Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

IMO there should be a CoL adjusted minimum livable wage across the country, and it should be illegal to pay a >18 year old less than what it takes to live on. And that should be calculated from the barest minimum living standards[1]. At a certain point it becomes unconscionable for a wealthy society not to provide pure commodities at their lowest cost of delivery to it's poorest. As we do that, tips should be eliminated too.

There's very few of us with a hard enough heart who'd say no to someone who asked for a glass of tap water, or to use the toilet. As a society advances other basic necessities should move into the common domain too. (And the wonderful thing about capitalism is it has driven down the real costs of most of these things to historically absurdly low prices eg a thrift store pants for $7 in the face of $15 minimum wage is cheap compared to history when it was normative to have only 2 sets of clothes)

[1]: I'm thinking like shared bedroom, thrift store clothes, rice + beans + costco, annual checkup + bare minimum health insurance, annual dental cleaning / bare minimum insurance, a mint mobile $15 a month cellphone plan, and a library card for entertainment and education. You're not thriving, and you're not a catastrophic burden on the system either.

Our society is wealthy partially because of this inequality, not in spite of it. The real risk and extreme danger of penury provides a pressure for people to work for the lowest wages possible, keeping the price of the produced goods low for those who can afford them.

Places with more mechanisms to prevent falling into deep poverty and policies to alleviate it have higher wages at the very bottom, and less wealth both in personal net and GDP per capita. But even then it only benefits local workers: they still depend on an immiserated worker underclass somewhere to make their cheap goods.

Capitalism created this problem, and it is a fundamental mechanism in how capitalism creates wealth. It's not within the powers of capitalism to solve it.

Absolutely not. Compensation should reflect value received. This idea effectively forces a business to subsidize their employees, because you damn sure can't pass all that to the customer (because then we are just back where we started, just with an extra 0 on every transaction). Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business. And this would consolidate capital into the hands of the big businesses and billionaires who can afford to pay everyone tens of thousands of dollars more than they can bring into the company.

A McDonald's cashier is not worth $55,000 just because they are >18 years old. That position is not supposed to be a career. That position is supposed to be a first job for a dumb 16 year old who needs gas money and $500 for a PS5. When their needs outgrow their paycheck, they are supposed to move to a job that pays more. Can McDonalds afford to pay the extra? Sure. But Jimmy's Hotdog Stand down the street can't, so he goes out of business and the money he would have made goes to McDonald's instead and the rich get richer.

> Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business.

Bad businesses that don't create enough value to justify their existence will be forced out of business.

That's a good thing.

I agree with you about the latter half of the sentence. But no business should be punished simply for being small.

I'd go so far as to say we should create laws that err on the side of "slightly favor the little guy" because, as I think we all know, big businesses have armies of lawyers, PR firms, and PACs that bend reality to their whims, whereas little ones mostly do not (though in theory they could band together for the same goal it's unlikely to happen if only for administrative issues).

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