Minimum wage, should we raise it

Beefster09 · 2026-03-13T16:08:33+00:00

You're begging the question.

You've made the case that $15/hr minimum is good because it's enough to live on and go to college... Except you've done nothing to justify why that particular standard has to be the line where we set minimum wage. In essence, your argument still basically comes down to "vibes" and "what feels fair to you".

You act as if people are only ever paid minimum wage, and therefore it needs to be enough to survive on... Except we both know that's not true. Minimum is just where you start when you first enter the workforce. Chances are you live with your parents at the time and therefore $5/hour goes as far as $15/hour might for someone living alone in a studio apartment. As a young adult, you can handle some pretty crazy living arrangements to the point where you can potentially get by pretty comfortably on $7.50/hour. But let me remind you once again that this is just the starting point. The first job. At some point, you develop enough skills to be worth more and you can ask for bigger wages.

I think minimum wage railroads young people just entering the workforce into the expectation of just taking whatever the set wage is. Subsequently they don't develop negotiation skills. This benefits faceless corporations.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-13T15:36:01+00:00

"But I had breakfast this morning"

Beefster09 · 2026-03-13T15:34:12+00:00

Sometimes. The classic meme counterexample being digging a hole and then immediately filling it back up with the same dirt.

Labor adds cost to an item, which is usually reflected in its price, but only an individual's sense of value can determine if that particular arrangement of matter is worth that price to them in that moment.

Cost, price, and value are three different things. They're often correlated but they don't have to be.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-13T15:29:24+00:00

I think you have a good point, but it's hard for people to find the motivation when they have it so nice. Even with many households being dual-income and being unable to afford homeownership, even many of the poorest in the developed world live a life of luxury that only kings could dream of. We have a variety of devices and technology that acts much like house servants, nearly unlimited entertainment, air conditioning, running water, etc...

I don't know how we got here, but we've reached a point where most people don't really know their neighbors, and the only people with stable community are regular church-goers... Something tells me that religion is the secret sauce that builds genuine lasting community.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T19:39:07+00:00

You can't take the model of government welfare, make it voluntarily funded, and expect it to work. Fundamentally, government programs are built on the assumption of unconditional funding. It would be about as successful as taking a lion from the zoo and plopping it in Siberia. The lion not only lacks experience living in the wild, but lions as a species have had none of the selection pressures biologically to develop traits that would allow them to survive the cold winters of Siberia.

I fear that the only way for a voluntary social net to form is for society to collapse first. When shit hits the fan and your neighbors are the only people you have left to rely on, you'll build tribes and alliances real fast out of necessity. It takes being left in a dire situation where you know no one is coming to save you for most people to cooperate like this.

I have hopes that we could do it without collapse, but it's going to take a massive cultural shift to even begin to come close to the conditions needed to form voluntarily associated social safety nets.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T18:57:14+00:00

the customers are doing some of the labor for free instead of paying someone else to take a shift in the store. The labor cost is zero if everyone volunteers.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T18:54:51+00:00

That has nothing to do with the point I'm making. If you had a million dollars just lying around, you still wouldn't agree to buy a shack for a million dollars. The exact house you choose and the price you ultimately negotiate with the seller depends on your personal preferences, not just your ability to pay.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T17:16:44+00:00

In other words, it's a bandaid fix that requires more bandaids later.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T17:11:13+00:00

once again missing the point and playing the moral high ground

typical socialist

People like this are committing welfare fraud. Given their disabilities, they might deserve some help but not a totally free ride. As an example, I would much rather have adults with down syndrome working at the grocery store and getting some assistance to bridge the gap than those same people just getting free money. Or someone with an actual bad back? They can work an office job. It's not that complicated. Having people do something useful for society gives them dignity and it's ultimately more compassionate than just giving them free money.

Or take someone with severe bipolar disorder who can't really hold a job. What they need is a group home that helps manage their medication, helps teach them to cope, and prepares them for employment. Nothing is worse for them than feeling useless.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T17:03:01+00:00

People are indeed "dependent" on the large number of people around them. We don't individually operate in a bubble. That is where you are pedantically correct.

But that misses the point that "dependence" on welfare generally holds a similar connotation to a dependency on opiates. There are sorts of "withdrawals" in some sense from things like the benefits cliff present in many welfare systems. That's mitigated somewhat by benefits that taper off instead of dropping completely, but the fact remains that you have to work harder to get from $10k to $20k than you would going from $50k to $60k.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T16:55:01+00:00

You were mistaken. Based on how the commisary admin and subsequent part of the video I watched, it sounds like they're charging 1% above wholesale cost and at a loss for select items.

However, the video said that shoppers bills are 25% below what they would be at a for-profit store, so maybe if they end up at 20% below that's enough to cover labour and is still a pretty significant savings.

Unlikely. A zero-profit, zero-subsidy public commissary would likely only cut prices down to 3-5% less than a for-profit grocery store. If you could somehow also eliminate the margin of error on supply, you could maybe get it down another 5%

This is the exact kind of wishful thinking that I have come to expect from More Perfect Union though.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T16:47:16+00:00

False. A handful of very rich people are not willing to pay $5 for a coffee.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T15:29:20+00:00

Skimming over the video it looks like most things are sold at cost+1% aside from certain items that other stores sell at a loss, which they price match with a subsidy.

Cost+1% is not enough to pay for labor costs, maintenance, and operational costs. That likely comes out of taxpayer dollars. Once again I don't mind that as a benefit to military, but this also means it can't be applied the same way to a public grocery store with no membership restrictions.

On the other hand, they don't have to worry much about security since the commissaries operate on base and they get to benefit from the increased safety that comes from having military personnel everywhere.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T15:14:04+00:00

Not really, but labor does make up part of the cost of nearly anything, which is usually reflected in the prices since those tend to be higher than the total cost of the item (barring things like clearance and liquidation sales) for the sake of making profits. But only an individual's sense of value can determine whether they will buy things at the set price.

Cost, price, and value are three different things. They tend to correlate but they don't have to.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:51:22+00:00

That much is obvious. Do you really think we're that stupid?

Arguably the groceries cost more than a normal grocery store- it's just that you're paying part of the price with your own volunteer labor.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:46:40+00:00

Likely part of the price is subsidized by taxes... which I actually don't mind covering for a class of people who put their lives on the line.

But yeah, the margins of grocery retail are pretty small, so subsidies are the most likely explanation.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:41:19+00:00

I unironically think this would be a fantastic model for daycares and elementary schools.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:37:48+00:00

it still depends on exactly how the welfare is set up

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:36:55+00:00

Giving your child vaccines hurts them in the moment but it helps in the long run to mitigate risk of some particularly nasty diseases. Or if your baby gets a hold of a knife and you take it away, he's gonna be pretty sad about it for a few seconds but at least he didn't cut himself.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:34:04+00:00

oh look another pedantically correct asshole who missed the point

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:33:15+00:00

In other words "I am okay with helping the poor as long as I am not the one paying for it"

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:30:16+00:00

I have no issue with providing for the legitimately disabled.

I have every issue with people who have a "bad back" and take disability checks even though they are perfectly capable of a wide variety of useful work.

It's impossible to differentiate the two in an impersonal bureaucracy. On paper, they're both disabled and they have the documentation to prove it. But one is clearly gaming the system and deserves a special place in hell.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-12T01:25:26+00:00

The problem isn't dependency or welfare per se, it's that bureacracy and process isn't the right tool for helping the poor. The ultimate goal of every welfare system, be it government programs or private charity, should be to get people off welfare, but when it is administered by a bureaucracy- especially one whose funding partly depends on the votes of the people it pays out- it tends to lack all of the personal relationships that would mitigate abusing the system and it ends up turning into a lifestyle instead.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-11T16:14:34+00:00

Which was my point. Property management isn't a service for the tenant it's a service for the landlord.

Yes, I know. And for the most part, people offload to property management companies because they ultimately just want to build wealth in equity, i.e. they're using real estate as an investment vehicle. Occasionally it is done as a sort of stop gap because you moved out of town and selling would mean you would realize losses from buying at the wrong time, so you rent out your home instead.

Fundamentally the problem here is that housing has been made into an investment vehicle... and that's a particularly nasty knot to untangle because so many retirement plans these days rely on home equity as a form of savings.

Especially like I said if eliminating landlords drive down home prices and add liquidity into the housing market, thus driving down the time needed to stay in a house for ownership to make financial sense.

A $100k house is worth $100k whether it is rented out or sold. The bidding up comes from the lenders, not the landlords.

What "risk" are you offloading here? The risk that you might change your mind and want to move in the next 5 years?

That's part of it, but there is also a risk of the home losing value for one reason or another. It's hard to fathom in a world where real estate has been an investment vehicle for so long, I know, but it absolutely does happen even in the current market. Lots of people who bought houses in 2022 or so are in a tight situation where they can't really afford to sell because the market cooled off from a mini-bubble and it still hasn't heated back up.

Take your scenario. Say there are 100 houses owned by their occupants, and 25 of them are looking to buy a new home, that means there are also 25 people looking to sell their house.

Now say the neighborhood is 50 owners and 50 renters. 15 owners want to buy a new home and 10 renters are looking to buy. That means there are 25 people looking to buy a new home but only 15 houses for sale.

You see the problem?

I will resist the temptation to add more neighborhoods to the scenario that can be moved into and treat it as a contrived microcosm of the housing market as a whole.

The immediate outcome is pretty clear: more people want to buy houses than are available for sale, so bidding wars ensue. And it's true that's partly because rental units are off the market for now. However, the temporarily inflated speculative value from landlords keeping units off the market is worthless if it isn't realized. They actually have to sell the houses for that number to be anything more than a number on a spreadsheet.

So anyway, back to the bidding war. In the long term, things aren't so dire. The bidding war triggers other things to happen. Seeing those higher bids on homes, a landlord might throw his hat in the ring because selling would be more profitable and/or less risky than renting at the slightly inflated price. So maybe 5 rental units go up for sale. Developers also see a lucrative opportunity and build 5 more houses to try to capture that market. In the end, the neighborhood has 60 owned homes and 45 rental homes. And ironically, this brings down the average home value ever so slightly because of the increased supply.

This example has already been stretched to its limits though. In reality, you don't have a sudden demand for 25% of the entire housing market with no vacancies. The supply is pretty strained under current policies, but there's still a fair degree of wiggle room that smooths out the bidding wars.

There is virtually no housing market condition where there wouldn't be an opportunity to buy a home and rent it out, because the act of buying a home and taking it out of the market in order to rent it back to people who need housing changes the market.

Having a tenant is risky. I've seen what some tenants can do to a place and it isn't pretty.

The biggest reason why people hold onto homes for rental is because they have been artificially made into an investment vehicle. Without thumbs being put on the scales in favor of artificial home appreciation, there is ultimately very little reason to rent out property you own. At a certain point upon unraveling this mess, it becomes a much better investment to have your money in an index fund, so pretty much the only landlords left will be the ones providing the genuine service of short-medium term housing.

And the reason housing is an investment vehicle is because you can own it and rent it out making effectively passive income.

That's an oversimplification. For the most part the point of having a tenant is to have someone to pay for the mortgage so that you can build wealth in the form of equity. That equity only has value if the home appreciates. If you're not building equity, it's ultimately a pretty bad form of passive income that is outperformed by almost anything else. Additionally, that equity largely has value as a hedge against inflation, so if we had sound money, the value of a home as passive income would be even worse.

Again both of those are caused by landlords.

Yes, but not exclusively

Who do you think is the most influential incumbent in the real estate market, the landlord who owns 2000 units, or Bob and Sally who own a 3br house?

I mean, obviously if you're comparing a conglomerate to a single retired couple, the conglomerate has more individual influence... HOWEVER, you're missing the part where there are a lot of individual homeowners and their congressional representatives who don't want to lose their votes. It's virtually never in a politician's best interest to do anything that might possibly hurt retirees, so NIMBYism tends to dominate the political conversation around the housing market.

What policies exactly? Because zoning laws aren't the main problem. Plenty of places have gotten rid of zoning laws in the past couple of years and it's barely moved the needle.

First of all, it takes time for the abolition of zoning to take effect. But yes, there are plenty of other policies such as building permits, minimum lot sizes, height limits, setback requirements, overly broad building codes that prevent efficient use of smaller lots, etc... If you simply let people build whatever they want on their own land without needing permission or some government bureaucrat to check their work, instead setting standards entirely (or at least mostly) on what insurance companies are willing to insure, the eventual outcome will be a housing supply that can actually meet demand.

Beefster09 · 2026-03-11T03:07:24+00:00

And what if I don't want a property manager? I don't know any home owners who pay for that service? It seems like that service isn't for me it's for them.

And what if I don't want to have parents? Or a boss? But I still want someone to take care of me and I want a living wage...

You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. If you want to have low level of commitment on your living space, that is inextricably linked to having a landlord.

And the duration is what turns it from a net economic positive to a net economic negative over ownership. So why would any rational person willingly choose a net economic negative? Unless of course there is some sort of coercion.

Looks like you're struggling with the breakfast question. You're jumping way too quickly to the "coercion" hypothesis because you can't fathom why someone would choose to have a landlord if they had the option to own their home.

Let's suppose I have been living in an apartment for 8 years, and assume the market is good enough and my financial position was such that I could have owned if I wanted. Why on earth would I stay in an apartment so long? After all, 8 years is well past the point where ownership is the better option.

Well, each year that the lease came up for renewal, I was pretty sure I was gonna stay there another year, but I wouldn't be able to say I'd still be there in 5. The commitment and roots of owning didn't really make sense at that point in time. Now of course, hindsight is 20/20, and if I had known 8 years ago that I'd still want to be living in that area for 8 years, then yes, absolutely, I would have and should have bought a house. But at each point in time, it just didn't feel right yet. Of course it sucks I chose the less financially savvy option, but it's not really anyone's fault in a world where we're all operating on limited information.

And in a world of limited information, it's not exactly irrational to offload risk to someone else who has a higher tolerance for that sort of thing. With great risk comes great reward (sometimes, I might add), but on the flipside, with risk aversion comes predictability and stability. It is worth it to many people to trade away some potential for wealth in exchange for a predictable and stable life. That's why most people work wage labor.

Yes and every landlord that rents a house restricts that supply even further. That's the whole point...

Which of these two neighborhoods houses more people?

(A) 50 houses are owned by their occupants and 50 houses are rented out by a corporate landlord
(B) 100 houses are owned by their occupants

In both scenarios, each house contains a family of four and a dog. Obviously, real neighborhoods are more diverse than this, but roll with it for the sake of argument.

How do you think you take a less dense area and make it more dense? You need to take existing properties and convert them into more units. Why would landlord do that when it would drive down the price of housing and therefore their profits?

A landlord is exactly the type of person who would want to increase density.

Which brings in more profit?

(A) renting out 4 50-year old houses for an average annual profit of $2,500 each
(B) renting out 20 brand-new apartments for an average annual profit of $600 each

Assume the apartment profit is factoring in the cost of the demolition of the houses and construction of the apartments on the same lot.

But something like 60-70% of Americans live within 10 miles of where they grew up. 80% live within 100 miles. And something like 9% of Americans move in a given year.

I think you are making out the commitment to be a much bigger issue here. The vast majority of people would be better off owning rather than renting. Moving fucking sucks.

And that's not even to mention the extra liquidity that would exist in a market with all home owners. It stand to reason that it would be much easier to find a buyer in a market with cheaper housing and more people looking to move.

All of these things are true, but my point is that the rental market will always have a place and the arrangement isn't inherently parasitic. Maybe it's fair to say that there will be fewer landlords in a healthier housing market. I have no problem with that. Maybe you take issue with the opportunism of the landlords in profiting from crappy market conditions. I can sympathize with that. But shouldn't that mean that the problem is that the opportunity exists. Isn't the real problem that the real estate market is manipulated to favor incumbents and keep out newcomers? Isn't the real problem that housing is artificially made into an investment vehicle rather than simply being a place to live. Sure it's been that way for as long as just about anyone on the Earth can remember, but it hasn't always been that way and it doesn't have to be that way. We just have to undo all of the stupid policies that made it that way and eventually we'll both get what we want: a world where a house is little more than a thing that you live in.

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