Is there a "labor shortage" or is this just too low of a wage for the labor? If these jobs paid a lot more, I am guessing they would be filled. If there was tr

Is there a "labor shortage" or is this just too low of a wage for the labor? If these jobs paid a lot more, I am guessing they would be filled. If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages. But neither is happening. So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.