minimum wages - just equilibria - uniqueness of the moment

Been pretty busy for a while. Haven`t even been writing down stuff that I plan to write about, but in any case here are a couple thoughts that stuck, in short form. It would be interesting to develop them more thoroughly later on.
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First:

Increasing minimum wages may be good for long term economic growth.

The logic? A simple economic argument and three lines (plus a dotted one) on a graph can be used to show that increasing the minimum wage will increase short term unemployment. This means that there are more workers competing for jobs. This gives them incentives to go and improve their skills, either through education or apprenticeships or whatever. Since wages are higher, and it is harder to find those jobs, they face an absolutely higher incentive to improve their productivity. Productivity is, at the root, the sole basis of long term per capita economic growth. When people are more skilled they can be more efficiently combined with capital, making returns to capital higher. This also acts as an incentive to investment in technology. ALL of which are good for productivity. Again, the basis of per capita economic growth.

However, there is an important effect pulling against this. Higher wages also have a marginal effect of reducing returns to capital in the short run. This reduces the funds available to companies for investment. It is certain that this effect will be larger for SOME companies in the mid to long term than the effect of having more talented workers in the labour pool, but which effect is larger is a matter of debate. Incidentally, higher wages themselves act as a direct incentive to investment in technologies to save money on labour. When technological progress is achieved, each hour of labour can become more valuable.

THUS, there is a very solid argument in favour of the proposition that increasing a minimum wage can be beneficial for long term economic growth via its effects on technical progress (people need to improve skills, companies want to spend on technology, and technology companies have more reason to suppose that there will be markets for products that they will invest in producing).

Obviously this does not mean that minimum wages should be raised ad infinitum. It does, however, imply that the economically optimal level of unemployment, as determined by minimum wages, is likely to be quite a bit higher than full employment. Not, as sometimes argued, because a pool of unemployed cheap labour is good for business, rather, because this creates incentives for workers and companies to take steps to become more productive.
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This one is tougher ...

Think Bentham's panopticon, J S Mill's discussion of behaviour as limited by socially acceptable norms, Foucault and docile bodies and the state's ability to control behaviour just by surveiling the public, the conspiracy theory movie called "Enemy of The State", China's use of online monitoring, Britain's use of CCTVs, and finally, the enormous power held in the hands of the global public via the internet and mobile telephony.

Conclusion?

Well ... Technology has significantly increased the state's ability to impose it's power by surveiling the public. This carries certain risks. However, technology has increased the public's power to monitor, record and disseminate information about actions of the state. (Clearly this is not absolute, but surely more so than before). It has also increased the public's power to maintain some level of panopticon-like social observation, with the sheer number of cameras on phones, etc, around the world, that can instantly transmit information just about anywhere.

The result is perhaps a fairly just equilibrium, with a balance achieved with the combination of society's ability to maintain soft social pressure via perceived possibility of observation, society's ability to observe and disseminate information about the government, and the state's ability to use its surveiling capacity such that the dominant forces in society can feel sufficeintly comforted that they will not wish to impose more draconian forms of state intrusion that carry the risk of driving the public to turn things upside down.

All, of course, with two implicit assumptions: first, that the arms of the state are fairly accepted or tolerated by a fairly substantial portion of society, and that they also generally represent the public interest including at least some diversity of groups, and second, that there exists some mechanism through which society's ability to monitor the state places either implicit or direct limits on the state's use of coercive power such that it is not deemed as unacceptable (at least not sufficiently unacceptable to drive revolutionary fervour) by a substantial portion of the society

Of course, if the state limits the ability of citizens to disseminate information or filters such information (with reasonable allowances for state security, etc), then no such equilibrium can be achieved.

That is to say that I think we are not particularly far from this just equilibrium (at least here in Canada), but that both the public and the state should remain vigilant to ensure that we do not sway too far either way. Neither the chaos of unlimited freedoms nor the chains of imposed order are desirable. As Rousseau argued, we are in a sense forced to be free by social and state rules. At the end of the day, the subtle nature of social coercion in the information age may leave a space for us all to be more free, so long as this just equilibrium is maintained.
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Think Douglas Adams and the improbability drive. Think infinite time and infinite numbers of particles, each of which are made of a finite number of constituents in a finite number of states. Consider any given object as being defined in physical or conceptual relation to, or opposition to, all other entities.

Is it possible for the same thing to happen twice?

What are the ontological implications of an answer to the negative as opposed to an answer to the affirmative?

What parameters are needed to answer these questions? Can it be supposed that empiricism has anything meaningful to offer to such contemplation?