| > You can't lower your minimum wage by law, but you also can't live on that, either. But, given the context of discussion, the only other alternative is to have no wage at all. Being able to buy some things allows you to live better than being able to buy no things. We're not talking about the real world where automation creates more jobs than it destroys, we're talking about a hypothetical world where your only choice is to go directly head-to-head with automation. You have no hope of winning if the law forces you to charge more than the competition. > It prevents employers from creating jobs that prevent a person from ever being successful. You're slightly off on that. Minimum wage prevents employees from competing against each other once the price reaches the defined minimum. It's to protect you from other workers, not the employer. Minimum wage exists precisely because people have proven over and over again that they will sharpen their pencils and figure out how to do job for less than you in order to get the job over you. If there was nobody to undercut you, employers would be forced to pay you whatever you want. This is why software developers, who are limited in availability relative to the jobs available to them, are generally able to charge significantly larger amounts of money. Jobs at the minimum have such an overabundance of labour that they're all fighting for the limited number of spots, and thus there is always someone willing to work for less to get the job. > Who does the OP think this person is that can live on $5/hr or lower? Minimum wage _as it is_ is arguably too low. Although it seems kind of silly to compare the needs of our current situation to some hypothetical future where everything is automated. If humans were doing all the work that automation currently does today, the current minimum wage wouldn't just be arguably too low, it would be but a tiny fraction of what would be necessary to survive. Food, for instance, would easily be 10x more expensive than it is now if we didn't have all of the efficient automation keeping the costs down. Imagine trying to live on the current minimum wage while paying an order of magnitude more for your groceries. With automation taking over in this hypothetical future, the cost of living will have no relationship to what we're accustom to in this current reality. |