Comment by jasmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasmer | Hacker News Reader

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My god man, use your logic: 'pay workers illegally under wage, then can just work 60 hours a week to make up for it!' at least before we make it an issue.

If there was no minimum wage, wages in some sectors wages would drop to where they are in the undeveloped world aka $2/hour. Little communities with favela-like structures with limited heating/electricity would pop up, and if you think the 'dollar store' is cheap, then wait for the '25 cent store' where they sell stuff as they do parts of India and Brazil.

It's funny how people don't think this could happen in the 'modern world', I suggest they don't know what makes the modern world modern. For a hint, go to where the illegal workers in Cali or Texas live and exist. Those communities resemble pretty much the standard of living of Central American countries, aka 'down the economic ladder'. Because they are.

Moreover, having secondary low-wage markets will put downward wage pressure on other jobs. Extra surpluses will mostly be yielded by financial asset holders.

The solution here is simple, require people pay minimum wage. If you look at corporate profits in the US for example, there are plenty of surpluses available to pay people.

Some jobs will go away, that's fine.

I can't believe what I'm reading on this thread, the only other time I've been suspicious of 'ideological paid bots' is when I see a ton of people defending the CCP.

"Some jobs will go away, that's fine."

To whom is that fine? To the people going from $2/hour to zero it certainly isn't.

I honestly cannot grasp how some people can _forcibly_ remove other people's _options_ then pat themselves on the back as some sort of armchair savior.

Yes, for some people a bad option could still be their best option. What sort of moral superpower is that that enables you to forbid a contract between two consenting adults A and B such that A wants to work for X and B that's willing to pay X, but you as a C that just won't let it happen and is willing to use force to stop it from happening

Ideally minimum wage should be coupled with higher taxes on the wealthy, a generous social safety net, a job guarantee fronted by the state, and a sovereign wealth fund which pays out a minimum basic income. This would eliminate shitty jobs no one wants to do and get rid of business models which depend on them, which is a net win for everyone.

Yeah I’m here for my job guaranteed by the state, and no way to get wealthy enough to escape the money printer that’s providing basic income.

You need hard money before you attempt this.

You only need a "money printer" if you don't have the chutzpah to tax wealthy people and the sources of wealth that the state supports.

Yes, nation states can totally resist infinite money if they just tax a fraction of the people in their tax base.

No one ever said anything about infinite money. The basic idea of socialism is that democracy should control some of the allocation of labor and that, because the functions of the nation state are necessary to the health of enterprises and because the fundamental purpose of society is the common good, the state has a right to some of the profits, which go beyond merely taking money from the wealthy.

Plenty of nation-states make different trade offs between productivity or growth or whatever and mitigating poverty. To act as if the particular style we have in America is the only possible thing that works is asinine.

No, democracy and socialism have nothing to do with printing money.

You can do either in a hard currency system.

No, as you can see by my posts, I'm a strong supporter of min wage, but there is no need for 'job guaranteed by the state' or 'UBI' - in fact, doing so would lead to economic collapse.

All of the UBI supporters need to do the math on it, it's 'extremely expensive'.

The 'economic collapse' part happens when 'not working' becomes normative, and socially acceptable - and be assured that it will.

The idea of 'working for a living' when you can just 'do whatever you want' is a bit glib. I suggest the only reason people would work, is to pay for that 'special thing' they want aka 'trip' or 'iphone'.

The ideological problem with UBI is the same as any broad social welfare program and that it doesn't reward material output. That is 'extremely bad'.

Finally - I do suggest that it may be possible to 'very simplistically means tested welfare' for people (to get rid of overhead) - and - to allow some of those people to have jobs so they don't get caught in that trap.

In fact, I suggest for people 65+ we'll need a program like this because they can still work, and frankly, working may be very good for their health, and they can do things that are 'extremely needed' right now, such as help to take care of the very elderly.

Your argument falls apart when you consider that the people who would be working those jobs overwhelmingly approve of the minimum wage. It's a coordination problem caused by the power imbalance between labor producers and consumers. Without the minimum wage, there would be a race to the bottom, but labor producers wouldn't end up better off. The minimum wage is effectively a national labor union.

When it comes to employees making a contract with an employer in the field of minimum wage jobs, the employees have no bargaining power. There will always be someone willing to work for less.

Ideologically, yes, your argument is sound. But I'm begging you to think through what would actually happen with no minimum wage. In reality, it would absolutely destroy the standard of living for unskilled work as there's a race to the bottom on wages.

Businesses only hire enough employees to satisfy the demand for products and services. Eliminating minimum wage won't create nearly as many jobs as you think, and instead, would merely result minimum wage earners losing their homes while they are forced to agree to work for $2 instead of losing the job entirely to someone who will.

It's downright exploitive.

This is a very interesting discussion, one way to think about the issue is: "what should be the minimum wage" and "who defines it". If you set a minimum wage too high, you are taking jobs from lot of people, and if its too low you risk people getting paid less.

Whatever number you come up with is going to be arbitrary. A country wide minimum wage is stupid because the cost of living in New York is very different from Lousiana, a state wide makes more sense, but even so, it varies greatly from city to city within the same sate, so a city wide makes even more sense, if you keep adding granularity you'll reach the individual level, because the cost of living within cities changes fast, and there's a plethora of other factors to consider.

I have worked for really low wages in the past, even the lowest of unskilled worker still provides a value. Senior programmers on NYC are worth at least $60/h, now, how much a really low skilled worker is worth? At the time I was an unskilled worker it was was around $10, and thats how much I got paid despite the minimum wage being $8, anyone could get a job for $10, so thats the value a worker with essentially no skills was able to provide. The $8 minimum wage didn't make a difference on wages, because unskilled workers were already providing more value than the minimum wage, so policy makers were behind in raising it, which they did.

Raising the minimum wage and matching it to the market price at $10 wouldn't make any difference either, however, raising it to $15 would wreak havoc, you are basically saying that any worker whose job isn't worth at least 15$ should not be working.

A Minimum wage value written on a piece of paper can't magically increase the true value of a worker, wages won't drop to $1 if you set it as $1, and also won't raise to $50 if you set it to $50.

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