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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

> Increasing the minimum wage in US states produces no negative employment effects.

Why not increase it to $500 an hour then? When you increase the price of cigarettes, people buy less cigarettes, when you increase the price of cars, people buy less of it. What do you think happens when you increase the price of labor and why do you think it has magic powers that makes it avoid these basic laws of economics?

What about people who prefer to work for Uber for $4 per hour rather than stay unemployed? Would you tell them "Sorry but this is inhumane, I can't let you do that to yourself and I'm ready to vote laws to forbid you to do as you please with your free time and send people like you to jail if they persist"? Do you know better than they do what's best for them and how they can use their own body? Doesn't that make you an authoritarian?

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Whenever someone trots out the "basic laws of economics" it usually means they're trying really hard to ignore the complexities of reality and force the world to fit into a simplistic and wrong model in their head. Study after study supports his position while yours is purely ideological and not in alignment with the facts. Rather than even discuss the facts, you've flipped to accusing him of being an authoritarian, and you think you're being the rational one here... really?

Try and understand that not everyone thinks employment is the end goal, rather being able to live a decent life is and that requires a livable wage and most of the western world has decided it's better to have a decent safety net that defines that floor than to let people be forced by circumstances to work for less than a livable wage. Try and understand what the words "wage slavery" mean to those who find meaning in that term, regardless of how you feel about it.

All democracies are authoritarian in the sense that you use the word; the minority will always feel wronged in some way by the majority forcing them to do things they're ideologically against. Using the word in that way makes it meaningless and makes your argument look weak.

A minimum wage still sets the floor to zero. It just outlaws values between $0 and somelike like $8.

Do your budget sometime with an effective wage equal to $4 an hour. What does it cover? What can a person do effectively with that $4 an hour? Will it lift them out of poverty? Can they live on an effective wage of $4 an hour working 40 hours a week and even afford shelter and food?

I mean, do people not get how little money this is?

$0 is even less than $4. So why forbid them from making even those paltry $4?

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