Not when we are talking about $15 vs $26 per hour. If you think there are workers out there whose productivity is $26/hour, but who can't find work at more than $15/hour, then you can truly disrupt the market and hire all these workers for $20/hour and become rich.

PS: it looks like the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 [1], not $15. You can become richer.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage

>If you think there are workers out there whose productivity is $26/hour, but who can't find work at more than $15/hour, then you can truly disrupt the market and hire all these workers for $20/hour and become rich.

How? If their productivity is $26 / hour but their market rate is $15 / hour, by paying them $20 / hour you'll just post lower profits than companies that pay them market rate.

The workers will leave all the other companies and work for you, so those other companies will be dead in the water and/or stuck raising their own workers' pay to compete

At least, that's how it was supposed to work in theory.. Now that we see people out there going for improved wages/jobs in line with good capitalist doctrine, the business owners are all screaming in rage about a "labor shortage"

Yeah, but there's a soft form of collusion going on. If we live on an inescapable island of 1000 people, and I have 200 jobs, and you have 200 jobs, and Bob has 200 jobs, then the fact that you and Bob pay twice as much doesn't matter. You guys only need 400 workers, total. Those 600 other workers will be left to compete for the 200 jobs I have.

I still get to name my price. And once you see that I can undercut labor costs due to this, it makes no sense for either you or Bob to continue paying twice as much as I do.

And let's not pretend that if you don't have the very best workers, you can't compete. First of all, you can't identify the best. You hope to get lucky, but in reality, you're going to be paying not the best, but those adequate enough to perform the job reasonably well.

COVID assistance has changed the game. Because before, the choice was to have a job or starve homeless. You'd take almost anything in desperation. Remove desperation and people stop acting desperate.

Yeah, I'm really optimistic about the labor market now

This is the first time I've ever seen restaurant workers, delivery drivers, etc taking charge of their own careers the same way Silicon Valley tech workers do.

All of our laws and safety nets are designed around the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest and hop jobs when it suits them, but I never saw that actually happening until this last year.

I'm pretty sure Walmart would prefer to post higher profits than to drive the local hairdressers out of business and have more job applicants than they know what to do with.

You could, if you also had access to the same assets that the employers paying $15/hour do.

Practically speaking, it's relatively hard to enter into a market and outcompete existing firms for labor without a significant amount of capital to offset the existing assets of the employers you're competing with.

The other downside is that it can initially leave a business more vulnerable to a bad economy in the same way corporations buying back shares can make them more vulnerable. With that said, the solution is to slowly increase wages while also building a sufficient amount of capital to weather an economic downturn.

And at the end of the day, anything that went into business expansion and/or profits could have gone at least partially to higher wages instead.

Why do you think the capitalist pay programmers so much?

Because they don't have an alternative. If the supply of programmers was as large as the supply of minimum wage workers pay would drop significantly.

That is exactly what capitalism is about. Prices being driven by supply and demand. Companies certainly try to pay the minimum they can get away with, just like workers look for jobs that pay them the maximum they can find. Companies are not generous (although some claim they are), and workers aren't either. But the competition drives the prices and, in the case of jobs, the salaries. If you are productive, you'll be in demand, and you'll be paid handsomely. If you are productive but live in communist Soviet Union, you'll get very close to whatever else gets in a similar job.

I think you're thinking of a Market Economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy

Capitalism is about the private ownership of the means of production and profits.

But yeah, competition for labor (and other things) via differences in wages are attributes of a market economy.

Capitalism can be a healthy part of this, but sometimes it isn't.

Crony capitalism for instance can provide companies the opportunity to collude so they can artificially suppress wages, which distorts the market economy for labor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Nobody is "glad" to pay programmers that much - they pay as little as they can get away with, which for programmers happens to be a higher floor.

Because they 'currently' have no choice. Give it a few more decades..

It indicates the major flaw of capitalism: It has no moral compass whatsoever. Its a vicious meat grinder. I think the comment is quite insightful, in the employers might think one thing while the realities of capitalism dictate another.

Capitalism is the only system that seems to work at all under the realization that society itself will never have a moral compass.

Outside of small communes, any society that heavily relies on trust doesn't work.

That's not to say that capitalism works well, or that we can't reign in some stuff (public works, monopoly regulation, etc). But a capitalistic base is the only system we've figured out that works at all.

s/capitalism/the universe/g

Anyways, your statement is not true. Capitalism absolutely has a moral compass, it had the moral compass of the consumptive patterns of society; if that compass points the wrong way then either we must take a hard look at ourselves, or, think about what policies are twisting consumptive patterns to go the wrong way.... Probably a bit of both.

The consumers don't drive much. They just exist in the environment they were born into. The idea we vote with our money doesn't hold much water when the system is rigged with regulations set by the largest corporations to their own benefit. Keeping out competition. And that's just never going to stop either, so the economic system needs examined, not hoping for some sort of libertarian awakening.

To make this worthwhile to continue at all, this conversation first needs to clearly define capitalism. Capitalism is not the free market. Markets existed long before capitalism. Capitalism is exclusively paying people less than the value they produce, to create a profit for the employer.

To rectify that economic system's moral compass, you create incentives to moving towards worker-owned enterprise. Instead of the employer/owner running your gas station, the employees that actually work it have 1 share each. To own a share you have to actively work there. That model resolves most issues with capitalism. Worker's unions also resolve it, but in a less ideal way as the tension between employer-employee still exists. Which is just a slightly kinder model as master-slave, or lord-serf.

Not sure about the universe comparison. The universe is chaotic entropy as far as we know, but assigning human misery- that we actively create, to the universe is a bit much.

"Instead of the employer/owner running your gas station, the employees that actually work it have 1 share each."

This is laughably naive. The power, then, devolves to whosoever authority gets to conjure the legal definition of "actual work". How can I be that person, and how can then use my power to enrich my friends and cronies and screw BuckRogers over? After all, all employees are equal, but some employees are equaller, and some are not even employees.

Calling the idea "laughably naive" doesn't seem appropriate when many businesses today are ran this way, some of them producing billions of dollars a year. That makes me question your age, as anyone with some life experience knows about worker co-ops. They're all over the western world. GE and Microsoft are fully aware of them, they've researched this extensively, sending representatives around the globe to figure out why these businesses maintain such high quality. It's the removal of worker alienation.

The authority to define what working there is decided upon by the shareholders, it's a democratic workplace. So you couldn't be that person on matter how hard you tried. That's kind of the point. To finally remove the master-slave class tension from the our places of work and replace it with democracy.

nobody is saying that NO companies should be run that way. I have a lot of respect for worker co-ops. But to say that ALL companies should be run that way is silly. Look at the companies where co-ops are successful: They have either 1) very predictable revenue streams or 2) are in an enterprise where there are almost no material costs (costs are entirely personnel or upkeep/personnel-infra costs).

In this universe are often high-capital-expenditure endeavours. You WANT the wealthy to take the risk on those, and not the workers.

For example, a co-op of 20 needs a million dollars to create a factory to build widget X. Where does this co-op get the money from?

What happens when widget X fails? Are the losses evenly distributed among the co-op members?

What co-op-ing everything winds up doing, in effect, is either 1) socializing the losses of adventures of politically-connected "wantrepreneurs" who are adept at converting political capital, or 2) making participating in risky ventures only accessible to the economically wealthy.

So in the long run enforcing it is likely to cause more economic disparity, not less.

Good thing that I never said all companies were to be worker owned. Because that wouldn’t be my belief. Other than my views not aligning with the premise that you’re pushing onto me, I agree with your points and think that they are good. My belief is that capitalist and democratic business should coexist and even compete for employees. I know where I want to be a developer. I think some of your assertions would be proven false, such as a democratic workplace not having the ability or will to borrow money to expand.

The majority of businesses actually are proven and stable business models. The local convenience store is pretty much the perfect cooperative opportunity. There’s really no reason for 7-Eleven out of Japan to be owning most convenience stores.

Venture capitalism still has a place in the ideal mixed mode economy.[0] For those risky ventures. But that’s really not what the majority of the economy should consist of. And it doesn’t. We’re just really misaligned in our model for what the majority of our economy is.

Unions did a good job of distributing wealth in a free market way. But those still drive out capitalist businesses to cheaper countries. Cooperatives have every incentive to stay here.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_socialism

Not to mention worker-owned companies and co-ops have shown to be able to weather economic uncertainty better. I will say, with the limited data we have. There is some truth that in America, various things rig organizing a company around the idea of co-ops and worker owned, so there are not many and not an abundance of data to be had on this. But the example we do have internationally, they tend to show that they weather the boom and bust cycles better.