| > Minimum wage does not price people out of jobs, Yes, it quite obviously does. > it puts a cap on the profit that a corporation can squeeze out of its workers. No, it doesn't. Competition does that. Minimum wage puts a floor on the economic value of labor that can get hired at all. 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. > Employers who would be paying under it are simply not viable moral businesses If there is work to be done that genuinely has value less than the minimum wage, is it truly better for society that the worker instead has no job prospects and the one who would have the work done instead has no work done? Who benefits from that. > Now we can have economic arguments about what is true here, but the purpose of minimum wage today is a moral one and that must be factored in. 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. Which is not to say that in practice minimum wage isn't better than nothing, it's just far from the best means of achieving it's legitimate purposes, in large part due to the adverse consequences it has in limiting employability. |
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.