| > 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. |
Minimum wage only potentially does it for a narrow range of work with actual economic value that is between the minimum wage and a small multiple of it, and only for jobs where there isn't effective competition for labor (because effective competition for labor already does it as much as is possible, leaving nothing for minimum wage to do), and always has the cost, whether or not the conditions exist to provide the benefits, of making impossible all wage labor with an actual economic value less than the minimum wage, which not only kills jobs, but prevents upward mobility from the experience people would gain in those lower-value jobs.
> Minimum wage is fully pragmatic to me, not an ideal. It's a net positive compared to the current situation.
Minimum wage + means- and behavior-tested public benefit programs is the current situation.