Thank you, Mr. Governor
An open letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger:
Mr. Governor,
I thank you for making my life harder. By allowing a minimum wage increase, you are ensuring that my money, as well as the money of every other Californian, will buy me less. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about much, since I’m not in the unenviable position of deciding between food, rent, and medicine. There are many in California who are in that position. You’ve just made their lives harder as well. You’ve made their food more expensive. You’ve made their medicine more expensive.
You are probably wondering how you’ve done this, aren’t you? Well, by capriciously deciding that the labor of minimum wage earners should be worth more, you’re sending ripples throughout the entire economy. You’ve forced business to pay more for the same thing. Who will bear the cost of this? Business, you say? Where is business going to get the money to pay for this? You don’t know, do you? You think that they’re just going to make less profit? As we all know from listening to the media, every business has plenty of extra profits to just spread around. Well Governor, I thought you’d be a little smarter than the second-rate socialists masquerading as our State Senators and Representitives. Apparently, you’re not.
Or, maybe you are smarter than they, and you do know that the citizens of California will end up paying for this, but you think that appeasing the left is worth the price. Either way, please open your eyes. You say you will stand up for the working people of California. Then do so. Stand up for us by not making us pay the price for feel good measures like minimum wage increases. Don’t make them pay more for food, medicine, gasoline, and everything else. You see, we are the ones who will pay this new minimum wage. Not businesses. We, the working Californians, are the reason most of the businesses here exist. They serve us because we pay them to. Now we will be paying more for their services. Can we look forward to another ten cents a gallon, another dollar per movie ticket, another quarter per loaf of bread because of this abomination? Absolutely.
The economy, as much as it can be viewed as a single entity, is a vast matrix of transactions based on worth. If you distort some of those decisions through the force of law, the people making other decisions will make them differently in reaction. The supermarket owner who has to pay employees $1.25 per hour more will raise the prices of his products to adjust, or he might fire an employee. Either way, the effects of this decision will ripple through the matrix and the whole will find a balance acceptable to those making the decisions. The force of law is not enough to overpower the judgement of millions of people acting in their own interests; it will never be.
Please, Governor, let your own judgement and your observation of reality be your guide. Rise above petty partisan games, and don’t repeat the same mistakes of your lamentable predicessor. If you can’t, we will all be worse off.
~A Concerned Californian~
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