>Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".

In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.

If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.

> If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist.

I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.

Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.

> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.

I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.

> I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster.

And such quibbling over definitions is irrelevant when people can't even afford the more affordable of the two.

Transacting is one aspect of business - ownership is much more important, and only exists as far as the government enforces it.

Did early humans own the tools they created? Probably. Government limits this in almost all cases. Even the liberty minded founders of the USA created eminent domain which is not limited in which property the state can take, technically. The USA typically is supportive of private ownership, but not the originator. I think ownership exists inherently in humans. As does it's counterpart theft. We have decided that theft is bad and ownership is good over the millennia. It is possible we may change to not value ownership and theft would then have a more positive connotation.

Business cannot exist without two parties transacting. Businesses can exist without ownership. That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them. There does not even have to be capital exchanged. Bartering for labor can and does happen.

> That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them

That would be an insane stance to take. That is essentially arguing in favor of slavery, the idea that someone other than me owns my labour.

You can own the output of my labour if you have an employment contract with me where I trade you that in exchange for something from you, but you can't ever own my labour itself. That would be nuts.

Businesses can be owned by all of the workers collectively, its rather silly to assume that's not true and it needs a singular owner. There is zero reason why this would be the case. Groups of people can agree on things, believe it or not.

I'm talking about all jobs

Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.

We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.

Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?

If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans

So, you would have the government step in and deny the right of an individual to earn what they may need at that moment, in their specific circumstance, to form a contract with another person - a business owner? The bureaucracy knows better, and if the individual can’t find another job at a level to even scrape by then the bureaucracy steps in again, but is this a path to a solid job in 20 years? The higher the wage, especially federally, the more dramatic and onerous the effect.

It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.

I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.

> I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.

This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.

Or employees could group together to form cooperative companies that don't simply work to extract from their labor and actually provides a decent living for everyone. There is no reason that we should be all working together as a group to make a few people wealthier when they didn't do any of the actual work.

We already produce enough food, goods, and housing for everyone in the country to live with their basic needs met. The only reason that isn't happening is because there is a small group of capital owners and corporations that work to create artificial scarcity. It's an absolutely disgusting practice that benefits nobody but people who are already rich

With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.