This is actually very common in the UK. People do self employed work and get paid less than minimum wage. People like cleaners are often self employed
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You have to start somewhere when you’re self employed, you are paid what you are worth and the value of what you are doing.
I did my apprenticeship for a year and then when I was 20 21 I was earning less than minimum wage, I bought my first house at 22.
People on my site do uber eats in the evening and they often make a nice extra to their daily wage just driving around. Seems really easy to get into
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That’s a fair point, I think Sowell uses data really well to make his points though. So I’m sure if we was to read one of his articles about the subject he would explain his example in better detail with data to back up his point.
And to use your example if tell someone who owns a hand car wash that you have to pay $15 an hour per worker it’s unlikely they would hire more than 1 worker if that (might do it then selves or hire family and further keep costs down) and your potentially pricing people out of a job who are willing to work for far less than that. With that $4 he could hire 3 people to work, which means 3 families would be better off as opposed to 1, wash more cars, potentially make more money. These kinds of laws hurt these smaller business and the people who want to or are willing to work on them the hardest.
Only economist can answer this properly but I suspect that even if you raise the minimum wage to a decent amount and somehow get the business to keep the number of jobs intact; you are eventually going to forward the cost to the customers which would raise the cost of products for everyone, including the people earning minimum wages.
At that stage because of inflation, the new minimum wage will again become insufficient.
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That cost has ALREADY been passed onto consumers. The issue is that wages haven’t even come close to matching the rise in consumer goods’ prices.
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I’ve got his book “race, politics and economics” good read
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I really strongly doubt Sowell’s gone into the accounting factors. In my opinion I believe he’s wrong, so long as management employs people to maximise their usefulness they will get much more worth than the current minimum wage out of them. They should get multiple times more worth
To function optimally the carwash needs to have the optimal number of people to process a line of cars. If they can’t do it quick enough the cars will drive off to another car wash or get it done another day. So the number of people isn’t based on the cost of labour alone. If you pay less for fewer employees and get less revenue you make less profit.
As for $4 an hour. That’s £3 an hour roughly. Can anyone even pay their rent on that? Wouldn’t you get more than that doing a paper round lol
For the record both Williams and Sowell are very conservative ‘morally’ and financially. They’re both controversial figures in the black community to say the least. And I’d speculate that they’re somewhat embarassed within their mainly white peer group by some part of the black communities behaviour. Which I think may form some of their social positions.
No, it’s influenced by the fact that Walmart can charge any price because there’s no alternative in many of the places Walmart is present.
Walmart opening up is always a death sentence for local businesses. Even certain boroughs in New York City won’t allow a Walmart to open up.
Perhaps instead of a minimum wage every government in the world could enforce mandatory unions for large multinationals that essentially have a monopoly or duopoly. Amazon’s one of the richest multi-nationals in the world, so force them to pay every worker a much higher wage. And let them all have the legal right to kick Bezos in the nuts while we’re at it
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I don’t know how that got posted. deleted now. I am half asleep. Will respond later.
There’s an even bigger enemy that Walmart if you can believe it…
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Sick of this woke nonsense the US is importing everywhere to get out of doing any actual substantive work towards equality.
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I believe dollar stores are government subsidized, that’s why they’re so cheap. The idea I suppose is to provide poor communities with products that would otherwise be unaffordable.
It’s another example of the government opting to put a bandage over a gaping wound rather than attempting large scale reform of an unsustainable economic model.
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Look at food deserts like the one we have in Baltimore. There are really nice, upscale grocery stores in the two mostly white areas of the city (Harris Teeter, Whole Foods) and basically no grocery stores in places like Guilford or Pig Town. There’s a Giant Foods near Waverly. But for a lot of those areas you’d still need a car because mass transit sucks in the City.
I wonder if anyone’s running studies on how expanded grocery services that popped up during COVID could help bring produce to areas that are typically reliant on Dollar Stores and convenience stores for groceries.
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They might have to circle back on that and address it later 
So either this undercover officer was doing nothing, demonstrating that the police sometimes beat peaceful protestors for no good reason, or there was a reason he got beat, in which case he was there undercover acting as an agent provocateur and his colleagues mistook him for a rioter.
To be clear, I reckon it was definitely the first one.
I had wondered previously whether or not being a police officer was enough to offer a black person some exemption from the incredible racial injustices of the US legal system, doesn’t seem so.
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Definitely the first one.
The US are currently in a war of words with Russia and China - tensions in both the Black Sea and the South China Sea are ramping up to no end. The US sending warships to both places - as Moscow and Beijing respond. China seem determined to poke Washington by their hostilty to Taiwan and Russia sending it’s troops and artillery toward Ukraine and Crimea.
A mad question, but… could it literally happen? Could the West be about to go to war with the East?
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It’s funny nobody is taking Biden seriously 
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