[CharlesColeman]

> The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general).

Also: things cost more in the US. You can't survive on 3rd world sweatshop wages in the US, even if they were permitted by abolishing minimum wage laws.

[AnthonyMouse]

How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

[CharlesColeman]

> How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

Very little, actually. Bus drivers need to buy more than bus tickets: even if you reduced their wages to third-world levels and reduced bus ticket prices to third-world levels, bus drivers still get sick and need to pay the doctor? Are you going to push doctor salaries down to third-world levels too? What about education, etc? At some point, you're just going to be pushing wages down across the economy and importing massive levels of inequality.

Expecting to people to take massive pay cuts and enact massive deflation in the name of market liberalism is frankly an ideologically-blinkered, impractical, stupid idea. It entails too much pain for little to no actual gain. The only people happy with the results would be a s small minority of oligarchs and ideological purists.