[AnthonyMouse]

The conspicuous difference is that you can choose who to work for and in consequences employers have to compete for labor, which is why the overwhelming majority of people make more than minimum wage.

You're also setting up a catch 22 where things like housing construction, which require labor to exist, are a prerequisite to not having slavery, but if no one has to do labor to construct housing then where does it come from?

[Nextgrid]

Minimum wage is an arbitrary construct that may have been reasonable when it was initially introduced but due to dysfunctional politics/corruption (or "lobbying") hasn't been updated to reflect the cost of living especially with regards to property prices, so making minimum wage isn't a high bar.

> where things like housing construction, which require labor to exist

That's why I mentioned land and not only housing. In fact in most places the land is more expensive than the building on top. Even if you hypothetically wanted to just put a tent somewhere and not require on any external labor, you'd still need to buy/rent the land first.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Minimum wage is an arbitrary construct that may have been reasonable when it was initially introduced but due to dysfunctional politics/corruption (or "lobbying") hasn't been updated to reflect the cost of living especially with regards to property prices, so making minimum wage isn't a high bar.

Irrelevant. The point is that you could set the minimum wage to zero and people would still make wages higher than that because employers have to compete for labor.

> That's why I mentioned land and not only housing. In fact in most places the land is more expensive than the building on top.

But this is really not any different -- depending on how you define it land is either a scare resource you can't get any more of at all or something that requires labor to create more of, e.g. by building sea platforms or similar.

And people don't actually need any particular amount of land in order to have shelter. You can build an arbitrarily large amount of shelter on a given piece of land by building an arbitrarily tall building. In theory there is a limit on how tall a building you could make, but in practice if we built buildings of the largest size we know how to build on the amount of land that actually exists we would have dramatically more housing than is needed for everyone.

So the limiting factor is not actually land, it's construction, which somebody has to do in order for you to have shelter.

[Nextgrid]

I disagree that the limiting factor is construction. The limiting factor is that there are significant entrenched interests based on the scarcity of property which influence any eventual laws/regulations or incentives to build more property.

> You can build an arbitrarily large amount of shelter

You can, but it isn't done, because of see above. For a lot of people/businesses in power to actually change things, it's often more profitable to defend the status-quo than make the change. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.

But my original argument wasn't even about third-party constructed shelter. Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first, which is often priced disproportionately compared to wages (and there's pressure to keep it that way, where either wages/earning potential are pushed down, or land will just raise in price to match).

[AnthonyMouse]

> I disagree that the limiting factor is construction. The limiting factor is that there are significant entrenched interests based on the scarcity of property which influence any eventual laws/regulations or incentives to build more property.

Now you're making a completely different argument: Not that the problem is that you have to work in order to buy housing, but that the cost of housing is too high because of artificial restrictions on housing construction.

Which is totally true but is something else entirely -- if housing cost 10% of what it does now, it still wouldn't be free.

> It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.

It's quite the opposite really. It would be better for anyone individually to build more housing on their land because they would make more money than the construction costs, so in order to prevent that they pass laws prohibiting nearly anybody from doing that.

These laws persist because of regulatory dysfunction. People benefit if the property they own is worth more and the property they might want to buy is worth less -- and any given person doesn't own most property, so the general advantage is to make housing cost less everywhere. But the laws that prevent it are instituted at the local level, in places zoned for single family homes that are predominantly owner-occupied, so the local voters are local homeowners who want local housing prices to go up rather than down. Meanwhile they don't get a vote in what the zoning is somewhere they might want to move to, so the rules make prices go up.

This is a real problem that could be solved by empowering individual property owners to build what they want on their own property, but what does that have anything to do with employers who are largely ambivalent to this? If anything employers should prefer housing costs to be lower so they can attract talent to their locality through a lower cost of living, and pay less in rent themselves.

> Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first

What are you proposing to do instead? You can't feasibly create more land, and what people actually want the land for is to have shelter. You can create more shelter, but that requires labor. It's never going to be free -- one way or another somebody has to build it. Somebody would even have to make the tent.

We could certainly make it cost less by removing zoning restrictions but less is not free.

[xkekjrktllss]

> The point is that you could set the minimum wage to zero and people would still make wages higher than that because employers have to compete for labor.

Wrong. Profiteers learned ages ago the importance of wielding their capital for political influence to maintain a stagnant pool of unemployed surplus labor by many means, including the prison industrial complex, migrant trafficking, and more. The result is that employers do not compete for mere labor but rather only for specifically skilled labor, meaning unskilled labor is only legally differentiated from slavery and effectively just slavery. Furthermore, most of these so-called unskilled laborers are in fact highly skilled surplus of the skilled labor market, which means the same holds true for a significant portion of the so-called skilled labor pool.

[AnthonyMouse]

> meaning unskilled labor is only legally differentiated from slavery and effectively just slavery.

Many unskilled labor jobs also pay more than the law requires, and there is basically unlimited demand for unskilled labor at low wages, so there is only a problem if the cost of living is higher than the wages unskilled labor receives in the market -- which in nearly all cases is because of artificial scarcity of necessities. Because otherwise the low wages would result in a low cost of living as necessities could be produced inexpensively through cheap labor.

If you let millions migrants come to the US to build housing and provide medical care and consequently made housing and medicine inexpensive, unskilled laborers in the US would be better off, not worse off. If you artificially limit the supply of those things so the cost of living remains high, you're screwed regardless of whether there are immigrants, because a marginal difference in the wages for unskilled labor doesn't hold a candle to a ten fold increase in the cost of living.

> Furthermore, most of these so-called unskilled laborers are in fact highly skilled surplus of the skilled labor market

There is rarely a long-term surplus of skilled labor -- or anything -- because that would just cause it to cost less, increasing demand (companies hire more) or reducing supply (people switch careers to ones that pay better).

[xkekjrktllss]

> Many unskilled labor jobs also pay more than the law requires

Because law requires such a low wage that it competes with the cost of being unemployed. Unskilled wages are just survival costs, if even that, just like a slave, and this is why people in those jobs live shorter lives.

> If you let millions migrants come to the US to build housing and provide medical care and consequently made housing and medicine inexpensive, unskilled laborers in the US would be better off, not worse off.

Then why aren't they better off now than before that was done?

> There is rarely a long-term surplus of skilled labor -- or anything -- because that would just cause it to cost less...

It does, of course. Wages for many many skilled labor jobs (whose capacities have proportionally increased faster than average) have decreased very significantly over recent decades when accounting for inflation. This is just common knowledge.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Because law requires such a low wage that it competes with the cost of being unemployed.

Everything competes with being "unemployed" -- which is another way of saying that you do your own labor. You can pay someone to make your dinner or make it yourself, pay someone to fix your car or fix it yourself, pay someone to make your clothes or make them yourself etc.

Specialization generally wins, even when you're not making a lot of money.

> this is why people in those jobs live shorter lives.

There are multiple reasons why this is the case. The people with the ability to do skilled labor more often also have the ability to do other things that increase their longevity. People who make less money are more likely to smoke cigarettes etc. There isn't a single unified cause, it's many things that correlate with each other.

> Then why aren't they better off now than before that was done?

Because they're not allowed to build housing and provide medical care. Zoning restrictions constrain housing construction, the AMA restricts the supply of doctors and people with legitimate medical degrees from other countries can't just come here and practice etc.

Regulatory capture is a thing. But the medical regulators are captured by the AMA (i.e. incumbent doctors), not Walmart or Comcast, who have no real interest in higher medical costs. The zoning boards are captured by local homeowners.

> Wages for many many skilled labor jobs (whose capacities have proportionally increased faster than average) have decreased very significantly over recent decades when accounting for inflation. This is just common knowledge.

Your argument was that a significant proportion of these people would end up doing unskilled labor. No they wouldn't, they'd still prefer to make $60,000 rather than $30,000 even if their skillset used to pay an inflation-adjusted $70,000. And some of them will even refuse the $60,000 and find a way to change careers to one that pays more.