I think your last paragraph is a point that is genuinely worth having a serious debate about. You are probably familiar with the Prisoners' Dilemma, right? Mor

I think your last paragraph is a point that is genuinely worth having a serious debate about. You are probably familiar with the Prisoners' Dilemma, right? More abstractly, there are situations where it is in the individuals' self interests to behave in a certain way that will lead everybody to end up in a place where they are worse off than if everybody coordinated to achieve an outcome that is not a Nash equilibrium. If you define "efficiency" as being "the outcome that you get when there is no cooperation between actors", then you're basically saying "efficiency = Nash equilibria with no cooperation". Then government action (which is simply one possible form of cooperation between actors) is inefficient by definition. But then that's simply a tautology, and a useless one at that. After all, whether the outcome is a Nash equilibrium or not is not a moral category. If you define "efficiency" as being "the outcome is optimal according to some welfare function" (e.g. social optimality, Pareto optimal, sum of logs, or whatever), then Nash equilibria and efficient outcomes are not the same thing, unless you can somehow exclude the possibility of Prisoner Dilemma-type situations. Do you have an argument against the existence of Prisoner Dilemmas when it comes to price-setting dynamics? Edit: And to answer your question about a "morally right wage", I think there was simply a misunderstanding between us. There is a moral argument that human labour should be given some appropriate value. This is similar to more general arguments for human dignity and human rights. This is a question of morality and ethics, and it can be the basis upon which a society decides to introduce a minimum wage law. My personal understanding of morality is in line with such a view, but I am not trying to persuade you to change your system of values, if it happens to be different.