When you compare labor to an apple how are you not commoditizing it?

And just to be clear, you unfairly maligned Adam Smith earlier. He staunchly advocated that workers should receive an equitable share of the productive value of their work, and said that the equitable share would be enough for them to tolerably fed, clothed, and housed.

The strange thing here is that I am arguing for value as economic fact, a reality - what someone is willing to buy and sell a thing for.

Y'all are standing outside the transaction telling one or actually both parties that they are wrong in their judgment.

That doesn't mean I don't want people to be well fed, well clothed, or well housed. What it means is that value is nothing more than an information signal. When the value of something moves against the relative value of something else, that has actual meaning. If the productive value of labor falls below the point where the person selling that labor can take the proceeds and buy food, shelter, and clothing for themselves, that is an VERY important piece of information for them and everyone else. Like any other economic signal it is telling you there is an imbalance somewhere. Fudging it with shoulds and oughts takes that existing imbalance and makes it even worse.

The analog isn't in comparison of labor to apple but in the fundamental relationship between buying and selling in the establishment of value. That is true for any product, regardless of whether it is a commodity or a unique in the world item.

Zobel said:

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And just to be clear, you unfairly maligned Adam Smith earlier. He staunchly advocated that workers should receive an equitable share of the productive value of their work, and said that the equitable share would be enough for them to tolerably fed, clothed, and housed.

The strange thing here is that I am arguing for value as economic fact, a reality - what someone is willing to buy and sell a thing for.

Y'all are standing outside the transaction telling one or actually both parties that they are wrong in their judgment.

That doesn't mean I don't want people to be well fed, well clothed, or well housed. What it means is that value is nothing more than an information signal. When the value of something moves against the relative value of something else, that has actual meaning. If the productive value of labor falls below the point where the person selling that labor can take the proceeds and buy food, shelter, and clothing for themselves, that is an VERY important piece of information for them and everyone else. Like any other economic signal it is telling you there is an imbalance somewhere. Fudging it with shoulds and oughts takes that existing imbalance and makes it even worse.

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No one is questioning the laws of economics or the signals they send; they're just questioning whether this is how society should be ordered; towards efficiency and philosophical purity rather than efficacy. As I've said earlier, economics is law as much as gravity is law, people will always seek to maximize their own self interest.

I have no problem standing outside transactions and telling one or both parties that they're wrong in their judgement if they are in fact wrong in their judgement.

As I mentioned earlier, I understand that the market is agnostic on literally everything, all the free market does is ensure that if there is a demand for anything: hitmen services, child pornography, organs; that supply will rise to meet it. I have no problem telling people they can't sell organs, I have no problem telling parents that while they can make their kids mow their neighbors lawn, they can't prostitute their children. Society is more than just a signaling switchboard. Some things are more important than ensuring perfectly efficient transactions.

You gave examples of illegal and harmful things, just like the person who talked about pimps and prostitution.

I'm talking about whether someone makes $6 or $8 an hour.

I'm not advocating for an amoral society. I'm saying arbitrarily setting a floor or ceiling for a price of anything is stupid and counterproductive, and will eventually have negative consequences, regardless of the intent behind it.

Sorry, I take the imago dei as axiomatic, along with the rest of the scriptures, so I'm fine with saying that murder for hire is different than negotiating a wage in good faith between two people.

Zobel said:

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Sorry, I take the imago dei as axiomatic, along with the rest of the scriptures, so I'm fine with saying that murder for hire is different than negotiating a wage in good faith between two people.

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Forget murder for hire; organ sales, prostitution, euthanasia. Obviously murder has a non consenting party, but what about the others?

Organ sales violate the sanctity of the body, which is in the image of God… prostitution is professional sexual immorality…euthanasia is still murder. I don't get it.

There is no sin involved in my scenario.

I'm sorry is there an objection to this?

Are you saying that when two people agree to exchange goods for a certain amount of money, that doesn't, in fact, represent a fact???

Zobel said:

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Organ sales violate the sanctity of the body, which is in the image of God… prostitution is professional sexual immorality…euthanasia is still murder. I don't get it.

There is no sin involved in my scenario.

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The Greek Orthodox Church in America and the Catholic Church would beg to differ.

Show me where it is a sin to pay an employee less than the federal minimum wage of the United States? For Pete's sake.

Zobel said:

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Show me where it is a sin to pay an employee less than the federal minimum wage of the United States? For Pete's sake.

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Congress defines what a just wage is now?

You realize that if everyone followed that, many jobs would just stop existing. You argued that you're not obligated to employ people at a loss, so this is effectively saying it's better for a person to have no job at all. You agree with that?

Zobel said:

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Congress defines what a just wage is now?

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This has nothing to do with minimum wage, just wage is defined in the excerpt I posted.

Yeah, but I was pretty specific that I find nothing immoral about someone being paid $7 vs $7.25. Your answer is the Catholic catechism.

Zobel said:

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Congress defines what a just wage is now?

You realize that if everyone followed that, many jobs would just stop existing. You argued that you're not obligated to employ people at a loss, so this is effectively saying it's better for a person to have no job at all. You agree with that?

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No they wouldn't, if you cannot pay a just wage, you are unable to pay a just wage. If you are unable to pay a just wage because you personally are taking a bunch of extra money, you are supposed to stop until your workers bare needs are met.

Zobel said:

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Yeah, but I was pretty specific that I find nothing immoral about someone being paid $7 vs $7.25. Your answer is the Catholic catechism.

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If $7 is enough to take care of a person's needs, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is, it's a living wage. You're saying the person's needs don't factor into it. It has nothing to with minimum wage law

Justice: A Short Play

"Please sir, I need a job. I have the skills to do x."

I can only pay you $7 and still make moderate recompense. But the cost of living here requires $8, so the Catechism says it would be a sin for me to pay you.

"But I need the money, I'll do it for $7! It will help both of us."

I'm sorry, but your opinion about the benefit is irrelevant. Go in peace, be warm and well fed.

~fin~

Zobel said:

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Justice: A Short Play

"Please sir, I need a job. I have the skills to do x."

I can only pay you $7 and still make moderate recompense. But the cost of living here requires $8, so the Catechism says it would be a sin for me to pay you.

"But I need the money, I'll do it for $7! It will help both of us."

I'm sorry, but your opinion about the benefit is irrelevant. Go in peace, be warm and well fed.

~fin~

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That's not what the chatechism says though. It says if the man can only afford $7 he can only afford $7. If he can afford $8 but chooses to pay $7 so he can make more money; that is where the problem lies.

Part II

Hey, good to see you again. I have made some process improvements, now I can afford to pay you $8!

Wonderful news sir, thank you! I didn't tell you my good news yet - I had a child! This job will help me pay my rent.

Oh… I'm sorry. I can employ a single person at $8, but your cost of living is clearly higher since you have a family. I can't give you the job, it would be a sin.

Please, I need the money. I'm willing to work, $8 is enough for me.

Im sorry. Go in peace, be warm and well fed.

~fin~

Read it closer. It says the amount has to provide a dignified livelihood, hence living wage.

You gotta watch those provisos, man.

Zobel said:

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Part II

Hey, good to see you again. I have made some process improvements, now I can afford to pay you $8!

Wonderful news sir, thank you! I didn't tell you my good news yet - I had a child! This job will help me pay my rent.

Oh… I'm sorry. I can employ a single person at $8, but your cost of living is clearly higher since you have a family. I can't give you the job, it would be a sin.

Please, I need the money. I'm willing to work, $8 is enough for me.

Im sorry. Go in peace, be warm and well fed.

~fin~

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You're creating strawmen. If the man cannot afford a living wage, he is unable to pay one. If he can afford a living wage and chooses not to, he is unjust, whether the employee agrees to it or not.

Zobel said:

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Read it closer. It says the amount has to provide a dignified livelihood, hence living wage.

You gotta watch those provisos, man.

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Where

As I said before, what good is it in reality if your obligation ends when you can't afford to pay the wage? The dude doesn't have a job, and now he has even less opportunity to make money because of an arbitrary price floor. Now instead of job and some money, he has no job and no money. This is what happens when you set a price floor above the actual economic value of a transaction, where people derive benefit - you preclude transactions from occurring.

Read your own quote. "Remuneration for the work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family".

Zobel said:

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As I said before, what good is it in reality if your obligation ends when you can't afford to pay the wage? The dude doesn't have a job, and now he has even less opportunity to make money because of an arbitrary price floor. Now instead of job and some money, he has no job and no money. This is what happens when you set a price floor above the actual economic value of a transaction, where people derive benefit - you preclude transactions from occurring.

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You're trying to misunderstand this too hard. There is no arbitrary price floor, if the man cannot afford to pay a living wage he cannot afford to pay a living wage, however when he is able to pay a living wage he needs to do so. Why is this confusing?

Zobel said:

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Read your own quote. "Remuneration for the work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family".

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Read the rest of it, it cites the state of the business.

Because the whole edge case IS the problem. The problem is precisely when both people want to make a transaction and you're over here saying it is unjust because it's not enough money.

The entire premise being presented is "what happens when the price of unskilled labor is below the cost of living?" Your answer is - lol not my problem, if I can't pay a living wage I can't pay a living wage.

Zobel said:

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Because the whole edge case IS the problem. The problem is precisely when both people want to make a transaction and you're over here saying it is unjust because it's not enough money.

The entire premise being presented is "what happens when the price of unskilled labor is below the cost of living?" Your answer is - lol not my problem, if I can't pay a living wage I can't pay a living wage.

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Which means you don't have to pay a living wage, you pay the wage you can handle, until such time as you are able to afford a living wage, then you are obliged to pay the living wage.

We're halfway there - at least you seem to agree that arbitrary minimum wage laws are inherently harmful.

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Y'all are standing outside the transaction telling one or actually both parties that they are wrong in their judgment.

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Right, and many examples have been given where a third party prevents a mutually beneficial transaction. These are all governed by law whether it is overtly criminal like selling murder for hire, socially destructive like child labor, treasonous like violating embargos, or just plain old labor laws like overtime rules. There is more to the world than mutual individual benefit. The effect of that transaction on other individuals matters (especially in the murder for hire situation) as does the effect on society at large. Economic transactions don't take place in a vacuum.

Zobel said:

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...so your go-to is a sublegal profession that is often tantamount to slavery, is based on implicit or explicit threats of violence, and because of its illegal nature has no recourse, and therefore is at least to a large degree involuntary? Yeah, that's exploitation.

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You can do the same example in a location where it's legal without threats of violence.

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Can you tell me why hiring someone willing to accept my offer of $15 for starting wage, when most of my competitors are paying $20, is me taking advantage of them?

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Because you are relying on their ignorance to make a poor choice and reduce their income 25%. This is a far cry from love your neighbor as yourself.

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I don't agree that a person needs to know all the relevant details to be able to negotiate.

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You can negotiate with almost no details. What I'm saying is that both sides having all the relevant details leads to a fair negotiation.

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You don't need to know the other party's benefit to know your own. It certainly helps, but it isn't necessary. It may change your opinion to know the total amount of the pie that is being divided, but it doesn't change your needs.

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Your needs are only part of the equation. I have been paid way past my needs for a very long time. In our system the employees are near universally negotiating at a disadvantage. There is not a thoughtful argument that I can see that increased information would not lead to higher wages for employees, and employers are well aware of this and heavily discourage sharing information (often illegally). Again, I'm not saying there cannot be mutual benefit, I'm saying looking at the market as it is as some objective truth of what employees are worth is silly when we both know they are often paid well below that and negotiate from a position of weakness most of the time. This isn't buying apples at the grocery store.

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Some of the objections here seem to want to have their cake (pie?) and eat it too, in that regard. Why should one party in the negotiation be forced to divide the pie to some third party's arbitrary definition of fair?

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You are missing it. It's not that some party should be forced to accept a third party definition, it's that the fundamental structure of the employer employee relationship and available information puts labor in a position of accepting worse deals than they otherwise would have. So it's not a third party definition of what's fair, it's what those two parties would agree upon given equal information. The only time we'd bring a third party in is deciding a minimum or subsistence level wage.

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Why does the employer need to consider not only his own negotiating objectives but ALSO take care for the negotiating objectives other other agent? We don't do this in any other transaction.

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In no other transaction do we set someone's livelihood. It's just being a person. We are homo sapien, not homo economicus. And I'm only arguing here for not deliberately taking advantage of the ignorance of information to drive them down in negotiations lower than where they likely would arrive with full information. You are telling me that's what Jesus would have you do?

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You don't ask yourself - is this sale price sustainable for this company? Should I really pay 50% off for this item? What if they're losing money? You say "is this worth $x to me?" and move on with your decision.

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Correct I don't and I'm not advocating for that. This is an exchange with equal footing and small stakes. What you are advocating for in employment is not saying this employee is worth $X to me, you are saying I won't pay more than $X for this employee let's see how little I can pay given their information disadvantages.

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Why do we expect employers to be paternalistic in negotiations in order for it to be fair? It seems like a soft form of bigotry. Don't employees know their own objectives?

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I'm not advocating for that. I don't think employers will be anything but self interested, and I'm not saying the solution is for employers themselves to willfully change behavior. That isn't tenable. Right now, I'm not talking solutions, I'm trying to get you to see the problem. This negotiation isn't on equal footing and the results would be different than what we see in our society if it were.

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And the business may need to compromise for fear of going bankrupt.

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Could be, dramatically less likely than the former.

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I don't buy that supply and demand should govern every single transaction except for this one.

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It doesn't. We interrupt markets all the time for a variety of reasons, I already pointed this out.

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There seems to be this lurking idea that somehow an employer making a profit is OK, but only to a point. And further, that there's some obligation to share profits with employees whether they know, or ask, or have someone else willing to do the same work without that profit sharing.

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I think this goes back to being a person who values more than maximizing their own profits. Being a person who treats others as they would be treated. Capitalism let's me open a sweatshop in the third world. I can make a huge profit and pay barely or less than subsistence wages and people will take it rather than starve. If I could triple their wages and still be a rich man, what's my moral justification for paying them the minimum they will accept in their desperation? And don't give me the line about what is the exact percentage of profit that is moral. We rarely operate with this kind of precision. But I would easily put not paying a subsistence wage in such a situation as easily and obviously immoral and exploitative.

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I don't know how you can justify that, or say what the "right" amount of profit is. Are you willing to work open book for someone to come and say that maybe you're being overpaid for your job? Why should anyone have to do that? What's fair is voluntary exchange, because both parties walk away with mutual benefit. The degree of benefit does not have to be equal.

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I don't have to say what the right amount of profit is, I think two fully informed individuals will come to that decision themselves, and I think that result will be pretty different than what we see today with employers hiring inexperienced people at higher wages than experienced ones.

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When businesses do it we call it collusion and the reason it is illegal is because it limits competition to artificially raise prices above their true value. What's the difference?

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What do you mean their "true value". This is nakedly contradicting what your fundamental premise is. That the true value is nothing more than what people are willing to pay when the government isn't in the way. Capitalism is freedom covered freedom with freedom fries right? So why doesn't that allow free association, freedom for employers to collude? Freedom to have a monopoly or cartel?

When it comes to the union, doesn't that just fall back under people free to negotiate as they please. Won't the market tell the owner when to hire scabs? Why are you paternalistically intervening? Why can't two people negotiate their services to the employer together and the employer accept this negotiation of his own free will?

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This is basically saying "preventing competition in a market changes the price." Yeah. Exactly.

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What lack of competition. I'm not arguing for a closed shop. Hire scabs.

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I don't see anything immoral about it, unless you're being deceptive to achieve this.

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Isn't willfully holding back information that you have that your prospective employee does not have and would help their negotiating position fundamentally deceptive?

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The real question is, would anyone pay an employee who matches productivity and output of others at half the wage? A fool might, but doing so would in the long run be against his own best interest. And you know what? He should be free to do that stupid, bad thing. Just like that employee should be free to accept something less than he should get.

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Except the nature of employment makes underpaying far less economically foolish than you are arguing here. The line of successful businessmen who've done it is very long.

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The only reason this is outrageous is because you picked a big number. The principle is the same at 50%, 5%, 1%, or one penny. Should people be allowed to be paid differently at all for the same work? Why or why not?

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I picked a big number (and it's a number we can find real examples of people getting 50% raises by leaving their company are not hard to find) to illustrate the point. There is no perfect knowledge of market value for labor, so 1% is certainly below our ability to know and 50% is certainly above our ability to know.

People should be allowed to be paid differently for the same job because people can perform the same job at different levels. And if employees knew they were being paid less for the same job than could bring it up to their employer and the employer could say, joe has 8% better numbers than you and that's why he gets more. Or the emplyee could say I've got 10% better numbers than joe, I want you to correct the imbalance.

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And no, I do not define paying that employee more than what he asked for charity. What I said was charity was paying above the value of the work product. In other words, charity would be me sacrificing for his benefit.

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No one here has advocated that.