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RE: What Should the Minimum Wage be?
This is bullshit. To legitimate a free market you have to ensure that even the weakest and poorest get a chance to thrive. With forcing human beings into a highly efficient treadmill and killing everyone who doesn't have the capabilities to live up to the "expectations" of the system, you disqualify the system in general.
Not a counter argument to what I said. What exactly did I write that was bullshit?
Allowing people to keep the wealth and property they acquired through voluntary means instead of forcing them to give some of it to others, IS ensuring that everyone gets a chance to thrive.
You're not describing an anarchist society; you're describing a statist one. In a statist society, those with political power and their minions force other human beings to give up x amount of their property and earnings. If they don't pay they can be taken away to prison and can be killed for resisting. In an anarchist society, the ethical norm is to have voluntary interactions, and to be free to choose who you associate with and work for/with.
I didn't propose a completely anarchistic society, did I?
Actually I think governments can do a lot of good things (and yes, they do a lot of not so good things).
A hyper efficient and totally frictionless market, as your kind believes in, generates, especially now that a lot of labor becomes obsolete (due to automation and computers), some problems.
A lot of jobs in such a society won't pay enough for the workers to (literally) survive. In your totally libertarian society, those people would starve until enough of them died to bring the market back to a stable equilibrium. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, this is just wrong.
Hope you don't mind me chiming in...
Having no minimum wage does not lower the pay of all the wage earners in general. Sure, it might if you were making artificially high wages propped up by regulation. Eliminating the minimum wage would allow for new job creation at lower rates that wouldn't have been possible before. These lower wages wouldn't be intended to be lived on. It'd just be a temporary rate to build up experience.
Perhaps a store owner would like to have a door greeter, but they don't think it's cost effective at a hypothetical minimum wage of $10/hr. However, they would be willing to pay $6/hr for someone with no experience. This job would never be created with the minimum wage. But without it, someone with no skills or experience could voluntarily work for that pay. It'd definitely be better than no job at all.
Why do you think it's so hard to pull yourself out of homelessness? When you're in that state, many businesses may not want to take the risk to hire you. You may have to prove you're reliable and a good worker before you can make a higher wage. You would be more likely to be able to do this without a minimum wage.
It wouldn't be likely that people would be working for near $0/hr. The business and the worker agree on a wage voluntarily. There is no coercion. And with no minimum wage, there would be more job opportunities, which means you have more of a choice to ignore the lower paying positions and look for higher paying ones. And again, this doesn't mean that if you currently work at fast food at $11/hr that you'll be dropped down to $2/hr just because there is no longer a limitation. They pay you for what value your job creates, and competition in the market promotes a tendency for wages to rise (depending on the supply and demand for that type of job of course).
The law of demand explains how the minimum wage affects the unemployment rate. All other things equal, when you raise the price of something (i.e. cost of labor), less of it will be purchased.
I took you saying "freemarket" to mean anarchist society, my mistake.
I agree with you, government can use the money it steals to do good. However, that doesn't legitimize the theft.
That's a baseless claim. What is the reasoning and evidence?
Again, what exactly did I write that was bullshit?
Actually (in my opinion) it does, if your social contract (vulgo your constitution) governs it that way. (Yes, I know, I know… you never signed that constitution and you have been born into a system you don't accept, which is like being born into slavery. I know these arguments, and I wish there was a possibility to give people the possibility to opt out of the state. I just don't see a possibility for this, because living on a states territory still generates costs for you being there. If you know a solution to this, I'd be happy to hear it.)
I can't quote any evidences right now, but from my understanding it's market logic. If you have a system where more work power exists than needed, the price of this power will fall.
Anyway, using the term 'bullshit' came more out of emotions, insofar I apologize for using this instead of something like: "I think you're wrong."
Your first sentence & whole comment is bullshit.
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If you have wage control, how is the market truly "free?" Labor is a commodity; it is bought and sold. If applied correctly, your argument makes trade tariffs and price controls (i.e. minimum prices for gas or a pack of cigarettes) legitimate. You can't have socialism and a free market. Sorry.
At no point did I say that I wanted a completely free and ungoverned market.
...then you don't want a "free market."