>>1736121
I'm not that anon, but...
Even the establishment of a minimum wage is inflationary and hurts purchasing power because it establishes a standard of what work, as a concept, is worth, rather than specific work as valued by the market, which is just a name for a complex system of buyers and sellers. While this can help in some situations, such as professional ignorance on the part of the employer for essential industries in times of crisis or the influx of a large number of unskilled workers, it's not good in the long run unless measures which promote competition and remedy the issue which prompted the creation of a minimum wage are enacted. When you look at the job market for individuals with degrees (its own issue), you see that the minimum wage for these individuals is, effectively, not the legal minimum wage. In fact, it's much higher, usually two or three times it for the lowest jobs. Tax brackets can create some awkward situations here, but the end result is that the average college educated person pursuing a career which requires a college education is having a magnitude of minimum wage removed from his wage after tax. Here, there are two problems. First, this effective minimum wage becomes the real minimum wage. The worker does not have his expected lifestyle, since, even if the money he's making seems big to him in comparison to minimum wage, he's not actually making a lot of money. This is why minimum wage advocates call this the "living wage," since it's what they think a person needs to live. The second issue is that the material reality of the worker in this situation, one which requires a constant and steady if not increasing flow of goods and resources, has worsened for two primary reasons.
First, an increase in workers at home and abroad. These workers typically
do make minimum wage or have their wages inflated by union demands. The former is a sustainable system when you have an expanding economy and can maintian a slave caste, but when the whole world is developing, the sustainability of an exterior slave caste diminishes, and the practicality of an interior one degrades. The latter is sustainable only in an economy where the average person is not a degree holder. That is to say, where they do not expect their time (and money) committment to have been placed toward
nothing at all. While it is theoretically possible to uplift entire populations into a state where even the most basal individual can hold thorough intellectual conversation, it's improbable for a number of reasons, the solutions to which (other than infinite resource application) are too inhumane for the average person to stomach. Returning to the topic of the average person being a degree holder, these average people will then expect to be able to unionize or will join unions themselves.
Unfortunately, the excesses of unions are also temporal phenomenon which feed into the second primary reason: traditional infrastructure. The same reason why American elevators must be at a standard size with standard parts created at certain factories by certain people is also why certain jobs are created just to prevent discrimination lawsuits because a company is over a certain number of people. Whole communities and cultures have formed entirely around the most basic, useless things simply because that's how they were done in the past for whatever reason (eg. protectionism, preserving a way of life). This lack of change in production is the second reason. Every port, factory, government office, railroad, mine, farm, shop, etc in America could be completely automated. They're not because the amount of work necessary to do so and its effects would be so immense that they would create civil conflict and likely be impossible to achieve outside of a newly founded society because labor is required to automate or substitute labor. More than just having to earn votes, people have to keep their heads to live. This is why the production cost of many things is much higher than their sold values. It's because the cost of an iPhone has to cover everything in the company and all attached companies for reasons ranging from hoodoo about things like generational trauma and brain drains to labor and monopoly laws that haven't been seriously updated in almost two hundred years. These expenses include the minimum wage of each and every person across every country involved.
If the minimum wage were to be increased, the dollar's purchasing power would only go down. It's not like the Federal Reserve would suddenly, say, triple the amount of money in circuluation to adjust for a $20 minimum wage. It's not like America has countries where it can dump its excess currency because these countries have no other currency and are desperate for cash (eg. the Eurozone). It's not like this would lower birth rates or the incoming population. It's not like this would make it any faster or more efficient to make products. It's not like this would bring in more production. It's not like the rest of the world will suddenly raise its minimum wage or maintain its prices. Increasing the minimum wage in a society which has adjusted to this minimum wage at the generational scale but making no sweeping changes to the machinery around the minimum wage (eg. completely removing all benefits) is a death sentence. A black woman at her $12/hr pencil pusher job suddenly makes $20/hr but still lives on food stamps and in assisted housing, and the college educated citizen suddenly lives in poverty. I didn't even get into the effects minimum wage has on corporate finance or its hand in undercutting the average person through gig work and illegal immigration.
If you want anyone to blame for the popularization of the minimum wage, blame FDR, who was set to kill the Supreme Court over issues like the NRA, even if Wilson and Hoover bit the poison apple with their work on the concept of "prevailing wage". FDR used the effectiveness of the threats he made to the Supreme Court as carte blanche to push his policies. I don't even dislike the concept of minimum wage. I dislike that, instead of following through with the relentless pursuit of global hegemony that FDR endeavored in with his involvement in WWII, America has gradually brought itself to heel and thus worsened its purchasing power. The government and industry just turn blind eyes to each other normally and hamper each other when the status quo could change. When the government attempts to use its power against industry, there are always political hangups. When industry attempts to use its power against government, the government makes a deal or some part of government doesn't like another part and hinders industry. It's an insane way of doing business.