alt Hacker NewsSure, but now there's a deadweight loss by allocation inefficiencies (plus the disemployment effects are strongest at the margin, so now many people are working less than they want to, because they cannot sell more of their work for less, so ie. they have part time jobs).
The "obvious" thing is to subsidize employment (by negative income tax for low-incomes to avoid discontinuities), and sectoral/collective bargaining (to avoid divide-and-conquer information asymmetry), and unemployment payments (to allow for the market to find new "healthy" equilibrium, so people don't have to take the first shitty job).
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You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it that despite the problem of #2. #2. Plastic is made from oil. Whereas anyone would exchange labor for energy, energy prices money. It’s the civilizational bottleneck. It would be cheaper to empty fort knox into Boston Harbor than accept another ship of disposable plastic goods that we send to a landfill. It’s effectively taking a big wad of US wealth every day and lighting it on fire, then using the nonsense FRL to make up the difference.
Given all that, whatever labor or wage trick you do is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know how to remediate the plastic issue, which is an engineering question. Until that’s addressed the union sq debt clock is counting the cargo ships docking to feed our money/energy/oil->landfill pipeline.
I really appreciate the level of discourse here on Hacker News. Thank you to threads like this and the authors of the comments.
I appreciate your argument, and you knowlwdge of economics adds weight to it. I'm wary of putting the burden on workers to remove information asymmetry and power imbalances in bargaining. Just because it's necessary now doesn't mean it needs to be. It could create a cycle of permanent extra work for those most in need of regulatory help.
I don't know if I had the full language of economic inefficiencies ready to flow like you do if that argument would be more effective. Or if there are other blocks, you know?