[seneca]

> If you get paid minimum wage, what your employer is saying is, "I would pay you less if I was legally allowed to do so."

The minimum wage is the government saying "if you produce less value than this arbitrary cut off, you aren't allowed to work".

[kelnos]

Ah, lovely, you're one of those people.

If you produce less value than the cutoff (whatever that means; wages are set based on how little a company can get away with paying, not on some arbitrary "value" you've assigned to the work), companies that employ you still have to pay you a living wage. Or not even, since minimum wage usually lags a living wage.

The funny thing is, I bet you're also the kind of person who is against welfare programs. So if the minimum wage didn't exist, people in these sorts of jobs would get paid so little that they'd end up on welfare. Not sure how that would be an improvement.

[eadmund]

> If you produce less value than the [minimum wage], companies that employ you still have to pay you

True enough, I suppose, but … if one produces less than one costs, a company will not employ one. Why would a company employ someone who produces less than he costs?

[tekknik]

the improvement here is in increasing skills, not paying someone more than the value they produce for the country, nor paying someone not producing any value.

welfare is great if your field is being phased out and you need retraining, or you’re disable or handicap but i loath people taking it when they simply don’t want to work and continue to have more kids that the state then pays for.

to help you understand this better let people move in with you and live off of your resources until you have none left for yourself. then don’t complain.

also insults aren’t allowed on HN

[majormajor]

Wages are more a factor of supply and demand and negotiation resulting from that than of value produced.

Otherwise we can have a long argument about if NFL players today truly produce 2-3x more "value" than 20-30 years ago for playing the same game.

(You might say "value" itself is coming from supply demand and that yes if more people have demand for NFL tickets or advertising spots during NFL games now then yes, the players are producing more value... but at that point when we acknowledge how interconnected and shape-able it all is, we could say that minimum wage is the government redirecting labor and businesses away from roles and behaviors that aren't even enough to cover the cost of living towards ones that are more valuable. Which would be... good?)

[krapp]

No it isn't, because wages aren't set based on some objective measurement of the quality of value produced. If that were the case, increases in productivity would have resulted in a commensurate increase in wages, but the only increase is the gap between wages and productivity.

[tekknik]

So all of the AI engineers getting large bonuses it has nothing to do with the value?

What you’ve described here is the way it’s supposed to work. But after decades of “progress” in removing morality you see the wage gap problem now.