At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
Now it’s quite bad though, a whole generation of 16-20 year olds entering the job market and there’s just no jobs because you can hire a 30 year old for the same money
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
So it’s better that they don’t get hired at all and live entirely off support of the (forced) largesse of the tax payer?
As one of those tax payers I’d much rather they work and earn at least something.
The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”
It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.
Many of the states[0] have started offering free or low cost tuition for their public community colleges and trade schools, and low cost tuition for their colleges and universities. For example, Minnesota offers tuition at a state college starting at $6k a year[0] and free tuition at community colleges if you're earning under $80k[1]. Those prices are before financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc which are widely available from multiple sources.
[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/states-with-free-tuition/
[1] https://www.minnstate.edu/admissions/affordability.html
[2] https://www.nhcc.edu/free-college-tuition-nhcc
As for the rest of your comment, you have a very distorted of what life in the US is like. Also, nothing you list is "free" in Europe, there's just a lot of rather regressive taxes that are collected to pay for it all. The US federal tax structure is actually rather progressive, but that also means there's less money for the feds to pay for all of those "free" things.
US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.
According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
OECD is the source for disposable income.
US: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...
UK: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...
https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/walmart-workers-go...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
"Median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026"
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html
I suspect the difference is that "full-time wage and salary workers" is a much smaller group than "all workers". I admit that I used the word salary in the original post though.
Doesn’t feel objective.