President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

The various motivations of buyers and sellers is not what determines the efficiency of a market. How freely that market operates is. Even if it did, you are creating a motivation, without looking at the zillions of motivations that paint the decisions of both buyers and sellers -- in any market, not just a labor market. You could just as easily tell me that a business owner will die without his business, because he relies on the income it generates to feed and house himself. It's an arbitrary argument that creates a favorable starting point for an arbitrary point of view. It ignores how an actual market works. First, whether you are an employee of someone or a business owner, you are not locked into one pursuit in life. If I start a business and it fails, it doesn't mean I die because I can't feed myself. Same if I work for you and lose my job. I am not doomed to death. It means I need to find something else (either deploying capital and finding a business that is viable or learning new skills, finding a job that produces a stable income, etc).

As for workers, let's say someone offers you a job. Your ability to negotiate the terms depends largely on your leverage -- the skills you are offering and how others value them. That isn't some arbitrary thing. It's a matter of lots of market participants interacting and placing a value on something. In a market for labor, if someone isn't valuing your skills highly enough, nothing precludes you from finding someone else who will value them more. Exactly how valuable you are to an employer will depend on supply, demand, economic conditions at that moment in time, etc.

In that second paragraph, you are redefining what a cartel is. Not all businesses have cartel power. In fact, ask anyone who has opened a restaurant, only to see it fail within the first year what they think about that notion. Undoubtedly there are specific industries that operate as some form of cartel. Very often due to unfair political patronage. It's one of the problems we create for ourselves. If Noah Smith wrote a column saying in essence that that works to all of our advantage (although that isn't the kind of column he does), I'd post the same thing I did about his actual column. A cartel benefits the members of the cartel, at the expense of others. It's an immutable reality.