Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

> No, it doesn't.

Competition can also do it, but idk how that eliminates minimum wage from doing it. Neither raises revenue, both simply put pressure on profit margins. The only difference is one is regulation, the other is market force.

> It might limit value extraction where there is a monopsony purchaser of labor who is not also a monopoly supplier of the good produced with that labor, but that's not actually all that common a situation.

I think that's a very narrow view. If you look at Walmart and the like, these are still huge chunks of the market with low pay precisely because of economies of scale, so they are monopsony purchasers, even without being the only supplier or a product.

Also not covered is that with high unemployment, competition isn't there. People in minimum wage job searches are often picking between a job and no job, not two different jobs. You're assuming that employment markets are both efficient and equally balanced.

> If there is work to be done that genuinely has value less than the minimum wage

I think this is where the moral disagreement comes in. An economy that regularly squeezes people below living wage for work needs to be corrected. Minimum wage is an attempt at that by lowering corporate profit.

> Any legitimate moral purpose of minimum wage is served better by taxing business income and high-end personal (including capital) income and providing a UBI as high as economic productivity can bear without out-of-control inflation.

I would love to see this! But realistically that's not politically possible (though it is looking more so with the pandemic but still, generally speaking) and we can't be idealistically categorical in our policy. Minimum wage is fully pragmatic to me, not an ideal. It's a net positive compared to the current situation.

In real life the problem isn't Scrooge McDuck buying the entire supply. It's everyone who buys a few extra just to be safe that makes demand rocket.

If TP costs $1 a roll to make and is currently selling at $10 a roll, the store selling for $9 wins the game. Then the store selling for $8, ...$7, etc. all the way down to the point where no one is left who is willing to compromise their living standards by dropping their profit margin below a certain percentage.

The rules of the game are that:

(1) If you collude to keep prices up you go to jail.

(2) Citizens must be allowed to move about freely to find the cheapest TP.

(3) It’s also cheating if you own such massive amounts of the economy that what you lose in TP profits you gouge back in cell phone bills.

(4) A basic standard of living has to be upheld by society to stop the TP manufacturers from only hiring 20 somethings, and contriving a social world that venerates business, hustle and money above all else such that their workers have to live with housemates well into their 30s in tiny apartments without gardens which cost them 65% of their salary in rent to landlords whose debt is owned by the TP companies financing subsidiary ok I need a cup of tea and a back rub now.

In many countries, child labor wasn't banned because of moral reasons, it was banned as an anti-competitive measure against un-mechanized factories.

Slavery was enforced (and subsidized) by many governments; it wasn't exactly a creature of the free market. Segregation was similar. Indentured servitude may be a different matter, though it brings up some more complicated questions.

"Not demanding payment up front" has nothing to do with morality; I've gone to many nice restaurants where they didn't charge me up front, and they weren't doing it because they were saints. The history of fire-fighting is also interesting, as it was private for quite some time in many places; insurance companies don't like buildings burning down.

You say that companies should expect profits to fall, but do you expect the companies to drive themselves into the ground (thus leaving their employees unemployed) in an attempt to do a little to help? Most companies spend about 50% of their revenue on labor, and have a profit of less than five percent. That means that a 10% increase in labor costs (think overtime) means they make no money, so they really can't afford to reduce their margins much, and remain an extant firm.

You say we shouldn't gamble our lives on the continued decency of for-profit corporations, but I have more confidence in their ethics than those of the common man. As we saw with toilet paper (and hand sanitizer), the average person will hoard anything they are afraid will not be available tomorrow. Companies have shown more restraint in this crisis and others.

So this is discussing two competing studies done at the same time. I linked to an article about the authors from the original study actually revising their results a year later with new data and basically saying "our previous conclusion was wrong".