> Just because people earn less and have less money, the economic output in goods won't change. Goods will simply become cheaper.
Wait, what? That is obviously not what happens. If 100K people lose their jobs, they have less money which means they buy less stuff. But nobody is going to materially change prices as a result of what 100K people do out of 300M. Those 100K people are just screwed.
> Criminals always had a competitive advantage. It's the job of law enforcement to make sure this doesn't happen - if that doesn't work you have a bigger problem.
Law enforcement is never 100% effective. People paying each other under the table is rampant and most of them never get caught.
Every time you impose more burdens on law abiding citizens, you increase the wages of crime.
> Depends on what the compliance cost is. Need to hire an extra guy to do paper pushing for compliance? This cost (maybe) can be spread. Need to use more expensive materials? Bigger corps won't have more advantages here than they had anyways (buy in bulk etc.)
Both of those benefit larger entities. Suppose you sell a unit for $100 and your previous unit cost was $80 but with the more expensive materials it's $90. Then you need to sell 50,000 units to cover a $500,000 fixed cost instead of 25,000 units. But you only sell 40,000 units, so you're out of business. The larger company sells a million units and has no such problem.
> Maybe they should use robots - if a robot can perform the work for less than what could be considered a livable wage for a human worker, the human worker is best used elsewhere. You just made a good argument that minimum wages could increase economic output.
But that's what would happen regardless if the human worker could find another job that pays more than the one being automated. The issue is that the human worker would prefer $5/hour to unemployment, and the employer would prefer a $5/hour employee to automation but prefer automation to an $8/hour employee, so an $8 minimum wage puts the employee on the unemployment line.
> The dignity of a job that is paid so badly that the government has to indirectly subsidize the industry by giving the worker additional government aid, even though he has a paid job? Another great example that the free market fails at setting fair wages.
Which is more undignified, working a job supplemented by government assistance or being unemployed and 100% reliant on government assistance?