Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

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tenebrisalietum

Couple of counterpoints:

- Let's say I'm a 16 year old adolescent who's doing well in school and wants to take a part-time/weekend job to gain experience in the job market. My basic expenses are covered (I live with my parents). Should a business get to pay me less just because of this fact?

- I'm a wife of a rich man and have never had to work, but decided to try it because I'm bored. I know nothing but the finer things of life and my basic expenses are 10x what the middle class is. If a business has to cover basic expenses why are we not going to cover this claim of full expenses, what determines in a corruption-free manner whether a claim for a basic expense is valid, and what is an acceptable burden to a business owner to determine this?

- Let's say I'm a jobless struggling adult, sharing a cramped living space with 4 others including 1 or 2 who are drug addicts. A job would really help me get out of this situation, but company X is only willing to pay minimum wage. It's better than what I have now which is nothing. How is having this job automated away a reasonable alternative for me - because you don't want this employer to give me a job in the first place because it doesn't cover my expenses.

- Let's say I'm a customer of your business, and you decide to pass on the full cost of living of all employees to me. Your product jumps from $10 to $50. I'm not shopping there, your business closes, and your employees are now jobless. How does this help anybody?

Are the first 2 points even made seriously? Obviously they aren't advocating for businesses to compensate people for exactly their specific 'basic expenses', they clearly intend to mean basic expenses for low to middle class in general, not based on the person.

Also, it always seems weird that whenever a minimum wage discussion comes up people jump in with these obviously contrived what if scenarios. How about we care about the real people that can barely/cannot afford food/housing/etc because businesses don't pay enough, rather than these situations with made up people.

The number of teenagers having jobs has plummeted over time as minimum wage has increased. Teenagers don't often have the skills / work ethic / experience needed to provide more value than they cost and so the job is eliminated. We are removing the bottom rung of the ladder. This is not a contrived example.

> How about we care about the real people that can barely/cannot afford food/housing/etc because businesses don't pay enough

Obviously depending on people to care out of the goodness of their hearts isn't working, if someone really cared about these people they wouldn't be in their situation. You can ask me or anyone else to care, you can even pressure them into appearing to care, but you can't really make them care, so this is a bad way to solve a problem.

If a good system that doesn't depend on emotions, media performances, or pathos can be put into place, it's probably going to be more reliable in the long run, and can mutually benefit both those in bad situations and those who would like to be able to walk in a city without getting asked for money constantly.

Hence it's very valid and good to ask what exactly entails things like "basic expenses" and use hypothetical situations.

> if someone really cared about these people they wouldn't be in their situation.

Do you really think that?

1 and 2 are counterexamples to something nobody really argues for, even in case of UBI. 3 is a more general problem, and a social safety net is one example solution here.

WRT 4, regulatory intervention ideas like minimum wage only work and derive all their power from being universally. Even if, as in your example, my product jumps from $10 to $50 (which would be something unprecedented), all my competitors (within the country) face the same issue too! Their prices will have to jump by roughly $40 as well. The overall demand for the product category may go down, but my position relative to competitors remains unchanged.

This may not work well for goods that can be easily offshored, like manufacturing plastic widgets. But (with the caveat that I'm not an economist, and didn't study this in too much detail) it seems perfectly matched for physical-space services sector - something, which by very definition can't offshore, and also resists automation pretty well.

> Your product jumps from $10 to $50

Please show where this has happened.

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