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The minimum wage should be 0 - sincerely any good economist
by cartercole 7y ago
The minimum wage should be 0
- sincerely any good economist
- tempsy 7y agoit might as well be - "gig" work is not bound by min wage laws. ask an instacart worker how that's worked out for them.
- Ohn0 7y agolol the minimum / livable wage is just another joke in lawmaking with vast loopholes.
- keeganjw 7y agoThe minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person
- fennecfoxen 7y ago> The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person Also unemployment should never happen, and if we simply declare how the economy should works, it will magically reorganize itself in a way that makes it so, and which doesn't do serious harm to anybody, and doesn't cripple our futures. And you are a monster for daring to entertain the notion that achieving goodness in the world is any more complicated than this, and you deserve to be shunned and hated.
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoLivable to what extent? You should be able to afford food (what quality of food? do good people also believe everybody deserves to eat filet mignon/comparable on occasion?), transportation (which in some cases means car + gas + maintenance + insurance) + housing (what kind of housing? rent a room in a low cost area? have your own single family home?) + family (should you be encouraged to have 3 children aka mouths to feed if you are low income)? I don't know if I've been brainwashed growing up by fake news but... isn't the idea "work hard for a living", not "do the minimum and be rewarded?" (aka minimum wage)
- jotm 7y agoWork hard for a living, even though it's minimum wage, knowing it's enough to support a life and family? Wasn't that the case 50 years ago? Too much to ask for today, I guess
- ceejayoz 7y agoDo you really think minimum wage always corresponds to minimum effort?
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoNo. I know that there are a few barriers keeping people near the "minimum worth" level: 1. education 2. language 3. physical/mental inability What are some other ones?
- ceejayoz 7y agoReady availability of competing labor. Minimum wage jobs are frequently difficult and labor-intensive, but the individual workers are replaceable. The idea that pay rate and effort required are perfectly linked is what I'm contesting.
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoYou are right. I was wrong to link "hard work" and "pay". I should have linked "skilled work" and "pay". Don't people work hard to become more skilled though?
- ceejayoz 7y agoThat takes another scarce resource, time. (And frequently money.)
- wcarron 7y ago> "do the minimum and be rewarded?" In my experience, the lower you are paid, the harder you are worked. Cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, mail(wo)men and amazon delivery workers, waiters, teachers, mechanics, construction workers, etc. all work longer hours in more emotionally and/or physically taxing jobs, with worse pay and work environments than any dentist, accountant, lawyer, CEO, sales person, or software engineer that I have ever met. Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely
- commandlinefan 7y agoWell, people _should_ never get cancer or any other debilitating disease, but just because we want something to be real doesn't mean it is.
- jimbokun 7y agoBut why tie it to a wage, instead of something like UBI?
- falcolas 7y ago... who would never work for 0 themselves, even though their own work arguably provides little tangible value.
- anonuser123456 7y agoExactly. People won't work for less than their worth. So a minimum wage doesn't accomplish much except set a price floor that excludes low value add workers from the economy.
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoYou clearly never have been poor
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- henryfjordan 7y agoIf you were starving and I offered you a job washing dishes for $2/hour, would you take it to be able to afford some rice+beans tonight or would you rather not eat tonight? You're worth more than $2/hour. We need minimum wage laws to protect people from being crunched by capitalists exploiting labor market inefficiencies.
- 0xffff2 7y ago> You're worth more than $2/hour. Says who?
- henryfjordan 7y agoIn this scenario let's presume the laborer has valuable welding skills but the only factory in town closed. They need to move somewhere else to use their skills but that takes time. In the meantime they need to eat and so they take a job washing dishes. Inefficiencies in the labor market happen all the time. A minimum wage is one way to protect desperate people from being unfairly exploited.
- tombert 7y agoThat's a common trope, but there have been studies indicating that minimum wage doesn't have a significant effect on unemployment. [0] [1] Assuming that's accurate, then shouldn't we mandate that these corporations pay their workers a livable wage? If they don't pay the workers a livable wage, guess who does? The taxpayers, in the form of food stamps, welfare, and increased prison population. I really don't see why the American public should be forced to subsidize Walmart (or any large megacorporation) just because they won't pay their employees enough. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-104 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-104 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-105 EDIT: Before anyone says it, I know forcing Walmart to pay more to their workers would increase the prices of their goods; that's still almost certainly cheaper than increasing welfare.
- Ohn0 7y agoIt's also common sense
- OscarCunningham 7y agoAssuming that's accurate, we should set the minimum wage to infinity.
- tombert 7y agoI don't think anyone is suggesting we set the minimum wage to be particularly high, just enough to have a reasonable living wage. In the case of the linked studies, it was an increase of somewhere around 20-30%. I figure you made your comment to demonstrate that the reasoning doesn't work on the extremes, but that only really works as a rebuttle if someone were seriously suggesting something extreme.
- kangnkodos 7y agoThe US minimum wage is now $7.25. Raising this to $15.00 is an increase of 107%.
- 7y ago
- linuxasheviller 7y agoAny good economist would point to the economic inefficiencies created on the whole market by the externalities of the human suffering this would cause.
- jimbokun 7y agoMight be viable if tied to a generous UBI.
- Kiro 7y agoThere are a lot of functioning countries with a minimum wage of 0 (e.g. Sweden).
- mayniac 7y agoSweden has unions which negotiate minimum wages for everyone in their industry. So yes, nationally there is no minimum wage, but in practice, almost everyone is covered by a minimum wage. Considering that almost 70% of people in Sweden are part of a union* compared to about 10% in the USA, scrapping federal/state minimum wages in America would be catastrophic, at least in the short term. *and those that aren't will still benefit from union set minimum wages