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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> Anything close to real work should pay real wages because otherwise you’re screwing the most desperate at the expense of the more affluent kids who can afford to walk away.

That isn't how wages work. If someone can do the same job for less, they will and you will not get paid.

You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive (the people who build the tractors get more, the guy driving the tractor gets more, the person picking the lettuce gets paid more, the lady trimming and repackaging the lettuce gets more, the truck driver delivering the lettuce gets more, the high schooler throwing the lettuce on your burger gets more...)

That "make everything more expensive" is inflation. Inflation hurts the poor the most. The lady making $400k/year doesn't care if ground beef is 10% more expensive.

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> That isn't how wages work. If someone can do the same job for less, they will and you will not get paid.

Sure, but recognizing that is what happens is important for both not patronizing businesses which give their workers the worst deal allowed by law and support for increasing minimum wages to match inflation.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive (the people who build the tractors get more, the guy driving the tractor gets more, the person picking the lettuce gets paid more, the lady trimming and repackaging the lettuce gets more, the truck driver delivering the lettuce gets more, the high schooler throwing the lettuce on your burger gets more...)

You're leaving out a key part: prices only go up for the fraction of those costs which are due to wages. For things like fast food, that's not a large component which is why, for example, a McDonald's worker in Denmark has a much better quality of life while the average Big Mac buyer is paying the same or less than their American counterpart:

https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

Another big factor to consider is the cost of poverty. The working poor have less ability to participate in the economy so a certain amount of local economic growth never happens, and they're often worse off because they're forced to do things like buy inefficiently because they don't have the reserves to optimize. Paying people at the level minimum wage used to mean would allow a significant number of people to participate in the economy more effectively and we've never regretted growing the pie.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive

Considering minimum wage in the US hasn't been raised in 10 years I should be paying 2010 prices.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive

Alternatively, the owner capitalist class could - gasp - take a cut in their already excessive profits. Shareholder, CEO, director and other executive pay has ballooned over the last decades, whereas worker wages (the ones that actually create the wealth with their labor) have at best stagnated.

Those ballooning wages are securities, not liquidity.

You can't pay rent or buy food with options. Securities are speculative, no minimum wage worker wants a gamble on if they get paid 5 years in the future.

Please keep the theatrics to a minimum. The goal is to have meaningful discussion, not attack your peers.

Divert the securities to the front line labor then instead of the upper few.

Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash?

You'd end up having to do something like a co-op model. However, if you want employees to earn their payout even if they leave before that five year payout then they couldn't sell back co-op ownership.

That means the co-op ownership continually gets diluted, or you run out of cap table to be able to hire more.

This scheme also means the first, eg fry cook, would make more money from the securities payout than the 3rd or 4th fry cook, even if the later fry cook is better/more dedicated/etc.

Also this means co-op voting for securities actions. The co-op can liquidate too early or too late which can hurt individual payout.

> Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash?

I didn't see anyone say "instead of".

If you want executives, you need to pay them.

Organizations without executives exist at really really small scales but they tend to be very short lived.

> If you want executives, you need to pay them.

I didn't see anyone say anything that conflicted with that, either.

You sure you're keeping track of the discussion here?

> I didn't see anyone say anything that conflicted with that, either.

Please look up:

> > Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash? > > I didn't see anyone say "instead of".

The whole of the pie is finite. If one slice is made bigger, the others must be made smaller.

The pie, in it's entirety, can be bigger or smaller with securities. That is largely determined by it's executives. Better executives cost more. Lesser executives cost less. A lesser executive shrinks the whole of the value of the securities. A better executive makes the whole pie larger, but wants a larger piece too.

> You sure you're keeping track of the discussion here?

Does snark like this work other places you post? Like, I can continue explaining concepts like "money is finite" and "lots of businesses fail and their stock is then worthless" if you really need that. Right now you're saying we should be paying low wage workers with fancy pieces of paper on the off chance they make extra money five years in the future when it does them no good. That's not some clever insight into how to fix economic disparity, it's just very silly.

> Does snark like this work other places you post? Like, I can continue explaining concepts like[...]

No, see, that's the thing; there is no continuous throughline to your comments here. You keep jumping around, and never to a place that actually makes any sense.

Someone said, very simply, that executive pay has "ballooned", and it was suggested that this should probably maybe not be the case. This would mean wealth can increase for both workers and those who are currently extracting most of it from the system, rather than payouts growing disproportionately for the latter. (It was framed as taking a "cut", but that's too generous of a description for a concept that comes down to "stop consolidating wealth to take it for oneself"—a slice of pie that grows by continually taking small bites from elsewhere. It's a "cut" only in the sense of someone backing off their notions of the size of their expected returns.) You didn't engage with this. Instead, you argued against an argument that no one was making—that employees should be paid in securities "instead of" cash. Called out on this, you made another jump to argue against something else that no one was arguing—to pay executives nothing and possibly work through the consequences of having no executives at all.

Dealing with this kind of monkey business is tiresome. To spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy dismissing nonsense arguments that someone keeps peeling off without any care put into them on their end is not economical for me or anyone else.

If you want people to engage with you, you need to knock off the bullshit. (And, please, keep the theatrics to a minimum.)

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