Why are corporations of billionaires and employers so stupidly greedy that think workers should be working for peanuts and be thankful they have a job?

For context, this is a question I answered on Quora

You likely believe that corporations should be paying their most menial employees your idea of a living wage which you likely to believe to be a definitive number between $15 and $20 an hour or a salary equivalent as most current state and local wage floors hover around those values.

In reality, a “living wage” is a moving target that legislation will never keep pace with. As soon as the rate of wages rise so do rents and housing prices. Both landlords and homeowners generally base their price on how much prospective tenants or buyers are both willing and able to pay. That is why you won’t find any more than a few dozen million dollar homes in Mississippi but they’ll be very common in California where people earn much higher incomes and thus are able to pay more for housing. With a national housing shortage the willingness to pay more isn’t much of a factor, especially for renters in the lower end of the income distribution who are generally priced out of home ownership in their location. When their incomes rise in a particular location, their ability to pay higher rents also rises in that location and landlords eventually adjust their prices accordingly. Homeowners do the same thing they just use what their neighbors are asking for as a proxy, but what their neighbors are asking for is just what they think prospective buyers are able to pay which just circles back to the income advantage they think their location has over other locations. All of the other factors people think make up location value like the quality of the school district or crime rates, the two most commonly cited, are also just proxies for the income advantage for that location. This is called the law of rent. If your policies ignore this rule they will fail.

Wage floors don’t work in other countries either. You probably think Western Europe is an exception where wage floors are high enough for minimum wage earners to comfortable afford the cost of living on their own and yet they are rent burdened over there too.

In the Netherlands, which adjusts its minimum wage every 6 months, workers spend an average of 56% of their income on housing. If you spend more than 30% of your income on rent you are not earning a “living wage” and the wage floor hasn’t covered your cost of living. Mind you these are countries where minimum wage workers don’t have to worry about the cost of healthcare so rent is by far the largest burden. If you are actually interested in solving the root cause of the problem, which I assume you are since you asked this in the Georgism space, you would push for land value capture to stabilize the price workers are charged for the location of their home.