Comment by moth-fuzz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moth-fuzz | Hacker News Reader

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Let's try an analogy - you dole out the whatever thousands of dollars it takes to buy a robot from whatever engineering company you fancy, including all the parts, labor, rare earth metals, venture capital interests, and whatever else went in to making it, you buy the whole damn thing off the shelf. If you then go and make it make mud pies, that's your problem. Furthermore, if the robot doesn't perform as adequately as you want, that's also your problem. You already paid for the thing. You can't just go complain to boston dynamics and say "actually, I've personally decided this robot is worth less than I paid for it, so I'm going to take back half my money and keep the robot". That's not how it works in the market of things, but in the market of labor, it is, because workers are under threat of homelessness and starvation. Companies get the labor they can't afford anyway.

What I'm saying is that fundamentally, a human livelihood has an upfront cost and that's the cost it takes to keep a human alive. I'm not talking about what work you as a hypothetical manager end up making this hypothetical person do, or how good at it they hypothetically are, I'm talking about living human beings as they are, baseline, whether or not you consider their labor valuable or potentially valuable.

The rest of your argument hinges on this misunderstanding, willful or otherwise. You've torn apart nothing but your own strawmen. Pragmatically, I'm not even sure minimum wage is the right choice to rectify this indignity, other options range from nothing to UBI to free housing programs to guaranteed jobs to communism. I'm not commenting on which one is best, I'm commenting on the moral framework from which these ideas come from.

Employees are inherently a service contract, without the upfront cost. You are renting the robot I your analogy.

Humans do have upfront costs too, but those are on individuals to pay. Generally the manufacturers of those parents (parents). It is not the responsibility of an employer or others to reimburse for those costs. Humans also have maintenance costs and personal desires, but those are not the responsibility of the employer either. The only responsibility is to pay an agreed upon price.

People are entitled to nothing from others beyond being free from direct harm.

I think what's being missed here is the function of a minimum wage is preventing workers from selling their labor below cost, just as we might attempt to prevent companies from selling products below cost under certain circumstances.

Why not let them sell below cost if that is all the labor is worth?

I understand that we want people not to starve, but surely paying them their labor value is better than them not working at all.

If the main issue is the difference between what their labor is worth and the necessities to survive, why is it the employer who should subsidize them?

The reason we prevent companies from selling below cost is because it is an unfair advantage to those companies-a very different concern than workers below cost.

This is beside the fact that the threshold for 'below cost' is not an economic reality, but an entirely arbitrary and unrelated moral position.

Why is the employer not the one who should subsidize it? Why should the employer only profit from underpaid labor? Is it because they "create jobs"? But no, most jobs exist whether someone is running a workplace or not.

Also you seem to have the idea that working a job is somehow inherently good. Some of them just are not and are a waste that are actively preventing people from working on what is necessary.

Example, a store clerk paid more than a teacher despite shortage of teachers. Garbage disposal specialists being notoriously underpaid because we feel like it. Research being underfunded compared to development compared to management.

Finding a place that's paid actual labor value is almost impossible in fact, as if the system based on maximizing profit is not optimizing for that but for lowest possible salary... You can compute a rough estimate of a labor value by an input-output model. Note that more things being produced is an actual negative value if they're not needed or sold.

Suppose having a line manager makes an employee 5% more efficient than not, but the gain falls the more employees each manager has to manage, even potentially becoming negative in some cases. Yet, "market forces" which is other managers set themselves a high salary.

>Why is the employer not the one who should subsidize it? Why should the employer only profit from underpaid labor?

I dont think the work is underpaid. If the price is low due to supply and demand, it is not underpaid, it is just low value labor. If we want people to have more money than their labor is worth, then the people who want them to have money should give it to them, or help them increase the value of their labor.

>Also you seem to have the idea that working a job is somehow inherently good.

Not at all. I think that self sufficiency and people taking care of themselves is good. Working and making money is good in that it reduces the need for others to subsidize and pay for their lives.

>Some of them just are not and are a waste that are actively preventing people from working on what is necessary.

I think this is a inaccurate and paternalistic view. low paid jobs are not a barrier. People can and do find better jobs. Destroying a job does not create a better job.

>Examples

Nobody in the examples underpaid. These are just examples of labor that has low value (supply and demand). If garbage specialists are underpaid, it isn't because "we feel like it", it is because it is low skill and anyone can do it. If teachers are underpaid, it is because we don't want to pay more for higher quality teachers.

You seem to be coming at things from a Marxist theory of labor value, which isn't workable.

>Why is the employer not the one who should subsidize it?

Because it's a government policy. If the government wants everyone to earn $25 an hour, the government should pay for it by providing a universal basic income, rather than forcing a third party to pay for it. This would also ensure that people that can't do work worth $25/hour can still survive.

The government should also be the one paying for universal healthcare, rather than (again) foisting the responsibility onto employers and forcing people to choose between being exploited in a job and losing health care for their family.

> People are entitled to nothing from others beyond being free from direct harm.

You state this as though it is an absolute fact. In reality, it's completely arbitrary, vague and reflects only your personal values. What is direct harm? Why am I entitled to not being caused it? Why am I not entitled to being free from indirect harm? If I poke at you, not directly, but using a stick, is that indirect harm? Is not paying you the agreed upon price dorect harm? Why is there a responsibility to honor agreements, but nothing else?

Even given a generous interpretation of "direct harm" it doesn't reflect society as it is: in reality, people cooperate, compete, create hierarchies, cause and accept harm, lead and are led and assign and divide responsibilities amongst themselves according to a wide range of value systems...so I guess yours is just some kind of prescriptive wishful thinking? Sort of like the libertarian version of the ten commandments?

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