I think you have a widely unorthodox defination of "force" as no one is forced to take any job at any wage.
Force in the equation would come from the government using the threat of government violence to force a wage on a business owner.
A person that voluntary accepts a job for X wage is not "forced" to do so.
This means to make this a free market many nations did the reasonable thing and introduced measures like minimum wages and unemployment benefits. This way when you loose your job the balance of power evens out a little and the job market works better for all involved (workers have a highee chance of finding a job they like, companies have a higher chance of getting people that like them, really shitty companies get an incentive to change).
In the US all shitty work places have no incentive at all to change, because everybody and their dog is struggling to make ends meet. That means no matter how slavishly they treat your people, there will always be another person desperate enough to throw themselves into the grinder. Result: No incentive to change for the company and people who feel like society ows them nothing.
I don't think that is recipe for a bright future, but who am I to judge.
So from a systemic perspective minimum wage is like a limit you can set for how desperate you allow people to get. And quite frankly. 15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on.
This is, to begin with, not true. It's common for small businesses to be operating at the margin. If you don't have someone making the sandwiches then you don't have revenue and you still have rent and utilities. That math puts you out of business in a hurry and then the owner (whose wages came out of the revenue they now don't have) is facing the same circumstances as the employee.
But on top of that, even if you existentially need a job, that doesn't mean you need that job. You can pick the one that pays the most.
Where this falls down is when all of your alternatives are terrible. But if all of your alternatives are terrible, prohibiting you from choosing the one that was the least terrible (e.g. because it's right across the street but pays $2/hour less instead of being a two hour commute for $2/hour more) is not actually helping you.
To do that you need something like lower housing costs (so the wage you can earn is enough to live), or some kind of free community college so you can learn a trade that pays better, or a UBI. Not a minimum wage that could take away the job you currently existentially need.
Oh sweet summer child. When you are in debt and struggle to survive on a day to day basis, time is your enemy You cannot afford not to take a job. And if you are lucky enough to be able afford it today, you might not tomorrow.
Another thing: many people need more than one job as it is now. Guess what: if you pay people a decent living wage more people can actually get jobs, because less people have to do two or more. If your business is so inefficient it can't support minimum wage labor, it was doomed to fail before. Again: even McDonalds manages to pay minimum wages in Europe and their prices are roughly comparable. You are being gaslighted by the people profiting from that modern form of slavery.
you are right in recognizing that living costs are an issue as well, and they are an issue in many big cities. The known solution for this issue is publically owned housing which you shouldn't put into their own districts (thus creating ghettos) but mix them in throughout the city (Vienna's "Gemeindebau" is a good example for this, Vienna repeatedly got the title "City most worth living in" over the past decades). Don't only put poor people into these houses, make them decent and make them something people want to live in. Make them cheaper to rent than other flats (this way the rents in the surrounding areas cannot go up so fast). But most importantly: this must be done from the public side — nobody else in control has the incentive to act in ways that lower rents.
Aside from all this, what the US really needs to do is to look at all the other countries that are comparable to the area you are living in and wonder why they are doing so well without all the doomsday scenarios your politicians make tou believe (both socially and economically). Whenever I talk to US citizens about this they are either completely delusioned ("I live in an oligarchy") or they pretend their problems are so unique the rest of the industrialized world never had to deal with comparable things. "Who knows, maybe it cannot be solved at all", they say, while it was solved literally one country over since half a century ago.
That's like wondering whether man will ever be able to move faster than a horse, while your neighbouring country has airplaines they use on a daily basis.
Housing is an issue in big cities largely due to government policies that both limit inventory (building and zoning regulations) and limit profitability (rent control) that make is extremely undesirable to create new housing.
The solution to this is NOT government housing but less government regulations about building new housing
Where and when did this work? Have you any examples?
One article to get you started (nothing special about this one, it's just the first I saw from google): https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
As to the earthquakes/natural disasters bit for why they build relatively disposable homes - does that happen on the west coast of the US, for instance? I'm genuinely interested, if anyone knows.
ugly is subjective so I won't touch on that.
The low standard one is reasonable as that is what keeps costs low. The alternative is high standard and high cost. You can't really get high standards for low costs.
If the government dictates that all housing needs to be high standard, the collateral damage to that policy is that you can only build housing that prices people out of the market.
I agree but here they're also expensive, which, in my view, is a symptom of the corruption and lack of a free market.
> ugly is subjective so I won't touch on that.
Again I agree, but if you're into industrial estates with lots of concrete and overhead wires galore, then Japan is the place for you. I'm sure someone likes it, maybe the brutalists who made the ugliest parts of my country (the UK) after the war.
Please try to keep the snark out. If they were snarky to you then I say go for it but I didn't notice they were snarky to you and, regardless of whether you agree with them, their contribution to this discussion is worthwhile.
Let's try and keep HN a cut above.
Needing only one job is a historical anomaly as a result of an industrial society. Historically, people would have to perform a variety of tasks to provide for oneself.
Furthermore, more than one job de-risks someone's situation just like a consultant with many clients can handle the loss of a single client and not see their income fall to zero.
It's the total hours of paid labor over N jobs that you should look at instead. If you do 60 hours a week at one job or three jobs for 20 hours each, you're doing the same amount of labor with less risk.
The only qualitative difference between one 60 hour job and three 20 hour jobs is the benefits received from working 40+ hours for a single employer, but this isn't an issue with how many jobs you work. It's an issue with an artificial asymptotic condition created by an act of legislation by government.
Every time legislation creates artificial asymptotic conditions, you're going to get actors that optimize around that artificial boundary condition. If you want to avoid the circumstance, you need legislative solutions that are continuous in nature instead of asymptotic.
In other words diversifying your income only decreases risk when you don't need all of it, you'd be hard pressed to argue that that group includes those earning minimum wage.
I will never stop being amazed at how Americans argue that something decent is wrong, or untrue, or even impossible... when Europe exists.
In Europe there are zero businesses operating at the margin that would go under if unable to staff their operation? That was the thing you are responding to.
Well, Europe did raise minimum wages. Undoubtedly, some businesses did go under when that happened... So what?
Did business cease to exist in Europe?
I do not want the US to be Europe, that is nothing short of a dystopia for me a person that wants Individualism, and individual freedom. rejecting Authoritarianism and Collectivism
If people in the US like the EU model soo much then i encourage them to expatriate to that location. Stop trying to make the US into the EU
I never said Europe was Utopia. All I said was, decent living.
> that is nothing short of a dystopia for me a person that wants Individualism, and individual freedom. rejecting Authoritarianism and Collectivism
Ah yes. Says the person from a country where charities stop giving aid to poor African countries and redirect their aid to Americans.
> If people in the US like the EU model soo much then i encourage them to expatriate to that location.
Those who have the means to, do.
I can't find hard data, but probably we should not say that "those who have the means to, do". It's likely more of "a tiny percentage of those who have the means to, do".
Yes. However, the main reason I phrased it the way I did is that "if you don't like it, move to a different continent" is a very arrogant approach.
An American barely surviving on minimum wage is very unlikely to move to Europe.
And even if they did they would be far less likely to contribute meaningfully to the commons in Europe to support that social safety net. Therein lies the rub.
The only way to provide the productivity that funds the social safety net is when those providing the safety net far outnumber those consuming it. As this gets out of balance, those providing it start to resent those consuming it.
When it gets out of wack, you get situations like the DDR and North Korea, where the government needs to erect walls to prevent the productive people from escaping that shitty deal.
You can only achieve this balance in a high trust society where there is social pressure not to be on the consuming side for longer than is reasonable to get back on the producing side.
Guess what destroys that high trust condition? Bringing in outsiders faster than can be assimilated and/or eliminating the expectation of assimilation as the US is doing and Europe is now starting to do.
It's not that you can't bring in outsiders and maintain a high trust society. You can. But that takes work and it requires an acknowledgement that a high trust society is something that we should be trying to preserve while we do things that can hurt the current state of trust in a country.
From a trust perspective, the US is at a low probably not seen since either the Civil War or the Great Depression. We should solve the trust issue if we are to have any hope of building the social safety net features that rely on high social trust as a foundation.
Believe it or not, a lot people, in poverty or otherwise, really like the unique things in this country and most would rather have it this way than to move to Europe (which has its own share of major problems despite being a cool place overall).
Also, poor people rarely know the reality of other countries. I have friends in the States who firmly believe that Europe is a hellhole even though they are literally a medical emergency away from a bankruptcy.
This is a myth that is often repeated, but I have yet to see it proven.
The Original Federal Min Wage was passed in 1938 and was $0.38 per hour, Adjusted to 2021 that would be $7.14
In 1981 it was raised to $3.35, in 2021 dollars that would be $9.76
In 2009 it was raise to where it is today, $7.25 ($0.66 lower than a pure inflation increase should have been) and is 9.26 in 2021 dollars
So if you want to do a pure inflation adjusted min wage it would be no more than $10 not $15
I can find at no point in the history of Federal minimum wage would have wage inflation adjusted be more than $15/hr today. I can debate the merits of minimum wage, the ethics, etc, but we have to be having a debate with actual facts not political talking points.
If computer processing power becomes cheaper an cheaper, but real estate housing value double in a decade, we have 2% inflation?
Given the context this would be the standard model upon which dollars are adjusted for inflation over time, tools like usinflationcalculator.com make this easy to factor in what that would be
If you want to shift the debate to "what is inflation" that is fine, but that is not the debate I am having in this comment thread
Before jobs offered by others existed, not working in some form would have been existential for those people. This is the de facto state of existence. You'd have to at least do some form of hunter/gathering or subsistence farming.
This increasingly common idea that individuals no longer are obligated to provide for themselves is wild. The only way around it is to obligate others to provide for you instead of providing for yourself. The last time this was a common idea in the United States was in the in the antebellum South.
It wouldn't be by force if people did not need to pay for the basic necessities
That's the way I see it.
It can simply pay you the wage as an indirect subsidy to stimulate production.
It can employ you in the construction of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the US is dilapidated to the point of national disgrace.
It should still mandate living wages, the same way it should not allow employers to lash their employees or own them as chattel, or any number of other practices which are both immoral, and cannot find any temporary justification due to exigent circumstances (eg. literal struggle for national survival...)
How I see it, labor cost have been cut, while rent has gone up and prices have gone down.
If you increased minimum wage, it would put pressure on prices to go up and rent to go down, both would increase the value of the labor itself.
I think this whole dynamic is way way harder to model and predict how it'll play out then everyone makes it out to be. None of people's simple projection account for it all. Even economists with fancy models backed by simulations, math, and all that can't figure out the real outcome and often disagree with one another on what would happen.
It's not as easy as saying, half the restaurants are going to shut down, and leave empty all those commercial space. What happens next? Maybe some customers start to be willing to pay even more to get back some of the great restaurants they lost, or their proximity to them. Maybe landlords have to lower their rent for something else to fill in the vacancy, etc. Maybe everyone is happy with only half of the restaurants remaining, and each of those restaurant is making twice as much now allowing them to hire more staff and pay even higher. There's a lot of balancing act that could happen.
But equally is it ok for people to work hard and long hours and only barely make Or not quite make ends meet?
Sorry I should note that I am not saying you are advocating for the above(could be misread).
If you set the minimum wage at $15/hr and do nothing else, you have made that person worse off than today. Everyone around them now has more money, so everything is becoming more expensive. They now can’t find or keep a job, because any employer who employs them is losing at least $200/week, $10K/year by employing them.
I don’t know what the optimal solution is, but it’s not clear to me that the above is it.
And several developed countries have no floor other that agreed by through collective bargaining.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/5-dev...
This isn't a matter of improving the situation for everyone, it's a matter of improving the situation for the majority of min-wage workers.
If someone genuinely can't provide $10/hr of value, then either 1) they need to upskill (and there are social services for that, although perhaps not in the US idk) or 2) they're like one of those literal retards who are becoming literally unemployable, and the solution is either to subsidize their employer (which is okay in this instance because you're not subsidizing a race to the bottom like you are with subsidizing normal e.g. McDonalds wages) or put them on a disability pension.
But realistically, most people are capable of upskillinng and that's what they should be doing if they're not valuable enough to an employer.
There are many people coming up with solutions but clearly 'free market' adjustments have failed an increasing number of workers.
But I will disagree with your economic value question, I think service workers are undervalued greatly.
There is a giant disconnect between wage and economic value, the market is terrible at connecting the two.
Further at the end of the day wages are not the problem, cost of living is, economic value of labor is. Waving a magic wand and proclaiming a new min wage does not resolve those root issue, it may in some limited circumstances help a few people for a limited amount of time, but you need to resolve the root issue which mandated minimum wages increases is not going to do and often harms the very people you are looking to "help"
You know this and are making a bad faith argument.
What is your goal?