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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general). Letting industries who would historically underpay US workers to instead just underpay some other countries workers defeats the whole purpose of those minimum wage laws, causing a worse quality of life then if nothing was done at all. Countries that want to treat its citizens well need to reign in that globalist behavior.

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The current US unemployment rate is 3.5% which is near all time historical lows.

Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.

That's because most vulnerable workers are either skirting labor laws through the gig economy or have given up and dropped out of the labor pool altogether, which means for whatever reason they don't get counted in the unemployment rate

To whatever extent that is happening, there is no evidence that it has happening more today than it was happening 50 years ago (before globalization) so comparing the unemployment rate of today to the unemployment rate then is still a perfectly valid comparison.

There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like...

- Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)

OPs comment asserted that developed world workers were being hurt specifically because of the combination of free trade and a minimum wage caused unemployment. My comment was refuting that specific argument.

The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.

> The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general).

Also: things cost more in the US. You can't survive on 3rd world sweatshop wages in the US, even if they were permitted by abolishing minimum wage laws.

How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

> How much of that is just the recursion though? If a bus driver in Washington got paid the same as a bus driver in China, they couldn't afford to take the bus. Except that if they got paid the same as a bus driver in China, it would cost less to take the bus.

Very little, actually. Bus drivers need to buy more than bus tickets: even if you reduced their wages to third-world levels and reduced bus ticket prices to third-world levels, bus drivers still get sick and need to pay the doctor? Are you going to push doctor salaries down to third-world levels too? What about education, etc? At some point, you're just going to be pushing wages down across the economy and importing massive levels of inequality.

Expecting to people to take massive pay cuts and enact massive deflation in the name of market liberalism is frankly an ideologically-blinkered, impractical, stupid idea. It entails too much pain for little to no actual gain. The only people happy with the results would be a s small minority of oligarchs and ideological purists.

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