But what's the root issue? Worker X is not able to produce value of more than $X an hour. Do we mandate he/she is paid more anyway, or do we try to train and educate a workforce that can produce more value?
Why must it be that the worker isn't producing the value?
Worker X may be producing value of $10X or $20X per hour, but corporation Y is pocketing the difference, and can do so because there is an oversupply of workers.
You are not fully understanding where the $10X or $20X value comes from. It doesn't come from the low skilled workers. It comes from the huge amount of automation, computerization, business process, and infrastructure all around that unskilled person.
If I work twenty years and invest all my spare money to build a fabulous machine that produces intricate and expensive electronics but the one thing I don't do is create a way to turn it on and off automatically. I hire a person to just sit there and push the button. This person needs almost no skills whatsoever.
Is this person really vital to producing my $100X per hour? In a way, yes. But then again, since this person's skills are non-existent - this person can be replaced by anyone else who can push a button.
I invested in the invention and the creation of the machine. I took the risk to build the machine. I spent the twenty years of my life dedicated to it. I created the environment where any half sentient being could push the button to get the thing going. Everything I did created the $100X per hour.
The person pushing the button doesn't deserve $100X per hour. The person pushing the button deserves the wages for someone with the skills to push a button.
That person deserves what the market pays for people with that particularly low skill set. It's not totally up to me. Maybe I live in an area where wages are really high. In that case, I'm going to have to pay the going rate for someone with low skills.
"living wages" are crap. They completely ignore the fact that some workers are young or spousal dependents looking for that part-time job to earn a little money.
On top of that there is no such thing as a "living wage" that can be defined. If I'm living alone, young, healthy, and not real picky about my lifestyle -- a living wage can be $1000 per month. If I'm married with 5 kids and in need of constant medical care, a living wage is 6X higher.
Yet you're implying that I as an employer with my available job for someone to push a friggin' button has to worry about all that or at very least accept someone's opinion on the lowest common denominator living wage?
At that point, I say screw the high school kid or part-time mom looking to earn a little extra money pushing the button. I automate the whole damned thing and eliminate the job. That, my friend, is called the "unintended consequence" of your heavy handed approach of controlling every little perceived injustice.
"That person deserves what the market pays for people with that particularly low skill set"
So I'm right, you do consider this a moral issue, you think that the free market is the be-all and end-all of morality and that people only 'deserve' what you deign to hand to them.
"Yet you're implying that I as an employer with my available job for someone to push a friggin' button has to worry about all that or at very least accept someone's opinion on the lowest common denominator living wage?"
You're the one that came up with the dumb button example.
Sounds like you don't really need someone to press the button anyway. If it was vital to your operations you'd be prepared to pay decently as it's not you've made a saving. Good for you.
"At that point, I say screw the high school kid or part-time mom looking to earn a little extra money pushing the button. I automate the whole damned thing and eliminate the job. That, my friend, is called the "unintended consequence" of your heavy handed approach of controlling every little perceived injustice."
If that is the price paid to get hundreds of other people off the government teat and stop subsidising the labour needs of you and your company, awesome. That high school kid misses out but his dad, who does more than press a button and generates more than ten times his pay packet for the company he labours for, gets to put food on the table.
A free market does not operate as a moral system. If you want to inject morals, price-fixing and wage-fixing are especially miserable ways to do it. The free market responds, often in ways you don't anticipate, and your social experiment goes weirdly sideways.
"A free market does not operate as a moral system."
I didn't bring morals into this, you'll notice the no-minimum-wage guy is the one that started bringing 'deserves' into this. I was talking about getting people off government support by making employers pay enough for workers to live on.
"If you want to inject morals, price-fixing and wage-fixing are especially miserable ways to do it."
Seems to work OK in a bunch of places.
"The free market responds, often in ways you don't anticipate, and your social experiment goes weirdly sideways."
Economists were warning of the housing bubble from the beginning of the decade.
Republicans were warning of the problems with fannie/freddie from as early as 2002.
How much do I value having clean water? A lot. I'd pay $100 a gallon if I had to do so to survive.
But I'm happily paying a tiny fraction of that and "pocketing the difference". That's because my demand is easily met by the supply.
Am I wronging the water company? Of course not. If they want to make more, they have to offer me something I can't get from someone else for cheaper.
Not to mention the fact that "pocketing the difference" in both cases actually means "spending the difference on something else."
EDIT:
I'm not allowed to reply to the next reply to me, but there is a difference between treating humans as a commodity and treating their labor as a commodity.
I have a right not to be enslaved. I do not have a right to be paid for my labor AT ALL, much less to be paid a certain amount. I have to compete to sell my labor to the highest bidder, just as though I were selling widgets.
"I'm not allowed to reply to the next reply to me"
You can usually hit 'link' and it'll let you reply in there, not sure if that's always the case.
"I do not have a right to be paid for my labor AT ALL, much less to be paid a certain amount. I have to compete to sell my labor to the highest bidder, just as though I were selling widgets."
You talk about these things as if they were written in stone somewhere. When you start to look at this in terms of absolute rights you lose sight of the point to some extent - what outcome do we want here? How can this best be achieved? What are the downsides?
The people who are stuck on minimum wage are the least able to compete. They have no skills and likely some difficulty acquiring them, they probably lack the ability to negotiate, they don't have the choice of not taking work because the alternative is starvation. The logical conclusion for them, were a truly free and unregulated market for labour ever to appear, would be contracting their lives away for a roof and some food, working insane hours in hazardous conditions for little to nothing.
Make no mistake here, a proportion of the population cannot better themselves.
Over the last hundred or so years we've added a huge framework of workers rights to our society to stop this very situation. A minimum wage is part of this, and raising it may well help large numbers of people.
However society is built by and for human beings, not machines or economic ideals. Where water is a commodity, treating humans as one must have limits, surely?
