My point is that it is most certainly not voluntary. There are people in the world who are not as lucky or intelligent or resourceful as you, me, and most others on HN. Try to empathize and put yourself in the shoes of the disadvantaged, they do not know the world as we do, they cannot shop around for high paying jobs, and if they miss a paycheck, they may very well lose their housing.
Given this asymmetry, society absolutely needs to step in to enforce basic protections that the free market cannot solve.
Asymmetry and inequalities are everywhere. I don't know which perfect egalitarian symmetric insert here another utopic adjective society you live in, but it's not certainly not mine
The elimination of minimum wage would marginalize poor people even more.
It's easy to think that the demand for labor is nearly infinite but at a super low wage. I mean, I'd gladly pay someone $2/hour to clean my house, and there are probably people desperate enough for money to buy food that they would do it. But minimum wage laws generally forbid it.
But consider employees at McDonalds. Walmart cashiers. Any other minimum wage job. If you eliminate the minimum wage, you create a race to the bottom. Eventually, you end up with people willing to flip burgers or work a cash register for $2/hour. They'll be living in a cardboard box with all their belongings in a shopping cart, but at least that $2/hour will buy them some semi-decent meals to survive.
Without a minimum wage, sure we'll probably see 0% unemployment, or something very close to it. But you'd end up absolutely tanking the median wage and standards of living. The term "working homeless" would replace the term "working poor" until some extremely low-quality housing popped up that someone could live in for $200/month.
you create a race to the bottom
you end up with people willing to flip burgers or work a cash register for $2/hour
Do you think you can force business to hire at any rate ? Or does the rate needs to follow productivity and current standard of living indexes ? What if your increase this rate by 100x, what happens ?
But you'd end up absolutely tanking the median wage and standards of living
....yes? Considering that's what we have right now? You don't need to imagine this scenario. We're in it right now. In Oregon, the minimum wage is $10.75/hour.
> Do you think you can force business to hire at any rate ? [...] What if your increase this rate by 100x, what happens ?
Obviously not. I knew someone would try to make this argument, but I think its absurd.
> Or does the rate needs to follow productivity and current standard of living indexes ?
I'd make it follow a standard of living index. What the standard should be is up for debate, but I think at a minimum, someone working 40 hours a week should be able to live in a studio apartment on their own and buy food without government assistance. Two people working 40 hours a week each should be able to have a 2-bedroom apartment while raising a kid.
> If the scenario where people don't work for 2 USD/hour they have 0 of salary. So the second scenario where they work for 2 USD / hour makes everyone more rich, I would be more inclined to believe the median wage would increase
You're forgetting that the people formerly making minimum wage would either have their wage reduced to the hypothetical $2/hour or end up being replaced by a worker willing to work for $2/hour.
If you lower or remove minimum wage, every minimum wage job will have a reduction in the wage. When an employer pays minimum wage, they're implicitly saying "I'd pay you less, but the government won't let me."
> The most important is that people worked and sustained themselves.
Only by a technical definition of "sustained".
....yes? Considering that's what we have right now?
You're forgetting that the people
Societies make a decision to be as they are. If you're trying to say that you prefer an inequitable society, that's fine. If you're trying to say that nature is inequitable, and that society has some responsibility to coordinate with it to preserve that inequity, I'd say 1) that's a weird nature-religion, and 2) property rights protect the weak from the strong.
Unfortunately the chances of everyone are rigged because of each of our societies history and past injustices. That's something we need to deal with and it's a hard problem
I think they should be allowed to vote and agitate for whatever they think is best for them. And thus.... viola, minimum wage and subsequent increases.
Although I know majorities are a touchy subject with libertarians since there are like six of you total nowadays.
So, because the world used to terrible centuries ago, and still is in some undeveloped or wartorn nations, we should be OK with it continuing to be terrible here in one of the richest nations in the world, even though it doesn't have to be?
we should be OK with it continuing to be terrible
99% sure Venezuela's inflation problems come more from the fact that the president-dictator takes monetary policy advice from a ghost-parrot, and not as much from implementing occupational safety standards that have been normal in North America and Europe for a century.
The answer is at least in part that the state attempted to deliver benefits to the poor not directly and honestly through taxing and redistribution, but through wage & price controls, and outright nationalization. Direct massive manipulation of the market. Obviously implementing occupational safety standards, or collecting resource extraction royalties at a rate similar to Canada wouldn’t have had this effect, neither would have a modest increase in the minimum wage that reflected natural wage growth. However there is something to GPs point; the history of labor laws in developed countries haven’t only altered the conditions a competitive labor market must operate in, but also reflect changes that have already been achieved through the competitive market. The laws against child labor, for instance, were only possible once a critical mass of the population had already pulled their children out of the labor market as productivity and living standards increased and made this possible (and don’t forget that unpaid child labour was rampant in agricultural families, and to this day remains largely exempt from legal censure in developed nations).
As productivity reaches higher levels, labor has been able to demand a greater share of the surplus through competitive labor markets and eventually agitate to institute that in laws, but it’s always been an interplay between these two effects. The massive unprecedentedly rapid reduction in absolute poverty in China where millions have left the brutality of rural poverty to work in factories that many of us in more developed nations would consider inhumane has seen this played out in an incredibly compressed timeline, and I’m certain that there are very few people living in a Chinese special economic zone who would trade places with a resident of Caracas in 2018.
Anyway, if the cost of work becomes overnight at minimum 1 million USD per month, what do you think would happen ?
So: yes, the rising inequality is a problem, no matter how badly some want to sell that as just a part of life (at least the way we currently structure it).
And i don't want a communist utopia. But also not reducing taxes for top earners to zero.
All it matters is people interacting voluntarily, that's the only argument against minimum wage.
Ex-felons would also "get away with it" (remember there are always at least two sides in an exchange), but they would be in a better situation if they accepted the job