>>Why isn't Amazon hiring fewer workers right now? Is the board wasting money on workers that it doesn't need?
We can't prove that it's not hiring fewer workers than it otherwise would have. In the absence of the ability to run a controlled experiment on how a minimum wage affects Amazon behavior, we can only trust in Economics, the same way we trust in what epidemiology tells us about the efficacy of vaccines, and assume that a larger volume of people would be hired without an artificial floor on the price of labor.
>>A) no one is talking about price controls on final products, they're talking about price increases on one of the inputs.
You're talking about a price control on manual services in general, i.e. labor.
>>B) on the subject of wages and worker prices, minimum wage increases have been shown on multiple occasions to increase net welfare.
No they haven't. Studies on minimum wage cannot conclusively show anything, because they are not controlled, and minimum wages are too low to affect a significant number of jobs.
Meta-studies suggest that minimum wage tends to be harmful, just as you'd expect, though these are not definitive for the reasons mentioned.
>>and basic economic principles is that in Capitalism, price is what people will pay, not what a product costs to produce.
Yes I agree with that, but I didn't make the counter-argument, another commenter did.
>>Possible, but definitely not guaranteed.
Nothing is guaranteed in economics, but we should err on the side of basic economics in the absence of certainty and proof.