I intended this to be no longer than six lines, as I don't have much time right now. But no can do. It's my English professor continually telling me to explain.
You're on to something. One unintended consequence of minimum wage is to reduce incentives to develop skills. If you work hard and get good education to increase your salary and a noticeable minimum wage boost comes along, you see the value of your hard work and education diminish while the value of if you had remained less skilled increases. This isn't to say that minimum wage jobs are not difficult. In fact they become even more difficult as employers are forced to pay more. You gotta cook a whole lot more burgers to remain employed at $15 than $5.
Which is an answer to your question about what is lost by not having lower wages. People with super low skills and even super bad work ethic can make more money, provide more value, and live happier lives if they are allowed to work for a wage that reflects the value they provide.
Note on Time Warner: municipalities and unions have played an unmatched role in having governments use laws and regulatory bureaucracies to make it illegal or cost-prohibitive or both for competitors to enter the ISP space. We see this dynamic in real time in that Google has the capital and motive to enter the ISP place in every area of the country, yet the company is moving slowly and only able to enter markets with super low barriers to entry. It's gonna be a long ass time before Fiber gets into heavy municipalities, and it's because of the law and bureaucracies, not free market behavior.
It can also be noted that unions and municipalities aren't the only players in creation of this cronyism. The incumbent ISPs themselves have also played. It's natural for entities to support what's in their best interests. This is why free markets aren't the same as "pro-business". Businesses are individually as crony as they can be, because it's in their interests. The reason free marketeers like me talk so much about government is because the same principle applies to the average voters, where it is in our interests to vote for policies and politicians who deteriorate this capacity for business cronyism.
As for the skill question, in an absolute sense, we are probably vastly more skilled. In a relative sense, I would argue we are less skilled. I put this blame on the shifts towards academic education and away from on-the-job training. This has made us far more "educated" but still not much more skilled at the jobs we enter. There is a good deal of overlap between education and skills of course, but it's not 1-to-1. Take this example, my father has been a construction contractor his entire adult life. It's a highly technical and skill-based field, and he learned 0% of it through an education system. Contrast this to me, who is going to college to get a degree to open up doors in business fields. The vast majority of what I learn in college is crap I don't use, won't ever use, have already forgotten, and is totally irrelevant to what I will eventually do.
The "more college" mantra we have going on is the opposite of what we need. People are remaining children into their mid-twenties these days and they enter the workforce about a decade behind what they would in a free market (and did back before the school system was federally centralized).
A plus plusIdk. I'm rambling but I'm bored as fuck waiting and it got me thinking about why it took me so long to realize that I needed to create value.
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