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Comment by gonzobonzo | Hacker News Reader

> You’re comparing human beings working to survive to used vehicles.

You could flip this and say "you're comparing people who are selling off an essential possession just to survive to a bit of company work."

The way people frame things in completely different ways to justify their preexisting beliefs is part of the reason why it's difficult to get people to consider other possibilities. The person could be doing their job to survive, or they could be working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of extra cash. A person might just be getting rid of their used vehicle, or they might be giving up an essential possession because they're in dire straights.

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> The person could be doing their job to survive, or they could be working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of extra cash.

Your statement makes it seem as if these populations are of equal size, but in reality the vast majority works to survive.

An item should not have a minimum price as it is just an item, meanwhile every person is, well, a person, and should be able to sustain themselves.

People sell something to survive (their labor, their goods, etc.). It doesn't mean that every single transaction they make is for the sake of survival, or that external actors are a better judge of what their prices must be.

In college I would often make some extra spending money by partaking in social science experiments. I didn't really care if the compensation was below minimum wage - I had time, it was easy enough, and it was easy to opt in when I could. I wasn't doing it for survival, but for a bit of extra spending cash. If someone forced them to significantly increase wages, I might have benefited, but it's far more likely that they would done fewer experiments with a more select group and I would have been worse off.

If someone is on the edge, and it's only a minimum wage job that they have open for them, California's minimum wage could help them if they're one of the lucky ones who benefit from it, or could hurt them if they were one of the people hurt by the loss of 18,000 jobs it caused (per the linked report). A policy that leads to fewer jobs that pay more tends to just increase inequality.

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