Ontario Minimum Wage Hike Is Costing Us Money (Freedom Minute) - a Rebuttal

Yesterday @joshsigurdson posted about his views on the increase in minimum wage that we have experienced.
Ontario Minimum Wage Hike Is Costing Us Money (Freedom Minute). To be honest, I frequently agree with World Alternative Media but sometimes I have reservations about their messages. Even when I disagree with their conclusions it is with the acknowledgement that they are providing important information and opinions that points to a larger picture.

Capitalism (and communism and socialism etc.) represent a particular form of social evolutionary force at play. Years ago, our small community had several mom and pop stores which sold office supplies to the local businesses. These stores had been stable for decades and "department stores" did not make inroads into their sales. Because of their maturity, the sales forces and the business departments had wages and salaries that were well in excess to minimum wage. Then "Staples" came to town.Staples is a retail chain part of a multinational conglomerate. The first thing that they did was to give away paperclips. Meanwhile the established small retailers who relied on the sales of paper clips fairly quickly closed. The Staples store has a virtual monopoly in the local market so the prices now are comparable or more than before. The dozens of people employees who had been paid higher wages lost their jobs to be replaced with 1/2 dozen minimum wage employees. Not only did local businesses lose expertise (granted it was in paper clips and pencils) of the local retailers but they also lost diversity. Potential multiple manufacturers of paper clips were reduced to a single manufacturer with the loss of quality.
In other words survival of the fittest was at play and while society benefits from economies of scale ... becomes more efficient, there is a trade off with effectiveness. If only a single type of paper clip exists in a society which works for the majority of paper clip requirements it is more efficient than having several paper clips which suit individual requirements (Hey I might need a left handed paper clip someday).

Another thing rarely considered is that companies like Staples or Walmart siphon equity out of a community. Having smaller businesses increases the velocity of money in a community. When you have more people employed and receiving more money, they buy more goods and services locally and those businesses in turn hire people who buy more goods and services locally.

While only anecdotal, this article from the Lindsay Advocate demonstrates how diner reacted to the increase of minimum wage from $11.60 to $14.00 per hour.

By his calculations [the owner], and taking into account the other changes brought forward by the Province like more holiday pay for his 20 employees, two sick days with pay, and more expensive employee contributions because of the higher wages, it was going to cost him about $100,000 a year.

His solution was to add more hours and more staff.

St. Dave’s launched a three-night-per-week buffet about a month ago that was “born out of necessity,” he says, but has been so well-received he knows they made the right choice... That’s when he hired five entry-level, part-time staff — a dishwasher, front-end staff, and kitchen staff for buffet nights on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Putting more money in the hands of poor people means that you change the slope of the demand curve of supply/demand chart. As far as having a government impose the minimum wage, it is because workers in this world cannot trust companies to work fairly. Historically union leaders or people trying to unionize were murdered to prevent the workers from collective action. Minimum wage forces all companies to treat their employees with minimum standards. Consider the following. I go out to a restaurant with a group of people every Saturday morning for breakfast. We don't go to Tim Hortons or McDonalds but to a locally owned small restaurant which serves about a dozen different types of bread freshly baked in the store. We not only go for the food but also the intrinsic aspects being friendly with the owner and the staff who know each customer by name. I think they increase their prices by about $1.00 for a meal but it is still less for more compared to food chains. Do I care that it increased in price ... I just tell people invest in bitcoin (or STEEM).