531–540 of 776 posts
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There would be no taxes, only voluntary cooperation.
What is this ideal world, I want to live in it. Reality and all of history tells us that doesn't work at scale.
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It’s also obviously untrue given the fact that wages in the US have stagnated while productivity has continued to grow. That’s despite a floor on wages.
No it's not obviously untrue. Productivity growth has been driven by capital, not labor.
> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces.
You may disagree with my reasoning, but you yourself are making the case that workers are not paid for the value of what they produce.
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Is starvation preferable to getting a low wage job? You start somewhere. Minimum wage laws just reduce the amount of opportunities low skill workers can choose from.
This could just go in circles. What benefit does a job that doesn't provide enough of a wage to survive actually provide to the employee, except a way to waste their time while they accrue debt and wait for an emergency expenditure to bankrupt them?
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Destroys small businesses and consolidates big corps as monopolies.
If you cannot pay your workers a decent amount, perhaps you should not have your small business. Working for a small business shouldn't mean sacrificing your ability to buy food. Offer something better than the large places.
Maybe you can help them by getting them food at lower prices. Just a thought.
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Which is why instead of mispricing labour through minimum wage you can have a negative income tax which makes up the difference. The nice thing is that it will apply to everyone -- working or not, sick or not, on mat leave or not, can't work because of covid or not. You top-up people's income and that's paid for through taxes. You take the benefit of efficiency and productivity from the entire economy and return it t…
I do not think it would help workers. What is more likely to play out is that assuming that when currently minimum pay for a hour is $10 and tax 0% then with negative tax X and no minimum the pay would become $10 / (1-X/100). The worker will get the same (hopefully) and the company will pay less.
> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. > Just as a monopolist can set prices higher than would be the case in a competitive market, a monopsonist can set prices artificially lower. A lot of economic arguments forget these ideas. The labor market is not a free market: companies have more power in negotiatio…
>> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. Textbooks actually say that a worker will be paid no more than the marginal product of labor, and if labor is in short sup…
So we started paying $16+ and hired much higher quality people.
Companies always want to pay as little as possible, but they also have to be able to attract the right level of talent.
Companies will only pay it if people are willing to work for it.
It's basically supply and demand.
The more research i do in economics the less impressed i am with the discipline. Economics is defined as a social science. That point never really struck home with me until recently. I think the fancy models, the cutting edge statistics and clever use of logic blinded me to the fact that the entire discipline is built on top of stories. There’s no gravity, there’s no absolute zero, there’s no kilogram. There’s no fun…
But does that mean that it is not worth doing?
For these fundamental reasons economics is “hard”, but I argue that it is still worth doing because economic policies have a big impact on people’s lives, and partial understanding is better than nothing.
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>> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. > This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. It's correct. You're assuming whatever the worker produces is sold at cost.
No? If value isn't defined as the price at which the product is selling (could easily be above cost), what is it in basic econ? 1. Worker(s) make a thing. 2. Worker(s) sell a thing. 3. All the above worker(s) (if there's more than one) receive a portion of the proceeds. If it reflects their actual contribution to that thing at its selling price, it's their marginal product of labor, putting aside things like reinvest…