Why spend $$$$$$ developing a drone delivery system that might face insurmountable technical hurdles like range, capacity and safety if you can just pay undocumented migrants on bicycles $2 per delivery?

In places with strong unions, there is often a de facto, negotiated minimum at least on a sector by sector basis instead.

E.g. Norway has a roughly 50% unionisation rate, and no minimum wage in most situations, but most sectors are covered by negotiated agreements between the unions and employer organisations.

The obvious alternative is to tax the rich to feed the poorest. We can start with capital gains.

(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.)

Prevent a desperate race to the bottom? Ensure something approaching a minimum wage? Nobody cares, so long as they're getting a UBI check from the government.

When facts conflict with beliefs we hold dear and perhaps define our identities, our brains are very skilled at finding ways to keep believing what we want to believe.

Especially when the facts define your in-group. Changing such beliefs, makes you one of the people you and your friends hate. The mind will convince itself of pretty much anything to avoid such social suicide.

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/YqyCaATQPtk?t=74

People started treating "meeting other people in person" as a tiresome chore, and the world is adapting to that change.

Depending upon the time of year and when the sun rises, I begin at different times, but usually around 6-7 am. I'm usually done before 8am, and the Subway was a convenient place to stop on the way home.

I don't cook much when I'm in California, and there are still some good restaurants near me there. Those prices have risen too, but it's high-end food, so I don't mind as much. There's a Carl's Jr. about half a mile away, and it's been closed for 4-5 months. It's in a prime location (on PCH), but nobody has moved in yet.

There's already a federal minimum wage, and a state minimum wage, but now there's a restaurant minimum wage too, and it was passed in California without any input from the food industry, or any concern for the impacts it would have on them.

Most of the workers in those places are students (high school or college), and they're not yet out on their own. They took the job knowing that they wouldn't be earning a living wage, and yet they still wanted the work. To me, it doesn't seem very fair to the employers when the government steps in and tries to "solve" a problem, causing a major disruption to their industry. This is the same sort of behavior the Soviet and Chinese politburos demonstrated during the peak of communism in those places, and the unintended consequences almost always made things worse.

I'm responding here because my politics are apparently unpopular today (at least in California), and my reply was modded down.

If the desire is to reverse that trend, the best way to move the needle is to bring housing prices (by far the largest living expense) in cities back down to earth so they’re affordable to normal people again, however that’s best done (probably building more housing, unlike SF which decided to instead prioritize offices and retail, leaving it vulnerable when the pandemic hit).

It is like when slavery was abolished, someone would protest against it, arguing that slavery cannot be abolished, since the masters feeds their slaves, takes care of them, treats and educates them, and if slavery is abolished, the standard of living of former slaves will fall sharply.

https://www.5out.io/post/a-detailed-breakdown-of-restaurant-...

That seems unlikely to be just that though, this study was just on the people who lost jobs. If 20,000 people are out of a job, there is probably another larger cohort on less hours. And we also don't know how much wages rose. The people who were fired were the ones who could only justify being paid the minimum. The ones who stayed might already have been paid more like $17, $18 or $19/hr.

So yes to what you say, but the study doesn't say anything about whether total compensation went up or down.

The gap between what a minimum wage job pays and what it costs to scrape by is covered by government or charity, if they didn't do that the workers would die, which means the jobs don't get done, so that means the resource spent by governments or charities as a result of a low minimum wage is a subsidy for the employer. Instead of paying what it costs they get it for cheaper to create a fiction of "employment".

I don't think it's nearly that clear. Western nations are at a near record low unemployment rate. We should want to remove low paying jobs.

Actually, a core part of Sweden's original plan for social democracy was to have "solidaristic wage policy" where high wage workers would accept a lower wage in exchange for a higher one for low wage workers. The idea was you'd both squeeze low productivity businesses out _and_ provide a windfall to high productivity ones, who could expand faster.

It's things like self-ordering, machines that make change (if cash handling still matters), conveyor ovens/charbroilers, more centralized food prep, self-service and automated beverage dispensing.

Plenty of automation is happening outside of California though. Here's an Illinois bases company's blurb about beverage automation [1].

Reducing labor in small amounts increases service capacity, and in large enough capacity lets you operate a restaurant with a smaller minimum crew.

[1] https://dimontegroup.com/projects/cornelius-quick-serve-pro/

Will I still be allowed to hunt for food?

Society is something better encouraged than gamified.

Well, not maximum wages as policy but policies where high productivity workers take a lower wage than they could individually bargain for in exchange for boosting wages of low productivity workers.

It provides a windfall to the most productive industries and a squeeze to the least productive ones.

Turns out economics is actually more difficult than "higher minimum wage is good/bad".

People don't work in low income jobs because it is the easiest option, but because it is the only option often.

Which is why the only rational position of a true believer in the free market is to abolish international borders.

"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes from labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15 years it has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."

"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made a name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for Radical Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting “public ownership of production and a government-planned economy.”"

https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-berkel... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...

"...and price increases of about 1.5 percent— or about 6 cents on a four-dollar hamburger."

Ah, yes, the fabled four-dollar hamburger. I know I never need to spend more than 4 dollars nowadays when I get fast food.

You're exactly what I was talking about. Indoctrinated into being absolutely opposed to anything in favor of workers, spontaneously regurgitating those same few tired "arguments".

Nah, most of them are most likely already employed somewhere else at a 25% wage increase.

Note that the unemployment actually didn't spike up according to a different study: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum... so that allows us to assume these people got a better wage somewhere else, at only a marginal increase to the consumer.

Now if they pay the teenager half the wage the same adult is doing then someone is getting a raw deal.

Said who? The same people who don't pay internships.

> but we also don’t need to make it near impossible for them to get work experience at a part time job because their skill level doesn’t align with $20/hr.

When minimum wage goes up, other more skilled labor also goes up, and adults will go somewhere better paid. Then the business will have no choice but hire the kids at the $20/hr and they will get that work experience you so want to bestow upon them. It's funny you are trying to twist it like it's gonna be a problem to find work experience for the poor poor kids, while all we know the business care about is how to exploit people at the lowest possible pay.

It's always "think of the children" with a specific crowd, an unhealthy obsession with children, I'd say.

Think of the children and ban XYZ books cause poor children can't comprehend what they are reading (allows us to ban books we don't like)

Think of the children and introduce chat control so we can track everybody and monetize their data (allows us to exploit everybody)

Think of the children and don't raise the minimum wage cause poor children can't find internships and part time jobs (allows us to exploit everybody)

There is a pattern here, not sure if you are ready to acknowledge it.

The government deciding the value of X is Y doesn't actually increase the actual value of anything, because that is decided by things the government does not control. Your point about carrots assumes, for some reason that you don't explain, that a firm chooses to sell for a price that is less than market-clearing (this happens all the time with people who make this argument: claims that businesses are both greedy and non-profit maximising). And this model is generally not true of labour either: minimum wage is minimum productivity, that is it, no need to talk about carrots.

Right, and you should be totally clear with people reading your comment: no economic theory supports what you are saying. Wages are productivity, the money to pay wages comes from customers, who choose to pay for something that the worker is producing. Minimum wages do not, and cannot, increase the share of productivity that is paid to workers anymore than the government can demand that shareholders accept lower returns. This is just total economic nonsense.