Just to get it out of the way: groups don't have ideas or opinions. Individuals do, and some self-identified groups share many, but rarely all and rarely levels as the identified individuals do. This is true even for traditional groups like "liberals", but even more so for disorganized ones like "libertarians" or "rationalists". You can find the US Libertarian Party platform at https://www.lp.org/platform/, but the vast majority of people who admit to libertarian leaning that I know of explicitly separate the libertarian belief cluster from the Libertarian party.
The general idea (with many variations) is that it mostly works as today, just with far more individual freedom to have exceptions, and less government enforcement of specific equilibria. Unions may still exist, but they're voluntary organizations to help employees coordinate their negotiations. The minimum wage isn't enforced, but it probably still exists as a norm for "the lowest you should expect to pay a competent adult".
The ultimate private property is yourself, and it's offensive to be told that you can't charge between $0 and some arbitrary number for your time. ESPECIALLY if the ways you can spend your time (due to preference, availability, or ability) are worth just under that, in which case you're being told that you can't work at all.
You don't mention which libertarian works you consulted in forming your views on the topic. A very accessible introduction is "What it means to be a libertarian" by Charles Murray.
This point of view is very old e.g. the early Daoist works have libertarian threads. So you don't have to imagine what libertarians think, and they have been thinking hard about the issues for a long time.
One thing that surprises many people is the enthusiastic support among many libertarians for collective action and for cooperative organisations. The caveat being that they are not mandated by overbearing people with guns.
Another thing that often surprises is the realization of how well people are able to coordinate among themselves without too many people who are from the government and here to help.
[shortening of another comment] I'm wondering how people think that wage negotiations would work out in a libertarian world, and in particular whether there are arguments that the results would be Just or good or something. Rather than e.g. the wealthiest purchasing and then enforcing a monopoly on violent force, or the workers doing the same.
It seems like unions and minimum wages are a form of bargaining, using the government as a way to overcome coordination problems given the cognitive costs of doing distributed game theory. Why isn't that considered by libertarians to be a legitimate (i.e., reasonably endorsed as part of a globally coherent notion of justice) form of bargaining / decision-making?
As for myself, the question is not "Is this a legitimate coordination mechanism?" but rather "Does this coordination mechanism effectively solve coordination problems?" In other words, rather than viewing government as some sort of privileged system that solves all the problems in the private market, we can view it from the same perspective that we view systems in the private market. We can do this through the lens of game theory: model the government as being composed of a bunch of different economic agents who each try to achieve their own goals in light of the incentive structures in government, and then ask whether the aggregate behavior of these agents adds up to something we prefer to alternatives.
When we start getting specific about what we mean by governance, then the flaws in using government as a device for collective action become more apparent. The flaws in first past the post representative democracy are fairly well known, but I'll repeat some arguments here:
Given these flaws in the way democracy actually functions (as opposed to the way people poetically imagine democracy), there's no guarantee that coordinating through it will actually lead to outcomes that maximize utility, like happiness or preference satisfaction. By contrast, libertarians generally share the intuition that market structures usually do a better job at solving coordination problems than government (and sometimes back it up with results like the fundamental theorems of welfare economics).
Ok, so the fundamental theorems are sort of relevant to my question. My question asks for a combination of reasoning like in those theorems, with empirical information about parameters like bounded reasoning, imperfect information, mortal agents, agents with complicated boundaries, etc. AFAIK in those conditions, there could be weird attractors that mean dumb-seeming stuff like government actually makes sense. I'm pretty confident that we could describe a coherent world that's vastly superior just by changing the (hypothetical) government away from our actual one. What I'm asking about is the forces that have to be contended with to make that work.
Not at all related to any libertarian or other political view point.
There's a huge literature for labor economics that will have a lot of theory on wages and employee-employer market workings.
Some of the more simple approaches is to assume wages and labor services are no different from any other price and service/good setting. You can add another layer here related to reservation wage which then puts the floor in. One might argue that some market failure situation exists that makes the reservation wage fail to bind market wages so government imposed minimum wage should be set to the appropriate reservation wage level. (Note, I am not aware of anyone actually making that argument but think one would find bits or even all of that in much of the literature.)
I think perhaps a more interesting line might be something of a mixed model where one analyzes the internal compensation/pay policies for the employer as a distributive problem rather than the allocative problem that often seems to underlie wage models. Then across the industry/sector you would see something of a market wage observed but the formation would be driven by something a bit different than the standard econ 101 type story. I'm also not aware of any model like this but would expect that at least some of the labor econ literature at least implicitly includes it.
Thanks! Yeah, IIUC (...and I don't...) I'm attending a lot to the distributive aspect of labor relations (hence talking about bargaining), maybe I'll read Rawls. And I'm interested in the equilibria that come from different ways of dealing with distributive justice.
I'm amazed you only have 4 answers so far.
The bog-standard classical (and, yes, "libertarian") answer is that wages work exactly the same as all other prices - prices for candy bars, gasoline, houses, lawn mowing services, plumbers, and milk.
That's to say, supply and demand (sellers and buyers) set prices, same as with everything else. If buyers don't like the price, they shop around some more, settle for a lower-quality "product" that's cheaper, or offer more to get what they want. If sellers don't like what's on offer, they look for another buyer who'll pay more, try to improve the "product", or settle for what buyers are willing to pay.
Generally speaking, price controls (a minimum wage is a price floor on labor) make things worse for pretty much everybody - laws that make mutually-advantageous trades illegal are generally a bad idea. Plenty of countries don't have any minimum wage (last I checked, those included Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - all pretty decent places to live).
There's a whole academic field dedicated to studying and understanding this called "economics".
It seems like all the countries you named have gvt enforced worker's rights, and strong gvt support for the unemployed (as well as strong non-gvt collective bargaining). That seems like a big factor to me in determining the wage equilibria, and isn't a standard part of the libertarian model, right? So my question is, what are the principles underlying what determines these equilibria.
Realistically, wages aren't like other prices because they are "sticky" in both directions. Employers will rarely offer a substantial increase to the remuneration of someone they've already got, and also won't reduce the salary of anyone with seniority , even if they have declined in productivity.
Wages are also unlike other prices , because there is a natural minimum wage, an amount below which you can't literally survive on.
The basic idea is that without gov forcing out competition via monopoly the market provides arbitration services.
Ok, so that's a good argument that government monopoly is less good, in a global sense, than a system with more competition for services. My question is, what would happen in such a world? It might be globally better but locally worse because e.g. it reveals the actual issues in labor relations, rather than covering them up with unsustainable compromises born of an ongoing political conflict that just confuses the issue. I'm wondering how people think that wage negotiations would work out in such a world, and in particular whether there are arguments that the results would be Just or good or something. Rather than e.g. the wealthiest purchasing and then enforcing a monopoly on violent force, or the workers doing the same.
There's a few countries without minimum wage laws that have way better average wages than the US and many others, I believe this fact already invalidates some of your observations.
For libertarians workers unions would be ok, as long as they're not government sponsored (they're a type of private government), while government intervention is pretty much always seen as bad since they are not considered a legitimate way to solve market issues (wages are a market issue)
Why is government intervention not legitimate? Is that judgement grounded in a model of how labor relations would work with or without various kinds of intervention? (It doesn't have to be. E.g. "intervention should be presumed bad because third parties have bad incentives from the 1st and 2nd parties's perspectives" is a solid argument; and it's not based on "here's how wage negotiations will go in a world without gvt monopoly on threats of force".)
I don't think it invalidates the claim that "Without the minimum wage law, lots of people would probably be paid significantly less." (I believe that's one of the claims you were referring to. Let me know if I misinterpreted your post.)
I don't have a whole lot of time to research economies around the world, but I checked out a couple sources with varying perspectives (two struck me as neutral, two as libertarian). One of the libertarian ones made no effort to understand or explain the phenomenon, but all three others agreed that these countries rely on str...
When an employee agrees to work for a manager, that's also sort of a move in a coordination game with the manager for them to specialize as worker and manager. That's a cooperative game. How does that interact with the adversarialness?
And part of that move, is that you give up your potential to learn to survive by finding food in the untamed forest. Which was supposed to be your BATNA.
It's worth considering the wages/worker exploitation angle from top down too, because that's where the deck gets stacked, against both capital and labor.
We can spotlight symptoms of undervalued workers and debate ways this undervaluing may be, potentially, ameliorated e.g. by imposing a minimum wage. But while government is a de facto enforcer for monopolistic interests AGAINST the free market, arguing for more libertarian or a more socialist approach to wages is pishing into the wind.
We're not at the point where arguments over libertarian or socialist or free market capitalist matter. All the sociopolitical arguments are moot while unaccountable oligarchy monopolizes the market and our government polices their monopoly with exclusive recourse to violent enforcement.
>We're not at the point where arguments over libertarian or socialist or free market capitalist matter.
Yeah, I think I agree with what you're saying. I'm trying to understand the hypothetical ideal-er situation (as a mathematical / scientific puzzle that touches on lots of stuff).
[ETA: apparently my actual question got completely lost in translation. Thanks to the people who tried to answer. I think it has something to do with having said "libertarians" when my question isn't really about libertarianism.]
[Disclaimer: this post was written hastily and barely edited.]
I don't get how anyone things employer-employee relations are supposed to work. Libertariants have some opinions.
I think the idea is, we have no minimum wages, no mandatory unions, etc.; and then employers and workers bargain over wages by making offers to hire or be hired at a given wage. If workers employed by a firm F are unhappy with their wages, then some other firm F' could poach them by offering higher wages. Since F is afraid of that, F will have already offered higher wages.
But like, how does bargaining work? It seems like there's all sorts of parameters that might make a really big difference to the outcome of a negotiation like this, and I don't have clarity on what those are and how they affect the outcome. Do other people have opinions about employer-worker based on beliefs about those questions, or what?
[Some more disorganized thoughts follow, but the above is the basic question.]
Humans need a steady stream of food and shelter, or they become less productive (often permanently). That means that if the boss Bob has enough wealth to outlast his worker's stores of nutrients, he can basically pay them just the absolute minimum so that they can still work.
An argument goes like: the minimum wage law only harms people. If you remove the law, then more trades would happen, which are always good (or good in expectation, or in aggregate across a given class of people, or something) for both parties. But this just seems false? Without the minimum wage law, lots of people would probably be paid significantly less. Or maybe that's untrue? If it is true, it seems like there's an attractor where managers have all the wealth, and everyone else is paid just enough to keep them able to work. That's supposed to be not an attractor, because a slightly more generous manager could easily poach employees. But how does that break the equilibrium? Seems like the generous manager is just losing a bit of money. They could have their pick of employees; is that supposed to be a crux of the argument? That seems to just imply an exploitative equilibrium, but with more desirable workers getting a slightly better but still exploitative deal. (Exploitative, meaning that the managers are actively trying to keep the workers desperate for their next paycheck.)
Maybe I'm confused about the equilibrium reasoning because there's two "forces" pushing in opposite directions: a manager wants to threaten employees with lowering wages, and threaten other managers with raising wages (hence poaching the best workers). Is there standard wisdom about how these things are supposed to play out, e.g. with an evolutionary equilibrium model?
It seems like unions and minimum wages are a form of bargaining, using the government as a way to overcome coordination problems given the cognitive costs of doing distributed game theory. Why isn't that considered by libertarians to be a legitimate (i.e., reasonably endorsed as part of a globally coherent notion of justice) form of bargaining / decision-making? Is it about the use of government force? But don't libertarians endorse private property rights and other rights, which are also enforced by collective agreement?