Run faster: There’s a new minimum wage in Arizona . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The voters of Arizona passed a number of those pernicious ballot initiatives Cameron argued against Monday night.

Probably the most consequential is a coercive increase in the minimum wage. Warm-hearted people like to think of poor people making more money, but the net consequence of minimum wage laws is to get marginal employees — such as teenagers, the handicapped and people recovering from really bad decisions — fired, while lowering the marginal costs of alternatives to local human labor.

In other words, when you raise the marginal cost of employing goofy neighborhood kids, you essentially lower the marginal cost of adding labor-saving equipment or sending that labor off-shore. This is pure Bastiat, the seen and the unseen. What is seen are the shiny, happy people working at Taco Bell — already a capital-intensive response to high labor costs — for much more money. What is not seen are the many more people who had been working there, but who were fired because they were unprofitable at the coerced higher wage.

The good news is, if you own, say, a real estate brokerage, the cost of independent-contractor labor just went down, and the quality of the labor pool soared.

Remember, avoiding slavery is easy. Just keep running faster and faster…

Here’s are some faster-paced idea to speed the race:

Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch both have news on like.com, a visual search engine. Like images.google.com or whatever, you can do keyword searches for images. But the cooler feature set is to use an image to search for other, similar images. Picture yourself standing outside a house, looking at all the junk mounted around the electrical panel, and the client says, “What’s that?” Wouldn’t it be sweet to whip out your digital camera and reply, “Let’s find out.”

The XBroker nails a manifesto to the door of the Treasury.

Christine Forgione at NY Houses 4 Sale has a stout defense of why you need a Realtor. (Am I the only person who sees this site as one giant link? Real Estate Snippets look like this to me, too, like everything is encapsulated within one giant link.)

Kris Berg from The San Diego Home Blog has thoughts on why a full-blown marketing effort works to sell homes.

The Real Estate Bloggers have a report that more than 50% of NAR members have fewer than four years’ experience. These numbers always astound me. I’ve been told forever that 93 out of 100 brand new licensees do not renew their licenses at the two-year renewal point. This would tend to argue that the accretion of new bodies is very slow, where this article argues to the contrary. The conjecture most ready to hand would be that, of those licensees who do renew the first time, a substantial number must last through a number of renewal cycles. But this must not be true — the turnover rate must be huge among all “generations” of Realtors, with only a few surviving out of each cohort. This would explain why, when I see a real estate sign, I’m always saying, “Now who the hell is that…?”

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