The Dwarf King increases the minimum wage of his kingdom to two-hundred-thousand gold pieces per day of work

>The Dwarf King increases the minimum wage of his kingdom to two-hundred-thousand gold pieces per day of work.

wat happens

I'm going to assume that nobody can afford to have any workers anymore and everything other than the ventures of the self-employed grinds to a halt while people either lobby to have the minimum wage dropped to something reasonable or someone assassinates or otherwise overthrows the king to accomplish the same thing.

He's declared insane and unfit for the throne by the dwarven assembly. They remove him from the throne and appoint a successor.

>nobody can afford to have any workers anymore

How can you not afford it?
Your salary just went up like ten million percent.

Inflation or economy collapse, assuming D&D standards. Potentially, he gets assassinated, but for most things, pic related.

The part where you can't physically pay anyone, for starters.

The gold pieces get a lot smaller.

>in concurrence with his pronouncement, the king declares a new currency
>he produces a small vial of what appears to be dust from his sleeve
>within is twenty thousand impossibly tiny gold coins
>turns out a mad hermit has spent the last six hundred years making micron-scale coins for fun
>the king doesn't really know what to do with them, but the worksdwarveship is simply too good not to do something with them

The Dwarf King dies in an unfortunate assassination-related accident in his hall, surrounded by the nobles of his kingdom. A new Dwarf King is put on the throne, and the minimum wage laws are quickly restored to their previous state.

Everyone is now rich and we all hold hands singing kumbaya long into the night.
Why does no one do this genius shit in real life???

Gold pieces are downsized to specs of dust, which neatly clump together into chunks approximately the same size as the original gold pieces.

The king employs everyone in his kingdom.

Semiplausible in very epic level 3e

Massive unemployment as forgemasters invest in automating the creation of weapons; there’s no way a single dwarf has the ability to create 200k gold in value every day

>Turns out minimum wage was 150,000 gp
>200,000 gp is the equivalent of $320 USD

It was the king's intention to look ridiculous. Since the new law is in no way sustainable, it ices the slope to a distrust of government, at which point he's disempowered his scheming senator bedfellows as well as himself.
The king passes a law that is acknowledged by no dwarf in the hopes of starting a true meritocracy, in which it is a joke that the government would intervene on a matter in such a rigid way, but it becomes communism and the dwarves are now genocidal, nihilistic conquerors fueled by an advanced weapons economy.

>the king didn't even want to do it, but the hermit insisted
>unfortunately, the hermit had been registered as dead about thirty years after he went missing, and now his legal status as an honored ancestor makes his will absolute
>this law is usually used to enforce the terms of inheritance, but occasionally bureaucratic mistakes like this causes a dictator to appear out of nowhere
>the dwarves don't mind, since they take a long view of things
>they'd rather simply bear it for a while than deal with an upset against tradition
>besides, the reign of despot noisebeard the monobrowed, who decreed that all junk mail must be color-coded as such and established tight hose as the standard uniform of female public officials, is fondly remembered among the people

That's elf talk, short beard.

Better question is what would happen if the dwarf king gave everyone food, shelter, medicine, tools, etc (everything necessary for both survival and work and a comfortable life) but still gave out vouchers for what would be considered luxury goods?

Too bad that couldn't happen IRL, by the way. Better make sure some people have billions.

>That scenario
>Gold pieces less valuable than the US dollar
Lrn2 econony

Called GP because they were originally made from gold, but are now made of a cheap alloy. Dwarves treat GP like yen.

The dwarves, not actually possessing this amount of gold, simply start issuing promissory notes instead of giving out gold coins.
Similarly, the dwarven gold "piece" is now defined by a small weight.
OR
People fire all their workers and instead offer food and lodging and some money for contract based services, to be rewarded to whoever should enact those services for a set amount of time. They will be called "part time consultants".

That Wage was written down by our ancestors.

THIS IS GOING IN THE BOOK OF GRUDGES.

>entire dwarf race begins subjugating the other races with massive amounts of riches able to be bought from other races
>entire realm becomes reliant on dwarves
>most Dwarf retailers and sellers go bankrupt
>total societal collapse
>the lower class is the most wealthy

>Minimum wage is 200k times larger than daily expense for a standard lifestyle
This is like Saudi Arabia setting the minimum wage to 4m dollars per day

Gold is obviously more plentiful and dwarves are much better at mining in this world. Just because something is rare and extremely valuable in one world doesn't mean it is everywhere.

>mistaking Earth gold for Fantasy gold
Filthy casual

The various buisness tenders and merchants instead hire illegal human labor who thanks to their nonexistance in the dwarven lands as citizen they don't have to pay the minimum wage... or much at all.

The king, even if he removes it and puts in all kinds of pro-marketeer laws will never undoo the horror of unemployment and economic destruction of cheap labor.

And if that wasn't good enough, golem workforces are becoming more and more advanced, while idiots say to just become golem constructors the majority of all work will be gone.

>workdwarveship
Kek'd

>Using USD as a metric
>nu uhhh casul u didn't think about gold right
Neck yourself

If fantasy gold is so plentiful then why the hell would anyone want to use it as currency or even bother mining it except in cases when it's a side product from mining something else?

Numidium

Is this a dwarf fortress thread?

If so toss him in a lava pit

Why?

That depends on a lot more than you've provided in the question, OP. For example: what was the previous minimum wage? What's the split within the dwarven economy between the marginal products of labor and capital? What's the kingdom's GDP? What's its fantasy Gini coefficient?

What kind of shit fortress do you make? Mine are always rolling in dosh.

I should note that Dwarf Fortress baseline acts like a communist paradise. until nobles show up

I only make "science" torture dungeons

>communist paradise
isn't it a great model for how a communist central planning system will inevitably collapse from the sheer complexity of peoples' needs leading to mass madness and starvation.
>Urist McUrist is taken by a fey mood!

Employers start paying by the hour.

I work for a day then retire. As it should always have been.

Yeah, can't incentivise production. Better divide up what we have today and pretend more will keep showing up.

>wat happens

Nothing, Dwarves don't pay one another for the work that they do in money, they're entirely communal within their own community and functional as they're not Humans.

When the Dwarf King says he's increased the minimum wage he isn't saying that he's actually increased the monetary compensation for his workers, what he's actually saying is that the value of his workers in the Human's eye of 'value' is x or y amount of gold pieces. The Dwarf King does this not only to advertise the wealth, economic stability, and power of his country, but to attract and intimidate the views of both foreign allies and enemies.

I think an easier way to understand it is the Dwarf King is loudly proclaiming the gross domestic equivalent income generated by his workers- if they 'were' to be paid, that is, they'd earn x amount of gold coins.
It's all bullshit either way, don't pay any attention to it- Foreign leaders never advertise or publicly state the 'real' numbers.

>work or starve

Americans. Not even once.

Increases it from what?

How much is a gold piece worth?

It doesn't matter though, because this thread just exists in order to shitpost about wages.

If that's how your forts end up then you're pretty shitty at the game, honestly.

Where does wealth originate from in your society, friend?

So farmers shouldn't have to work to farm their fields then, but instead be able to hobble into a free breadline in a big city and spend their days watching free govornment provided entertainment? Now where have I heard of that before?

That's how reality works, commie faggot.

Not even once.

Get off my board commie

The gold lobby pushes Dwarven politicians to maintain gold-alloy coins as the realm's currency, despite the cost of making the gold coins being higher than the value of Gold pieces.

People who do not contribute to society should not be allowed to exist, as they are a net drain on resources that could be better put towards productive citizens. They are, at best, a middle-man for the movement of money and add no value.

Work or starve is just.

What was the previous minimum wage?

What does that mean under conditions which make the employment of the vast majority of the populace unfeasible and unprofitable (e.g. total automation), or where arbitrary standards of hiring become prohibitive even for the exceptionally educated?

It worked when everyone could just find their own plot of land and work it, but how long before it becomes an outdated model?

What happens next?

And if it was someone for whom you had personal affection? A close friend or family member? Would that still be your answer?

What would you sacrifice, to keep the machine running? Yourself, even?

By your logic, we should kill every child in taxpayer-funded primary/secondary schooling, because they're not working in the factories.

look i'd love to engage with you seriously but the tone of your post tells me that you are, in all likelihood, a sociopath, and as such I see little point in doing so.

Well, how the fuck much is a gold piece's relative value? 20,000 sounds like a lot, but not if people use 1,000 piece coins and a thing of milk costs around 9,000.

Assuming that new currency can be printed fast enough to meet demand, then we can expect massive inflation and strained economic relations with trading partners that may require a new denomination of currency dividing GP into Dwarven GP and Everyone else GP.

>But how does anyone afford anything?

If you have to ask this then you don't understand economics at an intermediate level

>printing currency
>pieces of gold
>thinking gold id a fictitious currency and not a commodity
>thinking a small kingdom of introverts will crash neighboring economies
Realistically, hyperinflation within the kingdom leading to dwarves being forced to leave their mountain homes. They take their gold with them, which is still extremely valuable everywhere else because its fucking gold. They live like kings amongst foreign peoples, starting new dwarfy holds anywhere they can find a nice, big rock. Sounds like a solid motivation for what are usually interpreted as introverted isolationists to need to spread across the land and become a global presence.

Merchants begin to divide coins into the smallest pieces they possibly can to meet the letter of the law, but not lose out on it.

Fpbp, literally impossible to pay anyone

Suicide from work, poverty, illiteracy.
Your "reality" is not working very well in America...

You're describing china, not the USA, pinko.

T. An actual tendie eating NEET

>Suicide from work
China.

>poverty, illiteracy.
That's Baltimore.

>people who fucking put in some effort and try to compete are climbing up from the lower class into the middle class
>people who fucking put in some effort and try to compete are starting small businesses, or taking risks on their ideas
>loser commies still sitting around screaming that capitalism failed because they aren't getting what they want out of life when they refuse to do anything at all, to try to compete, to offer anything that the markets might want

The problem is the enemies keep piling up.
Skaven, Orcs, etc.
If Dwarves can't get to work, they will eventually lack armor and weapons, and be genocided.

So they will eventually accept lower wages in order to have an existence.
There is no room for ideology in this world, only survival.

Because he brought the entire kingdoms industry to a grinding fucking halt?

Air baloon trip.

Honestly? Depends a lot.

Factors that I can think of?

How much gold in the Treasury
Banks and Banknote usage
Difference between the old GDP and new GDP when accounting solely for wage increases
Are all standing contracts re-adjusted by law to account for new wage increases?

Heck, that last one is probably most important. Even assuming NO other inflation effects (Wages and Expenses go up the exact same ratio), the inflation would destroy any long-term internal contracts or savings.

Inflation is, in moderation, a good tool to keep an economy going - but a massive wage increase shock would make the economy explode.

Of course, this assumes that the prior minium (by law or by practice) wage was something less than 50% of the current one.

IF all contracts are by law to be renegotiated, AND the Kingdom has enough gold in the treasury to put in that initial flood OR Banks are able to print banknotes or make on-paper-only gold pieces that people trade with instead of physical gold?

It's doable, so long as the Dwarven Kingdom is a closed system.

If it's NOT a closed system, then all the hard currency will be drained from the kingdom very quickly as traders march in with goods that they can make for cheaper and sell at what would be insane prices elsewhere.

Of course, at the same time that hard currency is being stripped from the Dwarves, the Dwarves are ending up with a whole shitload of resources.

Of course, there's still a lot of assumptions in there. Are the Dwarves mining gold currently? What's the output? Are they engaged in trade, and if so, is it regulated? Is there an excise tax or tariff implemented? Do they use the same coinage as their trade partners, or can they develop a Yen for Thalers?

Huh. Thinking on it, if the Dwarves are capable of handling the initial wage shock and keep tight tariffs on imported goods, that's not a bad recipe for developing internal industry. Shit in the long run, IMO.

>capitalism has worked because a select few have succeeded

Americans. Not even once.

It doesn't rust, for starters, and it looks regal.
Or what, you think WH40k Terra is covered in Gold upon Gold because it's a rare metal? Nah man, they got enough gold. They do it cause it looks holy.

What kind of pleb-tier fortress do you have where you make gold coins? Adamantine coinage or bust, lads!

Imagine being this much of a poorfag cuck lmao

Two options which do not depend on the political, economic or ideological situation:
Expansion or extinction.

>people who fucking put in some effort and try to compete are climbing up from the lower class into the middle class
That's funny because what we call middle-class today is what used to be lower-class 50 years ago. People putting as much effort today as then get a noticeably lower reward.

This, of course, ignoring all the people who put some effort and get nothing because "it was not the correct kind of effort".

Effort has never been the key, and will never be.

>people who fucking put in some effort and try to compete are starting small businesses, or taking risks on their ideas

It's been proved before that most people "taking a risk" actually arne't taking such a risk at all. More often than not, thir parents have enough money to keep them afloat even if they fail hard.

The "risk" idea is a meme.

>to offer anything that the markets might want

That's the actual point here. You either do what the market wants or go fuck yourslef. It's not really "work or starve", it's not actually about putting effort and doing things.
You have to somehow guess what the market wants of you and dedicate yourself fully to that task. if you didn't guess correctly, fuck you; if you're not good at that specific task, fuck you; if you're living in a place or have been born on certain conditions that make said task unreachable for you, fuck you.

America's system is based on sociopathy, and the funniest thing is that they feel proud about it.

We overthrow the king, change the currency system away from gold backing, mint new money and devalue the currency to make the min wage viable, then kick back and enjoy our new Kingdom and all the money we made off of the stealth tax that is devaluing people's savings.

Git gud at life or die like a bitch. This is the way it should be, kiddo.

Americas. Not even once.

This man is good a dwarves.
Learn from this man.

>The lower and upperclass rotate and switch up violently from pay day to pay day

God bless Noisebeard.

Hes killed for being a fucking idiot.

Teach a man to fish user. This is the wrong way to go about dealing with things. The state bureaucrats aren't going to be more efficient than men seeking personal gain or even to help others freely. You do better work when you're work is tied to your pay. It's why salary workers are a lot less... focused on doing their job well then commission workers: now take that and do that to all of society. It's only exasperated when you don't even have to do your job. All those people who browse Veeky Forums if they get a chance at their work (like me) become unproductive bums in a heartbeat if they can: "I pretend to work and you pretend to pay me". I'm willing to bet you're no better based on where we are.

Historically speaking, Communism's not doing well from a humanitarian perspective. It tends to make statistics rather than tragedies.

It's better if the king started a Charity or a work program for the unemployed or something if things are so bad.

Change the legal definition of a day.

So, let's assume that
a. that much gold exists within the kingdom, physically.
b. The average wage of a workman is 5gp. Maybe a little high, but let's be generous.

Dwarven economy collapses, because there has been such a sudden spike in wages that no one would have the capital on hand to pay their workers.

The only people who remain unaffected by this is, shockingly, the peasantry.

Whoa, never thought if it that way!

Does this guy have a subreddit? I'd love to phonebank for him.

>git good at being lucky

Inflation unless it evens out eventually. Then nothing really has changed. Before you were dirt poor for not havig three coppers. Now you're dirt poor for only having 2000 gold.

Fuckers have more money to consume. If anything you'd make a shitheap more profit.
Learn some economics.