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Comment by Grollicus | Hacker News Reader

There'll be a bunch of cheap singular apartments spread all over the US - let's for convenience's sake assume they're about a one hour drive apart from each other but that's a totally random number of course.

You can rent them for very cheap but just as you're about to move in they suddenly become unavailable for whatever reason? Probably the owner lost their keys or something and then lawyers can argue for years if the owner is actually required to hand over the keys. Or maybe the apartment has no way to enter and lawyers can now argue for years if an apartment needs to have a door?

At least that's what I can imagine would happen.

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> You can rent them for very cheap but just as you're about to move in they suddenly become unavailable for whatever reason?

I mean, presumably in this hypothetical situation we wouldn't want to simultaneously dissolve basic renter's rights.

You obviously don't live in Indiana....to think there are basic renter's rights. That would be a huge win.

I'm only slightly kidding. The Indiana legislature was "too busy" to consider a renter's rights bill this year. They were busy trying to "solve the problem" of transgender kids playing on sports teams in schools. That's obviously way more important than lower income people having affordable, safe places to live.

Yeah, and this is the trouble with trying to get people to engage with hypotheticals on the internet in thoughtful ways.

The usual formula for any engagement with hypothetical ideas is for it to be reflexively dismissed with a "that'll never work" response. Most of the time I think this is the instinctive friction we feel at being asked to engage with a new idea, and saying that'll never work for [insert reason] is intended not to express a counter-argument so much as it is to reject the invitation to participate in the exercise.

But even in the genre of "that'll never work" responses, this one is uniquely strange. Normally the "that'll never work" response suggests that there's some obstacle that arises as a consequence of the change to the status quo. But here, it's just a list obstacles that aren't connected to any underlying principle. It doesn't even feel like the usual "that'll never work" response.

It's not really that complicated. If everyone has more money, then everyone can afford to pay more, so prices will rise to consume that extra money.

And you are back where you started. Or you have to raise prices again, in a never ending loop.

I suppose you can hand out ration cards for food and housing, so those never have a price, just a government supply. That's the only "out" I can think of to keep the loop from happening.

I mentioned this in a different comment, but this assumes the uniform distribution of inflation, which isn't how it works.

Different segments of the economy can function as shock absorbers that bear the brunt of inflation, while other segments of the economy see their prices rise more slowly then the increase of wages.

Different sectors of the economy face different degrees of surplus and strain, and the relations between those structures are always up for renegotiation as new money enters the system.

You seem to be assuming that all this new money comes out of thin air, which might be a plausible way to think about central banks issuing new money, but it doesn’t seem to be a natural way to think about changing the minimum wage. Changing the minimum wage makes specific things cost more, which isn’t the same as creating new money or “giving everyone more money.”

>> I wonder what the USA would look like if minimum wage was defined as; two people being able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment within a 1 hour drive without traffic.

> [imagined nonsense rules-layering]

That won't happen for two reasons:

1. It requires a massive conspiracy.

2. Any law like the GP describes would most likely be written to block off the exploits that it took you five minutes to think of. Exploits that are missed can be addressed in subsequent laws.

Practically, a minimum wage defined like the GP's would require a detailed census of actually-paid one bedroom apartment rents, which would be immune to your exploits.

The BLS already publishes similar statistics. It’s not rocket science.

GSA does the same thing for travel expenses. You can determine lodging and per diem expenses for every county in the US.

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