Hal's... at it again?

Nothing gets the threads burning more than Bernie...

~OGD~

It's tough discussing any of this with you because you seem to have 0 economics training & 0 interest in looking at economic things objectively with the types of basic frameworks that most economists agree on.

A consumer will have a maximum price that she will pay for any good. If the combination of labor cost, materials, transportation, shop or eCommece expenses and investor/entrepreneur margin add up to be too much for the consumer, or if the consumer feels a 2nd model is of good enough quality for less price, she will either not buy or choose the more affordable model (assuming marketing hasn't created some perceived extra value to commit that buy decision anyway).

Since most products are complex, they depend on an international supply chain, so some pieces are domestically produced, some internationally produced, with typically the sales & marketing costs & profits all domestic. And typically the sales & marketing margin is much greater than the profit of physical production. So a tariff on foreign parts could raise prices & lower sales and kill the much more profitable sales & marketing portion of activity.

Additionally there are issues like availability. Socialist times taught us that without decent profit incentives, some goods or spare parts or pharmaceuticals simply don't get made. So the first time I walked into a socialist store, there was a shelf full of some weird thin tomato-cabbage-carrrot-pea puree and not much else in way of sauces; 2 types of juice concentrates and none other; 2 types of bread and none other, no citrus fruit or bananas as those were too expensive for everyone, etc. Everyone got paid nearly the same, from factory worker to college researcher to company president - and nobody could afford anything nice except for the under-the-table/behind-the-scenes benefits like a deal on a car or fix the fridge for cheaper in exchange for English lessons or some other barter, as well as the factory benefits like a ski cottage that all employees might be able to use.

Yes, workers can be paid "too little", but as noted, they'll be competing against foreign workers for part of the product, so you have to differentiate between what makes sense overall and component-wise to produce locally and what to produce abroad.

Plus, the minimum price of a house in San Francisco is over $200K - in Nashville it's $47K, as an article notes on why millennials are moving out of the cities to the suburbs/exburbs or into flyover country, counter to myths that they'd flock to cities. So am I going to pay the worker the same in San Francisco as what I pay her in Nashville where her housing costs are 1/4? This is 1 reason why the unified minimum wage across the US didn't make sense. A $10-15 entree is normal in DC - not in Des Moines.

Also, wages tend to bunch towards the bottom, and the higher minimum wage lessens wage differentiation - so you have a high-school part-time pizza delivery worker making the same as a partly trained nurse and the same as a same as a road worker and the same as a teacher with X years experience.... - what's the incentive to get trained up and gain experience when all the focus is on a level bottom line? The idea of the minimum wage was to guarantee survival and some degree of fairness, not to promote equality and equivalence of all people.