141–150 of 776 posts
If you raise the price of cigarettes through taxes, less people buy cigs. Same for gambling, driving, flying, etc. If you raise the price of labor through minimum wage, you fix poverty. Opposed to literally everything else plus evidence.
The key point is that wages are being kept artificially low by monopsonies. And the evidence supports this. (Current hyperlocal minimum wage laws make for good A/B-ish tests.)
> 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…
The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything. You aren't de facto entitled to receiving money for any services you may or may not provide, regardless of whether you're skilled or not, just because you exist. A company exists because one or more people risked wealth in order to create a net positive system - their existence is not as riskless as one would believe.
This is a value judgment you have made, and one that seems popular in USA. It's not a priori true and it's not necessarily so popular in other parts of the world.
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i'm generally in favor of state-level control of such things, but i'd be remiss not to point out that that's a great way to further entrench inequality across america. i mean, if $15/hour is a little more than subsistence level in rural north dakota or the hills of west virginia, so be it. maybe it means they can buy a laptop for the kids, but it won't be mansions and teslas everywhere. current labor markets are prof…
It's one thing to be unfair when the government is footing the bill, like basic income or tax brackets. It's a good incentive to balance out rising cost of living. It's another when it's small businesses footing the bill. There's a very painful lag time between being required to pay employees more and when employees have more spending power. Typically all that happens is local business don't have the finances to cove…
Someone is paying the cost in the end, and probably shouldn't end up on the small business owner, and definitely shouldn't end up on the laborer being unable to make ends meet.
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> Workers can't usually live too much without finding a job. > Companies will always push for lower wages wherever they can but it's not just megacorp tho. minimum wage will lower employment from small business significantly; i.e. small shop owner will get by with one less garcon to pay the other one more. and if you think that can be resolved just by ample unemployment benefits, look no further than the Dublin heroi…
Who are these mom and pops that are hiring extraneous workers? If they can get rid of a position, they probably already have.
If you're running a business with These are probably not a significant part of the overarching discussion here, though.
> 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…
Minimum wage removes the choice. Minimum wage infringes on your freedom of contract.
The only politically feasible alternative is increased welfare spending, which means a low minimum wage is just a way to have taxpayers cover employers’ labor costs. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/02/13/ron_unz_h...
I don't like it but I think it would be something that would actually manage to pass with some amount of bipartisan support. The market still sorta-kinda allocates the labor, incentives for employer and employee are aligned, and as part of the program they would could implement some form of corporate austerity to audit spending so companies couldn't just walk away with the cash.
I know research is hard, and these issues are fraught with complexities and challenges in acquiring data, but it still boggles my mind just how many macro economic theories don't have strong empirical data to support them.
What if the strong empirical data were against the interests of the rich and powerful? They couldn't afford to base policy on those then!
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Who are these mom and pops that are hiring extraneous workers? If they can get rid of a position, they probably already have.
They're out there. Mom-and-pops are not known for their efficiency. I've known some that hire people as a favor to friends/family/community. ("hey, my kid needs a summer job, do you have a job for them?") Heck, there are entire mom-and-pop shops that exist not as a serious income stream, but as a hobby. If you're running a business with These are probably not a significant part of the overarching discussion here, tho…
And it is relevant, because there's a lot of data that there is no negative effect on employment elasticity, but there is significant publication bias in the field. And what always gets brought out is the argument that "businesses will start letting extra people go". They already do that even without minimum wage increases.
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There doesn't appear to be consensus like that - but not because lack of trying: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/anderson-...
Sorry but that seems to be an opinion article by a non economist? Or am I mistaken?
Here are personally penned unedited opinions from econ nobelists etc if you prefer :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/paul-krugman-libe...
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The Marxist perspective is that the employer is incentivized to pay as little as possible to extract the maximum amount of value from the person's labor, realizing the difference as profit (even though crucially that value was created by the worker). An example of this would be software engineers at companies like Apple and Google, whose labor has been shown to produce several times the value of their compensation. U…
> even though crucially that value was created by the worker Crucially the value wasn't created by the worker, but rather the worker played a part in the creation of that value. In a capitalist society, that worker's wage is determined based on the value of their contribution and the supply of workers with the requisite skill. In a Marxist society, it is set by the state, and it seems to be very hard for states to de…
He did feel that some other model of ownership & management could lead to some other form of remuneration, but he definitely left it unclear.
Read the other discussions on this thread, there's far more nuance here than I think you're understanding.