It's nice that someone watches MSNBC so we don't have to. Mike Miller at ijreview.com did and reported about it in This Was Not The Answer MSNBC Host Anticipated From Bill Gates About Raising The Minimum Wage. (Via Future of Capitalism .) Apparently Mika Brzezinski, expecting to hear the party line, asked Bill Gates whether he supported a hike in the minimum wage. Gates answered:
Well, jobs are a great thing. So you have to be a bit careful: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution, and you’re going to go buy machines and automate things — or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. And so within certain limits, you know, it does cause job destruction. If you really start pushing it, then you’re just making a huge trade-off.
If workers get too expensive, businesses will build robots to do the work or move where wages are lower. Makes sense, but too often logic gets clouded by good intentions.
Maybe someone will coin a cool word to describe this rule: Regulations are always going to have unintended consequences no matter how noble the intentions.
Sidebar: Speaking of Gates and the government, he can't be too happy that the NSA exploited Microsoft's error reporting system.
Comments