I find this purely economic argument unsatisfactory.
Firstly, I find it far too narrow, ignoring externalities. A certain level of crime is due to insufficient income to live. This requires creating prisons, housing them at higher costs than in society, hiring increasingly aggressive police forces and the paraphernalia of the state's law enforcement institutions, which includes servitude on jury duties. Increase teh minimum wage and crime should decrease by some extent, reducing all these external costs. What might be the needed minimum wage (and associated UBI?) to achieve this?
Secondly, while your analysis makes sense today, but what about in the future as automation eliminates many jobs, including those with minimum wages. Unlike horses as automobiles appeared, we cannot send people to the knacker's yard. Wage-earners cannot compete with machines. Unless there continue to be requirements for people to operate the machines and be paid to do so with a commensurately higher wage, employment will decrease and we will need to find ways to maintain an impoverished population. I suspect this will make minimum wage issues superfluous to the real issue - how do we maintain a population that is largely useless in the wage economy? Raising wages in some form now to aid voluntary retraining, education, and skills acquisition, as well as some form of real social cushion in the face of future pandemics and long term unemployment that is independent of political paymasters, need to be planned for now.
A technocratic analysis of minimum wage levels might be useful today, but it strikes me as very short-sighted when one lifts one's eyes to the needs of populations as intelligent automation rushes towards us.
I find this purely economic argument unsatisfactory.
Firstly, I find it far too narrow, ignoring externalities. A certain level of crime is due to insufficient income to live. This requires creating prisons, housing them at higher costs than in society, hiring increasingly aggressive police forces and the paraphernalia of the state's law enforcement institutions, which includes servitude on jury duties. Increase teh minimum wage and crime should decrease by some extent, reducing all these external costs. What might be the needed minimum wage (and associated UBI?) to achieve this?
Secondly, while your analysis makes sense today, but what about in the future as automation eliminates many jobs, including those with minimum wages. Unlike horses as automobiles appeared, we cannot send people to the knacker's yard. Wage-earners cannot compete with machines. Unless there continue to be requirements for people to operate the machines and be paid to do so with a commensurately higher wage, employment will decrease and we will need to find ways to maintain an impoverished population. I suspect this will make minimum wage issues superfluous to the real issue - how do we maintain a population that is largely useless in the wage economy? Raising wages in some form now to aid voluntary retraining, education, and skills acquisition, as well as some form of real social cushion in the face of future pandemics and long term unemployment that is independent of political paymasters, need to be planned for now.
A technocratic analysis of minimum wage levels might be useful today, but it strikes me as very short-sighted when one lifts one's eyes to the needs of populations as intelligent automation rushes towards us.