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You're not making a meaningful argument. If you want to pay market rates for labor, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. You are more than welcome to p
by vinceguidry 9y ago
You're not making a meaningful argument.
If you want to pay market rates for labor, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. You are more than welcome to pay $30+ an hour for babysitting. You'll find people tripping over themselves to take your job.
Everybody wants immigrants to be paid more until it's you that has to pay them. Then you'll find you're just as price conscious as everybody else.
The truth here is that this is a really hard problem. Nobody likes the externalization of costs onto the disenfranchised. But once price expectations are set, the expectation that they're always going to go down, that you're going to get more for less, is also set. That's just how markets and human nature work.
You can make an individual decision to pay more for a particular class of good, but on the whole the entire market is focused on delivering more for less, and even if you hang out your shingle and deliver more for more, you will always have a niche clientele because if it were more than niche, then your model wouldn't be profitable anymore. Someone else is going to offer your product for less, and they will eat your market share.
- pjmorris 9y ago> But once price expectations are set, the expectation that they're always going to go down, that you're going to get more for less, is also set. That's just how markets and human nature work. I'd offer counter-examples of houses, and stocks. Not everything goes down in price, only things that people don't borrow for.
- vinceguidry 9y agoNot all goods are the same. The prices of stocks and houses vary according to the demand, this is for all scarce assets. Labor demand varies with price. The price of construction is not the same as the price of housing. The price of construction has only gone down over time, because it's constrained only by time and materials, not scarcity.
- empath75 9y agoWhich is why you have treaties and laws that protect people. By your argument, actual slavery should have never been made illegal because it would just hurt the us in the marketplace. After all, anybody could have paid more for non slave produced cotton, if they chose.
- vinceguidry 9y agoSlavery had a simple legal solution, abolition. The political will to enact it had to be generated with a civil war. What would you propose as a legal solution for this? And how dearly do you think we would need to pay for it?
- euyyn 9y ago> What would you propose as a legal solution for this? By "for this" do you mean "to have a decent minimum wage"?
- vinceguidry 9y agoWhat defines "decent"? And even if you could come up with an appropriate algorithm for it, you realize this essentially constitutes price fixing, right? And that it won't actually fix the problem of getting Americans to take jobs that they wouldn't ordinarily take because the wage for them is too low?
- euyyn 9y agoNot saying it's an easy calculation, but as "a legal solution" it already exists.