Humans have certain fundamental maintenance costs. $100/hr vastly exceeds maintenance. However, if you pay below those maintenance costs, then society effectively picks up the tab via other social costs and programs. For instance, if employers don't provide healthcare, then we either pay more for emergency medical treatments and other publicly-subsidized healthcare programs, or we accept being a country with a bunch of people dropping dead at age 40 of entirely preventable problems.
This is very different from most other goods, because no one really cares if you break your chair, the chair's parents didn't spend 18 years of their life on it, etc.. If you break a chair, you bear the full costs of replacing it.
Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher than the maintenance wage.
It would be more efficient to pay someone market rate, have needed work get done, and subsidize their existence than to try and offload that cost onto employers.
Exactly. Minimum wages are an attempt to solve economic redistribution policies by obfuscating the cost to employers rather through the tax code, which is the cleanest way to achieve the goals of broad based prosperity.
It also has consequences like increasing the attractiveness of substituting capital (i.e., automation) for labor or simply leaving some work undone (e.g., many smaller restaurants in CA are going out of business due to multiple government policies, including very high minimum wages).
Why would it drive wages down? The less desperately that workers need a job (due to universal basic income), the more they can demand, assuming they also have skills that fill the employer's need.
The trick for this to work is that the UBI has to really cover a lot of basic needs.
Overall, this works better for lower skilled workers than it does for higher skilled and higher paid workers. But it could also make sense for people staying home to raise their children, a job which is not compensated today.
The alternative is that certain types of work simply do not get done, as shown by the article. That means if you care about providing for these people you'll now be responsible for shouldering 100% of their cost as they sit around unemployed.
Is it? Minimum wage is a pretty simple law, compared to the paperwork and bureaucracy of existing welfare programs. I suppose you could go with Universal Basic Income, but I'm not convinced society is actually ready for that one yet.
How would such a program even work? If we say the Maintenance Wage is $15, is the government just paying the difference between that and the market rate? If so, it seems the ideal salaries to offer are $0 (let the government subsidize it) and $16+ (but you could just get two $0 workers, so I'd expect pay scales to really start at more like $30?)
This seems like it rapidly descends into Bureaucracy or Communism
Just because a law is simple does not mean it's efficient. We are talking about the total value being produced. But if you want simple, something like a negative income tax would be simple and decently efficient.
>However, if you pay below those maintenance costs, then society effectively picks up the tab via other social costs and programs.
No, that doesn't hold because humans need these "maintenance costs" regardless of whether they're working or not. Therefore it's fallacious to claim that such "maintenance costs" stem from the job itself. It's a sunk cost arising from the person existing in the first place.
Exactly why healthcare should be just one more part of the standard social contract. We the people should collectively pay (single payer) for everyone to have the required basic healthcare in bulk, without the stress of billing, collections, etc.
Same idea as police, fire, basic education. We want a properly educated, health, safe workforce. That's the basis of a healthy, productive, strong society.
> Real question: If government-mandated wages are good policy, why not set the minimum wage to $100/hr?
Because min wage policies have a cost and a benefit. The benefit only happens at relatively low numbers (enough for basic necessities). After that point you dont get more benefits but the costs still increase.
Is a three-bedroom house in [pick nicest neighborhood in any metro area] a necessity?
How about a one-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood?
An in-law unit (e.g., "granny flat") on a farm just outside town?
A room in a six-bedroom co-op house where meals are collectively prepared and shared?
Same could be asked about food, clothes, etc. I can buy used clothes for $5 or new ones for $100.
"Basic necessities" is woolly term that in practice is full of paternalistic value judgements. Every individual has a variety of resources to draw upon that would make them willing/unwilling to work a job at a given wage.
A government-mandated minimum wage means some people who could find employment will not because their output do not exceed the wages the government has declared must be paid. In practice, it also means many people starting out in life or who are less skilled never get the chance to be hired and learn new skills that increase their pay.
Minimum wages remove the lowest rungs on the job ladder that often teach skills required to be successful higher up.
It is still useful to ask the question just so we know the answer. I admit the person asking in this case probably didn't mean it this way... :)
On speed limits, when it comes to road deaths, you get people saying "one death is too many" and so on when one of their loved ones die, even when speed limits are set to 20 mph.
These people are wrong. Asking why a 1 mph limit is bad can help reveal that we do put a cost measured in lives on convenience, and we do face the risk of death when driving a car, and everyone has a number they think is reasonable.
Asking why $100/hr is too high can at least help us decide on a quantitative way to decide on a number rather than just guessing.
Another reply already addresses your question about speed limits, which is another great example through which to examine these questions.
"Reasonable" is a completely subjective standard and not a good way to run a complex economy with an infinite combination of job seekers and providers.
Who gets to decide what is reasonable has big real world implications for millions of people. Get it wrong, and as we see in California here, people lose their jobs and businesses close all because some politician or bureaucrat (or misinformed voter) thinks they know better than workers and employers what the correct price for labor should be.
Your question can be applied to literally any market intervention with a grey area. If housing code is good policy why not make all houses 10 times as strong?
It's the same question, really. If we make housing too expensive to build through stricter codes, then housing won't get built and at some point (e.g., last decade in California discussed in the parent article), the homeless population increases and people/businesses decide to relocate because the math doesn't work.
I don't think a full look at the history of minimum wages will be kind to their supporters. Minimum wages were created by labor unions for the sole purpose of excluding other workers who are more productive or less expensive than their members[0].
Going back further, labor unions were created during the railroad boom by racist white workers to exclude Chinese laborers who were 2x more productive for the same price. Instead of responding to competition by getting better, American railroad workers formed labor unions and lobbied politicians for relief, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act [1] that forcibly expelled 400,000 Chinese immigrants and led to some horrific violence and racism towards Asian people in this country.
In all cases, the role of government should not be to mandate wages or prices or anything else that markets are better suited to establish, or there will necessarily be higher unemployment. Governments can help by establishing some health and safety standards and policing abuses, but when it comes to accomplishing the social goals that minimum wages intend to, that's better done through tax policy and income redistribution (e.g., guaranteed minimum income, earned income tax credit, welfare benefits).
You still didn't address the idea that there is a threshold for all intervention. You said "why not make $100hr minimum?" and the answer is "that's too high".
It sounds like, were you to acknowledge that thresholds exist somewhere for most things you think the threshold for minimum wage is 0 and that UBI and guaranteed services is a better mechanism.
Which is respectable, at least in that you recognize a government role in ensuring humane living conditions for its citizens. Most people who argue against a minimum wage seem to think any government action of any kind to protect or provide for citizens is "theft by taxation".
I don’t think there is a threshold for intervention in setting prices. If a $100/hr minimum wage is too high, then a $20/hr min wage will also be too high for plenty of employers and would-be employees who are now unable to legally transact. Safety standards create similar issues, but most typically require capex that can be amortized or depreciated (unlike labor opex).
I’m not opposed to taxes. When designed properly, they’re transparent and avoid excluding economic activity like min wages do.
Ah sorry I was taking you seriously when you said "real question", I didn't realize it was a rhetorical device. The history of the minimum wage is pretty irrelevant compared to the economic models and empirical studies in that article, I'm not going to engage in such a pointless distraction. If the Nazis invented building codes I would still support them based purely on whether they are a good idea or not.
But you seem to be missing my point on housing code: do you support a nonzero housing code? Some is good, too much is bad. Same for minimum wage, many models and analyses show that some minimum wage improves productivity and counterintuitively increases employment in monopsonistic industries up to the point when they (partially) undo the damage the monopsony caused, at which point obviously a further increase in minimum wage causes damage as you say. My point is that your "real question" (which was an argumentative point in disguise) works rhetorically against nearly every intervention, some of which you certainly support (I tried to pick an obviously good intervention and came up with building code), and thus is a weak argument. If you truly support no market interventions I at least respect the internal consistency of your worldview but think you must underestimate how much food poisoning, fire death, servitude, etc it would cause.
Rhetorical questions are real questions and useful for exploring the logical fallacies that are embedded in ideas like minimum wage.
As shown by comments elsewhere, picking a minimum wage is often based on some imagined everyman/woman’s standard of living that may preclude others from earning a livelihood at all due to jobs never created or capital replacing labor because government decided by fiat that no work that generates less than $X/hr in output shall occur. Human skills and living arrangements are infinitely variable, and governments fail when they attempt to preclude people with lower skills from finding work.
In practice, very few workers earn the minimum wage, but union contracts are often tied to it, so unions like to advance laws that increase the minimum wage, which leads to the outcomes described in the parent post.
As economic policy, they’re also bad because inflating the price floor of labor fairly quickly feeds through to higher costs for housing, food, and services.
Safety standards (ie rules of the road) and competent enforcement are good roles for government, and while they do tend to increase operating costs and function as regulatory barriers to entry, setting prices is best left to markets.
Monopsonies are easily solved by workers moving out of the (labor) market controlled by the buyer to better job prospects. Claiming ancestral ties to a place, etc, as reasons for remaining are then the choice of the worker. If enough people leave, the employer will be forced to increase wages to attract workers.
I think the solution here is to have you work at a fast food restaurant with a salary just low enough not to be able to eat at the end of the day. There really is no substitute for experiencing first hand what it is like to stack 500 burgers on an empty stomach then telling your kid there wont be any dinner today. Imagine some land whale exploding over her 7th burger not approaching perfection closely enough and that it seems you are not taking the issue seriously enough.
In contrast, if one earns enough to live a normal life they instantly change into one of the best regular customers. One can make a career out of flipping burgers and have a long term [professional] relationship with them. If they are indeed overweight give them a salad on the house and have them explore the many delicious healthy things on the menu. Delicious because one gets room to think about improvements when not drowning in bills. An eating disorder usually comes with above average knowledge of the culinary realm. Should make an interesting conversation.
(Btw, the American healthcare system is about as far away from a free market as it gets. Don’t think that example supports your point.)