There are people whose labor is worth $8/hr but not $11/hr. Raising the minimum wage will not result in "giving them a pile of cash", it will result in them no longer having a job.
"How much value do you bring in?" only puts a ceiling on pay negotiations. Desperation is what drives the actual number.
There are many, many more people like that which is why minimum wage rises almost always come straight out of profit margins:
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/NELP-Big-Busines...
There is, of course, the matter of the vast amount of economic propaganda saying the opposite. That's driven by what economists call "incentives".
You seem to think value and price are the same thing and both can be absolutely determined. Also it sounds weird to talk about people's labor as if they were potatoes, while you assert that minimum wage will result in them not having a job as if it's a nature law.
I'd try to reason with you, but it seems we're not in the same world anyway.
Claiming that I'm too unreasonable to debate with won't win you any points.
> Also it sounds weird to talk about people's labor as if they were potatoes
It's not weird since it's something that has a market value. People are not their labor. Someone's labor can be bought and sold, and the availability and price of labor is subject to the same economic laws as potatoes.
Some potatoes are worth $0.60 but not $0.80, and if the price of potatoes were dictated to be $0.80, the $0.60 would go in the trash.
I don't want potatoes or people's labor to go in the trash.
I'm trying to understand your potato metaphor. The US government has a long history of setting a price floor beneath agricultural products.
> Claiming that I'm too unreasonable to debate with won't win you any points.
It did with me... Seriously, I think you misconstrued this statement as a personal attack, whereas IMHO its simply used to highlight the flaw in your logic: If we have a complex system where A implies B and B implies C and C implies D and so on which possibly goes back to A in subtle ways, but you're just saying "A implies B, B implies no A, hence this won't work, QED" you are assuming a very simplistic view of reality.
You cannot just stop at one step and draw a definite conclusion from that. As pointed out, the wage increase can be rolled over to a price increase for instance, instead of now having to fire everyone. I'm not saying that no loss of labor could occur, but definitely it's only one of many possibilities and the economy is a highly complex system with all kind of direct and indirect effects that are at play here.
All that said, I would actually argue for basic income than a minimum wage as it will completely eliminate the possibility of the labor loss resulting in a wage loss, but in absence of this, minimum wage seems still better than having an increasing amount of working poor.
Coming from the other side of $8/hr I can assure you that you'll had so much inhumanity coming at you, you will very likely recognize the true intentions.* Looking back, I cannot thank the moments of compassionate harshness enough and could almost get angry at those denying these moments exist. Instead I say to them: It's easy to wear those rose-colored glasses if you don't have to live with its repercussions.
* granted, this works well on a personal level, maybe not so well if it comes out as a political press release
Staffing is more complicated than "how much they sold during their shift"?
Yes, staffing is more complicated, but min-wage labor cost for a restaurant are a significant portion of the costs and profit margins are very thin [0]. Many won't be able to absorb a ~50% increase in labor cost.
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Economics-of-running-a...
Its easy to play 'dot-to-dot' with these things - higher cost means lower sales means people fired. OR more money in the working class pocket means more coffee purchases means more hiring. You can connect-the-dots lots of ways.
The truth is, some of everything happens, and then it settles down into something workable. Yes we'll pay more for our coffee, but we'll also have more money in our pockets. And so on.
Eventually, of course, many things will be automated away by higher wages. At that point, basic income is a reasonable thing to consider.
It will increase the cost of labor, and result in fewer, more expensive goods and services.
We can both claim things all day.
But as far as reducing the amount of goods and services available, that isn't really backed up by anything. It's crazy that we're still relearning the lesson that we learned in the first half of the twentieth century, which is that when you raise the wage floor, consumer spending rises, which drives economic growth.
And yet, if they moved to a different country, their labor would be worth much more!
Funny how that works...
High-margin software companies wouldn't care about the cost of their janitors, like you suggest.
The CEO might not, but an enterprising facilities manager would certainly try to cut expenses by replacing the pleb who vacuums the hallway with a plus-size Roomba.
The opportunity cost of a service is the limit for which one would be expected to pay for it. If forced to pay $1,000,000 to have someone clean your bathroom, you'd end up cleaning it yourself.
To have been in a country where there are "high" minimum wages, the low value added jobs are the first going away because they're too expensive for what they are.
Cleaning service is one of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker%2...