[spugody]

I don't think that is an ideological aim of capitalism. It is just an emergent behaviour.

In any case, it is a genuine question from someone living in a decent welfare state and happy to continue to do so. I don't really care to engage in debates of who has the moral high ground, just the practical question, if you have an answer.

[aabeshou]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood your tone as challenging, like "who is anyone to say what is fair or not?"

technically in the U.S. there is a federal (nation-wide) minimum wage, then there are minimum wages for each state. I am not sure how they are defined, e.g. the federal one is certainly not automatically pegged to inflation. there is a movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour but even that is hard or impossible to live on in many areas.

[dpoochieni]

The effects of raising minimum wages are twofold: long-term businesses will invest more in automation as it will be more profitable; short-term they might fire one or two people who might make sense at 12 but say now at 15 it does not. Actually think about how it affects different size business, large corporations can easily afford the automation, fire many people as they have many others. A small business having to fire someone is more drastic. In the end, you might have big corporation owners doing better, and impoverished small business owners, while not really improving the situation of the employees.

[aabeshou]

arguably, a business that pays someone less than a living wage doesn't deserve to operate, just as a business that can't exist without using slaves doesn't deserve to operate

[dpoochieni]

Yeah but those people still have to eat no? Bad job is better than no job (Granted, not talking about extremely bad)

[scollet]

> one of the functions of the ideological arm of capitalism is to argue that determining fair wage for a low-ranked laborer is so inscrutable that only "the market" can do it fairly, ...

You have not interpreted the comment correctly. This is deterministic. A capitalistic system or game has naturally emergent behaviors, but the propaganda excusing and defending the reluctance to add egalitarian rules is very much deterministic.