Okay, so remove the “Propaganda that convinces…. “

Most people believe that individuals have a right to the fruits of their labor, whether in the form of their own actual labor or through enterprise profits. What I’m asking is (outside of propaganda or disproportionate political influence) what prevents the proverbial “tyranny of the majority” from ceasing byway of majority rule the fruits of a more productive member of society labor?

I mean this is kind of true as it goes about people sometimes make poor decisions, but we can imagine a world where everyone makes perfectly optimized life choices and someone's still going to have to clean the sh*t out of toilets.

Our system of government, a general sense of fairness, a lot of other things. It’s a complex answer. Do you believe a majority would take away all the wealthiest people’s money?

Again, how do you define productivity?

I don’t believe most people think they have a right to all the fruits of their labor.

Sure. But if a lot more people had a lot more valuable in demand skills, those crappy jobs would sure pay a lot more, just do to supply and demand.

Outside of that disproportional political influence you alluded to, what would prevent them from doing so?
Whatever people produce or facilitate the production of, e.g. produce.

I don’t know? Nothing? Is that the answer you are looking for?

That is pure and utter nonsense. When it comes to price controls and the markets the govern, the science is settled. The minimum wage does not increase jobs NOR does it raise wages. It simply makes it illegal to hire low skilled workers. All it does is make people unemployed, and the people who become unemployed as a result of the minimum wage are low skilled workers, the very people who most desperately need jobs. The minimum wage is an evil policy that hurts poor people.

You may be interested in this recent study, which contradicts your claims above.

Well, my question was the answer I was looking for. That is, minority groups tend to maintain or attain what they perceive to be their rights by acquiring disproportional political influence.

It can only do that, I agree. But only doing that isn’t an inherent feature because raising minimum wage can also raise an economy out of a low-skill/low-wage equilibrium to a higher-skill/higher-wage one.

What does this have to do with equality of opportunity and your belief that poor people deserve their wages because of moral failings? My belief is pretty simple. Someone's going to have to clean the toilets regardless of everyone's life choices so their wages aren't merely a function of their life choices. Rather the wage differential has a lot to do with power differences in society.

Like I said, it’s a complex answer. What does that have to do with you lying about what minimum wage increases do? Or whether AI will significantly devalue certain types of labor? Can you please just make your point?

For most, I don’t believe that their poor choices are due to moral failings. I think it’s mostly environmental, i.e., they don’t know better instead of they know better but do otherwise.
If we were to create a shortage of low-skilled labor, I think the least pleasant / most grueling low-skilled jobs would pay more than the more pleasant / less grueling ones. For example, imagine if everyone could do every job and we needed to fill every job. I would think the least pleasant jobs would pay more.

That's another very interesting topic but I wouldn't say that minimum wage type policies are anything to do with a different economic system. (UBI might well be and should be imo). The point about minimum age is that it is absolutely not being argued for because it is good for the economy although it might not be possible if it were very bad for the economy.

As for decisions - most people (pretty much everyone) make mistakes on a regular basis. Just doesn't matter that much if your reasonably wealthy and I want it not to matter too much for anybody. To err is human ...

So if everyone made the optimal choices scarcity would be removed and there would be no poverty.

Nope.

That article was more practical than ideological. In a practical sense I think it’s a lot easier to change people’s opinions on raising the minimum wage by appealing to the economic benefit side of the equation than to change their underlying ideology.
I agree with you on that point. As I said, I don’t think people are poor by choice. It’s more an environmental issue, e.g., circumstances of birth, etc.

What scarcity? The only reason we're not producing more stuff is because we're not producing more stuff, not because we couldn't if we wanted to.

The unemployment rate is at or near 50 year lows so that would seem to contradict that a bunch of automation has taken place and people are without jobs. We are extrmely likely to see wag growth from the lower and middle class over the next 10 years that most of us has never seen in our life times. That is what happens when companies are competing for labor because unemployment is so low.

These people wanted jobs and they got them - assuming someone hates the MCD cashier demographic because they like automation or lower/no minimum wage is just wrong. I think low MW and high automation helps those people (lower cost of goods, more job opportunities, etc) more than high MW, low automation and anti-growth type of reforms.

This post didn't get enough love.

But we don't have to imagine this. In the last 30 years the US has provided cheap tuition for relatively more people to have access to high skilled jobs. Concurrently companies bought into the core competencies idea that companies should only be big enough to achieve their core competencies. As a result, they outsourced a lot of the mundane jobs to low paying contract companies. So previously if you worked as a janitor for a Fortune 500 company you had good company benefits etc. But now, the companies don't actually employ those people anymore so those previously poor but still ok jobs became much more precarious and lower paying.

We can also look around and see countries that have sectoral bargaining, unions, etc the lower end jobs do have relatively more pay, better benefits, etc. So we don't need any navel gazing hypotheticals on how to try and make sure the poorest are taken care of. We already know.

These don't go together. Higher MW, at least in theory, would drive more automation. It also drives workers to larger, more productive companies. In order words a higher minimal wage could actually be pro growth by making companies compete on productivity and automation, and not on a pool of low wage, low productivity workers.

So you think fortune 500 companies used to over compensate janitors but then they decided to get out of the game and now they hire 3rd parties to hire people to be their janitors and they under compensate them? Do you think fortune 500 companies over compensate everyone or just those low income employees?

I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. I was pointing out that a lot of people who support a high MW are anti-automation.

I don't understand your logic here. Why would companies grow faster if their expenses (the cost of labor) go up? If they wanted to higher better workers they could do it before MW goes up.

Sweden doesn’t have a minimum wage, yet it looks like the average wage for a janitor over there is around $14/hr. So what difference do you see between achieving the same effect through collective bargaining and raising the minimum wage?

Have you considered that this time we may be the horse?

I don't think it's a matter of over/under compensating at the firm level. It's that the theoretical "We need a lot of high skill jobs and then all boats will rise" runs into the empiric reality that we did fill the demand of high skill jobs and f*ck over low skill workers at the same time.


If true growth comes from productivity increases, at a societal level we can align the incentives for companies to increase productivity by forcing them to automate their least productive parts. That combined with a tight labor market will shift more positions to high skilled highly productive jobs. It's basically doing the work of "get more high skilled jobs and then the poor will do better" but by actually forcing the change that's wanted via distribution instead of depending on some nebulous idea of "equality of opportunity"