Yes, it is better these people are unemployed and receive unemployment benefits until they manage to find a real job.

Because they are making the situation worse for everyone.

so your idea is necessarily tied to the existence of unemployment benefit.

When there exists a social net, isn't it obvious that the existence of poor costs money? Plus, that money disproportionately comes from the lower and middle class in the form of tax.

So in reality all you're doing with an underpaid gig economy is allowing corps to indirectly make money off of taxpayers instead of just the customers / companies involved in the service.

TLDR; You're paying a tax for someone else to get their food delivered.

That's not true; if no one offered "underpaid" work we'd pay more tax, so that interpretation doesn't work.

What you don't understand is that whike "existence of poor costs money", underpaid jobs do not made people poor - you'd have to assume that if companies where held to a minimum wage, that they just pay that (and/or raise prices), rather than employ less.

If companies are held to a minimum wage, then they'll pay it. Sure, maybe it becomes more cost effective to invest in technology that requires them to pay less people... but I would argue they are doing that already (especially in the context of Uber), regardless of whether it's gig or minimum wage.

Rich people don't buy more stuff in proportion to what they make. So the more money that moves from the lower and middle class, the less business opportunity you have. I'm not going to use 10 times more uber eats than someone who makes 10 times less than me.

It's not a hard problem to solve in theory. Just figure out how to move money the opposite direction and business will boom! It doesn't even have to be a socialist structure. Maybe we just tax companies for their external negative effects?

Suppose one day gig economy companies all go out of business, and all their current workforce files for unemployment benefits.

Is my tax burden as a taxpayer going up or down?

Hard to say. What are they going to spend their unemployment benefits on? What is replacing the gig economy companies?

> What is replacing the gig economy companies?

That one we do know without a crystal ball - taxi medallion systems and hotels.

The idea goes like this: drive to the bottom is not beneficial for the society as whole and therefore it is reasonable to establish some form of minimum wage.

As this prohibits very low paying jobs (i.e. better than nothing) then it would be fair to offer unemployment benefits in return.

Which means you also have to control immigration so that you don't get too many poor immigrants on those benefits.

Now the same poor immigrants that would have suffered from a low wage, suffer from never entering the country in the first place, and suffering a low wage in their home country with no benefits.

I really do not know why you bring the immigration into the question.

Because it often drives the drive to the bottom

Wrong premise. It's better to design your economy in a way that doesn't privilege shareholder and investor "risk" over employee and citizen risk.

Why should be corporations be given a free hand to act in ways that increase costs, increase personal risk, and lower opportunity for all but a tiny subset of the population?

What do you mean "wrong premise"? It might be better to design your mathematics so that 1 + 1 = 3, but the argument here is if that is possible.

At the level of an economy, the burden is on you to show that minimum wage results in lower risk/higher opportunity for employees.

I got a bunch of down-votes for questioning unworkable economics?

Just "imagining" there is a better way isn't a plan.

Whatever. If ppl in this thread wants to argue magical economics and down-vote anyone that disagrees, go ahead.