[djbebs]

The problem with that sort of argument is that you're not actually fixing anything, you're just shoving it under the rug at great expense.

Minimum wages do not improve low wage earners lot in life, they simply make it impossible for them to survive because it becomes illegal to hire them.

Once again, what effect do you think that making it illegal to hire someone who is unproductive will have on that person's life?

Arguments about a living wage, and other appeals to emotion are very nice, and certainly convince a lot of people who did not think through the full extent of the incentives at play, but at the end of the day their only result is to harm those it supposedly is seeking to help.

[tenacious_tuna]

Could you explain more the relationship between there being a minimum wage, and it being illegal for a person to be hired? I'm not understanding that causal relationship, and it seems essential to your point.

[djbebs]

I'm not sure I understand your request?

The minimum wage is simply the process of illegalizing the hiring of labor for less than a certain value. This means that hiring anyone whose productivity is below that value is financially non-viable.

The practical result is that people whose productivity is below the minimum wage are only able to find gainful employment by illegally receiving less than minimum wage.

[tenacious_tuna]

Your arguments seem to be from the business perspective, of the value of labor. My arguments are from the human perspective, in terms of the value of a person.

> hiring anyone whose productivity is below that value is financially non-viable

I would argue that the minimum wage is an indicator of the minimum humane value of an individual's time, in the eyes of the government. That is, if someone is paid less than that for their labor, it is humanely non-viable.

> the practical result is that people whose productivity is below the minimum wage are only able to find gainful employment by illegally receiving less than minimum wage

Again, this just feels exploitative. Take someone who hasn't finished highschool, for whatever reason: by your measure, likely not a very "productive" worker, and your argument implies someone like this may not "deserve" the minimum wage. But this person now has no way to rectify this situation: they have to work more than one job, beyond "full time", just to have enough to survive (because by your measure their limited productivity means they don't deserve enough money to feed and house themselves--a "living wage", as GP said above). Working multiple jobs to earn enough to survive means they don't have the time nor energy to continue to educate themselves, so they cannot raise their value as a worker, in your eyes. They are now trapped in this cycle.

Admittedly, "minimum wage" is perhaps not the best tool to address this problem. I would argue that something akin to UBI would be the best way to approach this--guarantee that every citizen has access to some minimum standard of living, with access to housing/food/education/information, and then let the labor economy exist on top of that. However, in the absence of such a system, and with intense resistance to anything like that kind of system, minimum wages are one of few tools available to address the problem of giving people options to exit living on month-to-month paycheck lifestyles.

[jdasdf]

> Your arguments seem to be from the business perspective, of the value of labor. My arguments are from the human perspective, in terms of the value of a person.

Well, given that we are talking about the market itself, that is and should be the only thing that matters.

Ultimately this is an economic issue, and you will not get away from the economic incentive structures by appealing to emotional arguments.

>I would argue that the minimum wage is an indicator of the minimum humane value of an individual's time, in the eyes of the government. That is, if someone is paid less than that for their labor, it is humanely non-viable.

You can argue that however much you like, it will not change the fact that such a policy will only have the effect of reducing peoples options and make life harder for the very people you are claiming to want to help.

This is plain mathematics, if the value someone produces is less than the value they cost to employ, then they will not be employed.

Companies are not, and should not be, charities. And forcing them to behave like charities will simply result in those costs being passed on to their clients, and to society at large through greater inefficiencies that will result in less wealth to everyone.

>Again, this just feels exploitative. Take someone who hasn't finished highschool, for whatever reason: by your measure, likely not a very "productive" worker, and your argument implies someone like this may not "deserve" the minimum wage. But this person now has no way to rectify this situation: they have to work more than one job, beyond "full time", just to have enough to survive (because by your measure their limited productivity means they don't deserve enough money to feed and house themselves--a "living wage", as GP said above). Working multiple jobs to earn enough to survive means they don't have the time nor energy to continue to educate themselves, so they cannot raise their value as a worker, in your eyes. They are now trapped in this cycle.

How can providing someone with the best option they have available to them possibly be exploitative?

And indeed, how can removing that option be anything less than exploitative?

Adding a minimum wage does not result in those workers being paid more, it results in them being unable to legally work. And work is the primary way that they dig themselves out of that situation.

The idea that people working for low wages will remain trapped in that situation forever is plainly not true, and indeed even if it were, that is a better situation than the alternative, where they are unable to even work at all!

>Admittedly, "minimum wage" is perhaps not the best tool to address this problem. I would argue that something akin to UBI would be the best way to approach this--guarantee that every citizen has access to some minimum standard of living, with access to housing/food/education/information, and then let the labor economy exist on top of that. However, in the absence of such a system, and with intense resistance to anything like that kind of system, minimum wages are one of few tools available to address the problem of giving people options to exit living on month-to-month paycheck lifestyles.

Why do you think offloading social work to private companies is a good idea? That has costs, and they will be paid for.

Having private enterprises subsidize your pet projects is a great way to make everyone poorer.

[tenacious_tuna]

I'm going to try to illustrate my point differently.

You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses. Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

As I said before, we have systems like this in place already: public education is a powerful equalizer. Still deeply flawed, certainly, but a fine step in the right direction, and it benefits the whole population.

You (rightly) say these things have costs, and you're absolutely correct--but it's a fallacy to think that we don't have the resources to fix it. There's dozens of political platforms with plans to fund UBI and Universal Healthcare endeavors. Beyond that, even just mild increases in taxes on the ultra-wealthy would fund plenty of these endeavors. Hell, two days ago ProPublica dropped a report about how the mega-rich can legally avoid taxes on an insane portion of their wealth, and how much more weight the rest of Americans (including those in the poverty cycle) have to then carry [0].

I find framing many of these questions in terms of "is it in the population's best interest?" helps illuminate flaws in various systems. For example, is it in the population's best interest for private insurance companies to control access to healthcare? What if all the money that flowed to insurance executives instead went into funding additional research? Is it in the population's best interest for energy companies to gain access to frakking permits via lobbying? Would investment in new nuclear power systems be more beneficial in terms of environmental impact and energy production?

The attitude that businesses and their accompanying markets somehow are the best vehicle to approach and address these issues, to me, is missing the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

[jdasdf]

Let's me just start by saying that I understand and respect your argument, and your motivations for them. I am sure you're a good hearted person, who just wants to help his fellow citizens, and that is a good thing, and one in which i feel we can agree as a goal to achieve.

Please do not take my arguments against your proposals, as insulting or demeaning, that is in no way my intention. I only mean to point out where their flaws lie, and why they will not work as you expect them to.

Let's break your arguments down to their core:

>You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

>You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

>This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

You misunderstood the argument here. I state that the economic value of hiring someone can be less than the cost of hiring that someone. In addition, I stated that if a minimum wage is imposed, unless that minimum wage is so low that every persons value added is greater than it (in which case the minimum wage would affect no one), then such a minimum wage would merely result in those people who are affected go from X to Zero.

The problem that you're having here is you are confusing the cost of labor (and value) with peoples necessities for modern life, when the two things are not related at all.

>I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses.

The population already decides what is best for itself, indeed it is a minimum wage that actively prevents them from doing so by closing off their best options and condemning them to subsisting on the public dole.

>Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

>If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

I am going to assume that you are talking about doing so via a UBI, as you discussed in a previous comment, rather than through some central planning system of goods production and distribution?

If so, then that would actually work much better than the current system with means test, bureaucracy and other massive inefficiencies.

That being said, you need to consider the terrible incentive structure involved with the statement "we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things."

On a fundamental level this implies that the cost involved with providing these benefits are "fixed" per person, and scale with population, regardless of the economies ability to sustain such expense. What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?

And if you "index" it to economic performance, how do you feel that cutting everyones benefits in the middle of an economic depression will go in an election?

Do you truly believe people will be content keeping such a system as is over time? What stops the creeping increase of benefits?

Furthermore, if the benefits are sufficiently large, what sort of motivation will people have to work at all? And indeed, those who do work and generate wealth, why must they be punished for it (by being forced to sustain those who don't even try)?

Finally, a final question, you say:

>will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses

Why is this a goal of yours at all? Why do you think that interfering with the way businesses work will increase the pie? Why do you want to pick winners and losers?

>To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options. UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do. And Minimum wage laws (and other restrictions) would remove their options.

I understand we're you're coming from, but I have seen first hand how those sorts of policies don't work, and how lack of cash and education isn't as much of a barrier to escaping poverty as creeping regulations are.

My grandfather was born in 1929 in a tiny village of twenty people in a poor mountainous area in interior Portugal, growing up he had to walk 20 kilometers each day to the nearest town to attend primary school, which he attended for only 4 years. This is not a rich area, and the conditions there, both at the time and today would be considered absolute poverty. For reference, electricity and running water (and sewage) only arrived to the area in the 1990s. His father was a woodchopper, and his relatives and ancestors were subsistence farmers.

At age 13 his father gave him a bus ticket to lisbon, enough money for 2 nights at a shared hostel, some food and enough cash for him to purchase a bus ticket back home. He went to Lisbon and began working in construction. He eventually resigned and started his own company building apartment buildings, single family houses, and other such construction work. He was never wildly rich, but he was able to build himself and my grandmother a perfectly respectable middle class life.

He did this with 4 years of schooling, a bus ticket and a couple of days of "runway". There was no minimum wage. There was no health and safety regulations. There was no public health service. There was no free education (beyond the 4 years of primary education).

The reason he managed to do this wasn't because he "had a leg up on everyone else".

He did this off the back of his own hard work, good decisions, a little bit of luck, and most importantly because no one was stopping him.

If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.

If there was restrictions and licensing requirements on construction, he would not have been able to build the houses he sold.

If there was age limitations on being able to work, he would not have been able to come to Lisbon at age 13.

Each of these limitations and regulations may individually make perfect sense, however collectively they ossify any form of social mobility.

If I were born today in that village, I would not be able to take the same path out that he took. I would have to find something else, or I would be stuck in that poverty cycle you described, and I would be stuck there not through lack of intelligence, or because the poverty is keeping me there, but because the well intentioned policies you are supporting would keep me there and prevent me from escaping.