@RexRed,
RexRed wrote:
Countries are already exploiting the minimum wage. And it requires these countries to all collectively agree on a minimum wage standard in good faith to their trading partners and their people.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Many countries have minimum wage laws and their set points, applicability and enforcement varies widely. I know of no serious efforts to harmonize minimum wages anong nations (except perhaps for the EU, and even they have many exceptions and variations).
RexRed wrote:
Then real "skill" will be based upon actual performance and not simply the cheapest labor source.
A problem is that for poor countries their chief competitive advantage is cheap labor. That's how they get past being poor. I see no way of harmonizing minimum wages among (say) The U.S., Europe Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria or China. Each country has different tax laws, standards of living, prices for food and basic necessities and many, many other factors. More importantly each country as different self interests with respect to the issue. Agreement is impossible precisely because their self interests are in conflict.
Consider the absurdity of our continuing import of agricultural workers from Mexico and Central America while thousands of Americans are unemployed. The Americans would evidently prefer to clllect unemployment checks than do the hard work in the Central valley of California I suppose we could raise the minimum wage to the point that some previously idle city boys could be induced to sweat it out in the fields. However their productivity is likely to be lower and the combined effect would raise the price of the food to uncompetitive levels - creating aan economic burden on everyone else. Very quickly foreign competitors would flood our markets with cheaper produce from their countries, leaving our former producers and their new local employees out of business and everyone worse off that before we started. Alternatively we could erect tariff barriers to protect local agriculture leaving us all with much higher food prices. In addition our trading partners would retaliate, erecting trade barriers against our export products.
It's basic economics. Markets work very well allocating production to those who delivver the highest comparative advantage; levelling inequalities in wealth; rewarding those who are most productive; and greating more goods and services for us all.
It is very tempting to think in terms of imposed "ideal solutions" but very hard to get real people to accept them and harder still to realistically think through their inevitably very bad side effects.
Aesop was very wise and his story about the mice belling the cat tells the story.
