Austin, one reason you should prevent a worker from working below that threshold you name is that doing so, and subsidizing bad economic actors means that we all have to tax ourselves at higher rates in order to pay for requsite social programs ( food stamps, etc ). This seems to me the problem with much classical libertarianism, which itself blithely ignores even classical/orthodox economic theories like marginal productivity it purportedly champions. Allowing economic actors ( firms, stores, whatever…) to pay below worker marginal productivity, as in monopsonies, means we as a society allow somebody to pay below what a worker contributes to that business because some people misrepresent the philosophies of Adam Smith and John Locke. I’d rather bad economic actors go out of business and make room for those that will at least approach paying worker marginal productivity ( Whole Foods or In & Out Burger come to mind…)
As to believing what one wants to believe, it seems you yourself are in the grips of some strong cognitive biases here. Your assumption. seems to be, whatever the economic studies suggest, that unless otherwise proved by data, you believe that raising the minimum wage negatively impacts the social/economic sphere. Want me to prove your own bias to you? You ask why society should prevent somebody working for less than 10 per hour at the end of your last paragraph. That question alone says volumes about your prior assumptions and attitudes about the nature of work, labor, and the minimum wage.
Any study has to take into account many factors for trying to determine what leads to job loss. Job loss, and more generally perhaps static economic conditions, is what is termed overdetermined. What does that mean? It means no one factor, alone, is responsible for why job loss occurs or economic conditions improve, remain stable, or become dangerously deleterious. So, just as raising the minimum wage alone doesn’t necessarily totally improve the economy or cause employers to start mass hirings, neither does it mechanistically pilot our society into the Hayek-inspired hysteia of ruin, inflation, and unemployment. The minimum wage is one way to keep a worker’s head above destitution and extreme exploitation. There are other ways discussed by economists and policy-makers: UBI ( universal basic income ), negative income tax schemes, etc. The minimum wage seems the least exotic and socially intrusive of these methods, so the caution is rather simple: you raise the wage today or you’ll have to perhaps resort to more exotic and intrusive strategies to stabilize your society and economy in the future.
One thing, though, to take away from this Berkeley study is the notion they found no evidence raising the minimum wage harms the economy. That is supported by Fox Business anchor Liz Clayman’s own research and statistcs on minimum wage data. She, and certainly no claim can be made that she is some crypto-socialist, found that 4 of 7 times when the minimum wage was raised there was concomitant job loss, but that loss occurred during some recession or dip in the economy. Remember what I said about overdetermination? 3 of 7 times the wage was raised she found no associated job loss. If 3 of 7 times an experiment was run and something was supposed to happen and it didn’t happen, what should you conclude?
Finally, your question as to benefit ( of course, you seem to perceive this from the angle of the employer and not the employee, but that is for another day…) is precisely why society shouldn’t allow firms or businesses to not pay a worker’s marginal productivity, as always happens in a monopsony. In many industries, food service being a prominent example, workers aren’t paid anywhere near their marginal productivity. Fims would rather pay the excess cost of hiring new employees and the resulting training costs than pay that marginal productivity. And yet they’ve somehow hoodwinked everyone into believing it is a simple game of risk versus reward or cost-benefit analysis.
Whatever you think of the moral issue of minimum wages ( and I happen to think there is one, but again, that can come another day…), the economics of allowing bad economic actors to underpay their workers forces the rest of us to make up that difference one way or the other.I can respect libertarians who accept the social costs of firms acting like monopsonies and don’t oppose the occasional increase in taxation. What makes no sense, except in some flat abstract land of libertariansville, is to oppose both raising the minimum wage ( or, as you did, to imply that we shouldn’t have one at all…) and the raising or stabilizing of taxation rates. A place that has low taxation, low wages, and low participation rates is going to have low growth as well. Places like this also tend to have high debt to growth ratios, but that too is a matter for another day of discussion.
