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Joshua Erwin's avatar

I think machine guns should be readily legal; this is my sole political concern. What does Ruskin say?

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Hurlock's avatar

How is this different from the minimum wage and how does it avoid all of the problems associated with it?

You are fixing the price of every possible labour service at a relatively high level, because if you fix it at a low level, you are back in the Eastern Block where the motto is "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" (this is an actual saying from my country). However, if the price is fixed at a high quality level you run into several different problems.

First, you effectively price out poor quality labour from the market. If the price is fixed at X for both a good and a bad heart surgeon or a bricklayer, who would ever choose the bad one? How are bad bricklayers or hearth surgeons going to find work? The reason why markets compete by quality and price simultaneously is because they cannot clear if quality cannot be differentiated by price. How is a market with a limited ability to clear functional? You have unemployment baked into the foundation of the whole thing - how do you deal with that?

Second, why are we only focusing on the supply side here? What about the demand side? If the price is fixed at a high quality level you are also pricing poorer consumers out of the market. Someone might say "well, since you have a high price floor for ALL labour, then everyone's income would be high enough to be able to afford the high prices" but that is clearly not so because we run back to the first problem which is that lower quality labour will be getting (close to) 0 income as long as its price is fixed at the same level of higher quality labour.

The only ways I can think of in which these issues can be circumvented are if the state in some way starts subsidizing everything. But then your "two-knob" command economy very quickly becomes Soviet Russia.

Furthermore, not everything makes sense to be a guild, especially in the 21st century. Pretty much all the professions that it still makes sense to be ran as guilds are indeed ran as such nowadays. Doctors, lawyers, etc. Bricklayers, no, sorry.

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