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Just FYI, the argument for a minimum wage is that the market for workers is not a competitive market, allowing firms to pay low wages and putting the difference

Just FYI, the argument for a minimum wage is that the market for workers is not a competitive market, allowing firms to pay low wages and putting the difference between the competitive wage and market wage into profit. Kind of funny that you'd refer to Silicon Valley as an example. Aside from having no practical implications (you can't snap your fingers and make markets act the way you want) they had one of the most famous cases of employers colluding to drive down wages.

nickpp 7y ago
And even then they managed to get wages to a few times larger than in the rest of the country. I rest my case...
- salawat 7y ago
  Your case isn't rested at all given most businesses in the United States aren't in a position to do business globally without heavily escalated logistical or infrastructural cost expansion due to physical goods or services (body in seat) as their product. Whereas Silicon Valley companies often only have to ensure that their information processing infrastructure expand to meet the capability to track/handle transactional load in order to have global consumer bases to pull from, thus allowing that several times higher wage financially. The digital expansion scales far easier than the physical. Those wages therefore aren't some quirk of the unregulated free market. That was physics. More income sources = more income extraction = higher geographic pool to fuel competitive salary while earning a profit. Yet you still have to answer for wage suppressive collusion. Despite having everything going right for them, they still colluded.
- jyounker 7y ago
  Those of us subject to the wage competition in silicon valley make wages many times higher than the minimum wage. We're talking an order of magnitude more money. Competition in silicon valley does shit all for the people on the lower end of the wage scale in the bay area.

nickpp 7y ago

And even then they managed to get wages to a few times larger than in the rest of the country. I rest my case...

salawat 7y ago
Your case isn't rested at all given most businesses in the United States aren't in a position to do business globally without heavily escalated logistical or infrastructural cost expansion due to physical goods or services (body in seat) as their product. Whereas Silicon Valley companies often only have to ensure that their information processing infrastructure expand to meet the capability to track/handle transactional load in order to have global consumer bases to pull from, thus allowing that several times higher wage financially. The digital expansion scales far easier than the physical. Those wages therefore aren't some quirk of the unregulated free market. That was physics. More income sources = more income extraction = higher geographic pool to fuel competitive salary while earning a profit. Yet you still have to answer for wage suppressive collusion. Despite having everything going right for them, they still colluded.
jyounker 7y ago
Those of us subject to the wage competition in silicon valley make wages many times higher than the minimum wage. We're talking an order of magnitude more money. Competition in silicon valley does shit all for the people on the lower end of the wage scale in the bay area.