No, it means that for someone to hire you, the value proposition of your labor to them has to exceed the costs in employing you, there's no such thing as an indispensable employee. Employers have several options other than hiring a new person: do the work themselves, have current employees assume these duties as well rather than hiring a separate person (the assistant manager will have to mop the floors now), opt for an automated solution if one exists, or leave the work undone.
Let's use a simple example for illustration; the numbers will be arbitrary but will convey the point. You (the potential employer) would love to have someone watch your kids so you can have a "date night" with your wife. Obviously you'd like to spend no more than you have to for a babysitter so you have more money to spend on your date, and they would like to be paid as much as possible in turn. In a proposed "minimum living wage" law you might have to pay the babysitter $25/hour, which probably means you wouldn't find the cost worth it and would just stay home - no one gets paid, no date night, and you're stuck with your children for the night.
Let's consider the opposite extreme which is the one liberals imagine - a world with no minimum wage laws would be one where everyone would be wage slaves to wealthy capitalists, but sticking with the babysitting example you'd see this doesn't happen. If you offered the local teenager girls a penny to watch the kids all night, none would take you up on the offer - no one gets paid, no date night, you're stuck with your children for the night.
In the realistic world, total utility is maximized with no minimum wage laws and the economy is allowed to find a proper wage equilibrium between employers and workers. In our example, at a mutually acceptable wage between a penny and $25/hour (say $5 or $10/hour) you might not only find someone willing to babysit for you, but consider the price fair enough to hire the babysitter later in the week as well and everyone is happy - the babysitter who is hired, you as the employer, and the economy as a whole.
Your examples are right-wing ideology, and flawed.
To give you a simple but informative response, before 'artificial government-passed rights for protecting workers' interests' increasing wages, in the period you call for, back in 1900, where the 'free market' worked exactly as you describe, the 'natural equilibrium' reached is that people have to eat, and workers are indeed replaceable, and so workers tended to make just enough to eat.
The fact is, the average income in the US, *adjusted for inflation*, in 1900 was $10,000.
That's the result of the ideology you promote.
A society with a lot of people working for just enough to eat. There will be some who make more; the economic pressures where scarce skills get more pay still apply.
But even those are drug down by the low wages of others.
These very low wages shrink the size of the pie, concentrating wealth which gets used less productively, denying opportunity to most.
You posted ideology. You should try doing some reading, get a little informed, find studies on the actual effects of these things and correct your errors.
The babysitter won't babysit for a penny an hour, but Americans did work for just enough to eat and sleep in a shanty with no healthcare, when that was the 'market'.
This is the basic notion Henry Ford seems to have hit on when he doubled workers' salaries, helping to drive wages up and increasing the spending for his goods.
Workers can be cut and cut and cut until they make enough to eat - which 'seems like a good idea at the time' to wage payers, but damages the economy, and the people.
There IS no 'natural free market equilibrium' that results in anything but this just enough to eat for many or most workers.
The 'natural' state is the concentration of wealth, and the concentration of power, whether it's King George III or robber barons or a dictator or other forms.
The US, with democracy and the ability for the people to have some power - finally exercised a little in the second half of our history - has created a historic 'middle class'.
That same middle class has hugely declined in wealth and power since Reagan, and is ever more in danger, under the same pressures as always, freshly empowered as the wealthy were unable to defeat the people politically for decades, but globalization has given them the leverage so that unions are a small fraction of what they were, and all the wealth the economy has grown for 30 years has gone to the very top, all to the top 20% but nearly all of it to the very top of that 20%.
You can have a democracy and a middle class, or a plutocracy, but the concentration of wealth is not compatible with democracy.
The power has shifted to the wealthy and the country is on the road to bad things. We need to rebalance things if we want a healthy middle class democratic society.
That means increasing taxes on the rich, among other things - the lower rates having done nothing but help skyrocket their share of wealth, not 'trickle down'.
The increased concentration of wealth isn't, as the simplistic right-wing ideology says, used much for 'creating jobs' and 'trickling down', it goes to harmful financial speculation and other such uses that not only do not contribute to society but harm society and deny opportunity as more and more work for less for the benefit of fewer owners.
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