the gilded age

The problem with the gilded age wasn't that there weren't enough regulations, but that corruption in the market and the government was ignored, so companies just bribed their way around whatever they wanted. That's another form of barrier, in that smaller companies can't bribe as effectively as larger companies.

One of the big changes that came out of that era was the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which gave the government a mechanism to break up anti-competitive companies. This isn't a regulation per se, but a kill-switch for when the market gets out of hand.

These days, companies can't just bribe their way around regulations, but they can bribe their way into regulations. ISPs can prevent competition by crafting arcane rules w/ city and state governments to endlessly delay any kind of construction effort. Factories can require workers to join a union and demand resources that new upstarts can't afford. And so on. So the bribery has just moved to creating laws to prevent competition, and they need to be more clever about it or they'll get hit with anti-trust.

They’re against unions, increasing the minimum wage, and other regulations

But big companies love higher minimum wages, Amazon supported a hike to $15/hr, and many larger companies have higher internal minimum wages. McDonalds also isn't particularly worried about it. I think this is for a few reasons:

• it's easier for larger companies to automate away their labor than smaller companies
• smaller companies can't afford to be competitive on labor and prices, so they're more likely to go under with a hike
• larger companies have the foot traffic and brand recognition to make it up in volume

Here's a paper about the minimum wage that discusses job loss:

Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

And some snippets from the paper:

But concluding that the research evidence as a whole fails to find disemployment effects of minimum wages requires discarding or ignoring most of the evidence on low-skilled workers or relying on the industry studies where labor-labor substitution is more likely to mask job loss among the least-skilled workers.

...

But our analysis shows clearly that most of the evidence indicates the opposite – that minimum wages reduce low-skilled employment. It is incumbent on anyone arguing that research supports the opposite conclusion to explain why most of the studies are wrong.

Unions are a bit more tricky, and it largely comes down to control. Small companies aren't big enough to have unions, so having a union at a large company is just an added expense and barrier to getting work done. If unions strike, they lose a ton of money, and unions will strike because they know it'll give them leverage, but they often don't get enough concession to make up for the strike (my union uncle constantly complained about that, and my non-union dad was a lot happier; they worked at the same company). IMO, unions are an indication of an unhealthy company, if employees feel like they're being treated well, they won't feel the need to unionize, and both the employee and employer are likely to be better off.

So unions can be a mixed bag, and since they don't really hurt small businesses, there's really no benefit to a large company for supporting them.

The difference between productivity and wages has increased over time. People do more work and get paid less.

No, people produce more value and their wages don't keep up with that. They're not doing harder work or working more hours, they're just using more efficient tools to get more work done with the same amount of effort. Worker wages are based on competition, so the more people there are that are capable and willing to do a job, the less that job will pay.

Real wages are increasing, that is the metric we should be interested in. If a worker thinks they can get more on their own, they'll do that, and that's a check on wages.

Labor is the source of value. Without labor the rich can’t get richer.

That's partially true, but capital is also important. You can't just go and make or fix high tech equipment with your labor, you need expensive tools to do so, and that's where capital comes in. Without invested capital, the jobs wouldn't exist.

If labor was the only ingredient, laborers would just labor for themselves and turn that labor into income.

The only way the wealth gap increases is by the rich taking more and more from the people actually creating the value.

They're not taking anything from anyone, there merely using their capital to produce goods, and selling those goods in a consensual transaction. The laborer is better off because they have a steady job, the customer is better off because they have a product they wouldn't otherwise have, and the investor is better off because the invested capital is returning more than was put in.

If you take away the capital, you take away the incentive for innovation and steady jobs. You can always choose to work for yourself and take on your own risk, and in that way you get to reap all of the benefits of your labor. Or you can choose to apply for a job and sell your labor for an agreed-upon price.

I think we should be pushing for something like UBI/NIT so people can make a choice about whether to labor in addition to where they might sell their labor. We shouldn't be pushing for increasing the minimum wage, because that just proliferates the dependence cycle on 9-5 jobs.