Reply To: Minimum wage and power imbalance

[Gerald]

Thank you Gonzalo Coelho. I’m glad you restarted this conversation.

My response is that you make an excellent point. Minimum wage causes harm to inexperienced workers.

My point is that there are always positive and negative outcomes to any economic policy.

In his writing, Saifedean explains how fiat_distorts_the_labor_market. His conclusion is that the high unemployment we know would not exist in an economy with hard money.

I hope someday we will have hard money. But for now, lots of people suffer avoidable unemployment thanks to the boom-bust cycle of inflationary fiat. Especially the poor. Until we have a better base economy, inserting just one small part of Austrian economics into a fiat economy can do more harm than good.

Pragmatically, we must develop policies that are in balance with the _current_ state of the economy, not with some utopian vision of a perfect world.

Unnecessary unemployment hurts the poor. Minimum wage hurts the inexperienced. Can we find a policy that reduces harm both to the poor and the inexperienced?