Sure. It boils down to “No one owes you shit.” and “Life isn’t fair.” I have high anxiety, less than perfect social skills and noise processing issues and I st

Sure. It boils down to “No one owes you shit.” and “Life isn’t fair.” I have high anxiety, less than perfect social skills and noise processing issues and I still spent five years teaching kindergarten. I dealt with the noise and the stress from starting a new job and then every year discovering exciting new things to stress out about as my responsibilities changed. No one owes anyone a job and no one is owed a job. Very few people are going to hire anyone unless they think that they can make money by doing so, businesses aren’t charities. Minimum wages make hiring large numbers of people unprofitable so those people don’t get hired. The higher the minimum wage the greater that number will be. See France. The argument generalises to any cost, very much including what lawyers would call “reasonable accommodations”. If the government wants to ensure working people get paid a certain amount there’s no reason the income tax can’t go negative, subsidising lower paid, presumably low productivity workers, as with the US earned income tax credit. The same logic applies to accommodations. If employing someone is unavoidably more expensive and the government wants them employed they can either employ them or subsidise their employment. You’ve internalised all the costs of employing you and now as far as employers are concerned you’re just another contractor. If the costs are borne by the employer then they’ll attempt to avoid them. See the drop in disabled employment following the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act[1]. [1] Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to ac- commodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase the employment of the disabled, the net theoretical effects are ambiguous. For men of all working ages and women under 40, Current Population Survey data show a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect. Although the number of disabled individuals receiving disability transfers increased at the same time, the decline in employment of the disabled does not appear to be explained by increasing transfers alone, leaving the ADA as a likely cause. Consistent with this view, the effects of the ADA appear larger in medium-size firms, possibly because small firms were exempt from the ADA. The effects are also larger in states with more ADA-related discrimination charges. http://economics.mit.edu/files/17 http://economics.mit.edu/files/17