Cities Should Stay Out of Living Wage Business

I feel that a “living wage” is a noble concept, but that it is one that is much harder to pin down as to specifics.

Places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, who attempt to regulate business by forcing them to pay higher wages, or who put a heavier burden on their local taxpayers by raising the wages of their own municipal employees based on an arbitrary non-contractual concept like the living wage are out of line.

The principles of Universality as espoused by John Stuart Mill, in seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, can be used to support fewer regulations of this type.

A “living wage” should be considered as one that would allow employees to earn enough income to be able to afford adequate housing, food, and other life necessities in order to enjoy a satisfactory standard of living.

It is sometimes also referred to as a “minimum wage”. However, what may be the “minimum wage” by law may not constitute what some consider a minimum “living wage” for workers. And the question of what constitutes a “satisfactory” standard of living is hardly agreed upon by the public.

In January, 2006 in Santa Fe, New Mexico the city raised its minimum wage above the federal level of $5.15 per hour to $9.50 per hour, which at the time made it the highest such rate in the United States.

The issue in Santa Fe was the same as that raised all across the country by proponents of increased minimum wage laws: Should an employer be allowed by pay a full-time employee a wage that is no longer enough to live on?

Immigration Nation Bordering on Insanity

For two hundred and thirty years now, the United States of America has been a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. As we have grown up as a nation, that reputation has only grown greater, has only become more solidified.

When people in other countries dream of a better life for them and their families, it is America to which their dreams turn.

There are no hordes of protesters marching in the streets of Moscow, Beijing, Paris, Tokyo or Mexico City hoping to ease their process of becoming citizens in Russia, China, France, Japan or Mexico.

As Neil Diamond famously sang: “They’re comin’ to America!”

For all the negative blather you hear about America from our own liberal press, the foreign press, and the many citizens of foreign nations interviewed on those broadcasts and in their articles, it is America to which they come to escape oppression and infuse hope into their lives.

In our past, we have been an immigration nation. We were born and nurtured through our earliest years as a nation as immigrants from England to a new set of colonies and then a new free country, on what is now the American east coast.

We grew and thrived, spreading across the land from east to west, thanks in large part to massive immigration from other European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

We are an immigration nation at our very core. That is our heart and soul, the accumulated values and experiences of our individual forefathers and our families’ ethnic and racial heritage, combined with the melding into American customs, laws and values that have formed over the centuries.