The benefits to raising Ontario’s minimum wage revolve around Corporatism

A few people not to listen too when the subject of minimum wages are brought up are Big corporations and individuals who’ve never started and/or run a successful small business in their lives. Reason being is that they couldn’t possibly understand the real world of business. This post is in response to a Toronto Star article that can be read by clicking the link below:

The benefits to raising Ontario’s minimum wage are tangible

If I’m going to be a doctor I’m not going to take doctoral advice from Lawyer, if I plan on becoming a Lawyer I’m not going to take Law advice from electrician it’s really that simple. But of course, everybody wants to be an expert because the assumption is that I was paid for doing a job so all businesses must or should have truckloads of money before hiring anyone in the first place? Makes a lot of sense right, if someone is privileged enough to start a business in Canada they should first have enough money to pay at least $14 an hour and if they don’t they should start the business all by themselves or be forced to get a loan or go into debt in order to meet the demands of the government.

Well, it’s a decent argument, the minimum wage argument is also the reason why the cost of living is so high and why manufacturing jobs are continuously leaving Canada, it’s also an excuse for people to be on welfare, so if you like government handouts minimum wages is a great way to get the government to give you more. Minimum wages also assist on helping big corporations to create monopolies in Canada, because again if you want to start a big business and you have little to no start-up capital now you have to take on more risk by offering investors more incentives to hand their money over to you, which of course then leads crony capitalism.

Because remember for most people in who start a business the moment they take on a loan the clock starts ticking on when they have to pay back that borrowed money, so obviously to protect themselves these small, medium and large corporations will look to a politician to get a particular law passed that protects their business interests. This, of course, leads to lobbyists which eventually turns into corporatism or corporate welfare.

Now they people getting stuck paying this corporate welfare bills are the people at the bottom opting for more welfare. Another example to explain how silly regulations that many leftists believe are created to help the poor actually make the situation of the poor worsen are the regulations around the housing. There is an equivalent to minimum wages in the rental housing market called Rent Controls.

Rent controls put a cap on how much money a landlord can spend on fixing his property, of course, the loophole to this law is that the moment a tenant moves out the landlord can charge the new tenant anything he/she wants but what rental controls do is they prevent rental housing from being built, because in effect what the government does with rental controls is it puts a cap on earning potential, which of course leads to the problem Toronto has right now which is an apparent lack of housing, which of course revolves around the CMHC and other governmental bodies incentivising home ownership.

So now when given the choice banks and builders of housing will opt to build condos over rental housing which equates to real estate investors and others purchasing condo’s as rental units and because these real estate investors also understand rental control laws they also price rental controls into their rental price. Being that it’s much harder for the government to monitor condo ownership foreign and domestic owned by real estate flippers and real estate cash flow rentals the artificial demand of a lack of housing is then created, adding to the problem is the fact that families and real estate investors often have different demands. Real estate investors want condos that are 1 – 3 bedrooms and sie isn’t that important to a real estate investor because they won’t be living in the condo unit so condo units in Toronto, for the most part, aren’t being built for families, or I should say aren’t being built based on market demand.

Then what ends up happening is that rental properties in demand are now more expensive than they would have been. How this relates to minimum wages is that many Ontario employees are paid more than their jobs demand which of course raise the wages of other professions, which in turn makes Canada very uncompetitive from a manufacturing standpoint which then, of course, causes manufacturing jobs to leave Canada. Now the genius of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has been their Parties ability to grow the public sector which of course gives the economy the illusion that it’s growing.

So when Kathleen Wynne raised minimum wages and when Justin Trudeau pledge that his government would engage in deficit spending because interest rates were at an all-time low people like David Olive can say look minimum wages are working in Ontario, even though as it stands now, minimum wages are working for the public sector and last time I checked public sector jobs rarely if ever paid less than minimum wages because of course public sector jobs come at the expensive of the private sector.

The entities that love minimum wage hikes are big corporations, in Ontario examples of big corporations are companies like Walmart, Loblaws, Metro, McDonald’s, Amazon and other large corporations that can unload minimum wages workers by simply replacing them with machines. There are even Canadian banks replacing humans with machines. In fact recently I went to Metro and they replaced their self checkout machines with an upgraded self-checkout machine, which is an indication to me that these self-checkout machines are now so plentiful that the companies making them are probably having bidding wars to get into big corporate establishments which should be worrying to Canadians because many of these self-checkout machines aren’t even made in Canada, because, well we’ve priced ourselves out of a lot of manufacturing jobs.

So this is the basis of why I call David Olive’s article The benefits to raising Ontario’s minimum wage are tangible is an example of corporatism in Canada. When you raise the barrier to entry you’re in fact putting more responsibility on the government to solve unsolvable problems. One of the main reasons people in Canada are poor is because of laziness, mental and government intervention. There would be no joblessness if it not been a minimum wage.

Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage.

There are quite a few nations in Europe that know that minimum wage laws were derived from racists, who wanted to assure themselves that immigrants, infidels, and people they thought were beneath them would never be able to outcompete a native for a job. That’s the roots of minimum wage laws, that’s the actual history of minimum wage laws. workers unions have always been fighters for fair or higher, livable wages. Even though these ideologies are rooted in racism or nativism I do believe they have a right to exist IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR.

Workers unions do not use force (well at least they’re not supposed to) to achieve their goals, instead, people unions as vehicles to boycott a business and it’s profits. So in countries with a welfare state like Denmark, there’s no need to have a minimum wage because quite frankly the workers refuse to work for anything less than a wage set the unions.

What this leads to in Denmark is a high cost of living and some of the highest tax rates in the world. However, in Denmark, their tax system, for the most part, revolves around tariffs and not income taxes, so the concept of volunteerism and free market principals still exist within the socialist framework of their economy. In Canada, we get taxed for working hard (income taxes) which results in a lot of Ontario employees not doing overtime, the barrier of entry into small business is very high so what you get a lot of in Ontario are small businesses that intentionally don’t want to grow because as they grow and take on more employees not only do they have to worry about unions but they also have to worry about minimum wages, because in Ontario simply sweeping floors or pumping gas for customers will yield an employee $14 an hour.

So, what you’re getting a lot of in Ontario are family run or 2 and 3 people run businesses, which the Liberals and other leftist groups label as tax cheats, this is why Bill Morneau wanted to change the corporate tax code, he was, of course, targeting doctors, dentists, Lawyers etc.  Because as every person in small business knows because of the existing regulations none of our professionals with small businesses want to hire anyone, it’s too risky, small businesses can also be sued which is another cost that they have to worry about.

 

But you see when you’re a writer or when you’re working for a company and you get a paycheck you don’t have to worry about these things, the only thing you care about is that your paycheck is there when you expect it to be. Small businesses, on the other hand, can’t grow because both the very rich, the middle class and the poor receiving government subsidies, regulations and protections are all against them. Leftists in Canada have somehow conned Canadians into becoming corporatists and if you read David Olive’s article it may appear to you, that he’s a corporatist too

Interesting times ahead.