> In a free market you would be bidding up worker salaries to hire and retain the most efficient workers. Demand would often increase the price of labor and perhaps the output.
That's not necessarily true. You assume that demand for workers exceeds supply. That is true for some vertical skilled labor. The often unspoken truth is that most jobs are commodity positions and people can be interchanged (from a labor standpoint). There is no upward trajectory of salaries for those positions.
Re:What harm do minimum wages do?
by TheOtherHobbes on Thursday August 20, 2020 @06:29AM
(#24221798)
Capitalism pretends to be an efficient competitive utopia of personal opportunity but in reality it's monopolistic, oppressive, hostile to small businesses, and even more hostile to resilience and collective initiative.
It inevitably generates huge concentrations of capital which have immense political, social, and economic leverage, with no effective democratic checks and balances - except patchy application of anti-trust action.
I think it’s time to pull out the ‘splitting’ distinction between “industrial capitalism” and “financial capitalism”. I’m an economist, but in no way enamoured with free markets and laissez-faire attitudes as the default for solving everything. I think Mark Fisher had it right in his Capitalist Realism that Capitalism has totally blinded modern western (and other) societies to the existence of any possible alternative form of organisation. However, the kind of financial capitalism we now live under in most of the West—the kind that generates huge income inequalities, concentrates power in the hands of the financial sector, disproportionately favours incumbents, and corrupts our political systems by means of lobbying by special interest groups—lacks all the oft-cited advantages that Capitalism is supposed to bring in tow in exchange for its shortcomings.
In almost every sector of the modern American economy, the rules benefit capital over competition. In my area in New York, there were dozens of small bakeries pumping out good bread... today we pay more for shitty frozen stuff baked at the supermarket. ISPs were plentiful, now they are a monopolist service that costs 10x more than they did in 1999. We broke up standard oil decades ago... That monopoly is mostly reassembled today and we have weaker competitive forces around prices of fuel commodities than we did in the 90s.