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Comment by goalonetwo | Hacker News Reader

that is the dirty truth. All of those feel-good minimum wage laws are in fact stealing wages from those workers. Those workers were OK to work for those wages before the law. Now they have nothing.

The result is now higher unemployment and use of tax-dollar to subsidize those people.

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this is the traditional belief, but all the empirical research on this shows that it is not true.

https://www.umass.edu/news/article/umass-amherst-economists-... https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/01/30/w...

_All_ of it? Damn. That's wild.

Or, since the overall demand for transportation hasn't changed, jobs shift over time to ones with less exploitative terms.

Yeah, to be clear – I obviously want people to be compensated well for their work, but the path to that isn't as easy as passing a law. And I wish that wasn't the case, but it is, and ultimately this is the consequence of pretending otherwise.

But having laws still works better than to just hope that no greedy businessmen would ever want to exoit workers.

They are okay with it at first because they don't realize they're going to wear out their cars. Then when the car is in the shop for a week, and they can't work, they're not only paying for expensive repairs, but also not making any income at the same time. There is a reason the turnover is high with Uber and Lyft, and it's not because the pay is good.

Those workers often had no other choice other than to get exploited to scrape by, and now businesses who will refuse to pay a living wage have thrown them to the street. It's clearly economically viable for them to pay the bare minimum, but they will literally cease business than accept slightly lower profit margins.

Yes. More people should take note that there's always unintended consequences with price controls. It usually makes things much worse.

Reminds me of: https://www.lenconnect.com/story/opinion/columns/2013/09/23/...

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