you can support a family. And you can't put that on the employer. Now when you say that Singapore has a higher average income, is that because ... And no minimum wage. Is that because there's a shitload of billionaires that have moved to Singapore because they don't have a minimum wage and because they can exploit lower class people or people that don't make much money? The millionaires and billionaires are really not even affected by the minimum wage. What you'd have to look at is the rate of unemployment in Singapore, which is tiny. Do they have good tax rates in Singapore? They do. Do they have good incentives for very rich people to move there and doesn't that jack up the minimum wage, or not the minimum wage rather, the average income? Yeah, well the fact that you have entrepreneurs that are succeeding in Singapore because they have small government and low taxes means that there's a lot of competition for workers. And so that's what bids up wages, right? Competition. I mean, I've got no problem with a vibrant market bidding up wages. You just don't want the government to try to artificially force wages above their productivity. Because it's ultimately your productivity that determines your wages.