I saw the flaw in Thomas Sowell's Assertion

I am like a broken clock - I can be right twice a day. One of the times that I disagree with Mr. Sowell is when he talks about how the minimum wage is bad. The problem with economics is that what might be truthful under one set of conditions is not the same under the second set of conditions. To illustrate my point describe water. Most people will say that it is a liquid. What is water if its temperature is below freezing? It is usually solid.
What happens if the wage is below an individual living wage? A living wage has been described as the amount of money needed to support two working parents and two children. I am describing an individual living wage as what is needed to support an individual. If the minimum wage is too far below an individual's living wage, the person needs to rely on charity or government assistance. Alternatively, the person will work two or three jobs to fill their living wage requirements. This frequently will happen with single parents, parents without custody but whose child maintenance exceeds their minimum wage (there are no food stamps taken for Child Support).

I have heard the argument that minimum wage jobs are meant to be for students to get work experience. That is not reality. The area that I live in has few well-paying jobs for people. The industrial jobs have moved offshore leaving only retail and restaurant jobs. Even in a city like Toronto, jobs that are minimum wage are not just for kids.

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While I suspect that these salaries pre-date the increase of minimum wage to $14.25, the point is that the living wage in Toronto is $22.00. The people applying for these jobs would need at least one other part-time job to live in Toronto depending upon their family circumstances.

When Sowell asserts that increasing the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs, in Ontario it actually was paradoxical. It increased the demand for labour. If a person was able to cover their living wage with one job, they would quit their second (or third job). This meant that companies needed to hire more people. It actually meant fewer minimum wage jobs because businesses needed to provide a premium to good workers to keep them on.

Another assertion that he made was that increasing the minimum wage would invoke a change in technology replacing workers and that was a bad thing. His example of losing the jobs of ushers in movie theatres. Sometimes less optimal solutions need to happen when labour is no longer useful. When I was growing up, we would hire a gang of people during the summer to help harvest hay. As labour became less available, we moved to more capital-intensive means. Traditionally we would harvest hay by bale it. The hay was compressed into a rectangle and bound with twine. The bales could be stooked, and then manually put on wagons to be stored in the barn.

Example of Stooking Hay

Initially, we went with a bale thrower, which cut out at least three people (the ones needed to manually load the wagons).

Example of Bale Thrower

We experimented with blown hay (dried hay was blown into a barn) and hay silage (cut grass was blown into a silo to cure) which eliminated a couple of jobs needed to stack the bales of hay into the barn.

Example of harvesting hay silage
The final refinement occurred after I had grown up which turned baling hay into a one-man operation. One would bale the hay into big round bales and could later pile the hay outside in a huge mound or bale it surrounded with plastic.

Example of Round Baling

Each option was less optimal than the first (one could harvest closer to the corners with smaller equipment) and had a lower nutritional value (excluding silage which had an added component of fermentation). Round baling is the least expensive route to go in both labour and overall capital cost but was my least preferred option for feeding control.
Ultimately farming will be under autonomous control:

[Examples of autonomous tractors]

A second area that I disagree with Mr. Sowell is around the concept of a #UBI. A Universal Basic Income in his point of view is just another form of welfare payment. If you use the negative income tax method similar to the one proposed by Milton Friedman, you would undercut the welfare system.

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I have a contemporary justification for this method in Canada. Currently everyone in Canada is paying property tax (aside for the homeless) plus some form of value-added tax. Even a person renting pass part of the landlord's property tax. A negative income tax would merely be returning the tax that people have already paid. Even the homeless pay the value-added tax.

An alternative option is to provide a means that workers can transition to be investors. Is it welfare if a person receives a dividend cheque instead of a welfare cheque? Having a self-funded UBI would I hope satisfy Thomas Sowell.