Minimum Wage

The primary purpose of a capitalist enterprise is to make and maximise profit for the owner.

In the absence of any wage regulation those deemed to be at the low-skill or low-demand sectors would at best be paid the smallest amount possible above starvation levels

(pay someone too low a wage and it will affect their labour output).

Though even then unemployed people would find themselves competing with each other so as to accept below-starvation levels of wages

, which they would attempt to supplement by begging/stealing. This is what happens in the USA where minimum-wage is very low as is welfare provision.

...

Are you for or against the existence of a minimum wage? In my opinion it should be just over benefits but no higher, in order to dissuade people from sitting around scrounging all day, but it undoubtedly does have a negative effect on business to some extent.

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Markets are controlled by the capitalist class, everyone else is subject to them. This principle is especially obvious where there are fewer wage-labour opportunities than there are would-be wage-labourers, as is the case in almost all sectors of almost all markets.

As I've said, the capitalist class seek to pay as little as possible to the worker in order to maximise their profits, the result is that many have to compete with each other for near-starvation wages, in the absence of wage regulation and/or welfare provision that is.

Don't worry, I'm not really indulging in your normative paradigm, for me capitalist arrangements are illegitimate in toto so discussions about minimum-wage and welfare within capitalism are entirely moot.

5) "starvation levels"? what country do you think we're in here? uganda?

I take it you are aware that there are nearly a million people in this country who rely on charity food banks?

I support the minimum wage. Just imagine how low wages would have been driven following the mass Polish emigration to the UK in 2004.

^that's one of the big reasons why I think we should probably leave the EU we're forced to need a minimum wage from hyper-competition from synthetically low-demanding workers from poorer countries

"capitalists" wish they could control the market...

Got to admire their high productivity though

Are you for or against the existence of a minimum wage? In my opinion it should be just over benefits but no higher, in order to dissuade people from sitting around scrounging all day

Markets under capitalism are controlled by capitalists, if imperfectly, to that extent you're right.

I just wish socialism at least did what it said it would do, but it doesn't that's half its problem - it doesn't work

Markets under capitalism are controlled by capitalists, if imperfectly, to that extent you're right. A capitalist presented with would-be labourers competing with each other for wage-labour can simply pick the worker willing to do the most labour for the least wages in the least attractive conditions.

As I've suggested, in almost all sectors of all markets this principle is at work and only suffers 'correction' through wage regulation and welfare.

Otherwise the individual would-be wage-labourer suffers starvation should they attempt to withhold their offer of labour for better wages (that is their 'power' in the market place, such as the term has any meaning)

whereas the capitalist has every other would-be wage-labourer competing for employment. Even in the last instance, where all would-be wage-labourers withheld their labour from a capitalist, the capitalist has capital with which to ensure their capacity to hold out, often for some time, while the would-be wage-labourers pretty quickly succumb to the limitations of begging and/or stealing.

In any event, and as I've suggested, you are offering up an entirely normative argument which treats capitalist arrangements as legitimate whereas they are not so from my perspective.

To be fair, you can't really call what's been carried out in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea etc Socialism, it's State Capitalism. Socialism, to me anyway, is where you extend democracy to every area of life so that businesses and politics are controlled by neither governments or boardrooms of executives but by everyone. That means you can "roll back the frontiers of the state" as libertarians like to put it, and power won't just shift from governments to elites but everyone will be responsible for their own destiny. One of the biggest misconceptions about socialism is that it's about massive state intervention, even Marx (who I'm not that big a fan of) believed in eventual dissolution of the state.

Until we've had true socialism, we can't really comment on whether it works or not.

I'm against it on all fronts - people shouldn't be forced to pay people more than they're worth, and it simply increases the unemployment rate and causes more people to rely on tax money over the private sector

Control only in a very loose sense. Markets are more a form of emergent order than top-down control, that's why markets are so vital and revolutionary and could so easily outcompete command-economy socialism (and I say this as a socialist)