Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
Do you suppose someone who doesn't want to do a job will do as productive a job as someone who does want the job?

Given the answer to that question, do you then suppose that two different employees provide the same value to their employer?

Further, is there a critical point where the money an employee is paid is worth more than the value they provide?

How many people do you suppose do less that the minimum required amount of work to reach this critical point?

The wage an employer is prepared to pay is related to the value the employer anticipates. That might not equal the value the employee actually provides. The employer might not even have the means to calculate the value the employee provides. The employer can be less productive a business if they employ useless staff.

The point is... from an individual company's point of view, some people are better off out of the workforce. This is easy to imagine by asking yourself... would you employ someone who doesn't want the job? Not if you can help it, because you know it will affect your profits. Thus, it's a net loss to your business, and thus the greater economy.

Now, is that loss to the economy worth more than employment benefits? Honestly, I don't know the answer to this question. But still, if I'm an employer, I don't want to employ people like me.
The economic concepts we're dealing with are in aggregation. The setting of wages where what the employers and employees value equal doesn't happen perfectly on the individual firm level but does happen at the market level. I'm not sure how much headway we're gonna make on this, in part because it involves the utility theory discussed on this board a while back that does not go over well. Just know that it's at the backbone of microeconomics and assumed as given in the labor economics subfield.

A way of looking at it is that when a person sells his labor, he ONLY does so when it provides him equal or greater utility* than not doing so. The same goes for those who purchase labor.

*Recall that "utility" means "happiness" and is probably best thought of as "better-offness" or "preferredness".