> "‘Robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms,’ said FTC Chair Lina Khan, who appeared at a House hearing in 2023."
Should be the motto of every government in the world.
Well if your goal is "freedom" all-around then it would make perfect sense that sometimes that would lead to regulations that prevent things and other times it would lead to regulations that allow things. In each case the regulation does whatever is best for people's freedom?
I seriously can't understand how anyone could be opposed to this. Laws that help people and protect them from people who have power of them are... good. That's what laws are for.
The point is that some people will be priced out of the labor market because they are only allowed to exchange their labor at/above a set rate. If your labor is worth $10/hr because you have very little job experience, you will be unemployed in a jurisdiction where the minimum wage is $15/hr.
It is not "best for people's freedom" to have that restriction; it benefits some people (those who remain employed) and worse for others (those who are laid off or cannot get a job). And it's good for companies that make tools to automate jobs away (we've seen more fast food kiosks recently).
But the big picture point I was making is that it's silly to wave the flag of economic freedom if you don't actually embrace that concept wholeheartedly (which I am assuming she does not).
Very simplistic view. A worker at $15/hour isn’t as productive as someone who also makes $15/hour - that happens every day at all levels of the labor industry.
There is a net economic loss - externalities imposed on society - to people working at jobs where their basic needs aren’t being met. That comes in the cost of mental and physical health issues of the worker as well as their family through their inability to properly care for their children; which is a humanitarian issue but an economic one as well because those children don’t reach their full potential. Police, jails and health services all have this burden fall on them, and we all experience a lower quality of life as a result.
What point is there pretending that the giant debate about minimum wage doesn't exist? These points have been argued to death. It is not like everybody hasn't thought of "with a minimum wage people whose labor is worth <15$/hr won't be employed", and that's a first-order "naive" observation that is only useful when considered alongside all the other arguments that correct it.
If a person working can't afford basic expenses they're slightly better off than not working, locally, but at a policy level neither outcome is acceptable---and part of the solution is to ensure that there is a floor because, surprise, employers will pay powerless people less if they are allowed to do so. It is a tradeoff between "making some jobs uneconomical" versus "putting a floor on people's ability to be exploited", and the obvious next step of logic is to look for, given that that floor is in place, what other parts of the economy will transform around it? Well: some jobs are removed (bad maybe) but other jobs will pay more than they would (good maybe), plus some prices for things will go up (bad) but they go up in a way that allows people to make non-exploitative wages (good), which means that the much richer and greater-agency employers may have to share more profits with labor (good) which means that some business ventures might not be profitable anymore (maybe bad) but then they'll have to innovate to find more profitable ones (good)...
etc.
Pretending like there is one argument and ignoring the rest of the picture is ignorant and a waste of everyone's time.
I'm a huge fan but nobody's perfect. Two parties were not only inevitable but work unbelievably well.
I'm not American, and I really don't want to inflame the political passions of either side, but take the US 2020 election, for example. I remember reading an article comparing various polling results on policy points and candidate popularity to the election outcome.
The polling results suggested that people didn't want Trump again, but liked many of his policies, and didn't want a far-left candidate either. Through votes for president, governors, senators, etc, they got exactly what the polls said they wanted.
Using the two-party system, over a hundred million US voters were able to send a very clear and nuanced message to the political system. How's that for a solution to a distributed co-ordination problem?
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Under the final rule, existing noncompetes for senior executives can remain in force. Employers, however, are prohibited from entering into or enforcing new noncompetes with senior executives. The final rule defines senior executives as workers earning more than $151,164 annually and who are in policy-making positions.
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Given in tech industry / FANG, most people earn above the $151,164 I wonder how they define "policy-making positions" ?
As I read the above sentence I understand that this is a binary and and not an either you earn that much or are in policy making positions?
Should be the motto of every government in the world.