I experienced zero side effects when I got HPV vaxxed at 38yo.

I’m not opposed to taxes. When designed properly, they’re transparent and avoid excluding economic activity like min wages do.

As shown by comments elsewhere, picking a minimum wage is often based on some imagined everyman/woman’s standard of living that may preclude others from earning a livelihood at all due to jobs never created or capital replacing labor because government decided by fiat that no work that generates less than $X/hr in output shall occur. Human skills and living arrangements are infinitely variable, and governments fail when they attempt to preclude people with lower skills from finding work.

In practice, very few workers earn the minimum wage, but union contracts are often tied to it, so unions like to advance laws that increase the minimum wage, which leads to the outcomes described in the parent post.

As economic policy, they’re also bad because inflating the price floor of labor fairly quickly feeds through to higher costs for housing, food, and services.

Safety standards (ie rules of the road) and competent enforcement are good roles for government, and while they do tend to increase operating costs and function as regulatory barriers to entry, setting prices is best left to markets.

Monopsonies are easily solved by workers moving out of the (labor) market controlled by the buyer to better job prospects. Claiming ancestral ties to a place, etc, as reasons for remaining are then the choice of the worker. If enough people leave, the employer will be forced to increase wages to attract workers.

When government tries to set minimum wages, they often result in job losses (or foregone jobs that were never created) which, as you wrote, is known in economic circles as "deadweight loss."

I don't think a full look at the history of minimum wages will be kind to their supporters. Minimum wages were created by labor unions for the sole purpose of excluding other workers who are more productive or less expensive than their members[0].

Going back further, labor unions were created during the railroad boom by racist white workers to exclude Chinese laborers who were 2x more productive for the same price. Instead of responding to competition by getting better, American railroad workers formed labor unions and lobbied politicians for relief, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act [1] that forcibly expelled 400,000 Chinese immigrants and led to some horrific violence and racism towards Asian people in this country.

In all cases, the role of government should not be to mandate wages or prices or anything else that markets are better suited to establish, or there will necessarily be higher unemployment. Governments can help by establishing some health and safety standards and policing abuses, but when it comes to accomplishing the social goals that minimum wages intend to, that's better done through tax policy and income redistribution (e.g., guaranteed minimum income, earned income tax credit, welfare benefits).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workingmen%27s_Party_of_Califo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

"Reasonable" is a completely subjective standard and not a good way to run a complex economy with an infinite combination of job seekers and providers.

Who gets to decide what is reasonable has big real world implications for millions of people. Get it wrong, and as we see in California here, people lose their jobs and businesses close all because some politician or bureaucrat (or misinformed voter) thinks they know better than workers and employers what the correct price for labor should be.

It also has consequences like increasing the attractiveness of substituting capital (i.e., automation) for labor or simply leaving some work undone (e.g., many smaller restaurants in CA are going out of business due to multiple government policies, including very high minimum wages).

Is a three-bedroom house in [pick nicest neighborhood in any metro area] a necessity?

How about a one-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood?

An in-law unit (e.g., "granny flat") on a farm just outside town?

A room in a six-bedroom co-op house where meals are collectively prepared and shared?

Same could be asked about food, clothes, etc. I can buy used clothes for $5 or new ones for $100.

"Basic necessities" is woolly term that in practice is full of paternalistic value judgements. Every individual has a variety of resources to draw upon that would make them willing/unwilling to work a job at a given wage.

A government-mandated minimum wage means some people who could find employment will not because their output do not exceed the wages the government has declared must be paid. In practice, it also means many people starting out in life or who are less skilled never get the chance to be hired and learn new skills that increase their pay.

Minimum wages remove the lowest rungs on the job ladder that often teach skills required to be successful higher up.

Why not $100/hr?

(Btw, the American healthcare system is about as far away from a free market as it gets. Don’t think that example supports your point.)

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The tech will continue to improve if it finds its niche. Dynamic, low power, color informational signage displays are a big enough market by themselves to adopt and support enough product cycles to address shortcomings that advertisers have.

The potential for no mains power (e.g., small solar panel or a vibration energy harvesting power source) means virtually any flat wall could be turned into advertising inventory. Do accident lawyers need their ads to pop or just be displayed over and over again?

I’d argue the TikTok remedy should be applied to X, too.

[0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

The CA FAIR Plan only offers $300/sq foot to rebuild, which is far less than the $500-1000/sq foot it costs to build new construction in most parts of the state.

In other words: the backstop for the CA FAIR Plan being unable to charge risk-appropriate premiums is an involuntarily assessment of policyholders in lower risk locations.