No one thinks that. The wage should be entirely determined by 2 parties -- the worker and the employer, each one having the sovereign right to refuse any amount. And any amount they both agree to is the right wage for any worker to be paid, with no one else having any right to interfere to impose anything different than what the individual employer/company and individual worker agree to.
And along with this, the customer and the seller also need complete freedom to reject any price, and whatever price both agree to is the right price. So indirectly the customers/buyers help set the wage levels by their choice of what price to pay -- thus making everyone better off.
With the only caveat to the above being that neither the worker or employer, or the buyer or seller, commits fraud onto the other.
This rule for wage and price levels is the one which would lead (or does lead) to the best possible condition for all humans, because it results in the optimum production for human benefit.
No, what's "bizarre, degrading," etc. is anything other than the individual employer and individual worker deciding the amount, and free to accept or reject anything with no outside interference, thus making the world better off.
Meaning any desperate job-seeker must be free to accept a low wage in order to be able to get hired, i.e., free to choose a low-paying job rather than have no job at all -- and thus making everyone better off.
And to deny a desperate job-seeker the freedom to compete by offering his labor at a lower wage is bizarre, degrading, disgusting, etc., because denying the choice to work at a lower wage eliminates many jobs and needed production, thus making the world worse off.
That Americans are completely unaware of just how awful it is, is symptomatic of the wider insanity that includes this nutty idea that minimum wages far below subsistence levels are acceptable.
Meaning most wage levels in poor countries -- having a third or half the world's population -- are not acceptable. So, to make it "acceptable," those countries must be forced to increase all the wage levels up to "subsistence levels" -- meaning millions of people would starve who otherwise would live to an old age. Because when you force the wages up above "subsistence levels" in those countries, vast numbers of those jobs would be eliminated, tens of millions made poor, production vastly reduced > extreme scarcities of food and other necessities.
It would mean vast suffering and starvation, possibly a billion humans starving or brought to near starvation, in order to make it "acceptable."
In other words, it's a "nutty idea" that millions of humans should be able to live and not have to starve, as they would if all the world's wages were forced up to "subsistence level" and no jobs could exist which pay below that level.
And it's also a "nutty idea" that millions more are made better off, in the higher-income countries, from the benefits they buy from the poor countries at lower prices.
So "acceptable" means making everyone worse off, greatly increasing the world's suffering, and imposing starvation onto a billion or so humans. That's "acceptable" -- while making people better off, letting them improve their lives by taking advantage of cheap labor in poor countries, thus making poor people better off and less poor -- that's a "nutty idea."
Why?
Why is it "nutty" for people to be better off? And why isn't it "acceptable" unless a billion of them starve from increasing the wage to an "acceptable" level which would eliminate so much needed production?
