Tell her that without government, there would be more competition between companies and we wouldn’t need a minimum wage.
There’s nearly a guarantee of failure.
I have open-minded parents. They are willing to engage in debate with me. But I can tell that I will never win them over. You can make an irrefutable argument against them, and they feel no pressure to accept it. They remember you when you were a little kid, they remember raising you, they remember teaching you a great deal of the life skills you currently have (including the skill you are using to argue with them, speaking itself). There will likely be no point at which they will accept your opinion - whatever it may be, however well supported as it may be - as more valid than their own. Parents have a huge superiority complex when speaking with their children (especially the ones still dependent on them), that’s just how it is in most cases.
I would posit that she doesn’t understand what it’s like being poor. Those who think with a want vs. need mentality, as minimum wage proponents invariably do, seem to me incapable of imagining that those who lack access to clean water or a house to sleep in might not wither and die, but might decide to substitute a cheaper alternative, like drinking dirty water or sleeping outside (the way people have lived for most of human history).
That being said, it is worthy of note that many or most of the more viable cheaper alternatives are illegalized (expired food, etc.). In that regard the drive for higher minimum wages is ironically a response to previous state interventions (like most other state actions).
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the topic.
Wow, I should show this to my mother. But then, they would probably retort with “people can’t survive with these cheap alternatives”.
And for some reason, my parents get really angry whenever I get on mises.org. Guess they think I have silly ideas that will never work (about removing welfare), that I am for the rich (which I am not, and that if every welfare program was removed today, you would see hordes of dead, poor people.
They think of the business owner as this greedy person, who will exploit people every chance he can get. While this is true, in some part, it is due to Government Intervention, and the blame should not be put on the market.
Also, they think of the rich as this greedy person who witholds stuff from the poor. They think he should be forced to pay the fruits of his labor, because he recieved it because his parents were wealthy.
Maybe this mentality, in part, comes from emmotion, not logic. I don’t know, though…
Perhaps you need to take a more sensitive and moderate stance regarding the kinds of changes you’d like to see when you’re talking to people who don’t understand? If you’re really interested in spreading liberty, you should try to engage people on their own terms, not on yours. You’ll find a lot more success that way.
Can you guess how she (and anyone else of similar sensibilities) would come to such a conclusion? What socialists do is set some (arbitrary) standard said to be the minimum needed for living (though they secretly mean the minimum needed to live without suffering, as though pain were unnatural) and then use the state to enforce that standard. Of course, they fail colossally in achieving their (ulterior) goal, and in fact aggravate the plight of the poor. From this they take a leap of faith and conclude their standards were simply too low. Thus the $4/hr minimum wage becomes a $6/hr minimum wage, guaranteed primary school education becomes guaranteed high school education, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a vicious cycle.
That’s always part of it. I would also say it’s acting on an egalitarian impulse, since the standard set for the poor is based on its comparison with the lifestyle of the rich (can you imagine socialists demanding air-conditioned housing for the poor a hundred years ago? But it doesn’t seem crazy today, although I suppose none of them advocate it since it would conflict with their environmentalism).
Heh. Yeah, that’s pretty sound advice. I wouldn’t recommend actually arguing “they can always eat dog food, drink from the pond, and sleep in a dumpster.”[:P]
Sure, we are so often told that we need the state to keep rich white men from “exploiting” people. But tell me again, who is it that runs the state?