[navi0]

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.