What harm do minimum wages do?

So if your goal as economy is to select for producing nice products at affordable rate then adding purchase decision to low income workers is best way to let them get out of powerty. Maybe they don't need shitty food produced by rich folk with connections to gov but computer for their childeren or some tool to start business?

Some consenting adults don't have the power to negotiate fair transactions so we, as a society, can use our collective bargaining power to define what a fair transactions is.

The value of their production is NOT the value of the production of the enterprise in which their production is employed.

Take a worker, whose work is worth $5 an hour according to market forces. Employing him to operate a $40,000 bakery, which generates $40 an hour in operating profits sans labor costs, does not mean the worker's labor is suddenly worth $40 an hour.

You can 100% pay workers what their labor is worth, and make a profit, and believing otherwise is a layman's understanding of the factors of production and the definition of value, and exactly the fallacy that underpinned Marx's quackery.

I see so many of these comments in Hackernews, which misunderstand basic economics, endeavor to expose some Big Lie allegedly being promoted by Economics/capitalists, and seek to defend some allegedly exploited underdog who needs laws limiting private-property/contract rights to be protected from said exploitation.

Also, there is no indication of information asymmetry playing any role in contract negotiations. Signals like market prices are an emergent phenomenon that are easily accessible to all prices.

They are easily accessible because well-resourced parties are incentivized to carry out actions that make them accessible, like a firm advertising a job opening and the pay offered as widely as possible, to maximize the number of potential applicants that see it.

I’m not persuaded that economics has that quality. It seems to be infected by political interests too easily.

As evidence of that statement i submit the example of Austerity as a concept. It’s something that’s been applied hundreds of times, there was a resurgence in the 2010s but it was very popular after the First World War too.

One problem, despite all these applications of the concept, its only ever worked twice in documented history. Both instances occurred in a context that doesn’t apply today and, well it’s not impossible but almost impossible for that context to appear again.

The concept has no economic foundation, it’s a device born of a political belief. It even contradicts economic assessment.

And yet, It’s continually proposed. It’d be like suggesting sugar is a weightloss product if you consume enough. If you gained weight, you didn’t do it right, you just need to consume more sugar, then you’ll lose weight.

Oh, there certainly is a lot of beauty in the world as well.

But it comes at a cost.

Every year or so, I try and get in at least one overnight backpacking trip, or at least one day of off-trail hiking. I'd do more, but I live in a country that cranked the "civilization" knob to 11 about a thousand years ago, and hasn't looked back since.

You really begin to appreciate things like "a hot shower" after a couple of days in the backcountry.

We can journey to those breathtaking vistas, relax, and bask in the majesty of creation because civilization makes that possible. With aircraft, roads, park rangers, clean water, nearly limitless food, all the rest.

Subsistence hunters, fishermen, and farmers certainly got to enjoy that same beauty, but I rather doubt it was as relaxing for them as it is for us.

And the reality is that violence is the price of civilization. There is not one civilization on the face of the earth that has escaped a baptism of blood and fire.

This has only gotten worse as our technological prowess has progressed.

Spending time, alone, in nature, you realize just how... vulnerable human beings are. Last time I went hiking, solo, in the US, I heard an animal approaching about twenty yards ahead of me. Turned out to be a bull, of all things.

I'm glad he was obviously used to humans -- and I was sure to give him all the room he wanted, and then some -- because, combined, my bear spray and my subcompact 9mm would have just pissed him off.

Nature, for all her beauty, is indifferent to suffering.

Human hunters work hard for an instant kill. Most other predators only work hard enough to disable their prey, and then eat it whether it is alive or dead.

As for humans being ugly... well, that's what I mean by choice.

You're totally right -- there's plenty of happiness to go around.

Part of the problem is that there's money to be made in making people unhappy.

Happy people buy less stuff.

But at least the stuff-sellers give you something. The real hustlers are the people that take your money for "the cause", whether the cause is Jesus, or Social Justice, or something else where you can be convinced to part with resources in exchange for a feeling of moral superiority.

It really is kind of amazing how wealthy politicians, preachers, and pundits can get when they successfully engineer or leverage a large social movement.

It is even more amazing how little they actually need to deliver.

That's what real greed looks like.

Another part of the problem is comparing yourself to your neighbor. I think that's even a cognitive bias, but I forgot the name -- that isn't not absolute wealth that we value, but that instead, we want to have more than the people that we can see around us.

Unless you master envy, you can never be satisfied in a world where you are always comparing yourself against the apex of whatever it is you value: wealth, strength, beauty, etc.

But all of those horrible things about humanity -- greed, envy, hatred, all the rest -- are things we can choose to overcome.

We can be better than the worst parts of our nature.

That's kind of where I was going.