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> How many businesses that pay minimum wage really can’t afford to pay more? By my estimation, it’s a fraction, if any.

Have you never used an automated car wash or self checkout?

People can decide their own minimum wage and to be unemployed if an employer isn't offering enough. This is literally what everyone does above the minimum wage.

> We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.

Every country that "decided" this ended up with famines killing millions. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism keeps lifting the poverty floor, life expectancy, child survival rate, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...



The failure of various alternative economic systems seem to have been universally caused by malice.

Either foreign powers trying to keep dominos from falling or internal forces leveraging control to create dictatorships.

I don’t think collective economics has a chance until we’re generally more evolved as a species.

Though, if we do enter an age of abundance, it will likely be the default as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves.


The incentive structure of central planning doesn't work and it's not something that can be solved with people evolving to be more altruistic. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism has raised the quality of life of billions of people.

> as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves

It's not an illusion. If you want gold, you need to mine it. If you mine gold, it means you're not raising chickens or writing a social networking app or cutting down trees or whatever. Everything has a trade-off, scarcity is never going away.




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